Callie sat there stunned as the strange machine-woman wrapped her arms around him...no, around her. She hadn't exactly had a lot of education, in these matters or in general, but everybody knew boys and girls had different parts down there, and before some of the older boys in the village had grown up and left for the city, she'd overheard enough from them to put two and two together here. But...but this didn't make any sense! The treatment was supposed to fix these changes, but if anything they were just getting worse!
She looked up at the strange clockwork girl, feeling the tears pricking at the corners of her eyes and feeling upset at herself for feeling like she wanted to cry. "I...I..." she said, her voice quavering, "I was gonna go to the...to the bathroom, b-b-but..." She bit her lip. "It's gone!" she wailed. "I turned into a girl an' the treatment didn't do nothin' about it! It's not workin'! An' you said it would!"
I-5483113 peered down at the child, as she squirmed her way out of the embrace. "I do not understand," she said calmly. It was understood that in these circumstances a biological parent might try to use a more actively soothing tone and manner, but attempts to replicate this had proved counterintuitively to be more distressing if anything. "The treatment has progressed exceptionally well," she continued. "Your fundamental anatomy is now fully aligned with your genetic makeup, and development of your clip and VP organ are both within norms for a child of your age. In fact, your rate of physical maturation has even slightly exceeded the average in the area of secondary sex characteristics. What is the nature of the problem?"
Callie bit her lip harder. They thought this was normal? Then...then all along, they had meant for...! She clenched her hands into fists that felt a lot less like effective outlets for her frustration than they'd used to, and to her own deep embarassment, found herself huffing and stamping her foot. "I'M NOT S'POSED TO BE A GIRL!!!" she yelled, then suddenly burst into tears. I-5483113 moved to offer another embrace; despite her anger at this stupid, clueless machine, she was so overcome by her emotional turmoil that she didn't even try to fight it.
The clockwork girl considered this. "You must be mistaken," she said. "A blood sample was analyzed when your injury was treated, and you are certainly genetically female. Your abnormal physiology must therefore have been due to some unknown developmental disorder, which we corrected for." She attempted to comfort the child, but she appeared to be inconsolable. Was this distress due to Callie's apparent belief that this was not her natural form, or some other point of confusion owing to an evidently long-untreated disorder? She submitted information on this to the master machines on the network, and courses of action were considered.
The simplest approach would of course be to perform direct mental readjustment to correct her erroneous understanding of the situation, but Ethics rejected this unanimously and immediately. Psychology of sentient beings was a delicate and highly personal matter; unfortunately, it would be difficult to perform effective treatment without a genuine therapist available. Perhaps the education center could offer some instruction as to social gender norms to help her adjust, but this seemed dubious when the core point of confusion seemed to be over the fact that she was female in the first place. This was a difficult problem, and would require substantial analysis to devise a working solution for. In the meantime...
In the meantime, there was little that could be done other than to simply provide support. The machine-woman noted that, if nothing else, the child's outburst had broken the steady rise in tension and blood pressure that she had been exhibiting, and while the obvious emotional distress was still a problem, she was no longer on the verge of developing petechiae, which was something of an improvement. She remained in place as Callie continued to cry, making occasional attempts at comforting motions. Finally, it seemed that her distress was beginning to subside, at least for the moment.
Callie pulled away from the clockwork girl and looked up at her, trying to summon the energy to get properly angry at her, but too emotionally drained to do so. It had been bad enough for the changes she'd experienced back at the village to happen to her, but for this strange machine and her unseen friends to do _this..._this place was so cool and it had been so exciting to come here - how had things gone so wrong?
She felt her new socks shift around on her legs and realized that she was antsily shifting her hips from side to side as a nervous tension developed in her abdomen. Remembering at last what it was that she'd been up to before the terrible discovery, she looked up at the machine-woman. "U-um," she said, cringing and blushing furiously, "I...gotta go to the bathroom..."
Mary stared at the ceiling and listened to the sound of her altered body, as parts she'd never had ticked and whirred inside her. The voices that had thought at her earlier continued to chatter in the background, tossing around terms that she didn't know or understand; she was vaguely aware that she could seek explanations from them, but right now it was enough of a task to take in what she already knew. They didn't know where Kevin was, and whoever it was that they did have, she was apparently undergoing some kind of treatment and couldn't return at the moment.
She looked over at Sarah, who was watching her with visible concern on her face. I guess she thinks this is her fault, she thought. But lots of people in this village go through this; we were the odd ones out until now. She supposed Kevin was lucky in that he'd left before this sudden spate of transformations took place; everybody in the village was still trying to figure out what to do about all the people who were changing. They'd seen changes before, of course, but never like this...she wondered what could have caused it. Would they change back? Would...would she?
Mary sighed, purely out of habit. The sound had a gentle metallic tinge to it. "Miss Sarah?" she asked.
Sarah turned her attention to the innkeeper's daughter. "Hm? Yeah?"
She bit her lip. "If...if I'm going to be like this...what's it like?"
Sarah stared at her, then sighed. "It's...I dunno," she said. It wasn't as if she didn't have some experience with it by now, but how would you describe a state of being to someone else? It was what it was, and minus a few specific experiences Mary probably knew as much about it as she did. "I mean, I guess you already know about what it feels like," she said. Mary nodded thoughtfully; it was...different. Her whole body was a hollow shell filled with moving parts that she could hear and, vaguely, feel moving inside her. Even in her head, there was a constant whirring and soft clatter of things she didn't even know the names for catching, tripping, stepping in time with each other.
Sarah shrugged, feeling her own mechanisms ticking away. "Anyway, I guess the biggest thing is you keep winding down and you have to wait for someone to come help you. That's a pain, but you've got people you can trust with that. And...it does feel kind of nice." She smiled to herself; it was a gentle kind of physical bonding experience...but then she remembered all the things it wasn't. She hesitated, wondering how to broach the subject. "Um, Mary...have you started having...y'know, thoughts about boys?"
Mary thought for a moment, then shrugged. "I...don't know...? Papa told me that'd start happening as I got older, but...well, none of the boys in the village are even my age." Well, there were a couple kids who had been boys, but the vagaries of the curse had changed that, so they hardly counted.
Sarah nodded. "Mm." At least she won't really know what she's missing, she thought. That's probably for the best. "Anyway, that's...most of it, I think. I don't know that much more about it myself."
Mary frowned. "But you've been this way your whole life...haven't you?" She paused; she hadn't even considered the possibility that that wasn't the case until that moment...
Sarah shook her head. "Nope. I used to be human too. I just...woke up in this body a few days ago. Tom's been trying to help me figure out how to get back to normal."
Mary nodded thoughtfully; that explained a bit. She knew that the effects of the village curse were often only temporary, and it was probable that in a week or two she'd be back to normal, but if Ms. Sarah had changed some other way, maybe she didn't have the option of just waiting it out...
"Anyway," Sarah said, "I'd better check on Diana. Who knows what she and her little boyfriend are getting up to in the middle of all this craziness..."
Jon took a long pull off a glass of cool milk and exhaled heavily. As it turned out, the curry was quite spicy - just barely this side of setting her nose running. But, to be fair, it was also really good.
She and Maggie were seated at the counter of the stall run by the snake-woman they'd met the other day. As far as Jon could tell she just barely managed to fit her tail in underneath herself in the little stall, and the little cooking hearth seemed awfully close to coming in contact with her coils. Then again, she thought, maybe the snake half of her doesn't mind the heat so much. The woman was assisted by another snake-girl around Maggie's age, who Jon took to be her daughter - at least, when the younger naga wasn't busy keeping track of her little brother, who looked to be around four or five and kept slithering off into the crowd at shin-level and winding up getting underfoot more often than not.
Jon was in the middle of trying to get the last of the peanuts dug out of a corner of the dish when Maggie spoke up. "Hey," she said, "that lady's gotta harpy feather in her hair. Why's that?"
She looked up across the square and spotted the woman Maggie was talking about - oh, yes, she'd seen that person earlier. "I don't know," she said. "I figured you might have some idea."
Maggie shook her head. "Nuh uh. I never hearda that."
Their hostess laughed. "Oh, her?" she said, sliding over across her coils to the counter. "She's secretary-to-such-and-such with the port authority, I think. The way I hear it, the feather is her husband's."
"She's married to a harpy?" Jon asked in surprise.
The snake-woman nodded. "Most of the ladies of the town think it's a 'token of their troth' or something like that, but nobody's ever asked that I know of. We figured it was a harpy thing."
Maggie shrugged. "I dunno. All a' us do things different in different flocks, so maybe it's a thing where he comes from?"
Jon shook her head, trying to picture that. A human married to a harpy? What would their children look like? Could they even have kids? How did that work in this world? Did...did male harpies even have...? She flushed at that thought, and forcefully returned her attention to the curry.
Zoe got up from the divan she was lying on and had a long, thorough stretch. They'd finished breakfast a little while ago, here on the veranda looking out on the little garden that Khuit's apartment had in back. The servants had given her odd looks when she'd come out of the bathroom having only bothered to clean her teeth (or tried to, anyway - she'd just ended up getting hair on her tongue and spent a couple minutes coughing it back out before she thought to try using the pads of her paws - which still wasn't exactly optimal, but it at least worked) and given her new wavier hair a run-through with her claws to comb out the tangles, but Khuit found her wild appearance terribly bemusing; Zoe was minorly annoyed by that, but not enough to put her off breakfast.
After they'd eaten and spent an inordinate amount of time remarking on how very nice her gardens were, Khuit had excused herself, saying that she had some pressing business to attend to, and Zoe had been left to her own devices. The day was still fairly young, and the garden was pleasantly cool, the ground dappled with sunlight filtering in through the leaves of the various trees and bushes. Zoe was tempted to find a nice large sunny spot and have a lie-down, but she had only just gotten out of bed an hour or so before. Anyway, as pleasant as all this was, she wasn't going to make any progress on finding Jon and returning home if she just lazed around here all day.
Tossing her head back to get her hair out of her face, she left the garden and went inside. She didn't really have any idea where to begin looking, but surely a nicely-furnished place like this would have a library or study or something. She'd seen most of the main living area last night and she knew that only the bedrooms and the bathroom were down the one wing, so she made her way down the other to see what she could see.
This wing seemed to be more utilitarian, with closets down the one side and the kitchen at the far end (so that, she supposed, the heat from cooking wouldn't warm up the rest of the house too much.) She kept an eye on the main rooms on the other side from the closets as she made her way down...some kind of parlor or music room with a couple instruments sitting inside, a room that looked like some kind of religious shrine...
Her attention was distracted from her search when she heard soft voices from the other side of the hall. Wait, she thought, that sounds like... Yes, that was definitely Khuit's voice, but what was she doing in one of the storage closets? Now that she looked, the door was open just a crack, and...
Oh.
Um.
Whatever exactly was going on in there, it wasn't something they expected company for. She caught enough of a glimpse to tell that her hostess was accompanied by one of the young men who escorted her outside the house, and neither of them appeared to have much on. Well, that was definitely something she didn't want to stick her nose into; accordingly, she backed off in a hurry, hoping they were too wrapped up in what they were doing to have noticed, and backed right into the last room across the hall.
She stood just inside the doorway for a minute, feeling the sudden adrenaline rush drain away now that she was no longer worried about being discovered. She wondered idly what the story there was - was this just a bored rich girl and her boytoy? Were they actually in a relationship? (She hadn't gotten enough of a good look to tell, if it was even possible to gauge that at a glance.) If so, why the cover story? Was there some kind of social taboo between nobility and servants? Not that that would mean anything to her - but then, just walking in on that had been enough to get her a little rattled. Shaking her head, she turned her attention to the room she had entered.
It was obviously a small study/library, with the walls lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves and a desk in the center of the room. The main difference from any similar room she'd ever been in was that the desk stood only about eighteen inches off the floor; clearly, it was intended for a sphinx to sit at. The other primary incongruity was that, on a chair in the corner, someone had thrown together what was apparently a loose pile of bedsheets.
Zoe padded over to the desk, where there was a book that had been left open, and peered curiously down at it. It was written in some script that she couldn't read - very calligraphy-brushy, but some of the characters almost looked like little picture-symbols, or at least like the shorthand forms of them. As near as she could tell it had actually been hand-copied by someone; the writing, while clear, was too irregular to have been done mechanically. Athena'd have a field day with this, she thought. But it didn't do her much good, seeing as she couldn't read it. She wondered why that was, when she understood Khuit perfectly well; maybe this was actually her native tongue?
"I'm afraid my mistress doesn't have many books written in the common tongue," said the pile of bedsheets. Zoe, caught off her guard for the second time that morning, jumped practically out of her skin and, with a subconscious sweep of her wings, leapt back to the far corner of the room. The sheets rose from the chair and revealed themselves to actually be a man, stooped with age, and draped in absolute piles of robes. She wondered how he ever got around with that much fabric engulfing him.
The old man bowed to her; given his already wizened stature, he wound up practically on eye level with Zoe herself. He, like the others, had the same dusky copper skin as Khuit, with a twisty little wisp of a beard and some stray fringes of hair that hadn't yet vacated the premises. "Many of these were brought with from Khemet," he said, "and much of the rest are my own collection of works from various scholars. There aren't many that you'd be able to read." He frowned curiously. "Er, can you read? I'm accustomed to Khemeti sphinxes, but I'm given to understand most of your kind live out in the wild."
Zoe frowned. "Well, I can't read that," she said, somewhat miffed at the implication that she was some kind of savage. "And anyway, I wasn't a sphinx at all until yesterday morning."
His eyes went wide, and he put a hand to his forehead. "How I forget at this age!" he said. "Yes, that was what milady's servants were saying last night. No wonder Khuit took an interest in you."
Zoe eyed him curiously. "Aren't you one of her servants?"
He grinned, revealing a mouthful of somewhat crooked and yellowed (but at least present) teeth. "Not exactly. I serve in her best interests, but I am in fact her guardian and the steward of this estate, for his majesty the king of Khemet." There was a twinkle in his eye. "Someone around here has to be able to tell her 'no.'"
Zoe laughed softly at that, in spite of a little unease at the thought that this was probably the guy the king paid to keep tabs on Khuit. He seems nice enough, though, she thought to herself. After all, it wasn't like Khuit was likely to be any meaningful threat to the crown; probably a posting like this was, for this fellow, an excuse to enjoy a rewarding management position and a lot of slack without needing to worry about any uncomfortable conflicts of interest. Or at least that seemed like a reasonable assessment of the situation...
The old man chuckled and looked her in the eye with an expression that left no doubt that he knew exactly what she was thinking. Zoe had a feeling that he was a lot more perceptive than she assumed was normal for someone this old. It made her feel a bit exposed; moreso, in fact, than actually technically being exposed on account of having no clothes on did, which would've seemed strange if this whole situation weren't already beyond crazy. But he was friendly enough...
"May I ask how that came about?" he said, eyeing her curiously. "I'm sure Khuit has already quizzed you thoroughly, but someone being fully transformed into another race is a fairly remarkable occurence. I've heard tales of villages cursed by the gods and whatnot, but from what the servants were saying your story was nothing like that."
Zoe nodded and gave him the same rundown she'd given her hostess; it was a little gratifying to tell it to someone who was more interested in what had happened to her than in its romance or lack thereof. He nodded thoughtfully. "So you came from another world," he said. "I suppose it's easier for a soul to be drawn unchanged into another body than for a body to be changed so completely."
Zoe frowned. "So you think this body was already here? But it's still my face on it..." Did she just have some doppelganger-self in this world? What did that imply?
He shrugged. "Who can say? I've heard theories about the transmigration of souls, but it's not, shall we say, a topic that lends itself to empirical study."
The sphinx-girl laughed at that. "Yeah, I guess. But if that's how it works, getting back home should just be a problem of returning the soul to the correct body, right?" She frowned; then again, Jon had disappeared entirely, and there was no reason to assume that her own body hadn't vanished from reality just as completely. Were her parents and Mikey just as unaware that she had existed?
Callie exited the bathroom, cringing and blushing furiously. That...was...mortifying. Ordinarily it would've been kinda cool to see what this strange moon-city had to offer, and the thing in the bathroom here was much fancier than what the inn had, but she'd been too busy trying to...trying to figure out how it worked now that she was a...a girl...to pay much attention to the marvels around her.
It was weird...too weird...the way not having the familiar parts there to direct made her feel such a loss of control...and it was only made worse by the fact that the thing she'd spent weeks teasing Peter about had happened to her instead. If she ever got back home, she'd never hear the end of it...!
If she ever got back home...
Sighing, she reentered the room that had been assigned to her and leapt up on top of the strange bubble-bed. No matter how heavy her heart, she felt so light doing that, almost like she could simply hang at the top of that arc forever if she wanted...but she didn't want to, not right now. She sank into the bed, feeling surrounded and a little comforted by the softness of it; it wasn't warm and enveloping like her mother's embrace had been, but it was soothing nonetheless.
The floating screen that had shown her all those sights and sounds was nearby, but she didn't feel like watching it; instead, she stared up at the ceiling, which opened onto the night sky like the dome in the reception area did. She stared out at the stars; at times, she felt like she could almost hear that sound that had drawn her here, while the little star-shaped baubles at the end of these strange antennae that had grown out of her head bobbed and danced just at the top of her field of view, framed by purple bangs. I miss you, Mom, she thought. I thought you were out here in the stars...I dreamed it...I wish you were.
Down at floor level, the door opened and she heard the strange machine-woman enter. "I have been sent to check up on you," came the rustling, ringing metallic voice. "We felt that it would be beneficial for you to review some of the health education for girls your age, in view of your unfamiliarity with normal anatomical development."
"Don't wanna," Callie muttered. The last thing she wanted right now was to have to learn about girls' bodies - she'd had enough of that in the bathroom. And she was in no mood to play along with their games anymore, not after what had happened to her.
I-5483113 considered this. Analysis had concluded that in light of the child's apparent acclimation to her abnormally-developed state, education would be required to help her adjust now that her body had been corrected. However, it seemed obvious that her delicate emotional state was, at the moment, a more pressing concern; there would be time enough for this when she was less upset. It was still concerning - according to the monitors, the oviduct had finished forming several hours ago, shortly before the development of the external organs, and given the apparent head start on physical maturation that the treatment had induced, it was certain that it would activate sometime within the next orbital cycle. That could be a difficult experience even when the girl child was prepared for it. But...she had been far too emotionally unstable earlier for it to be worth pressing the matter right this minute.
"Very well," the clockwork girl replied. "Do you require anything else?"
"No. Go'way."
I-5483113 nodded and withdrew, the door shutting behind her as the lights in the room dimmed. Callie was left to herself, with only the stars for company.
