Recent comments

Christmas came earlier :)

I thought of putting a meta-comment in the dialogue about how the day's been so long it feels like it's lasted eleven years, but I couldn't get it to work organically. In any case, I think it's clear by now that the story is about to move beyond Day One, which has lasted quite a while. I have a few ideas as to how to move the Transformation Guns story on to the next day, but first I have to do more with MTI. More to come later.

Yes!

The more wild changes are mostly listed for humor/to leave room for others to go in different directions. The planned path I have is for this season to get the rare triple exchange where all six contestants are paired up in some way, with the first two being a classic body swap. I'm thinking of having Sabrina and Biff exchange social groups, basically Biff becoming a goth and Sabrina becoming a jock. For Leonard and Sarah it might be something like a transformation that necessitates them working together in some way, like turning them into siblings or something.

Looking forward to how you handle the other exchanges. I'm also curious to see if the temporary Gibson family will be able to recognize that the other members are also people who's identities were taken by Jon's family.

Really like where this is going! I love the frantic pace and how Jen is immediately thrust into a 'mom' situation. Can't wait to see more episodes!

Nicole's flashbacks are both from earlier episodes in this branch. This episode's a bit lengthy with people telling each other what happened elsewhere and thus being full of recaps, but it's to set up what I have planned as a followup, where we'll finally get back to Sarah and Karyn and find out what's been taking them so long.

Is this episode the earliest appearance of both Steve "The Stud" Farber and Nicole Tiller? Looks like it predates the previously reported first mention of Steve Farber.

Thought it would add a dynamic spice to the fun

Like your direction also. Hadn't thought about making mom and dad competitive.

Karyn totally bullshitting here claiming her kids will just have the ears and tails and grandchildren maybe not even that, after wishing they would be infectious for life. She’d infect the kids and also the father fully and all her descendants will be as much cat as she is, right? Is the point that she’s lying or did the writer get criminally forgetful? Hard to tell.

This episode may set a new Fiction Branches record for most transformations in a single episode. I"d like to add that I usually like to give transformations more room to breathe, but in this case I felt an exception was necessary. It made sense given the unpredictable nature of the Random Gun, and where the story was going in general.

Great opening! Can't wait to see where it goes, bring on the synth, big hair, and neon colors!

This storyline seems pretty interesting.

Well, I figured it was a good compromise between the two. So, if you were literally acting, and playing older, you might make your hair look white. In movies, they might use prosthetics. So, this is magical acting. So, Linda isn't going to become a carbon copy of Leonard...but she has to look the role. Zoe has probably changed the least, because she's able to pull off the role, with her outfit, of a more mature woman. Although I'd imagine she will be able to avoid killing any of her patients.

I'd like to add as a disclaimer that the views of Nadine Ferguson do not reflect the views of the author. It's just that Nadine comes from a very strict religious background that views any magic outside the scope of its teachings as 'black magic' or 'evil', whether it is or not. So this naturally leads her to clashes with Athena. In many branches, she serves as the 'foil' to Athena (with Athena being the member of the Goth community with an interest in magical items and stuff associated with witches, spells, and so on).

So of course with her very limited world view, she views just about all magic outside of baptism to be wicked.

Melony Tyne, meanwhile, is usually a nice person who tries to be friendly with people. So she probably shows more patience with Nadine than many of the other characters in this branch would.

Much of this chapter (aside from the end) is basically told from Nadine's viewpoint, so she doesn't know what happened at the Principal's office earlier in the story. She hasn't heard about the Babe Gun and its effects yet, so she doesn't know how Nicole and Melissa became more attractive, nor does she recognize Chris Morgan. And she certainly doesn't know the delirious girl is Steve Farber.

I say this just for the benefit of those who stumbled in and hadn't read the episodes leading up to this one yet.

Just taking a break from my usual branches to check back in on this amusing premise. I'm surprised someone else didn't use this trope in this context.

Well, I mention several different possibilities as to how this one could turn out. Feel free to use any of them, and come up with more I didn't think of.

Special thanks to Cork for suggesting the names for Athena's pendants.

This episode is a bit of a 'rest and examine the situation' sort of episode, a kind of a breather to answer a few questions. Before, of course, we get back to more twists and turns, and transformations, and other developments in various places.

I like this take with the more drastic transformations to accommodate their acting. I'm curious to see what Leonard thinks of becoming Linda and particularly interested in Jon gaining the physicality of an Olympian while she loses it. Good stuff!

Glad you're back ◕‿◕

Well yeah... but Karyn isn't thinking about them. The media has told her that all men like huge boobs, and the last week made... a very big impression on her. She'd have a hard time believing a straight guy that told her he likes flat chested women because to Karyn liked being into big boobs so much she would have trouble understanding not liking big boobs... even though at this point in the story she doesn't.

They're not pregnant because of Karyn's wish earlier, before the second change, it was worded such that it would apply no matter which way around they had sex that they could only get conceive together if they both consciously wanted to. Back in this chapter, before any sex, https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/3729555 “I wish that Jon and I would not be fertile together unless we both consciously decide we want to be.”

Nope, I'm male and cis. I do pee with morning wood by leaning against the wall behind the toilet, mostly because it gets me an angle where I can aim down far enough without discomfort. Jon's reactions are based at least partly on imaging myself it his place.

Men and women are still physically different, hormone levels stay different after the change, so aside from having boobs men still have a mostly male body shape, aside from their pelvis. Men would still also have a lower healthy body fat %, and fat deposit patterns would still be different for men and women. So men wouldn't have quite as much curve, generally bulkier waists and so men's waist to hip ratio would still be different from women's on average. Remember, up until people turn 18ish at the youngest, mostly older, they develop as they would without the change, and post change men get boobs, and just skeletal changes to their hips, and even there probably not as much as one might expect. The top part doesn't really need to get wider, just the bottom to pass a baby's head.

Men still have much higher testosterone levels than women, with all the effects that has on psychology. Women still have much higher estrogen levels. The change causes what triggers breast development to change, and other things, probably it created new hormones to keep systems working in both men and women, I'm not a biologist so I don't know what would be needed to make this work.

I didn't go into more detail in the story because it was already WAY to info-dumpy, but yeah, any change to men's anatomy, imagine it's the least it can be to make pregnancy almost as reliable as it is for women. Probably men are more likely to need a C-section since they're more likely to not have room.

I very intentionally constructed to change such that gender identities would be able to remain since I thought anything that erased all separation would probably be a bit much for most people to handle, and well because I wanted them to remain.

I also think that even if there weren't easy ways to tell men and women apart anymore people would cling to their previous identity.

In other words, yes, effectively anyone over 25 is the same sex but gender identity would almost certainly remain, as would sexual orientation based on what sex people were born... or in some cases changed appearance to.

I guess you can read it that way. I did intend to be that she really is just super into boobs and isn't attracted to the rest of a woman's body, she's into Jon's body more than just his boobs.

Nope, I've read some of it a long time ago... but that's not where this came from.

The shift to one arousal or the other happens well before orgasm. The physical responses are different since they involve different body parts, and well it triggers different desires.

Female orgasms do actually last slightly longer than male ones on average, as measured by having people masturbate hooked up to machines. I don't recall the exact method, if it was measured with neural activity or based on how long the body kept doing the associated muscle contractions, but there was actually a study. Meaning that yes male and female orgasms are different.

In this world, no you can't have two different orgasms at once, because long before that your body would have picked a "mode".

don’t get me wrong though, I am not putting down your story, it was deeply engaging and a very interesting plot, it just seemed to have some things that stood out as mighty strange. It was a good story, it just had a few details that didn’t sit right and didn’t seem thought through enough.

Well that was sure something. A few thoughts and questions though

1. What was the explanation for why they don’t think they’re both already pregnant? They had unprotected heterosexual sex each way, with each of them the female at least once. It seems to me most likely they would both be pregnant. They didn’t wish for any temporary contraception measures to be in place over them, right?

2. A question for you bigbustgazer. Despite your username, I’m rather convinced you are female. Every bit of this does not seem like something written by a male. The characters and motivations were extremely female. Jon being overly preoccupied with his feelings and whether they were real or counterfeit and put in place by the stone 3 steps back despite exercising his free will and making decisions and changing his mind several times on his own with no influence from the stone. He plainly thinks like a girl and did throughout the story. And a real man would know peeing with morning wood isn’t feasible if he leans against a wall a certain way, it simply can’t be done, the prostate literally cuts off flow from the bladder until the erection is mostly gone and a man would have known that. The whole story struck me as something written by a woman who is not as knowledgeable about men as she thinks she is. Just wondering out of curiosity, feel free to ignore this question if you don’t want to say what you are in real life.

3. It also seems pretty weird to me how preoccupied they were with gender and who was what. Jon insisting he was still a man, Karyn insisting she wasn’t into girls (and is in deep denial), when they have literally destroyed the difference from the very human condition. It doesn’t even make sense to talk about men and women as if they are different things after this change. Jon and Karyn are no longer a man and a woman, they are now the same sex, they are both. Yet it seemed pretty artificial and hard to believe the extent to which they went out of their ways to pretend otherwise and I don’t think this was even lampshaded by the narration of the story. It seemed very misguided to me, this omission from everyone’s understanding.

well Karyn is certainly in denial in her continued insistence she’s not into females

fun fact in reality though, an orgasm is basically a seizure in the brainstem so it would actually be physically impossible for a hermaphrodite to experience separate arousal systems for male and female unless they literally had 2 brains.

SOMEONE had been reading the left hand of darkness I believe.

of course plenty of men don’t like boobs and I’m not just talking about gay or asexual men, but some just see them as the hunks of fat that they are and prefer them flatchested

for variety sake they could do it differently next time around like making Jon all the way a girl and Karyn a lesbian for a few days, or making Karyn a man.

though I hope it goes in a direction where there’s an actual conflict or else I’m afraid the currently 17 pages left are just going to be solid porn with not much of a plot.

good job. Not a lot of these stories where Karyn takes control without Jon’s permission and does something weird to him but doesn’t just do it out of inexplicably instantly having become a psycho but here she is doing something he’d never have wanted on his own yet it’s all in good fun

What Perri said above is correct. The upvote may be encouraging, but it doesn't really say much. A recent episode I wrote got an upvote, but I don't know where the upvote was because of the transformations in it, the pop culture references, the humor, the awkward conversation in the hallway prior to all that, or some combination of the above. Or maybe the upvoter just like the episode in general.

In any case, it's best not to take upvotes too seriously. They're not that much different than the 'like' function on social media sites.

Oh, and I LOVE the names of the cats. Clearly whoever named them is a fan of a certain popular sci-fi franchise.

I love this one! It's a cute story here. Of course the human characters are likely to be really confused about how this reunion came about.

The cafeteria chaos episodes were fun to write. I liked being able to work in a lot of the Lake Point High School 'quasi-canon' characters into this one, and include some pop culture references.

Clyde Meehan and Starla Stanfield are new additions to the Lake Point High School cast, as is the lunch lady Enid Parkes. Everyone else in this episode has appeared in at least a few other branches besides this Transformation Guns story.

If you know the song being referenced, feel free to play it during this episode. In my mind, it starts just as Athena tells Jay "I've got this", and ends when Coach Barry blows the whistle to indicate the fight's over.

There have been a number of branches where Athena has some variant of an anti-magic pendant. One variant protects its wearer from magic, and the other variant just protects them from memory or personality alteration. I decided that in this branch, Athena would have one of each variant. It made sense to me.

As for the premonition, it probably came around the same time as Jon's unfortunate wish that "something interesting would happen", but Athena doesn't know about that yet at this point in the story.

and the parents of the year award goes to….. some other family

Cats seem telepathic sometimes….

wow does this branch deserve more love. It ties different pieces of the story together perfectly and if Jon gets pregnant from this and actually gives birth, it won't just be Karyn but Jon too will have very strong and a deeply personal reason and vested interest for making the new reality permanent that would likely supersede the strength of desire to have his original body back, and allows the character Bernie the chance to grow as a person in the process, and actually drives the story forward instead of just being aimless filler material. It looks like passiveobserver got a real hate following based on his last post, I’m guessing the others writing this story ignored this branch solely out of resentment and contempt for him personally which is a pity since his writing is better than theirs. I kind of don't even want to read the other branch now, they should have just accepted this as canon and continued from here. It looks like the best writers left this place possibly out of disgust. I keep looking at the last few posts of writers and they obviously leave for that reason, lalilu and mystchevious are other examples making this very clear. And I don't see anything recent from BroomB but I bet the reason is the same.

ironic that this would prove to be your final post on fictionbranches when you are clearly facing the same issues based on your post “disappointed” (corrected spelling) and actually are in agreement with the one this is a reply to.

doesn’t seem likely to me that the catgirls’ behavior would be so fundamentally different than humans. Do you not think your caveman and monkey ancestors ate all sorts of gross things? Bet they would be more likely to eat a live mouse than a catgirl raised in modern culture. They should culturally be just the same as humans if they were raised alongside them. I would expect they would be as revolted by eating a live mouse as a typical human, but if not then it definitely wouldn’t be the case that a whole room of humans would be shocked and appalled by this behavior. All the humans and catgirls seem so mystified by the behavior of the other species when it’s pretty easy for me to understand and I haven’t even been living together like they have in their world, so it should be even easier for them if anything.

"Maybe she isn't really your sister," thought Jon. "I mean- maybe she just calls you sister? Girls do that.. right?"

Karyn shook her head. "No- I- I can sort of tell we're sisters." She gestured to her nose. "You must be able to tell Tabby is your sibling too right?"

So they can communicate with telepathy then? If I say something in quotes accompanied by 'thought Jon', that means Jon was thinking those words, right? And then Karyn responds to it.

you know, another thing is they shouldn’t give birth to singletons but have litters if they have 6 breasts. They wouldn’t have evolved to have 6 otherwise, so it really makes little sense that all of Jon’s siblings are just catgirl versions of themselves. Instead of Jon’s brother being a single girl named Tabby, she should suddenly find him replaced by like 4 sisters all the same age.

actually there are a few all female species like the whiptail lizard, it is called a parthenogenic species when they do this and the males disappear entirely, so it actually should have had no trouble granting the result of the roll without complication, it would probably be better to explain it by the stone only affecting things within a few miles if you didn’t want to have the whole world population changed and explain it as best as possible. It seems much less likely they would be able to interbreed with humans since they would be much more distantly related to humans than lions and tigers are to each other, or horses and donkeys, and even they are too distant for their reproduction to be a complete success since the offspring are usually sterile and riddled with other genetic problems

And so here I fix what (to me, anyway) was a plot hole with Gladys Brewer. I always pictured Lake Point's MTI branch building to be far, far in another part of town from Lake Point High School. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought there was no way Gladys Brewer (in her pre-Babe Gun form) could just run all the way from McMillan Tech Industries to the high school, and get there at the moment she did.

I also needed to account for where Mycroft Brewer was, so that we know where all of the six Transformation Gun collaborators are at this point in the story. So I establish here that Mycroft drove Gladys home, and then Gladys left home and went to the school, taking with her the Fat Gun she had stolen from MTI. (This Fat Gun was in the batch Jeffries teleported to the non-basement levels of the building).

Jessica Davis is another one of those cheerleaders that appears in several branches, though not as often as Tiffany Sanders, Melissa Smith, and Amber Levine. She's only occasionally used, and while she has run into Athena in some branches, I don't think she has been in the same episodes as Jay Duncan and Leonard Drullers (though she might have, and I just haven't seen them). It makes sense, however, that she doesn't usually interact with them, as they're not in her usual social circles.

It's fun to sometimes have the opportunity to end an episode with at least two cliffhangers. Here, we've got one at MTI, and one at the school. I plan on adding more soon.

If these Transformation Guns are from MTI, then they must be from the other two batches Jeffries was trying to teleport to the Pittsburgh branch of MTI when the Teleportation Chamber's power source overloaded. Perhaps they didn't reach their intended destination. I pretty much left it vague as to what happened to those specific batches.

Aside from those two batches, all Transformation Guns outside of MTI (Lake Point Branch) and Lake Point High School are the result of the wave from the overload transforming normal guns into Transformation Guns. They were, in effect, created outside of MTI so they didn't come directly from there.

Anyway, up to the episode this branches off of, the fate of those last two batches of Transformation Guns that Jeffries sent through the teleport was left ambiguous so these COULD be (at least in this spinoff branch) those last two batches. However, there's no Random Gun in either of those two branches. Samantha switched one with a Restoration Gun, and removed the other one just before the teleport.

I probably won't add to this spinoff branch, as I didn't really want to get Mikey involved in all this.

Am happy Jon is a lesbian with a girlfriend. We need some not half bad lesbian shit.

It’s interesting you can infer the difference in the ideologies of the writers by the pronouns they use for Jon. With this one we get a sudden shift to he/him/his again. This one would probably contend you are what you identify as. And not just that, but now Jon is suddenly all sensitive about it and deeply traumatized over the change in body and hung up on "his" gender identity while before this page "she" was simply going with the flow and enjoying it. Honestly though, I would expect to a normal person, that having half a body, never again to have privacy, being immortal and forever bound with your childhood friend would be far more significant and worrying, and a change in gender would be incidental by comparison.