NothingSpecial: gender-bending transformation stories, comics, and occasional poetry =^_^=
The bus up to the mall was more crowded, and we got quite a few stares from the other passengers. I felt much more uncomfortable now; it was one thing being out in public like this when the "public" was across the street or the room, but being within speaking distance of a whole variety of people… What was I to them? Why did they look at me that way, and what did their expressions mean? I kept going back to what I'd wondered at the diner earlier; was I an unusual young woman, in their eyes, or a disturbing simulacrum? An object of desire, or of fear and loathing? And what did I want the answer to be?
Of course, I wasn't comfortable with the idea of people seeing me as a woman at all, when I arguably wasn't one on any level other than external appearance, and I certainly didn't want to be. But somehow, the thought of being seen as less than human – an object trying to pass as a person – felt even worse. It rubbed some deeply-buried but extremely raw nerve in my psyche, a feeling I was already intimately familiar with, but I couldn't put my finger on; not here, surrounded by people, unable to focus on that instead of worrying what everyone around me was thinking.
But the trip was short, we got nothing but some funny looks, and soon we were piling back out of the bus. The mall was interchangeable with any other mall in the nation, set in the middle of a parking lot large enough to land passenger planes on. The sky was gray and overcast; the rain had let up, but it'd be back before long. And, I realized, I hadn't brought my umbrella – mostly because I hadn't thought to, but also because it had changed from a plain pop-out compact job into a lace-trimmed black parasol. Like the dress, it wasn't too overtly frilly – fairly tasteful, on its own merits – but it wasn't my style.
I'd conceded on the need for the purse, though; these jeans were so tight and the pockets so tiny that I simply could not fit either the new wallet or my phone into them, even separately. It drove me crazy; I couldn't even comfortably slip my hands into them! They might as well not have bothered adding them at all…! Well, hopefully we'd find a solution here; I didn't know if they even made normal-fitting jeans for women, but I'd settle for baggy cargo pants, if I could just move around comfortably.
Tammy immediately and assertively took the lead as we entered, just as Emma was pausing at the directory/map kiosk. After this morning, it seemed like she was trying to keep this from turning into a dress-up expedition, which I greatly appreciated. I followed behind, and she kept a modest pace so I could keep up; I was still getting used to my altered proportions. As Emma caught up with us, Tammy charted a course decisively past the main lingerie outlet, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
It still seemed odd that I could do that despite not breathing. Probably, like Emma's new habit of mimicking normal head-gestures with the use of her hands, it helped facilitate relations with the rest of humanity; this was a common pattern seen in many other cases. (I wondered if that explained other oddities like still being able to smell, but that could be a survival feature, too – I really didn't know.)
And I wasn't sure why I felt relieved. I didn't normally feel prudish or shy about women's underwear; really, I didn't think about it much at all. And it wasn't so much that I felt super awkward about the idea of wearing women's clothing, specifically, as that it just fed into the general massive awkwardness of this whole experience…I thought…? But that still didn't quite explain what I was feeling.
Really, it was the idea of Emma making a game out of it that bothered me. It didn't feel malicious when she weighed in on what I should wear earlier, but there was no mistaking that she enjoyed teasing me about it at least a little – and I didn't need that right now; I was still trying not to get mad at her for this catastrophe in the first place. But for now, she kept quiet and didn't try to drag me out of my comfort zone.
The mall was filled with an echoing clamor, tile floors and glass ceilings turning the babble of human voices into a continuous, almost industrial kind of sound. Tammy led us down one wing to a department store that took up the whole end, one of those national chains that once dominated retail: a broad range of mostly store-brand merchandise at affordable-but-not-great prices. Which was fine – I didn't want anything fancy, just something that fit comfortably and didn't stand out. And so we ended up in the women's section, looking for just that.
To my mind, pants that fit were the first order of business. I rifled through the rack of jeans as peppy Muzak chimed out of a distant overhead speaker; after a minute, I turned to Tammy. "Um…what size should I be looking for?"
She laughed. "Honestly? You can pick a number out of a hat; it won't help."
"So they weren't kidding with all those articles about this a few years ago."
Emma shook her head as she browsed through the options herself. "Nope. All the manufacturers wanted to sell the same product at the same actual size with a more flattering number than the competition year after year, but they also had to keep the numbering scheme for their own lines vaguely ordinal, so by this point it's all just anybody's guess."
Tammy nodded. "Yup. Just grab stuff that looks right and try it on. You can get a rough idea holding it up to yourself, but it's all trial-and-error in the end."
I sighed. "Guh."
Emma chuckled. "Welcome to our world. I've honestly thought about trying to start a service to cut the BS out of this. There's gotta be a million-dollar idea in there somewhere."
Tammy thought for a minute, while I looked through the variously distressed, skinny, flared, distressed-and-skinny, distressed-and-flared, skinny-and-flared, distressed-and-skinny-and-flared, etc. jeans on offer, in search of something normal. "How d'ya mean?" she asked. "Like some kind of wiki for manufacturer size conversions, or…?"
Emma grabbed a pair of slacks with one hand, holding it up to her head for closer inspection. "I hadn't thought of that, but it's probably more doable, isn't it? I was thinking of a shop that would keep your measurements on file and compare them against the actual measurements for whatever they got in, and text you if they got something with a good fit in the styles you like. But that's got all the usual problems for a startup, plus trying to make it in retail in the 21st century."
"Ooh," Tammy said. "I mean, you're not wrong about the viability, but I'd kill for that."
"Same," Emma replied dryly. "Now if only I had any expertise in business, instead of all this science stuff, right?"
Tammy laughed, and I couldn't help but chuckle as well. A moment later, I finally happened across a pair of jeans that looked fairly normal; holding them up to my waist, they weren't obviously the wrong size. "Hey," I said, "can we look for any more of these? They seem pretty okay."
Tammy shrugged and began looking; Emma gazed at them with mild distaste. "If by 'pretty okay' you mean 'generic and bland,' sure."
I felt my tempo picking up again and tried not to get irritated. "Look, I'm not trying to draw attention here."
She shifted her head further up into her armpit, raising her shoulder to bring herself a little closer to eye level. It was oddly effective, considering that this was still a head shorter than me. "There's plenty of reasons besides drawing attention, Stu. Looking good makes you feel better – science fact. And you could use a mood-lifter right now, right?"
I couldn't figure out if spinning her game of dress-up as an act of compassion was sincere, or a ploy to get me to play along. No, she probably did mean it; Emma might be a schemer, but she wasn't really duplicitous. But then, she was prone to projecting her obsessions onto others and trying to rope them in, which was why we were in this mess to begin with…
"Honestly," I said, feeling frazzled as I tried to play nice and engage her argument sincerely, "it doesn't do much for me. I know some people really do care about this stuff; I'm just not one of 'em."
She bit her lip and bobbed her knee impatiently as she tried to come up with a response; a ventilation fan rattled somewhere overhead. "But it's such a waste…" she said, half disappointed and half pouting.
My neck twitched at that, and something inside me skipped a beat. I'd heard that line more times than I ever cared to, and I definitely didn't care to now. I started formulating a comeback, trying in vain to keep myself from getting worked up, but Tammy stepped in. "Okay, seriously, Emma," she said. "If Stu wants to keep it simple, that's h–his decision. You can have plenty of fun dressing up yourself, without badgering other people when they don't want to."
Emma said nothing for a moment, visibly working out some inner conflict. Then she sighed, her shoulders drooping. "fine," she said. "No, um…sorry. It's just…I can't stop thinking about how to make the key shaft work with an outfit, or turn those seams at the elbows into an accent, or…y'know, stuff like that. It's just begging for a real thematic unity. I'm jealous; this–" – she gestured to her absent neck – "–is pretty neat, but all I can do with it is dress up as Anne Bole—"
She stopped short, and her eyes went wide. "Wait, wait, wait, holy…!" She put the slacks she was holding down, took her head in her hands, and set herself on a nearby shelf. Then she turned around, arching her body this way and that as she observed herself from an entirely new angle. "My God!" she cackled, grinning broadly, "I can actually tell if things make my ass look big!"
We stared at her. "That's your primary concern here?" Tammy asked.
Emma waggled her hand in that universal more-or-less gesture. "Eh, it's more of a spin-off benefit. But seriously! I don't have to awkwardly crane my neck to see in the mirror or ask someone to give me the honest truth anymore!"
"That's, uh…that's great, really," Tammy said, before resuming the search. Emma shrugged and returned to her own explorations, piloting her body around her head to retrieve the slacks she'd set down with only a little stumbling. It was fascinating to watch, but I had my own goal right now.
Tammy and I collected a modest pile of jeans in a few different sizes, and I made for the changing rooms to see what actually fit – but she stopped me. "Hold up there, Stu, we're not done yet. Still need to decide what to do for you up top."
"Huh?" I said, frowning. "I thought we were gonna hack up some of my shirts with a sewing kit or whatever." I wasn't thrilled about it, but we could use the ones I wasn't too attached to, and it beat the alternative…
She shook her head. "Uh, no," she said. "Under the shirts."
"Um, wait," I said, realizing what she was getting at. "I…don't actually need anything like that…?"
Emma came over to me, casually reaching down to turn her head in my direction as she did, and put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "Hate to break it to you," she said, "but…you kinda do."
Tammy nodded, looking just a bit embarrassed for my sake. "Stu, we all saw how you're, uh, built this morning. You don't need support, but your, uh, 'assets' are fairly detailed, and I'm gonna guess you probably don't want everyone on campus taking notice of that."
Emma was too far from herself to reach over and give a nod, so she gave my shoulder an affirmative squeeze. "I mean, you're only getting away with it now because that top is on the starchy side. If you're really gonna wear those same old worn-out T-shirts…sure, they're not tight-fitting, but without a bra or camisole they're gonna drape in a pretty revealing way. Especially if that 'skin' causes static cling."
I squirmed, feeling myself rev up, my body quivering as I wanted to blush and couldn't. There was no reason for this to feel any more awkward than our whole situation did, but I couldn't help it…
Tammy gave me a sympathetic look. "Hey, if you're uncomfortable with anything…girlier, we can just get some plain stretch camis. You don't need anything more, just something for contour, and they're way less fancy than even what you had on last night."
"It's, uh…" I tried to suppress a grimace. "It's just…the principle of the thing, I guess."
She shrugged. "Yeah, I guess – but those're basically your options. You can go without any layering, but you're gonna attract more attention that way, which you said you don't want."
The Muzak switched to something generically mellow and soothing, but it didn't help matters any – there were no good options here. I wasn't a cross-dresser, and I wasn't thrilled with the idea of wearing women's underwear; on the other hand, I really didn't want to draw more attention like this than I would just being like this. Tammy and Emma probably knew what they were talking about, but…could I really…?
I huffed in irritation (another odd respiratory tic, come think) and felt even more irritated at the sound: something like the chuffing of a steam locomotive raised to a pitch about halfway to "whistling teakettle," filtered through the same shimmering metallic something-or-other as my new speaking voice. As if this wasn't all ridiculous enough…
Get it together, I told myself. Are you really that insecure? This is a temporary necessity, that's all – just until we can use the machine again. But no matter how much sense it made, no matter how I tried to rationalize it to myself, it still felt weird and awkward to think about. If only dealing with issues was as simple as talking myself into believing what I chose… Still, there wasn't much choice. "fine," I sighed. "Let's just get this over with…"
Tammy nodded. "Of course. C'mon, Em."
Emma shook her head. "Actually, I was gonna go look for some button-up tops, if you're cool. Not much I can add to that discussion."
The subtext was clear: she'd been hoping to get me in something fancier than what Tammy had suggested, and she'd lost interest once that was off the table. I tried not to get irritated with her; at least she wasn't nagging. "Sure," I said, "that's fine. We'll meet you up front?"
She nodded and went her own way. Tammy led me to the other side of the women's section, through an unsettling forest of disembodied mannequin torsos modeling various tops, past the displays with rows of different bras, and back to the aisle where they kept all the plain, no-frills stuff. She spent a minute or two browsing before gathering up a few different pieces and turning to me.
"Okay," she said. "You can try these on, then we'll come back here and grab a few of whichever fits best. I can guesstimate for socks and underwear, but these we want to check."
Reluctantly, I followed her to the changing room, took the clothes, and went in. "I'm gonna go look for sewing stuff while you're in there," Tammy called from outside. "Back in a few. Hey, are you okay with snaps?"
"Huh?"
"You know, snap fasteners – for the shirts. I can't do buttonholes without a machine, and I hate those iron-on zipper things. Plus, they'll help hold the hems in place."
"Uh, that's fine, I guess," I answered. I only half-understood, but I really didn't care as long as I could keep wearing relatively normal clothes.
She left, and I set the underwear aside; it still felt awkward, and I wanted to try the jeans on first. I painstakingly peeled off the borrowed pair; they really were unreasonably tight, though the friction from my felt "skin" didn't help. I tried a couple pairs before finding the most comfortable – fairly loose-fit but not in danger of slipping, and not too figure-hugging. Luckily, Tammy had found a couple more in the same size; that should do it for me. After all, if I couldn't sweat, I wouldn't need to change them too often.
Which left the underwear. With a sigh, I unbuttoned my borrowed shirt and stood before myself in the mirror again. The light of day didn't make it any less strange, but without that initial panic, I only felt weird and unsettled looking at the thing that was me now, rather than totally overwhelmed. I thought back to the dismembered mannequins. Tammy was right; I was detailed enough that, had I passed myself on the street in a faded, worn-thin T-shirt, I definitely would've noticed, nipples or no.
I took one of the camisoles she'd picked out and held it up gingerly. It was simpler than what I'd gotten in the change: just a sort of sleeveless undershirt in a stretchy fabric, really not too different from some exercise jerseys. It was cut short; she must've gone with this to work around my key. The fact that it only went to the midriff and the thin little straps over the shoulders were about the most defineably "feminine" things about it. I guess I can work with this, I told myself, if I have to.
Hesitantly, I slipped it over my head and pulled it down into place. Nope, it was too small. From what Tammy and Emma had said, it was probably supposed to fit snugly, but this was noticeably tight around my ribcage (well, the part of my torso shaped like one) and my "breasts," modest though they were. I discarded that one. The next fit much better – just snug, not uncomfortable. It worked alright with my key, too; it bunched up a little over the top of the shaft, but it wasn't too noticeable.
I took a look in the mirror and saw what they meant – it stretched over my bust and smoothed out the details into a simpler shape that betrayed less of the underlying anatomy. Having a bust in the first place was still a problem, and this didn't hide the fact, but at least I'd draw less attention this way. For now, though, I took it off and set it aside.
The last one was bigger, so I didn't bother with it. Dressing in my borrowed clothes again, I exited to find Tammy waiting for me. The fabric/crafts section wasn't that far away, but I was still impressed that she was back already; she could really move, when she needed to. "Hey," she said, her caudal fin flipping idly back and forth, "any luck?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm good on pants now, and, uh, this one seems like the right size."
"Great," she said, smiling. "We'll go get a few more of those, and put the other stuff back."
"Well, I probably shouldn't need any more," I said. "Emma was right, I'm not gonna be sweating or anything as long as I'm like this."
She shrugged. "Okay, but I figured we could get a couple full-length ones and cut them up the back, in case you weren't comfortable with only having a T-shirt over the midriff. And you're still gonna need some other colors."
"I don't really care how it looks," I said. "It's not like anyone else is gonna see it."
Tammy laughed. "It's not for showing off, Stu, it's for not showing off. Say you wear a dark bra or cami under a white top – it's gonna show through, especially if we're talking about some of your shirts. So you want a couple different colors, to minimize that."
I shrugged in resignation. She was probably right, but I just wanted this whole thing to be over already. We put the other stuff back and grabbed a few of the right-size camisoles, long and short. While we were back in the no-frills aisle, Tammy pointed out another item on the shelves. "figured those might suit you a little better than the panties," she said.
It was something that I was only vaguely aware existed: women's underwear that wasn't panties or thongs. This was…again, not something that changed much about my situation, but another little scrap of quasi-normality in the midst of the insanity. With a grateful nod, I grabbed a pack of simple, boring solid-color boxer-briefs, ran them by Tammy to check the size, and headed out to the registers.
The trip back to campus was mostly uneventful. We stopped at the food court to get takeout for lunch, caught the bus back down the hill, and made it to the back entrance of the women's dorm with nothing worse than a few stares. We were almost back to Tammy's room when I felt a sensation that was immediately familiar, despite being pretty new to me. I was running down.
I didn't know if it was from all the walking and carting piles of clothes around, or if it was "normal" for this body to need winding multiple times per day, but I recognized the symptoms from earlier. My movements were slower and jerkier, my sense of time was getting a little whacked, and I could hear my internal tempo dropping. "U–um, guys?" I said. "I thiiink I'm…" I trailed off; it wasn't hard to think, not yet, but I was losing coordination as parts of me took too long to respond to my brain.
"Oh, geez," Emma said, glancing back at me. "Again? Um…" She fumbled around for a moment trying to free herself from her burdens; she had our bags (a couple of mine, plus several of hers) slung from her elbows so that she could carry her head with both hands. "Uh, Tammy, could you hold these for a minute…?"
Tammy shook her head. "C'mon, we're trying to lay low here. You're gonna kill five minutes putting that stuff down just to pick it back up again. Stu, turn around, okay?" She wheeled around and rolled up to me; I turned my back to her and made to crouch down, but she stopped me. "I can reach just fine, thanks," she said. "Be more trouble for me if you're hunched forward like that."
Scooching up so that her tail slid past me, brushing the side of my leg, she took my key in her hands and started turning it clockwise. Her grip was firm, but gentler than Emma's had been; there was less of a lurch in my perception with every turn, even though the strokes were quicker, and the motion was smoother. I was surprised at her upper-body strength, but her arms had been getting exercised for years.
But she had more than that to work with now, and as the tension in my mainspring made winding harder, she planted her tail against our makeshift footrest for a better foothold ("tailhold?") A pectoral fin brushed against my thigh; she was probably moving it reflexively as if it were still a leg. I heard the popcorn tin flex under her weight, but it didn't buckle. She wound the key about as tight as it would go, then smoothly let it reverse as the spring began to unwind.
I actually felt more energetic than I had that morning; Emma must not have wound me completely. "U–um, th–thanks," I stuttered, various parts of me still getting up to speed and back into sync. How was she so…together? So much more than myself – she was helping me here, despite everything she had to deal with that I didn't…or hadn't had to, until now. Sure, she was no longer paralyzed, but even before this, she'd given off the same feeling of decisive reliability…
"Don't mention it," she said, interrupting my musings. "But seriously, c'mon. I don't want to get waylaid out here; the food'll get cold. Well, Emma's will."
We went inside; her roommates were still gone. Tammy and Emma tucked into their meals immediately; I went into the bathroom, extricated myself from the tight jeans, shucked off the panties that I'd ended up in last night, and dressed in the alternatives we'd picked up. These jeans definitely felt more comfortable, and having more familiar underwear helped things feel at least slightly more normal.
…Slightly.
While they ate, I slipped out to the men's dorm. Gil wouldn't be back until later; he spent his Saturdays scoping out the recycle center downtown or working in the CS lab on a project he always talked to me about – restoring some even older computer to working order. I worried about being seen, but I made it to our room, grabbed some T-shirts and my laptop and headphones, and got back out without encountering a soul; some combination of last night's weather, the threat of today's, and people being gone for the weekend spared me any awkward encounters.
Being spared from the weather was another matter. In the time I was inside the men's dorm, it turned from ominously cloudy to actively raining. Fortunately, I'd gotten a new umbrella at the mall, and I had the leftover shopping bags to carry my things in. I passed a few other students on the way back, but nobody wanted to do more than stare at me if it meant getting wet.
When I got back, Tammy was modifying one of her skirts, while Emma idly browsed on her phone. She'd cut slits in the sides almost up to the waistband, and was stitching up little flaps of fabric she'd folded over into hems on the new edges. I watched curiously; she really seemed to know what she was doing. "I, uh, didn't know you did this kind of stuff," I said, after a minute.
She shrugged. "A little. My sister is the one who's really into it, but she always gets me to help her when she needs a spare pair of hands." She motioned to a couple little packets of metal bits. "Hey, can you open those? I'm nearly done with the needlework here."
I took one and tore it open, with some difficulty – I no longer had fingernails. The pieces inside, as far as I could tell, made the ring side of a snap-fastener when pressed together. I'd never really thought about how those worked before, but it was a clever little design. The other packet had the pieces for the corresponding side.
When Tammy finished her sewing, she took the packets from me and got out a pair of pieces. She thought for a moment, and reached down to measure the base of a pectoral fin with her fingers. Turning back to the skirt, she guesstimated a slightly larger distance from the top of her cut down the side, and pressed the pieces together through the fabric; then she positioned the pieces for the other half on the opposite hem.
Honestly, I was a little…jealous? Intimidated? Embarrassed? I couldn't have done this without at least an afternoon of research and prep, but here was my (formerly?) handicapped classmate just improvising useful clothing alterations on the spot like it wasn't even a thing. I felt kind of useless by comparison.
Okay, I did remember what Emma had said last night, but…that wasn't the same, was it? Carrying around a head full of trivia that just happened to come in handy in these unusual circumstances wasn't the same as having broadly useful life skills you could whip out at the drop of a hat – on top of apparently being a musician as well. Why was everybody I knew more together than me…?
Tammy added another snap further down, then did the other side up to match. Evidently she didn't mind a bit of a slit in the side, but not all the way up what used to be her thigh. "Okay," she said, "that'll work for now. You brought over some of your T-shirts?"
"Uh, yeah," I said, still a bit distracted. I fished one out – a faded logo tee from a favorite band – and handed it to her. She looked it over and nodded. "Okay, yeah, this isn't too thin to work with. Shouldn't be too tight, either. Here, come over here for a sec."
She grabbed a measuring tape; it was a bit too far from the neckline to the top of my key-shaft to span with her fingers. Nodding to herself, she took a hefty pair of scissors and cut her way up the back of the shirt, then did the new edges up as she'd done with the skirt. When she finished there was an opening most of the way up and neatly-spaced snaps all the way back down. "Okay," she said, "go see how that fits. Hey, take the grey cami with you."
I went into the bathroom, doffed the borrowed shirt, and tossed it in the hamper with the unreasonably tight jeans. I could still smell the perfume on myself. I slipped the camisole over my head, tugged it down into place, and pulled the shirt on. It felt comfortingly familiar, even with the slit up the back. I buttoned it up and looked into the mirror; it was still bizarre to see this clockwork-automaton creature looking back, but having her dressed the way I did made it a bit less creepy and weird to think of her as being me.
Tammy looked me over when I came out and nodded. "Good, that'll work," she said. "Now, gonna be honest here, Stu, it's a little obvious that the cami is bunching up over your key, and a bra-strap wouldn't do that – but that's your call. And we'll cut up the full-length ones, after the shirts – not like we've got much else planned for the weekend."
Actually, we were done with the alterations by the end of the day. She downplayed her skill, but Tammy's work was neat and fast, and we didn't have that much to do: another half-dozen shirts and three camisoles for me, a couple skirts for her. The only noteworthy interruption was a text from Gil asking where I was and how I was doing – which seemed odd, but then it probably was strange for him to return to our room and not find me holed up in it.
I told him I'd gone out with some other students, which wasn't untrue; he replied with a thumbs-up. No doubt he thought I was getting out and socializing, instead of having my entire life turned upside-down and hiding out in the women's dorm, sewing. Well, it's easier than explaining the truth, I thought. Though I'd have to break the news sooner or later…
Tammy and Emma had dinner delivered, and Emma went down to pick it up. She came back giggling madly. "You shoulda seen the look on the guy's face when he saw me!" she said. "I almost lost it right there, but it was even better when I kept a straight face and he was trying to pull himself back together…" She set the food down and wiped tears from her eyes. "Oh, man," she chuckled. "I gave him like a $10 tip. Worth it."
"We're trying not to cause a commotion here," Tammy groused as she took her tray. "I'd like to at least have two days to get our shit together before we have to deal with the faculty on Monday."
Emma shrugged. "C'mon, they're not even in the office over the weekend, mostly. Monday'll come when it comes, no matter what we do. Heck, it might be good for an icebreaker."
"I'm talking about what'll happen when anyone else finds out," she replied. "We already have to deal with the Little Divas. If we lay low, tomorrow could be nice and quiet while we think about what we're going to do on Monday. If we don't, and word gets around, it'll be Katey-bar-the-door while every bored student whose tailgate party got rained out tries to barge in. Capisce?"
"Yes, Mom," Emma sighed, digging into her pasta. She turned a critical eye toward Tammy, who was munching calamari with gusto. "Isn't that basically cannibalism now?"
Our resident mermaid shot her a Look. "I'm not a friggin' fish, Em. Hell, neither are squid, for that matter."
Emma frowned. "Aren't you?" She turned to me with a sly grin. "Hey, Professor?"
I hesitated, wondering where to begin, or whether to get involved at all, but Tammy fixed me with a stare that said two things simultaneously: please, shut her up with this nonsense, and, don't you dare tell her if it is true.
"Um, no…?" I said. "I mean, muscle tissue is basically the same, at least in vertebrates. It mostly differs in configuration and what's packed in with the muscle fibers. Beyond that…there are similarities, but it's just the way they're engineered. It's what you'd call convergent evolution, if merfolk had evolved instead of coming into existence by happenstance."
Emma cocked an eyebrow, tilting her head to one side in a show of curiosity as she swallowed a mouthful of linguini. "Oh? Do tell."
"Well, think about it," I said. "Merfolk and fish both live – normally – in an environment where fluid density does most of the work in supporting their weight, and they move by repeatedly flicking a single body segment from side to side. They don't need sustained strength nearly as much as short, strong bursts of motion, so they both have a lot more fast-twitch muscle than slow-twitch. Similar problems, similar solutions."
"Is that why this dumb thing's always flopping around?" Tammy interrupted, motioning toward her caudal fin, which twitched from one side to the other as if to illustrate."I swear it has a mind of its own…" She seemed annoyed with me talking similarities, but she was clearly a little curious herself.
"Probably…? Seems like it'd make sense," I said. "From what I've read, most of the similarities can be explained that way – the scales reduce drag, the pectoral fins are a lightweight and flexible control surface, the gills let them breathe without surfacing, et cetera. But they're mammals through and through, adaptations notwithstanding.° Not fish, and definitely not cephalopods. In terms of dietary ethics, a human and a cow are closer than a squid and a mermaid."
° (Which wasn't to say that other species didn't blur the lines a bit more. Several kinds of demi-humans, for example, were oviparous, including an otherwise normal-looking human variant.)
Tammy gave Emma a smug grin, but she was lost in thought, cradling her head in her lap as she finished the last of her pasta. "Come think," she said, "I wonder what we're supposed to be feeding Lucky now?"
"Huh?" I had to pause and search my memory – my brain clicking and chattering away inside my head – to remember who or what she was talking about. "Oh, right, the rat. Wait, what even happened to him?"
"Oh, you never did get a look, did you?" Tammy said. "We were so out of it last night, we didn't even think of it until today – while you were out getting your stuff. Cage's on the other side of the desk."
I went around the double desk that divided the room to the side by Tammy's bed. The cage sat atop the desk, which also held a pile of miscellany; she used the other desk, on the more easily-accessible side of the room. Standing in the cage, peering out through the wire mesh, was a small humanoid figure.
This wasn't a huge shock. Experiments on animals sometimes produced "homunculi," non-sentient life-forms with a vaguely humanoid appearance; as usual, this was the subject of much debate between the Strong and Weak camps, with predictable arguments from each. But there was no dispute over whether the likeness went any deeper; mere animals changed into mere animals, and people into people. For better or worse, no test subjects had ever changed from beast to person – or, thankfully, vice-versa.
Homunculi tended to end up in the higher-functioning range for non-sentient life, though, whatever they'd started out as. They weren't always terribly clever – more often like a dog or cat than, say, an octopus – but they were generally curious and (usually) sociable creatures. Some kinds, when chance had produced enough similar specimens to allow breeding, had even caught on as pets.°
° (There was a kind of primate – a small Old World monkey, but with a face halfway between a chimpanzee and a Muppet and a head of human-like hair – that had been a full-fledged craze a decade ago; I found them deeply unsettling, myself. Some parties had also gone to great lengths trying to make "ur-gerbils" – an inapt name for jerboas the size of a pony – into A Thing, but space and fodder costs were prohibitive, and it'd just ended up as a variant on the old emu-farm scam.)
But what stared back at me wasn't something I'd heard of before. The new Lucky was a sort of mushroom-creature about five inches tall, with stubby little arms and legs, stumpy feet, and mitten-hands (thumbs, but no fingers.) Its skin was light beige and rubbery like a mushroom stalk, and the "face" was a round surface with no features besides two beady black eyes. But it was surprisingly expressive, and I could tell the little critter was in a friendly and curious mood.
The top of the head and the lower torso were mushroom caps – red with patches of white material, the iconic spotted-toadstool look. The head-cap was broad and shallow, like those conical Asian hats; the one at the waist was longer and, with the legs peeking out from inside, resembled a skirt. Fringes of loose "skin" hung down around the upper torso and forearms for a ruffled-shirt-and-flared-cuffs look, as did the similar fringes around the upper legs, under the "skirt;" the veil of white spongy stuff around the back and sides of the head looked a bit like hair.
"Cute, isn't she?" Emma said.
"I, uh, don't know if it's a 'she,'" I said, thinking back to high-school biology. "I think they reproduce asexually."
"Oh, c'mon, she's got petticoats and everything," she replied. "She's obviously a 'she.'"
There was an awkward silence as something inside me got hung up over her weird insistence on assigning a gender to a sexless, non-sentient life-form; I could feel some mechanism in my chest clicking like it was trying to move past a certain position and getting stuck. It was probably no weirder than people who insist on referring to yappy little dogs as their "kids," but it just bugged me, for reasons I couldn't articulate.
Finally, Emma shrugged. "Alright, alright," she said with a smirk. "If she wants to correct me on her pronouns, I'll respect her wishes."
I rolled my eyes, but we both knew it wasn't worth arguing over. "Anyway," I said, "don't they – uh, 'eat…?' – rotting leaves and wood and stuff? Or…I guess rotting anything, if you count mold."
"Right, right," she said, nodding her head thoughtfully. "And we're in a college dorm, so it's not like decomposing organic matter is gonna be hard to come by."
"You're not making a compost heap in my dorm room," Tammy interjected.
"Not a heap," Emma said, stuffing the plastic utensils and empty takeout boxes into the bag they'd come in. "Just, you know, get some old banana peels and whatnot and make a little layer of, um, stuff. We'd need a proper terrarium, though."
"No, Emma."
"Um," I said, "I think there's home cultivation kits you can buy, so there's gotta be some way to feed them that doesn't involve composting. We could look into that."
"We'll have to," Emma said, setting her head on the end-table next to the couch. Her body stood up and took the bag over to Tammy's trash can. "I mean, we can't let the poor thing starve."
"Okay," Tammy said, "when did we decide that we're keeping her in my room? You've got a room of your own, you know."
"Oh, I'm moving in with you," Emma said nonchalantly. The "smoke" between her shoulders curled lazily up towards the ceiling, dissipating into thin air partway up. She returned to the sofa and picked herself up.
Tammy stared at her. "Come again?"
"It's only logical," she replied, holding herself just below her bust to look Tammy in the eye. "Your roommates are moving out, which frees up the other room. We're all in the same boat, so we can all look out for each other – and it's easier for us to be on hand for Stu when she needs winding."
I did a double-take as the machinery in my brain skipped a beat. "I—wait, what? Huh!?"
Tammy thought for a moment. "I…damn, I hate to admit it, but that kinda makes sense."
"W–wait, wait," I stammered, things getting off-kilter inside me again, "that's…I can't…"
"You can't go back to the men's dorm like that, right?" Emma said. "You said so yourself. This way, you'll have a place here, with two people you can trust, who are in the exact same position. Plus, you know more than either of us about the practical implications for transformees. We'd all benefit from having each other around."
"But…they're not just going to let a guy move in here," I said, before stopping to consider that. "I mean, whatever you think about…this, they know perfectly well what it says on my student record."
Emma scoffed. "C'mon, this isn't Old Kentucky Confederate Baptist University here. We can talk 'em into it, if we tell them you're tra—ow!" She winced as Tammy gave her another whack across the shins with her tail. "Geez, you need a trigger lock on that thing."
"Speak for yourself," Tammy said acerbically. "Look, Stu…I think she's right. And I'm sure we can get housing to make accommodations for you, given the circumstances. Even if your roommate's an okay guy…you really don't need to deal with some of the cretins they have over there."
"Seriously, I can't just…!" I trailed off, losing steam for my own protest. I knew the pattern: this was the part where I flailed around mentally for a bit, trying to work up the willpower to say no to something, while group consensus steadily encroached upon me, until I was finally bound to the will of others. The sensations were different – a spring near the base of my neck coiling tight, gears somewhere under my shoulder blades whirring frantically – but I knew the feeling intimately.
And yet I couldn't disagree. They were right – I had said so myself, and thinking about some of the troglodytes I'd encountered in the dorms, I felt the bloodless equivalent of a shudder. Being crawled all over by a drunken sophomore was gross enough when I wasn't a petite…girl-thing…who might just freeze in place at any moment. Like it or not, I would need people to support me while I was like this, and maybe I could be helpful to them, and here I went again pre-justifying a course of action that other people were pushing me into just like always and this always happened and…and…
"U–um, I guess," I murmured, sealing my fate. My shoulders slumped; the tension inside me relaxed, but it still felt draining.
Tammy nodded silently, giving me a look of mild concern. Emma grinned. "Excellent. We'll hit up Housing after we talk to the faculty on Monday. We can move your stuff tomorrow – you don't have much, do you?"
I shook my head slowly; Emma took it as agreement, and rattled off plans for the remainder of the weekend, but I just stared down at Lucky in the cage – the other member of our group to become a sexless nonentity that people were insistently trying to feminize and align to their plans. You're "lucky" you don't have the capacity to angst out over this, I thought to the little mushroom-critter.
After brooding about it for a while longer, I called it an early evening and went to bed, where I willed myself into dreamless "sleep."