Jon found himself in a strange dream. It was more like a memory, in fact, he was fairly sure it was a memory. He was eight, back at the family home and running excitedly. He and Karyn were playing hide and seek and he needed a place to hide. Luckily, he'd recently discovered the trapdoor to the attic and hadn't told Karyn about it. It was the perfect hiding place!
Jon climbed the ladder into the dusty attic, and made sure to pull it up behind him. After closing the trapdoor, the attic was not as dark as he might have worried, dusty shafts of sunlight peaking in from an only partially boarded window. After a few minutes of hiding, Jon got board and began to explore, poking around. It was mostly boxes of old clothes and photoalbums, but there were a few odd trinkets his grandfather had brought back from his adventures. Eventually he pulled a sheet off of a large ornate floor length mirror that he thought might have belonged to his grandmother. It was the sort of mirror a child might imagine leaping into, to go off to some magical land.
However, what Jon saw in the mirror wasn't any kind of land filled with rabbits and hatters, it was simply a reflection. Only, it wasn't his reflection. It was a little girl, about the same age as him. She had a cute button nose, big blue eyes, and long blonde hair tied back with a pretty blue bow. She was wearing a cute orange dress with blue buttons, white stockings and a pair of mary janes on her feet. None of that was what caught his attention, what caught his attention was that the girl in the mirror was copying his movements perfectly.
He stood their, mesmerized until the trap door opened, just as he remembered it, and he heard Karyn shout from below, "Sierra, I found you!"
In an annex on the other side of the facility from where Sierra's room was, lay Madame Leclerc's dormitory where the former Zoe Gibson, now Jeanette Rochefort was undergoing her readjustment. It was a much less luxurious building, modeled after servants quarters in old world mansions and run by the stern but fair Madame Leclerc. The dorm was filled with the future domestic servants of the new Lakeview, the maids, the butlers, the cooks, the chauffeurs, the valets and the nannies. Jeanette herself was sharing a dormitory with five other maids to be, Elsie, Una, Leela, Fifi and Jane.
However, at the moment she wasn't in her spare dorm room, she was currently furiously polishing silver down in one of the classrooms as part of her cleaning module. At least I like this part of the job, everything should be clean and neat after all. They haven't changed that about me. Zoe thought (still refusing to think of herself as Jeanette, at least within her own mind.) Her memory of her former messy room and hatred of chores having already evaporated like ice under the sun of Femcorp's programing.
Jeanette was a phase 2 citizen, needing less extensive physical changes than her former brother, so had been awake for over a week and was well into her program. Unlike Sierra, who bore no outward resemblance to the old Jon Gibson, Jeanette looked a bit like the old Zoe, if you squinted. Her hair was now naturally black instead of dyed, and looked far healthier, glossier, and noticeably curlier falling in loose ringlettes when it wasn't held in a french braid. Her features had changed a bit, poutier lips, a perter nose and the addition of a beauty mark on her cheek. Her body had been matured to fit her new age, with a larger bust, a loss of baby fat, and a derrière that filled out her new maid's dress.
The dress was a classic black and white maid's uniform, rather than what your typical modern cleaning person might wear. It wasn't the halloween skimpy version of it, but it was attractively cut and paired with low black heels Jeanette/Zoe had quickly become accustomed to wearing everywhere she went.
Since waking up, she'd been plowing through her modules, learning cleaning, etiquette, deference, and everything she'd need to be a perfect loyal lady's maid. Today they were working on detail cleaning, which was her favorite since she hated mess and grime.
"Mademoiselle Rochefort, you missed a spot on the soup spoon," her teacher Mr. Haypenny said as he made his rounds of the students. Zoe grimaced at her mistake and quickly went to correct it.
"I'm sorry, I'll fix it right away Mr. Haypenny."
Mr. Haypenny turned back and tutted, "your dialect please, Mademoiselle Rochefort,"
"Oui, Ah meent eet iz no problem, Monsieur Haypenny," Zoe said with a little giggle at the end. Those had been her oddest lessons, not just going through a crash course in French, but learning to always use an exaggerated French accent when she spoke English. She'd been resistant at first, but soon realized how much more natural it felt to speak that way, even if she still slipped up sometimes.
Sierra woke up to the sound of a pop song playing on the room's built in speakers. She stretch languidly and smiled as she sat up in her plush king sized bed. She was out of the hospital gown, having been helped into a simple bra and panty set by Tracey before she fell asleep. Everything just felt so peaceful, until her memories of the previous day came flooding back to her.
'Oh Shit! They turned me into a trophy wife and I'm trapped in some sort of brainwashing center.' Sierra recalled in a panic. "It's okay, Sierra just calm down," she told herself, taking a deep breath. There was a light at the end of the tunnel, the Wishing Stone. She just had to get through whatever this program was, so she could get back out in the town, get the stone, and then none of this would matter.
It was at this point she realized she'd been thinking of herself as a she, and moreover, as Sierra. She knew logically that she was Jon, but she just felt like Sierra. 'It makes sense, that's who I am now. I was Jon, but at the moment I'm Sierra and obviously a woman. It only makes sense to refer to myself as a girl right now' she rationalized, unknowingly repeating her subliminal messaging form the night before. Sierra shook her lovely blonde head and put a determined look on her face. She'd get through this and fix everything with the stone, after all, she remembered who she was.
