Friday Update #40 Part Two: The Entire Britney Outline (Patreon)

Published:

2023-08-28 20:51:47

Imported:

2023-10

Content

Edit August 28 2023: I have COVID-19 for the third time (thanks parents!) and decided to get done with some low brain power work I've been putting off for a while, such as separating this Friday Update into two parts (and editing both for typos I missed the first time and clearer wording and context). I did this as I felt that the drama of the intro to this Friday Update detracted from some of the best writing I've ever done.

Also, there's a new bit in the epilogue I forgot to add (visiting an anime convention with Britney and someone else).

Seriously, this is your last chance to turn back from spoilers, so do so now if you don't want the entire Britney route spoiled.

So, here's the entire goddamned Britney outline. It will be presented in two parts: a very long post-hoc monologue/soliloquy by Zoey (yes, she's going by that now as a trans woman), and a narrative summary. Both are to be told in present tense, but I might have slipped up here or there.

It is close to 100% comprehensive, unlike Keisuke's, and it is intended to be told as a recap of the route in the epilogue before turning into the full epilogue after Zoey leaves her grandpa's grave. Many parts of that recap will be condensed, shortened, or omitted based on C.H.E.A.T.S. stats, and not all of those divergence points are labeled. This is the full-length version of what that conversation could be with maximum Awkwardness stats and such, as its role today is as the overall outline. Its role in the visual novel is a recap of the entire route, which is expected to be 25 hours long and releasing over a few years, to show how Zoey's thoughts on her experiences have changed from when she first experienced them, and it will likely not be nearly this long.

Also, this outline assumes that you haven't just read re:Dreamer but that you know the lore of Kevin Taylor, Z's dearly-beloved deceased grandpa (you can find his World Information entries under "Zach" if unlocked, but here they are, along with his son's, if you need a 12,000-word refresher).

Also, some details, like Author's Notes, will be labeled between angle brackets <like this> and function as extra details or commentary.

A few weeks after the re:Dreamer season ends and a week after Zoey's freshman year of college ends (that semester ending on May 12th; it is now May 19th), Zoey shows up with Britney to a Catholic church she's only been to once before, when she was nine. It's not a place with good memories, but those bad memories were in the chapel, during her grandpa's funeral. She's never visited his grave until today, and she brought a bundle of white flowers and a long, crazy story.

"Zoey, are you sure you don't want me to come along with you for this?"

"I'm positive, Britney. This is something I need to do, and I need to do it by myself because I'm too much of a coward to do it if anyone is watching."

Zoey suddenly thinks of something.

"Also, hold onto my phone."

"Why?"

"Well... call me paranoid, but I want to guarantee that this talk is private."

"I would call you paranoid, but I understand."

Ai got deleted along with re:Dreamer, but not only has Zoey gotten used to having an eavesdropper on her phone listening to everything she says, neither she nor Britney know what Ai was or if she could still be an is.

Zoey hands over the phone, and if Awkwardness == 5, Zoey asks Britney not to look through it because she's pretty sure her girlfriend knows her password.

Britney tells Zoey good luck.

Without Awkwardness >= 4, Britney simply tells Zoey good luck and Zoey nods and heads off; otherwise, Zoey says to Britney, "I don't know how long this will take. I have a lot to tell him, but please, wait for me, and don't come to get me unless it's an absolute emergency."

Zoey walks up a hill to her grandpa's grave. She's really glad he got a place to rest on a hill, because he always liked hiking mountains. In fact, his ashes are scattered over a Mt. Hood trail just under 2 hours of driving away. Zoey has always treated that like his true grave, but she never visited it either after that day with her dad.

Zoey sees the grave for Kevin Taylor and starts to tear up a bit, but she wipes her eyes and puts a big but slightly sad smile on her face.

"Hey, Grandpa! Long time no see!"

Zoey mutters under her breath about how that's too casual for what she's planning on saying here, but even after all this time, she doesn't know what to say. She's terrified she's going to freeze up and not say anything again, so she pushes on through despite starting off on the wrong foot, hoping she'll find the words along the way.

"So, it's been over twelve years, and not only have I grown up, it's probably not the way anyone was expecting."

It feels... silly, but Zoey worries that she asked Britney to dress her up too well today. She's looking amazing, with a tastefully mature outfit for summer in Portland, well-styled hair, and makeup that makes her unmistakably a woman, but while Zoey thought that look would give her confidence for this conversation, it now makes her worried that someone who only knew Zach before he turned ten would have a hard time recognizing that same person in this woman.

"God, would you even recognize me? I've still got the same red eyes, and Mom says I look a lot like her back when she was in college, so hopefully that would be enough."

"Oh, and don't worry. You always warned me that Mom was trying to live through me, but I'm committed to not turning into a younger version of her. It took me 21 years, but I finally learned how to stand up for myself against her and keep her at a distance. The apple didn't fall from the tree, but it wasn't as close as it seems, despite my body."

Zoey sighs.

"That's the big thing I'm here for, isn't it? To tell you that I'm not your grandson anymore?"

"And never really was?"

"I had a little bit of a talk with Dad about it — he's doing well, but I'm guessing you and he still talk to each other and you didn't need me to tell you that — and he's told me that you would have loved me no matter who I am."

"I know that just as much as I know I'm the person who I want to be, or at least on track to be that person, but I can't quite get rid of all these anxious thoughts."

Zoey clicks her tongue. She just got done telling her grandpa (or at least, his grave) how she's not going to end up like her mom, but she's doing the same sort of anxious rumination that only gets worse with overthinking.

"I should probably talk about how I ended up looking like this, and I don't mean the makeup and clothes."

Zoey doesn't know where to begin with that tale. She's about to start with talking about re:Dreamer, but she chides herself.

"No, no. I need to give context, or else that doesn't make sense. And it's been so long since we've talked."

After a few moments, she figures that the best place to start was after her last moment with her grandpa.

"Seconds after the doctor pronounced you dead, Mom whispered 'Thank God' under her breath in that mutter she does where you're never quite sure if she meant to say it and be overheard or not."

"Looking back, I know she meant she was glad your death had been a peaceful one where you got to say goodbye to me, but I was so angry at her when she said that. I was in a lot of pain, and I turned and snapped at her about how she never loved you and that she didn't deserve to be in the hospital room."

"I held your hands for what felt like half an hour as they got colder and stiffer, and the same thing happened to my heart. I realized you were gone and that I was crying over a corpse, and that broke something inside of me. The only way I could cope with all those negative emotions I felt was shoving all my emotions into a box and trying to logically think my way out of feeling anything."

"I was numb for the next two years. Dad was grieving too, but he dealt with his grief alone by giving himself more and more work, and I started to resent how he didn't notice how sad and lonely I was without you and that he never stepped in to fill that void in my life."

"You know your son better than I do, so I shouldn't have to tell you how fucking oblivious and dense he can be. He'll often need someone to tell him something, and I just never told him how much I needed him because I assumed he would notice, and I was a dumb and angry kid treating that like a test of his skills as a father figure. Like, how he shouldn't have to realize he needed to be my dad, or something like that."

Zoey slowly looks down with a bit of sadness, but also a tiny bit of anger.

"Mom needed him even more, and without you around, she started to go off the rails. I don't think she'd admit it except through one of her verbal riddles, but she missed you as well. The problem was that she dealt with her sadness by taking more control of my life, and I was too angry at her and too spineless to do anything but let her and get even angrier at her over it."

Zoey briefly thinks about trying to justify her mom's actions out loud, but she decides against it. In Britney's route, and unlike in Keisuke and Samantha's routes, Zoey is less forgiving of her mom's bad parenting and emotionally immaturity, and she's not going to let herself or her mom make excuses for it anymore. Besides, this talk is about Zoey's life, and while her mom is a key player in it, Zoey is taking steps to distance her life from her mom's life.

"So, I didn't have any male role models in my life I saw with any regularity besides Keisuke. You know, that big kid next door I would play with?"

Zoey sighs.

"Of course you know who Keisuke is. He's doing well too, by the way, and I might have just played matchmaker for him. I'll have to see how that goes because Sir Nakamura has a habit of ruining the 'happily ever after' moments after saving a damsel in distress, but I don't think he's running off to Ireland to punch that girl's deadbeat dad in the face anytime soon."

"Keisuke's great, but a kid my age I could easily outsmart wasn't a good male role model to have. But I didn't have anyone else around that made my loneliness bearable, so I latched onto him in a way that was pretty toxic in hindsight."

"We had an activity every summer, like building a treehouse or commandeering an abandoned lake boat as a make-believe pirate ship. They were typical adventures of boyhood, but something never fully felt right about them."

Zoey looks down at her chest with a wry grin.

"And now I know why."

"One summer, when we were 11 and about to enter middle school, Keisuke and I found this stray cat and started to take care of it. We built it this elaborate shelter out of spare lumber and leftover concrete — and you'll be happy to know I built that thing to code and it could have withstood a Pacific hurricane — and we fed it, and we had this elaborate plan for how we were going to take turns after school looking after it."

"But..."

Zoey clutches her right arm in pain.

"She died pretty horribly, and she was scared and in a lot of pain as I held her in my arms in her last moments."

"I put on a brave face that day, but the way she died reminded me too much about how you died. It was also the first time I realized my own mortality, and I didn't take that discovery well."

"Part of the way I dealt with my grief of losing you was by telling myself that there was no God, no Heaven, no Hell, and no afterlife. When you died, all that was left was your body and what you've made in this world."

"I..."

Zoey knows she's getting ahead of herself, but talking about Kurohime's death is still hard for her a decade later, so she moves away from the subject to a more comfortable one.

"I'm doing better with that nowadays, partly because I've had several significant experiences in my life that I can't explain away through logic and science, and my girlfriend recently downgraded me from 'edgy atheist' to 'angsty agnostic.'"

"I'll talk about her a lot more later, but you're going to love this: she's Catholic."

"So... middle school was rough. I hated being around the only parental figure I had any real contact with, I had less and less opportunities to hang out with my only friend, I was getting bullied constantly, and I realized that I wasn't going to grow up big and tall and strong and manly like you and Dad."

"I hated myself and being by myself, but I couldn't wait until school let out every day so I could run home and spend all of my time in my room alone. I became an introverted isolationist with hobbies that were solitary, and those hobbies meant the world to me because I had nothing else."

"I didn't know how to change as a person, but then I met someone who changed my life."

Zoey has the warmest smile on her face so far as she starts to talk about how she and Britney met.

"Early into sophomore year of high school, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria with the fruit of my labors with my hobby, a custom smartphone I'd built, when this cute blonde girl practically tripped over herself rushing toward me like a bull."

"Right from the start, she made an impression on me, and she started to ask me about my phone and the game I was playing with in a voice filled with excitement and energy and a bit of what I later placed as a Texan accent."

"We introduced ourselves to each other, and I learned that her name was Britney Becket. The conversation soon turned into an argument about the historical accuracy of a reference in the game to American aviation history, and this American girl just would not accept that this Akarian quarter-Japanese kid knew as much about American history as she did."

"We both realized how smart the other was. I later learned she was the daughter of a great lawyer who had tried to turn her into a lawyer herself, complete with a field trip version of law school, and I of course was the then-son of a genius polymath who wouldn't accept that I couldn't be as smart as her."

<Awkwardness >= 4 tangent begins>

"She's definitely more specialized in debate skills than scientific knowledge, but she's got a great understanding of the law, politics, and history. But as I've realized, it's one thing to be smart, but it's another thing to do something with that intelligence."

"Just look at Mom. She's easily the smartest person I'm ever going to meet, but she wasted that potential by sacrificing a meteoric start to an incredibly promising career to raise me full-time, and it's clear she's bitter with regret over that decision."

"It's so easy to fall into the trap of assuming you're always right because you're smart and everyone has told you how smart you were for as long as you could remember. I was starting to get past the point of no return on that path, but Britney was the first person I'd met in my life besides Mom who was a challenge to out-reason, and she taught me that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was and that there was so much more I could learn."

</Awkwardness >= 4 tangent ends>

"We also realized how much fun we were having with this little debate, so we agreed to meet up for lunch tomorrow with sources."

Zoey pauses.

"I don't think you, Mom, or Dad intended to raise me as a nerdy dork, but that's what I am, and I'm glad I am."

"The next debate led to another one, over and over again, and our little Lunchtime Debate Club meetings became the highlight of my day, and probably hers as well."

"For the first time in years, I was feeling... happy."

Zoey mutters to herself about how miserable she was, but it's both with bitterness that she was that way and sweetness that Britney got her out of that pit of despair.

"This went on for a year, and we became friends pretty quickly, although not very close ones."

"But one day, Britney, who was a theater kid, asked me to help with the construction of a theater set since they needed a spare hand."

"I don't think I mentioned my construction skills, but even if she knew, I blew away all her expectations."

Zoey breaks out into a smug grin here.

"I just did what you and Dad taught me, which was efficiently organizing labor while being another pair of boots on the ground leading by example, but Britney was so impressed that she begged me to joining the theater club in a part-time capacity, and I agreed after she agreed to pay for my lunch from now on."

"But if I'm going to be honest, I don't think she needed to go that far. Keisuke was off at a sports high school learning how to hone his baseball talents, so Britney was my only real friend around."

"And it felt good having a friend praise my skills and what I've worked so hard to be good at, and it felt more 'real' than vague praise from you or Mom for being 'smart,' like I was born that way and it was expected of me."

"Britney and I started to get closer after that."

Zoey's not sure how to begin this part, but she only hesitates for a second or two before charging ahead anyways.

"You know how I hated having these weird red eyes, right? I've had to deal with constant questions about them my entire life, and I hate how much attention they draw towards me."

"I'm slowly starting to like them a bit more, but Britney never asked about my eyes, and I appreciated that so much. I only opened up to her about them in the middle of a panic attack after I got blinded by a spotlight I was fixing and thought I was going to be blind forever, and she helped me calm down from it."

Zoey looks away a bit bashfully and talks out of the side of her mouth. She's a lot more relaxed than when this talk started, and that comes with treating it a lot less like she's talking to herself. It's more like a conversation with her grandpa, a man who was always quiet and listened as his grandchild ranted about whatever they were excited about at the moment, and who only spoke up to ask Zach questions because he was truly interested or once Zach had finished talking.

"I later found out that she's got a vampire kink and that the reason she even wanted to talk to me in the first place was that I was a pasty kid with red eyes and black hair, so she thought I was related to a vampire or something and thought it'd be suspicious if she started to ask me questions about them."

Zoey groans a bit. She doesn't know if she would have gotten as close to Britney had she let on why she was interested in Zach, but she's so glad that it wasn't an issue.

Plus, Zoey has gotten temporarily turned into a vampire through a re:Dreamer quest, and if that, let alone re:Dreamer, can exist, who's to say that vampires aren't real outside of the reality-editing competitive sex game she took part in?

"Yeah, she's got a lot of weird ideas about things, but despite that ulterior and strange motive, she showed an overwhelming kindness as she helped me calm down, and as curious as she was, she still didn't ask questions and let me talk about them as little or as much as I wanted."

"From then on, I started to think I could really trust this girl."

"Mom never liked me going to theater club as it dropped my GPA because I was studying less, so my injury, which thankfully didn't cause any permanent damage, was the excuse she was looking for to not pick me up after school."

"But then Britney offered to drive me home, and we made a deal for her to keep doing that in exchange for my continued help with theater club."

"We had this sort of quid pro quo relationship, and we still do, but I think that's just what it means to be close to someone. She's not someone I want to use, but someone I can trust to help me and want to help in return."

"If it wasn't obvious, I started to develop a huge crush on her by the end of my junior year. I had no intention of telling her about it because I was afraid of breaking our status quo of being close friends, and I just hoped she would notice my feelings."

Zoey pauses and her eyes go wide.

"Oh my God, it was the same thing with hoping Dad would read my mind about needing him in my life."

"Anyways, I was doing all these things trying to get her to notice me. I even rebuilt most of her car's systems in two days, barely getting six hours of sleep total, all because I was trying to impress her."

"But of course it didn't work, and I was disappointed in both of us that it didn't."

"I think 'dissatisfaction' was the word that describes my senior year of high school best. I felt like I was drowning under the weight of my future and did the stupidest thing I've ever done to try and escape it: I burned my full-ride academic scholarship to Lewis and Clark University, took out a 10,000,000-yen student loan, and traveled the world for a year with a vague goal of 'finding myself.'"

Zoey shrugs. She's a little surprised she's no longer considering pirating re:Dreamer as the stupidest thing she's ever done. In a way, it was the best thing that ever happened to her, and now that the stress of it is over, she can acknowledge that.

"I could be here all day talking about the sabbatical and what I did on it, but I did visit Milwaukee for a day and saw a Braves game and had a pint of Third Base, which Dad said was your favorite beer, and watched them lose 0-7 to the Pioneers."

"I haven't kept up with baseball that well since you died, but Christopher Yelich, that 2010 draft pick you were raving about, hit a triple, and they've had this phenom pitcher Corky Burns since 2018 who led the NL in strikeouts last season with an ERA of 2.93 who's shaping up to be the best pitcher in the sport."

Zoey, of course, considers this a layperson's knowledge of baseball.

"I thought I'd learned a lot about myself, and I definitely ended the trip with a more worldly perspective on life, but all of that inner peace came crashing down on me once I got home. Mom sat me down and forced me to sign enrollment papers and a housing contract to the university. She made it clear just how much of a disappointment I was, and I spent the next 3 months more miserable and alone than I'd ever been cramming for late entrance exams and whatever Mom deemed necessary to learn."

"I of course breezed through those entrance exams, and because of how much of a budget the family was on after I burned my scholarship, I was living in a total shithole of a single dorm, and you'd know better than anyone how unsafe that construction was."

"There could have been a way out of that misery, but even though I quickly realized Britney had miraculously wound up on the women's wing of the same dorm building, I was so afraid of any awkwardness between us after not seeing each other for a year, and so ashamed of myself just for existing after failing to 'find myself' with a stupid stunt, that I kept ducking her."

"Seven months ago, and six weeks into the semester, I realized just how lonely and miserable I was. I'd ducked Britney in the biggest way yet that morning, hiding from her behind a pillar as she vaguely caught a glimpse of me, and I felt ashamed of myself for being such a coward."

"And the day just kept getting worse and worse, and out of desperation, I used that fancy smartphone I mentioned to pirate a video game and break into it, just because I could and that tiny bit of control was all I had to feel better about myself."

Zoey sort of exhales incredulously, partly because of knowing how insane this sounds, and partly because this is just a ton of shit to explain to someone. She's done it 2.5 times now, and it hasn't gotten easier.

"You never were one for video games, but I found threads of this phone game called re:Dreamer that people were acting secretive of, and through a bunch of complicated programing tricks, managed to grab onto that thread and pull it until I got a copy of that game when I wasn't supposed to."

"I hacked into it, created an account, and was presented with a character creator screen. Not thinking too much of it at the time, I was presented with an avatar that looked like me, so I flipped the sex from 'male' to 'female,' made the hair longer, the waist thinner, the thighs thicker, the butt a bit bigger, and the boobs a lot bigger, because that's what I thought was going to be attractive as a player avatar."

Zoey groans.

"Oh my God... that makes me sound like such a dumbass and a creep to just say out loud..."

Zoey still has a bit of shame about the true origins of her body, and her boobs are definitely larger than she would like, now that she's had them for nearly seven months.

"Well, there's no easy way to say this, but that turned out to be a body editor, and it turned me into that girl, and she's standing right here."

Zoey looks down at herself and smiles. She's a bit uncomfortable with how big her boobs are sometimes, but for the most part, she's really happy with how she looks.

"So, yeah, that wasn't really a video game but what was described as a reality-editing competitive sex game, and I had just signed myself up as a player with a new body without realizing it."

"I was pretty sure that I had just discovered literal magic, but I was far more concerned with what had just happened to me than any broader implications."

"In the middle of freaking out about this and realizing it wasn't a dream, I got some of the details of this 'game' explained to me by a digital-assistant-slash-watchdog named Ai."

"She's... not around anymore, but she refused to call me Zach and gave me the name Zoey instead."

"It drove me up a fucking wall at first, but as the months passed, I started to like it. That's that name I'm going with now. Zoey Taylor."

Zoey has a slight smile on her face as she says this. That's who she is now. She didn't decide the name, but she decided to accept it.

"So, about that 'competitive' part... I am still missing some details, but the idea was that the more you, uh, 'competed,' the more points you got and the higher your rank rose. The winner of the season of play, which was six months, won a wish, and it could be for anything apparently."

"My first thought was panic. I was a virgin back then, and this was going to be my only way to change back."

"If I'm going to be honest, I think even back then my plan wasn't to change back so much as it was to survive the school year until I could have a summer break to take legal steps for this busty young woman I was to be the person I was going to be for the rest of my life, and I don't think it was just because my chances of winning that wish to change back were so low."

"So, when Ai told me I could contact a single person to tell everything and get help from, Britney was the obvious choice, instead of someone like Keisuke to have lots of sex with. Not only was Britney a woman, but she was skilled with fashion and acting, specifically cosplay, and—"

Zoey pauses, not sure if her grandpa knows that word.

"She already has fantastic tailoring skills, and they specialized in helping her change her body shape to be more masculine or feminine, and I thought she could apply those skills to help disguise my body while giving me 'acting' lessons and general advice of how to discreetly maintain a female body."

"Anyways, Britney was of course incredulous, but this was a girl I'd known for nearly three years with quite a bit of mutual history and a few shared secrets, and I still looked mostly like me with those distinct red eyes and general facial structure, so I was soon able to prove my identity."

"...I didn't quite frontload what the game that had transformed me was at first, but to say that Britney was eager to help would be a gross understatement. She at first thought I was a trans woman, but after I... uh, wrongly explained that I wasn't, which she didn't quite believe, she dove right into measuring my chest to make me a bra out of one of her old ones, and she was excited beyond belief to do that."

Zoey pauses, a bit flustered. By now, Britney has made it clear she thought Zach was an egg since the later half of Zoey's junior year of high school, and she had been making subtle (and a few unsubtle) moves to try and get Zach to realize they were a deeply repressed trans woman. Having been such an easy read bothers Zoey, but not as much as how dense she was. But that's not what she's focusing on for now.

"Britney is a fantastic tailor, but her hands were unsteady and trembling, and her tailor tape kept slipping over my sweaty chest."

<Awkwardness >= 4 tangent begins>

"Oh, yeah. I don't know if you knew this, but boobs sweat, and I had been hiding them beyond multiple layers as Britney came in because I was trying to hide how massive they were."

</Awkwardness >= 4 tangent ends>

"I was getting hot and bothered by this intimate contact by my crush, and I didn't realize until Britney suddenly spun me around and planted a deep kiss on my lips that she had gotten pretty hot and bothered too."

Zoey pauses for a bit, then feels a bit silly she was trying to create a dramatic pause now of all times.

"I had never realized she was a lesbian, and I was apparently her type now."

Zoey sighs with an embarrassed smile.

"I said she had a vampire kink, remember? Now that I was a beautiful girl with pale skin, long black hair, and big red eyes, she couldn't keep her hands off of me."

"She quickly apologized, realizing she had gone too far, but she clearly showed an interest in taking it further."

"And... as fucked as the situation was, I realized that this was the moment to tell Britney my feelings. She had no idea I had a crush on her as men weren't on her radar, even if they were effeminate ones like I had been, but after a bit of coercing by telling her she could call me 'Zoey' in private, she agreed to go out with me."

"Or rather, she was willing to explore being a couple together, but that's getting ahead of myself."

"And then..."

Zoey feels a bit... off about talking about Britney's deep issues when she's not present, but this is a private conversation Zoey is having with... well, she's not sure, but it's private.

"Britney's one of the most interesting people I've ever met, and she's full of contradictions. For instance... she dresses in breezy clothes that are a bit too skimpy that slide off her body when she moves quickly, but far from being a slutty bimbo, she's a surprisingly innocent girl who's smart as shit socially, academically, and creatively; she got all this one-on-one tutoring from her dad to be a lawyer and clearly has the skills to be a fantastic one, but she's a theater major with grand artistic ambitions of playwriting, acting, and fashion design who I think has more than enough talent to realize her goals; and she's a very patriotic Texan whose homeland and Catholic faith are deeply important to her, but she's an extremely socially progressive feminist and queer ally, in addition to being a lesbian herself."

"I don't know how the girl does it, but she's able to reconcile a lot of these contradictions into a single person. But until very recently, the hardest contradiction for her to reconcile was her Catholic faith with being a lesbian."

"Her parents heavily suspected she was a lesbian after, well... she did something really suspicious and got in trouble for it, so like a good Catholic, she's had all this repressed — and unrepressed — guilt from existing like this."

"So, when this 'girl' who was totally Britney's type called her, begging for help, Britney briefly slipped up like her tailor tape slipped over her boobs, and she kissed that girl. She quickly regained control of herself, and apologized and felt guilty, but when that girl told Britney she's had a crush on her for years, and that girl was someone who didn't realize was the person Britney considered her best friend, and when that girl was a bit insistent about continuing where that kiss left off, it was bit too much temptation for Britney to endure."

Zoey feels kind of bad for being so insistent about the 'friends with benefits' relationship with a Catholic girl that they started off as. She doesn't know if the person she is now would put Britney through that crisis of faith, but she's glad the person she was did.

"So..."

Zoey wonders if it's okay to talk to her grandpa about her first sexual encounter, since she's now his granddaughter, but she's come this far being honest and continues.

"Yeah, Britney and I took each other's virginity, and I can't overstate how much I enjoyed it."

"God, I distinctly recall thinking 'I just had one of the best things that's ever happened to me happen on the worst day of my life' as Britney got off of me and took a nap next to me."

"Uh... where was I?"

"Oh, yeah! re:Dreamer."

"Later that night, Britney was furious when she learned what I had just forced her to take part in, as she hadn't consented to it, but she soon understood without me saying it that I wasn't a pervert who had sought out to play a game like that and had stumbled into trouble like a dumbass."

"Which was good, because Ai, that watchdog that came with the app, was monitoring every word I was saying, and if anyone besides Britney found out what had happened to me and why it had happened, or my legitimacy as a 'player' ever came into doubt, such as saying I pirated the app and broken into the servers to play it, the app would auto-delete, along with my and Britney's memories of it, meaning I would be stuck as a woman for the rest of my life with no idea what happened."

"So, like I mentioned, Britney and I have a sort of quid pro quo agreement to settle disputes, and she asked for two things in return for helping me hide my body, dealing with whatever issues would show up with my female body, and having sex with me not fully of her consent."

"The first was getting her parents off her back by publicly posing as her boyfriend, since everyone but Britney still thought I was a guy. Britney's family life is important to her, but her place in that very Catholic family was under threat with the suspicions of her being a lesbian. As Britney explained it to me, if they ever got hard proof of her being one, they were going to ship her off to a convent until she was 'cured,' effectively killing her dreams of being a playwright, actress, and fashion designer."

"That one was easy enough to agree to, and because I had carpooled with Britney for a few months in high school, a few people already thought we were dating; plus, Britney's skills with tailoring led to us jointly developing this chest binder that hid my breasts far better than you'd assume possible, and it even had cooling pads."

"I even managed to make the blueprints for the chest binder for my freshman engineering orientation's final project. I had to present the blueprints as being for Britney's use with costume play, and I'd impressed the professor so much that I wound up getting extra credit for my thoroughness."

"We got the stuff for it on our first date at the mall northeast of campus, but it was mostly a test run of the first attempt at a chest binder. I'd been a nervous dumbass who had over-planned everything, but after taking a selfie of us posing together to sell the sizzle of us as a couple, I undid my disguise since it was so sweaty, and she took control of the day and took me to an arcade, a barbecue place she ended up hating for not being 'authentic,' and then clothes and supplies shopping."

"The second was helping salvage her college theater club's production that semester, as they were a dysfunctional lot with a shoestring budget."

"That was the more difficult one..."

"Britney not only learned I was good at construction and labor organization, but that I was a great accountant and knew how to get the construction supplies the department desperately needed, using both my knowledge and Dad's connections."

"This involved organizing a cookout fundraiser at Britney's church — St. Patrick's on Oberlin Street, if you know it, which was right outside of our dorm — and part of that was piggybacking the theater department fundraiser on an existing fundraiser for the church for renovations, which is how Dad got involved. I first wanted to just pass the buck to him, but then I realized that with how much I was struggling with my gender identity, having a father figure around to reference would have been extremely helpful."

"But anyways, theater club."

Zoey sighs, and it's a lot more wearily than her other sighs have been.

"Because that's where I met Molly..."

"I was attending theater club as a man and met the director, Molly, as one, but I had an accident disassembling the set from last semester — yes, they were that disorganized — and I got knocked out from a wooden support beam and needed to be treated while unconscious."

"The director and her half-brother — it's complicated — took my uniform dress shirt off, then saw the chest binder and realized I had boobs and a female body."

"Britney and I had a short strategy meeting after I woke up, and while Britney told Molly I was a trans man, Molly wasn't buying it, and I was going to have to convince her that I wasn't a 'normal girl' and to keep my body a secret."

"I somehow managed to do that. I guess all those debates with Britney paid off, but Molly, who had figured out that Britney was a lesbian, said, 'Britney will be disappointed.'"

"All of a sudden, I was thinking not about what was in my best interests or even Britney's, but how to make her happy, so I showed up to the club with the full member roster present as a woman, boobs visible and everything."

"Britney introduced the cookout fundraiser idea, and it easily got accepted."

"I expressed surprise that such an unconventional idea had been accepted with a unanimous vote, but someone clued me in — I think the assistant director — that there had been some drama in the theater department last summer — fancy that."

"Yeah, it was Karan, the assistant director, who told me that. He was the only senior in the room, and he explained that all the rest of the seniors and a good number of the juniors had changed majors or universities out of protest over things like drastic budget cuts to the department, firing of beloved faculty members... academic politics like that."

"As someone put it, the department was a sinking ghost ship with a skeleton crew, and they were willing to try anything at this point."

"The next order of business was that we didn't have a play, which I said was going to be integral to me making the budget, which is what my job there was going to be, even though I'd been disassembling the set earlier waiting for everyone to show up. Some decent suggestions kept getting shot down, and I was asked, somewhat unseriously, what I thought the play should be."

"Molly is, uh... eccentric, and she misconstrued my suggestion of the fall production being a historical drama of the French Revolution by deciding it would be a musical production on the topic with a very loose grasp of history. Everyone was suddenly on board with this idea, and then Britney and I somehow got cast into the lead roles."

"I got assigned the female lead, but..."

Zoey looks down.

"Man, beauty bias is real. I had zero qualifications to be stepping onto the stage at all, let alone as a female star, but everyone besides Britney and I got convinced it was a great idea."

"I'd just wanted to be the set builder and accountant, but fate had other plans for me, I guess..."

"I was still doing the latter, by the way. I went around the theater checking what was on hand, what wasn't, what needed to be bought, what we could scrape together, and so on. I used that knowledge to break down a budget of 875,000 yen, give or take 25,000 depending on things like scarcity of materials driving up prices and needing backup supplies."

"But that tour gave me short one-on-one chats with the members in charge of all the departments required to make a musical. They're by and large a great lot of kids."

Zoey is still getting used to the fact that she is an adult, but she's still got a bit of a mindset that her 'real' life begins after college.

"Afterwards, while eating late at night at The Pilot House — the 24-hour campus diner — Britney and I were talking about how chaotic this situation had become, and she expressed condolences to me for getting wrapped up in Molly's directorial ambitions because I hadn't been able to convince her of my masculinity."

"Britney was going on and on about how transphobic that made Molly, and that conversation had continued after we had walked to our dorm building, so I admitted it wasn't Molly's fault, because I had convinced her, then showed up to theater club while presenting female anyways."

"She was shocked, and she asked why, and I told her it was to make her happy."

"Britney is the type of person who angers easily, and she at first looked like she was about to get so angry that she was going to slap me since we'd had a similar argument a week ago where I did something stupid that hurt my chances to change back in order to make her happy that led to that, but she then suddenly became so, so sad, and she started to cry."

"I'll never forget how she said, 'You promised you weren't going to do anything that reckless again without talking to me first, Zach. I trusted you.'"

Zoey grips her arm with a wry, pained smile.

"And she ran off in tears, and I felt like complete shit, and I deserved it."

Zoey doesn't have to explain why. One of her grandpa's biggest lessons to her was that a guy had to do everything in his power to make sure he didn't make a girl cry, and while Zoey isn't a guy anymore, she holds that lesson close.

"I didn't see her until tomorrow afternoon, where she met Dad for the first time, because part of the way I got Dad to agree to look at the church for a renovation estimate at the very least was by telling him about my new girlfriend, and he was very excited to meet her."

"Britney, the fantastic actress that she is, acted like nothing awful had happened yesterday, and my dad took a fast liking to her. And was so proud of me for getting a girlfriend like that, but he reminded me pretty explicitly I had to keep my dick out of her because she was Catholic."

Zoey looks away, sort of whistling nonchalantly.

"All I said in response was that was not going to be a problem for the foreseeable future."

"So, after a talk with the pastor, Dad agreed to talk to Zhulu to get approval to renovate a property not on their listing, and while they were getting the paperwork sorted out, Britney pulled me aside and asked if I wanted lunch."

"She even asked me where I wanted to go. I was feeling a bit proud of myself for getting the vital pieces for that church renovation off the ground, and forgetting how much I had fucked up yesterday, I treated this like high school where Britney paid for my lunch, so we went to Fry Guys, that expensive artisan burger chain that Texans can't shut up about since I wanted to try it."

"The lunch was good, although overpriced, but on the drive back, Britney started buttering me up. She told me she considered me her best friend for at least 2 years by now, and that I'm one of the few people in her life she's ever been able to be honest with, and that's because she's comfortable around me. As a girl who had been trying to hide being a lesbian since high school, she'd always kept her female friends at a comfortable distance; and she'd never felt that sense of latent aggression and power from me that she associated with men and hated so much."

"I wasn't like the other guys... but despite that, and my body, I was still a guy, and that was a dealbreaker."

Zoey looks sad and frustrated as she continues.

"For all her posturing as an ally, I still had the same face of the guy she's known for three years, and for all of her efforts, even calling me 'Zoey' in the bedroom during sex and me enthusiastically going along with it, she was never able to fully convince herself that I was a woman."

"My 'girlfriend' hadn't just friend zoned me. She had also told me that any chance of romance between us was going to be impossible as long as I still thought of myself as a guy."

"And then she continued by saying that of course she was going to keep helping me disguise my body as much as I could and having as much sex with me as possible so I could change back — somehow, we were close to first place, even though we hadn't even done that much, and Ai was convinced we had a good chance to win the season — but she then told me that I need to not get the sex confused with romance, and that the fake romance we were putting on for her parents wasn't real."

"I knew why she was doing this. I was dumb kid who had unwittingly forced the girl I had a crush on into a friend with benefits relationship, but we were partners, not lovers. Any delusions I had about that changing if I wanted to be a guy were going to get us both hurt, and how much that hurt was going to get worse the longer it went on."

"But I just felt so angry and betrayed. She had agreed to go out with me, and here she was, telling me how much she cared about me when her actions showed the opposite."

"I even thought about angrily telling her, 'I think I might be trans,' but I didn't because I didn't think she'd believe it when I wasn't sure yet."

"Once we got to the parking lot, I told her I was going to work on homework and wanted to be alone, but I slumped against my closet door and cried in frustration and sadness, because it was stuck and my womanly body that was the only reason Britney had ever expressed interest in me and made me get the wrong idea was too weak to open it. Britney had opened it last week by slamming her hips on it, and she's got great hips, but I couldn't let her see me this sad and pathetic."

"Realizing how much this 'break up' was hurting me, I tried to do a sensible thing, which was asking someone for company and advice. I wanted parental advice, but calling Dad was off the table because I'd need to tell him what had happened, and he was so bad he is at keeping secrets that this charade between Britney and I would fall apart in a week; Mom was also off the table as she didn't really approve of Britney being my first girlfriend, and she'd already had suspicions we were faking a romance for whatever reason."

Zoey thinks about how much she wishes her grandpa had been an option to call, but she buries the thought.

"But... I was a loser shut-in with few friends. I tried Keisuke, but his number was out of service. I tried Rich, but his advice was misogynistic, like, 'fuck women, right?' and I hung up before he could give more."

"That left a guy I'd had a really personal talk with at theater club yesterday: Patrick, the director's younger half-brother. He was this tall Irish kid who had been pretty good with unsolicited advice yesterday, and he was also a freshman mechanical engineering major."

"But he said he was busy today, but he told me that if I really needed someone to talk to, his half-sister was free, and she was probably overworking herself writing the musical's script at that moment and needed a break from it, and suggested I get coffee with her."

"I... didn't want to wear the chest binder Britney and I had made together right then, and my chest was still tender from that wooden beam that had slammed into it yesterday, so I wore clothes that fit my body better."

"It was a warm day, too. 30°C, so I wore a V-neck T-shirt and some skinny jeans."

Zoey thinks, "Man, the fact that I was so willing to wear female clothing in public probably should have been a sign that something was up with my gender identity..." before continuing.

"Molly is this tall and skinny Scottish girl with very pale white skin; long red hair, but it's more orange, like... burnt sienna, a pointed face, and these big pretty blue eyes. She looks stunning, like she's a Paris fashion runway model in her off-hours."

Zoey is briefly glad her girlfriend isn't here to listen to her talk about Molly like this.

"Yet for all of this, Molly has severe body positivity issues due to her life circumstances. I think she's completely incorrect to think that way, but she hates how any weight she gains goes to her belly and arms, since she grew up poor and somewhat malnourished and her body isn't used to being able to eat well; she hates how she has such a tall and narrow waist; she hates being so tall in general; she hates how broad her shoulders are, a side-effect of the muscles she used to have working as a farm laborer as a child to help her single mother make ends meet; she hates that she has to wear sunscreen everywhere or else her skin combusts; she hates that her chest is so small, but they're still a respectable medium B-cups; and she hates that her cleavage gap is so wide."

Zoey sheepishly looks away and smiles.

"Molly has a bit of a temper and would have exploded if I told her this back then, but I first thought her body positivity issues stemmed from being a repressed trans man, mirroring my situation, and that's why she was so insistent that I wasn't one and it took so much effort to convince her I wasn't, but she really just saw me as having the type of body she always wished she could have and was upset I was denying myself from liking it with this whole concept of gender dysphoria that she didn't understand at first."

"She's gotten better with that, and with her own body positivity, but she's still got a long way to go toward liking her own body."

"But if anyone can help her realize how great she looks, it's Keisuke. I know he likes older women, and tall women, and he's probably going to convince Molly that she's hottest when she's buff from working out instead of trying to force herself to be curvier with fat she has difficulty gaining."

Zoey blushes a bit, imagining the scene of an amazon Molly looking down at her and thanking her for helping her to realize how hot she is, before shaking her head and continuing."

"So, I walk into that coffee corner shop, and we both stand out like lit flares."

"We're both trying to not attract attention to ourselves, but it's not going well. Within a few minutes of pleasant and comforting but otherwise meaningless small talk as I dance around why I asked Patrick to ask her to meet me, Molly and I have had enough of the stares, so we pour our drinks into to-go cups and walk around campus."

"It wasn't just a warm day, but a sunny one, too. Molly's got this big straw sun hat on, and I've got a pair of my sunglasses on. We both start chatting about it, although I broach the subject first by asking Molly if she burns easily. She says, 'Aye, Lassie' and then hesitates to ask me about my eyes, and I can tell because of how much she's looking at them through my sunglasses."

"I hate the constant questions I get about my eyes, but that's when I first meet someone, and the flow of the conversation was clearly headed there. I didn't realize how awkward it felt to have someone visibly want to ask me about them but not, so ask her what's up."

"Molly tells me Britney told her, pretty explicitly, not to ask about my red eyes under any circumstances since it bothers me so much."

"I was both... touched and offended Britney was apparently doing this for most of the people I've been meeting through her since we got back in touch? Like, it does bother me, but it also bothers me that Britney is doing P.R. for me without my knowledge, if that makes sense."

"And then it kind of clicked that I had no right to be mad about that when I had been doing so much shit behind her back to try and make her happier, so I just told Molly about my eyes."

"I did the standards lines, like, 'yes, they really are just like that naturally,' 'no, I am not wearing colored contact lenses and I do not want to get extra attention for having them,' and 'no, they do not cause me any vision issues besides their increased sensitivity to UV rays and fluorescent light bulbs.'"

"This is pretty much a script for me at this point, but then... this is childish of me, but I wanted to prove Britney wrong, that talking about my eyes didn't always bother me, so I started to brag about the details I never told anyone but you or Britney about."

"Like, how I pretty much have night vision, how I almost instantly adjust my vision between bright and low-light conditions, how my pupils turn into tiny dots in bright light, how much I can tell specific colors apart, how much detail I can see in distant objects, and how good my eyes are at tracking motion."

"If I was trying to impress Molly, it worked. I don't think she believed some of the points at first, but I took off my sunglasses, stared up at the sun for a second or two, which is definitely something my optometrist told me to never do, and then stared up at her face so she could see how tiny my irises were. My vision was a little bit spotty, but I remember feeling pretty flustered as she looked down at me with awe."

"Within a sentence or two of that, she then pivoted the conversation to the subject of body positivity."

"This body comes with a lot of... well, let's just say 'vocal tricks,' but I'm not going to attempt to imitate her Scottish accent."

<Awkwardness >= 4 tangent begins>

Zoey clears her throat a bit and pitches her voice down.

"But I can imitate your voice very well, for whatever reason. It impressed Dad quite a bit."

"Christ, why am I such a braggart...?" Zoey thinks.

</Awkwardness >= 4 tangent ends>

"But Molly said, 'I empathize with not liking how you look and even being ashamed of some of the parts, but it's a bit ridiculous when you got lucky with all these boons."

"And I just kind of stopped dead in my tracks, feeling offended."

"Molly thought I was AFAB — assigned female at birth — and in hindsight, I didn't really take that into account."

"But because I had made a lot of choices for my own body, I just glared up at her — not that icy glare, mind you — and said, 'if I could make any changes to my body, I'd choose to look a lot more like you than I do like me."

"In hindsight, a cis—"

"Oh God, do you even know what cis means with gender?"

Zoey knows her grandpa is from a different generation, but it still shocks her how much gender psychology has advanced in the last twelve years alone.

"In hindsight, a man in my situation who still thought of himself as a man wouldn't have said that, but it just seemed natural to say something like that."

"Christ, there were a lot of those moments, looking back..."

"Molly in turn got a bit upset, and as we walked, we traded... weirdly passive-aggressive complements of what physical attributes we'd like to steal from the other? And if so, how much?"

Zoey realizes how weird that sounds, but it felt like such an organic conversation at the time.

"It was a weird bonding moment, and before I'd even realized it, we were outside of Molly's apartment."

"I hadn't even told her what had upset me so much that I had wanted to talk to someone, anyone, with her being the eventual choice, and while she had invited me inside, I declined the offer as I didn't want to take up any more of her time. I was still upset about what Britney had told me, but I felt a lot better about myself... although I don't know to this day if it was the company, the unintentionally flirtatious conversation, or that I was presenting as a woman during it."

"I just told her thanks for giving me company, and I headed back home to my dorm."

"But I paused after two steps. I remember feeling bad for not telling her, so I got her attention before she stepped inside of her apartment complex."

"I said, maybe a little too loudly, 'Britney and I broke up this afternoon because she doesn't really see me as a woman, but we have to continue the charade for her parents. I just really needed a friend to talk to today, and I'm glad it was you.'"

"I then turned around and went back to my dorm, feeling a lot better."

"So... yeah, Molly isn't my girlfriend now. Britney is, and your granddaughter is a dumbass who didn't realize she was leading Molly on. Get your shots in now, because I'm not going to let you..."

Zoey stops. She's not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that she's treating this like an actual one-sided conversation instead of... she should know this given how much she helped out with theater club a few months ago, but she's not sure this whole thing counts as a monologue or a soliloquy.

"Things continue on this course for a while. There's a Halloween party at some frat house where I get turned into a vampire — magic sex game on my phone, remember? — and that's how I learned that Britney has a vampire girl kink, and on the day we met, she thought I was a vampire and that's how we got to know each other."

Source: Cen on pixiv

Source: 3O °C on pixiv

<While not final, Honkai Impact 3rd's Fu Hua's Shadow Knight model is going to be the likely inspiration for Zoey's vampire countess Halloween costume. The goal of the outfit is blending elegance, stunning beauty, and just a bit of sexy coolness, and this fits very well; I also have a Dropbox folder of references if you're curious about other design possibilities and amalgamations.>

"Okay, well, not a literal vampire... I bit Britney hard enough to draw blood, and she didn't turn. She got turned on, but she didn't turn into a vampire."

"As Ai explained it to me later, it was more that my personality got altered to match my Halloween costume, and it made me an... aristocratic vampire countess who was upset that Britney, my subject, wasn't paying me proper tribute?"

"That night is still a bit of a blur. I wish I remembered that sense of power Britney said I exuded better, but I know I took her to some out-of-the-way bedroom and topped her in that skimpy cowgirl sheriff costume she'd made, and it was a good thing both our school uniforms covered our neck and collarbones."

"And speaking of blood... I had my first period the next day."

"Britney was the MVP of that day, because I was a lot more of a monster than I was when I thought I was a vampire."

"I was such a grouchy and horny bitch, but Britney had been preparing me for this moment for most of October, so I knew how to hide the symptoms."

"Still, it was not a fun experience to wake up bleeding like that, and none of the medications Britney gave me helped with the pain, but when she gave me chocolate ice cream, that ended up helping a lot."

Zoey pauses, looking sad, before slowly going into a tangent that sees that sadness turn into nostalgia.

"I know you know this, but those outings we had that always ended up at some ice cream place or another were some of the best memories of my life. I think I'm finally old enough to know the flavor I like the best, too."

"Anyways, I nearly killed her when she tried to take the pint back, because she was going to have her period two days later, but I did mom's 'ice glare' thing and told her to back off."

"Don't worry: I'm not using that trick nearly as much as my mom did. Not only am I trying to distance myself from being like her, that's not a thing a person should rely on."

"So... it took me three days to recover, but like I said, Britney was around and made that experience much more bearable, and I was able to provide minor support for her cycle starting when mine ended, and it felt nice to return the favor, even though she didn't really need my help."

"Sorry for going into such a feminine subject with you, Grandpa, but I think it's important to remind myself that I went through such a complete change by highlighting a negative one, because even with how bad my cramps get sometimes, it's still worth it."

"But God, you're lucky you never had to deal with blood coming out of your crotch every twenty-seven days. That's the thing I miss the most about being a guy."

Zoey's face becomes gray as she says this, but it soon warms back up.

"And there was another even weirder re:Dreamer transformation a week later that I'd really prefer not to get into, and it made me flunk my midterms because I was dealing with it, but theater club, homework, and sex were eating up most of my time, in that order, and I was unhappy the with that."

"Molly had decided on a French Revolution musical, but she had decided that for whatever reason, I, Marie Antoinette, and Britney, Louis XVI, were princess and prince, which they weren't. The basic plot was that we were trying to flee from the French Revolution, which was a thing the royal family attempted, but Louis convinced Marie to stay because he saw that France wasn't being replaced with an enlightened government, but a tyrannical one. And we stayed and fought and died at the guillotine."

"Britney spent most of the first week of November looking after my stupid ass, but she was also busy with making our costumes for the play."

"They were this beautiful long white dress with an inlaid corset, long white elbow gloves, and some red glass and silver jewelry. It showed a bit too much cleavage for my taste, and the front hem of the long dress was just a little too translucent for my own taste, but it looked like moonlight turned into fabric."

Source: Commission from TiltSHIFT (base sprite) and Myumi (outfit)

"And for Britney, she made herself this white men's suit with blue and gold highlights. She's always had a bit of a tomboy side to her that I think she feels apprehensive about expressing, but white, blue, and gold are her colors, and she's at her sexiest when she's at her coolest, so I of course loved the outfit."

Source: Ryu Jiao on pixiv

"She was a little annoyed that Molly told her she couldn't wear platform dress shoes since Molly's version of Louis XVI was written to have a Napoleon complex. Britney is only a centimeter and a half shorter than me, and I was wearing tall heels."

"I'm 163 centimeters — wait, you hated using metric for height."

"I'm 5'4", but I was 5'5" before my body changed. You're not getting my weight, Grandpa."

From time to time, Zoey has a bit of fun over-accentuating that she's a woman.

"The real-life Louis XVI was supposed to be 190 centimeters tall — sorry, 6'3" — and it bothered me that Molly changed this detail for a plot reason that never really got expanded upon. One day, during dress practice, Britney and I were going through some choreography because of course this play also had complicated choreography, and Molly was off to the side, doing various theater duties while directing us."

"This was the first time I was wearing heels, and it was rough, but Molly was really helpful with her advice."

Zoey clears her throat and tries to imitate Molly's speech despite saying she wouldn't try to mimic her accent earlier, because she still remembers her words perfectly.

"'It's okay, Zoey. Heels are hard ta walk in. Take slow, mincing steps that lift yer feet up instead of pushing them offa the ground, and try ta swivel yer hips a bit ta put less twisting motion on yer ankles. If ya need ta, stick yer arms out a bit more ta add a little bit more balance, but remember that yer supposed to be a dignified royal princess here.'" <Author's Note: I actually have a Scot in the server as of yesterday who has offered to translate Molly's line into a Moray Firth Scottish accent as they are familiar with the Scottish speech around Inverness, but I don't want to bother them for this outline since they've helped with Molly's extant dialogue in the visual novel as of her sprites appearing.>

"If you didn't understand a word of that, I'll take that as a compliment that I got her accent right. It took me two weeks of fairly frequent meetups to understand her fully."

"Britney was basically a pro and didn't need any directing, but she probably needed managing, as she got into an argument with Molly about her character's height, and both girls were getting upset. Britney wanted her character to be taller, and Molly couldn't understand why she wanted to be taller."

Zoey pauses, not realizing until now that Britney probably has a bit of a complex with her height, but the opposite of Molly's and not anywhere as severe.

"Arguments like that were why I got pretty good at playing peacemaker between Britney and Molly, although Britney always seemed to get really mad whenever it looked like I was siding with Molly..."

"Molly and I kept hanging out during the school week and after rehearsals for coffee — I did get Mom's coffee addiction, but I don't need it to perk me up as much as I used to so I just get decaf now — and she was a great stabilizing force for me as Britney and felt like we would break out into little squabbles every time we showed up to theater club."

Zoey kicks herself for being such a dumbass, not realizing back then that she was creating a love triangle, but she moves on.

"Things improved between me and Britney in the middle of November after she finished the costumes for everyone and could be a bit less stressed out, but when I mentioned a week before Thanksgiving break that I wasn't sure I'd be able to survive a home visit with Mom mad at me for flunking my midterms... and you know how perceptive she can be. Even with Britney's disguise being so refined by this point as to be largely undetectable, I was worried about getting busted, but then Britney offered to let me stay at her place for Thanksgiving, and I graciously accepted."

"Surprisingly, Britney's parents were not just okay with the sudden extra guest they were taking on but eager to accommodate me. I think it was because they were so happy Britney was dating a guy, but I'm not sure."

"Britney said her family was just fond of Southern hospitality, but they practically rolled out the red carpet for me as I showed up."

"There was her dad, John, who I'd met before. He's a partnered lawyer at a big law firm downtown and the one who gave Britney those law school field trips, but he had long light brown hair with a hint of silver down to just below his shoulder blades, and I wouldn't have guessed he was a lawyer if I saw him on the street in casual clothes." <Author's Note: I have had some women begging me for a man with long hair in this visual novel for ages, so I guess Britney's dad gets that role.>

Zoey briefly thinks, "I can see where Britney got her fondness of anime men with long hair now."

"Britney's mom, Elise, was this 40-year-old blonde woman with a surprisingly buff physique, which Britney said she had because she ran a gardening business part-time and was often outside gardening at a large scale, usually with her hands and knees in the dirt." <Author's Note: There's a server member who is using her Sustainer request to be Britney's mom.>

"And..."

Zoey hesitates before introducing the final member of Britney's immediate family.

"She had a little brother named Tucker. They were this beautiful 9-year-old with a blond bob cut and Britney's teal eyes, so it was clear they were related, but they were so kind and polite, and they spoke without a trace of the rest of the family's slight Texan accent because, as I later found out, they were born in AKR."

"As I was wondering how this cherublike kid fit into this family, Tex came over and said hello to me."

"Tex, which I later learned was short for 'Big Texas,' because it was now the largest U.S. state with Alaska as a part AKR, was this big Great Pyrenees with a huge white coat of fur."

"Seriously, this dog was massive! He must have weighed 70 kilograms, which is 10 kilos more than I weigh! And his big fluffy coat just made him look ever bigger!"

"And I nearly had a panic attack as he jumped on me to lick my face."

Zoey realizes she's skipped some context.

"I'm, uh... scared of dogs now," she admits sheepishly. "I know you wanted to get me a dog for my 9th birthday before you died, but Mom shot the idea down because there was no way a woman with such severe OCD was going to allow a pet in the house."

"Maybe if I'd gotten one, things wouldn't be like this, but I had a pretty traumatic encounter with a pit bull when I was 11 that resulted in that cat being killed. If my body hadn't changed so much, I would still have the big scar from that on the inside of my right elbow."

"But while that scar is gone now, the mental scar isn't so easily healed."

Zoey looks glum, but then she cheers up remembering the other side of this coin.

"But I love cats! And Britney has the cutest cat. She got him for her 11th birthday, just after she moved to Portland from Texas, and he's this big Scottish Fold with huge eyes called Mimou. He's, like, handsome, and dorky, and... he's the perfect cat!" <Author's Note: Elise, the self-insert for Britney's mom's, has this adorable cat from her childhood named Mimou. She's French, and the name is apparently a childish slip of the tongue of a French word for "kitty" ("minou") and can be used to say something is very cute ("Il est trop mimou.") Keeping with the Great Pyrenees (a French breed), Britney's mom's name, Britney knowing French, and this cat's name, I think it's a safe bit of lore to state that Britney's mom is either French or of close French ancestry.>

<Author's Note: Okay yeah both parents can claim French ancestry, but her mom's side is closer as Elise's dad was a French immigrant.>

Zoey says this with a huge, happy smile on her face. She's been having this conversation in the white text (her "normal" speaking voice, which is an androgynous mid-contralto that still leans heavily feminine), but this one slipped into the pink text (a girlier low alto that is unambiguously a woman's voice, and a sexy and sultry woman's voice at that).

She blushes, feeling a bit embarrassed, before coughing into her fist.

"Y-Yeah, so my voice cracked just like that when I saw him for the first time. I'd been doing a great job of holding 'guy voice' up until then, but I squealed when he walked over — no, waddled over — and I saw how big he was and how huge his eyes were and how short his legs were. Britney had to elbow me in the ribs — in other words, my compressed boobs — to get me to stop."

"Oh my God... I should tell Britney I want to stop by her place later today to see Mimou..." Zoey says with a little bit of a sighing giggle, hoping she can get another photo of him doing his funny sit or a video of him jumping off a counter. The Mimou folder must keep growing.

"Jesus Christ... when did I turn into such a stereotypical transbian?" she scoffs, before clarifying the slang for her grandpa.

"That's a portmanteau of 'trans girl' and 'lesbian.' Britney told me about it one day, and I liked the cleverness and how the word sounded, so I've been using that to refer to myself."

"Anyways, I unpacked my bags a bit after noon on Saturday — that would have been the 19th, I think — and then Britney's dad..."

"Fuck, I guess I'm just using first names for her parents."

"John invites me and Britney to go shooting."

"Like almost every Akarian, I'd never shot a gun before, let alone seen a firearm that wasn't a museum piece. I was understandably nervous about this, but Britney had so much enthusiasm for the idea, and I was trying to be a good guest, so I agreed."

"I waited in John's big pickup truck — an American brand, of course — for about fifteen minutes, as Britney and her dad loaded up case after case of locked plastic crates as I worried about what I just signed up for."

"I didn't even know a gun range could operate in AKR given all the civilian restrictions on gun ownership, but there was one only a twenty-minute drive from her house."

"The Beckets have a great house, by the way. Dad would probably poke his head into every corner with visible excitement and ask the owner a lot of questions that I don't think anyone but the designer would know, and I think even Mom would be impressed... as long as she didn't know it was Britney's house. If she did, she'd probably criticize every minor detail she could and explain how she would have done it better."

Zoey sighs.

"I don't know what Mom's deal is, but she doesn't like Britney very much, and she's bad at hiding it. I don't think she's transphobic or homophobic because she's been way too enthusiastic about me being her daughter than I'd like or would have expected, but she keeps looking for all these reasons to dislike Britney instead of reasons to like her."

"I don't want to attribute this to such stereotypical Asian-ancestry parental behavior, but I think she's upset that I'm dating a woman because she wants grandkids. If that's the case, she needs to grow the fuck up and realize that her wants don't override mine."

A good part of Zoey does want to have kids, but she has to put that aside and focus on herself and Britney's future before they think about anything like that. Her parents didn't think through having her as much as they should have, and if she's going to have kids, she's only going to do it if she can avoid their mistakes.

"But yeah, the gun range..."

"I obviously didn't have a firearms license, but I think the Beckets frequented this range so much that I just got waved in because I was with them as I helped carry in some of the locked cases."

"Once all of us were in the four booths we had — I don't think these were on permanent reserve for the family, but the question of me getting my own booth never came up because I shared one with Britney — John unlocked the cases, and there was just a goddamned arsenal of weapons in them, with enough ammunition to survive a zombie apocalypse or something in the largest one." <Author's Note: Based on Awkwardness, Zoey can use a less-dorky "fight a guerilla war" or just not use a metaphor at all to explain how much ammunition was in the separate case; in the re:Dreamer alternate history setting, AKR is following our modern Japan's gun safety laws that requires annual firearm inspections by the government and separate locked storage for the firearms and ammunition (although mainland Japan does not have these restrictions).>

"I don't know how much you knew about guns. I'm still learning a lot, and Britney has made it clear she wants to go on more gun range trips with me, but she pulled out this EDL French rifle from the European Cold War — a FAMAT, if I remember correctly — and it was supposed to be converted to a semi-automatic rifle for civilian use, but I'm pretty sure it had a full-auto bump stock to overcome that restriction." <Author's Note: Britney has a FAMAS, but made from the Tulle armory instead of the Saint-Étienne one; also, Zoey is wrong about the bump stock.>

"I'd never shot a gun before, but you know me. I'm practically a savant with mechanical devices, and I know most of the principles of firearms construction and am more than a bit of a military history nerd, so I was a very quick learner and absorbed Britney's operation and safety lesson like a sponge."

"It was a bit hard to focus though, because Britney had these on these sporty muzzle flash sunglasses with yellow lenses, black baseball cap she tucked her ponytail through, safety earmuffs, and vest with magazine pockets, and it made her look like such a badass military operator girl."

Zoey lets out a dreamy sigh.

"Look, Grandpa, your granddaughter has a type, and that's cool, confident, and skilled girls, with a lot of beauty and just a hint of danger."

"Britney was always beautiful, and while trained in gun safety since she was a kid, there's always the chance something can go wrong, and she was holding what is ultimately a weapon."

"And damn, was Britney cool, confident, and skilled! Nobody in the family was a bad shot, even Tucker, who kept a tight grouping with some pellet gun."

Zoey feels a bit weird about her phrasing here, but she's telling a story here, so she moves on.

"But Britney... the girl was a hole punch machine with her grouping."

"I mean, I knew she was a good shot, as we'd played an arcade game that had shown that, but she was operating on a handicap of it being a video game where she had to aim from the crosshairs on the screen."

Zoey blushes, a little embarrassed that this is a thing that gets her gooey with Britney.

"She could have been an amazing competition sharpshooter or military sniper in another life."

Zoey briefly thinks, "And with my eyes, I could have been an amazing spotter."

"I didn't need her to press a button to pull the target back to take a closer look at it, but she insisted, and she had this big beaming smile on her face as she locked the bolt back and engaged the safety, telling me to look at the paper target as she took it off the frame." <Author's Note: Assume Zoey doesn't know what she's talking about with guns.>

"I was pretty ignorant of just how good her accuracy back then, so all I really noticed was that there was what looked like one bullet hole with three off-center arcs at most punched out of it, despite the magazine being thirty rounds, and her family's grouping great but not nearly as close."

"And then when her mom — Elise — joked that her daughter was getting sloppy, Britney got a little sad and mopey, and I realized this was how good she was when she was out of practice."

"Man, I get turned on by the weirdest things," Zoey grumbles with a smile.

"So... whatever turned me — well, changed my body to an AFAB female body — gave that body a few quirks. I mentioned the voice thing, but my hands are robotically precise, and they give me flawless and unchanging handwriting or the ability to do projects with my hands I would have assumed you'd need a machine or tooling for. I still don't know what causes it, but it's kind of neat to have them."

"Fuck, I should have said, 'They're kind of handy.'"

"I was understandably eager to start shooting, but Britney got upset when I tried to use her rifle."

"'Nobody but me gets to touch Matilda,' she said with a glare on her face. Once I meekly nodded my head, saying 'roger' like a total dork because she looked sort of like a soldier, she said, 'good boy,' with a grin, but I could tell what she was really trying to say, and would have said had her parents not been present."

"'Let's get you something easy to start with!' and she talked to John, and I got handed this antique from an unopened box, and it's an M1 Carbine of all things." <Author's Note: the Wikipedia article uses "an M1" and not "a M1" for the article. Heh, dumb wording.>

"That's probably a gun I don't need to explain to you, but it's a bit of a peashooter compared to what Britney was firing."

"Man, I was dense back then, so I thought it was... unmanly, or something, so I grumbled as I loaded 15 rounds in and started with a new target."

"Britney was impressed with my grouping, but I was disappointed because even though this was the first time I got to shoot a real gun, I had been expecting more."

"She then told me my posture was wrong, so she asked me to reload and chamber with the safety on as she stood behind me."

"She put my shoulders and elbows in the right spot, and I, being the dumbass with a crush on this girl who can't keep her head out of the gutter, started to lightly pant and moan from how close and intimate this is."

"In the middle of this, she put a hand over my mouth and leaned in to whisper in my ear."

"'For fuck's sake, Z! My parents are 6 feet away on either side!'"

"I don't think she realized that turned me on even more, but her posture advice was helpful, and my grouping showed it. I wasn't as good of a shot as Britney, but I was doing better than everyone else in her family, and I guess that really impressed them, because John asked me if I want to try shooting something bigger."

"I was feeling good, so I agreed. I thought he was just pulling out a rifle of a larger caliber, or maybe a revolver like he had been shooting, but he pulled out a shotgun."

"It was a Mossberg 500, which was chambered for 12-gauge, and he was loading it with slugs."

"Britney, to her credit, tried to talk me out of it, but I was feeling manly, especially after impressing her dad — he's always liked me, by the way, and I think it was because of how I fixed her car two years ago — so after I ignored her warning, she just sighed and backed up as John loaded it for me and taught me how to use it." <Author's Note: The car repair is why John likes Zoey, but it's also because Zoey told him how the dealership it came from was likely a chop shop as it had been missing critical safety systems, and John managed to get win a class-action lawsuit and even criminal charges against the dealership, which had been connected to a string of automobile thefts, making a very strong first impression on him.>

"I got handed the gun, I braced myself — rather incorrectly, though, I aimed, and I squeezed the trigger — Britney had been very clear that you squeeze a trigger instead of pulling it, which is probably why my grip was so loose — and then the hammer snapped forward, and I felt like I got hit by that wooden beam back in October, but worse."

"I hadn't expected the recoil to be so strong, and while my hands are precise, they don't have a ton of grip strength. The barrel jerked up and right, the stock jerked down and left, and the butt of the shotgun shot back and hit me on my compressed right boob, almost instantly knocking me out."

"I don't think I have a good way to explain this, but boobs, when compressed, hurt almost as much as balls do when they get hit, but it also knocks the breath out of you."

"Just imagine how you'd feel if you had a 12-gauge shotgun recoil hit you in the balls."

"So, I woke up in Britney's room about 30 minutes later with her looking over me, and I felt the bruise instantly."

"To my credit, my first thoughts weren't about my chest, but whether or not Britney had gotten busted. I think she appreciated me jerking up to ask her that, but she just pushed me back down on the bed as I winced."

"She and her mom had carried me to the truck as her dad and the little armory sergeant packed everything up, and they drove home."

"Britney had apparently been incredibly insistent about treating me in private in a way that I worried was going to raise some red flags, but she able to spin up a lie about a dog bite scar on my collarbone that I was ashamed of, which sounded even more suspicious, but she told me to trust her judgment that her parents didn't suspect a thing, so I did."

"She let me rest for two hours as she unpacked our stuff. Her parents might have liked me, but they weren't about to trust a 'man' to sleep in the same room as their daughter, so I was made to sleep in the half-sized guest bedroom."

"Man, it is weird being in someone else's house. There was dust on some of the furniture, and while I know Mom has some very strong untreated OCD, it is kind of nice to have things be spotless."

"We really didn't do much but chill for most of the week before Thanksgiving dinner, and—"

Zoey stops. She then sighs, not really sure if this is something she should share, especially in this way, but she eventually decides that her grandpa can be trusted implicitly.

"'Dead men tell no tales,' right?"

"No, there was a big moment, but Britney wasn't around for it."

"On... I think the Tuesday of that week, I was showering, which was thankfully a safe venture since the small guest room had its own tiny bathroom and shower. I'd also been hanging out alone with Britney when possible since the chest binder hurt with my boobs being bruised, which might have caused me to let my guard down, so I guess either the door handle didn't lock as well as I thought it did, or I forgot to lock it, because Tucker walked in to hand me clean towels since Britney had grabbed the ones I had been using and tossed them in the washing machine without me realizing."

"Helpful kid... but the shower curtain is one of those ones where the top part is transparent, and I think it got hung too low, because they saw my breasts."

"I remember thinking that this was the stupidest way for me to ruin my and Britney's lives as I crouched down low, hoping to God he didn't see despite knowing that they did, but Tucker didn't run off to find their parents or anything."

"Instead, they just asked, 'Zach, why do you have boobs?'"

"'Okay, he's curious,' I thought at the time, 'I can work with that.'"

"Man, you can really see the repression in this... but I didn't tell Tucker the line that had worked so well with the theater club, 'I am a trans man,' I said, 'I'm both Zach and a girl named Zoey.'"

"Yeah, terrible call... but it worked. It shouldn't have worked, but I don't know, maybe my subconscious realized something."

"Tucker, to their credit, was really polite about it — I think the topic of queer people in gender had come up at some point because of Britney — and they asked if I bisexual."

"I told them no, that's when a person is attracted to both sexes, which are a male and female."

"Tucker asked if I was a male or female, I said I was female, and then..."

"And then they asked if I had started out male. I thought I was getting through to them, somehow, so I said that I had."

"Tucker then asked if all guys get a chance to do that, and if so, how? And was it possible to guarantee good results like I had gotten?"

Zoey apologizes to Britney's younger sibling in her head before continuing.

"Yeah, so the tone of the conversation changed very quickly from 'this is a naive kid I can lie to without consequences' to 'this is an egg, and I have to be very careful about what I say.'"

"I've got to stop using lingo like that," Zoey thinks with furrowed brows.

"An 'egg' is a trans person who hasn't realized they are a trans person yet, 'hatching' is the moment when they realize that through guided help, and 'cracking' is a catch-all term for someone realizing they are trans."

"You know, like 'eggs hatch into chicks.'”

"Again, I can see the repression now that I am stating this after the fact, but I was pretty sure they were an unrealized trans person, because they reminded me a lot of myself at that age."

Zoey groans from how dense they were. <Author's Note: Isn't it fun how "they" can be singular or plural here?>

"I was not qualified to have this conversation with that kid right then, and frankly, it would have been, like, really bad for me and Britney if that conversation had happened and they had realized some things that week, so I just told Tucker, 'Ask me about it when you're older.'"

"I then got them to promise to keep this conversation and what they saw secret, no matter what, even to Britney, and they readily agreed before handing me the towel."

"As they were about to leave, they asked if they should call me 'Zach' or 'Zoey.' I genuinely hesitated, but I said 'Zach.'"

"And then nobody talked about that experience, which was convenient for both of us..." Zoey says in a deadpan, almost sarcastic, monotone.

Zoey regrets going down that conversational tangent, but it's something that needed to be said... probably?

"I thought about making a hint to Britney later, but I wasn't ready for the consequences of that for her, me, or Tucker."

"Thanksgiving dinner had mostly-amazing food and mostly-terrible people. Britney's extended family is very conservative, and eight of them had flown in from Texas that morning."

"I had just spent the entire week charming Britney's folks, and I was still in that mode, and those good first impressions proved to be awfully convenient at dinner."

"Because of the sabbatical, I've got a year of more interesting stories and experiences than most people get in a decade to draw upon, but these in-laws were insistent about talking about politics."

"I did my absolute best to veer their conversation away from those areas, but I should have been focusing on Britney, not them. She was very hard to back down from responding to their quips."

"When one of them said to Britney, 'I'm glad you decided to stop fooling around with girls and date a man! And a nice, young, handsome one at that!' I just took a nervous sip of my water, smiled, and really wished I was back home at my house, even though it would have been a shitstorm from Mom."

"Yeah... so nobody killed each other, and Britney and I didn't get outed, so I'd consider the night a success, in the same way I'd consider a plane crash that doesn't kill anyone but destroys the plane a success."

"On Saturday, we went to an outdoor shooting range and shot clay targets. Britney had this rare wooden bullpup sniper rifle from the 1980's — only 176 were made — and she had fun showing off her accuracy from 500 meters away. I shot it a few times, and while it has a bit of kick to it, it's got a soft feel instead of... well, a kick like a gunshot."

"I then got dragged to church on Sunday... not a fan of that, and I was grouchy and edgy and hadn't even heard of the 'First Sunday of Advent,' but it apparently is a prelude to Christmas. I just spent the entire service with a stomach cramp and alternating between reading the hymn book in front of me, listening to the service, and being pissed I got dragged to this and wishing it was over already."

"When we got home, we started to pack up, but Ai, who had been dormant most of the week, told us we'd gotten a semi-mandatory re:Dreamer quest given to us because we hadn't done anything in a week. We either did it now or we would take a massive point drop that would have set our point value over two weeks back. Or was it four weeks?"

"I don't remember. I was out of it with a stomach cramp after the sermon, and it took me two hours to recover, and of course the family wanted to go out to lunch..."

"Thankfully, it was a simple quest involving sex of any kind, and Britney and I figured we could finish it in, like, fifteen minutes at most."

"Britney and I skedaddled to her room to 'pack,' and Britney and I rushed through foreplay."

"Yeah, women aren't kidding when they say they need that. I can spend a night loosening up without it, but that's when the subject of sex is on my mind. Foreplay is mandatory with a cold start, or else it's just so painful you can't do anything."

Zoey stares off into the distance, not sure why she's going into such detail.

"Five minutes in, Britney was warmed up. I was fully clothed, but Britney's tank top and bra were off. She had her legs wrapped around my waist while lying back on her bed as I was leaning over."

"And then Elise came in with snacks for the road. Tucker was right behind her."

"We all just kind of froze, and I think Britney and I were mostly relieved that this happened at this exact moment rather than five seconds from now."

"Elise quickly covered Tucker's eyes and harshly scolded Britney, reminding her she knows she shouldn't be doing that with a guy yet when she isn't married, and for the love of fucking God, she should at least have waited until she and I were out of the fucking house."

Source: m kyo on pixiv

"She then led Tucker away and closed the door, which totally killed the mood."

"We later had sex on campus, but Ai said it hadn't counted in time, so we bit the bullet and took the point loss."

"So, my 21st birthday was a bit over a week away, and Britney managed to surprise me with tickets to Jantzen Beach on Monday morning! I'd never been to the amusement park — you know how easily I got motion sick — and while I was really excited by the thoughtful gift, I was worried about that motion sickness coming into play."

"But... Britney had dropped over 12,000 yen on these tickets, and she said we could always do calmer rides if something more intense didn't work."

"Britney gave me the option to show up on the date as a man or as a woman, and I think she knew what she was doing with that, because she had presented these tickets right after I had spent a week wearing the chest binder and only gave me a few minutes to decide."

"I chose to show up in a female outfit she'd prepare, and she clapped her hands in glee and told me to leave everything to her."

"She showed up at my dorm room — I didn't have a roommate, remember? — with the outfit and a makeup kit. She hadn't said anything about makeup, but she was insistent, so I sat at my kotatsu after I changed into an outfit she had prepared for the day and let her do it."

Sources: one, two, three

Sources: one, official art, three

<Remember: Britney coordinates Zoey's outfit(s) for the winter date in both her route and Keisuke's.>

"This was the first time I'd had makeup applied, and it felt weird. I felt kind of nervous, too... like, what if it looked bad? Which of course was a very manly reaction in hindsight."

"I didn't recognize myself when she was done. My heart skipped a beat when I looked at my face in the pocket mirror she'd brought, and I suddenly understood why Britney had kissed me without warning nearly two months ago."

"I was beautiful."

"Damn, how did I not crack right then?" Zoey mutters under her breath.

"To her credit, the makeup was subtle. She'd put a nice light coral lipstick on my lips that made them look so soft. And whatever Britney had done to the skin around my eyes made them pop, and I remembered thinking for the first time that I liked my eyes being red."

"It was a face I wanted to keep looking at, but it was already 10:30 AM by that point, and the park was big and days are short in December in Portland."

"We showed up at around 11:30 AM, and of course the first thing Britney wanted to ride was the log flume, ignoring my recommendation to start slow."

"I didn't even know how it was operational, given that it was 7 degrees out, but I guess they had a small amount of antifreeze in the water."

"I objected on those grounds, as well as the fact that log flumes are the worst of both worlds when it comes to roller coasters and boats."

"But she's the most persuasive person I know, and she used the argument that this was the last time this ride would be open for months, so within a few minutes I was in that boat and regretting my ability to argue against her."

"But I wasn't regretting it for long, because I was actually having fun. With no motion sickness!"

Zoey has a big, happy smile on her face here.

"Sure, my heart lurched in my chest — which also lurched — as we went over the drop, but it was exhilarating."

"Britney was in front of me, and she got soaked. She was a bit upset about it, but even in wet clothes she looks great."

"She wanted to change, but I was on a goddamned high at that point from this body somehow no longer having motion sickness, so I convinced her to go on Big Dipper, the antique wooden roller coaster in the park I've always been fascinated by when looking up online, telling her the fast movement of air would dry her off."

"It did, but she was also a bit cold after that, so we went to a café and got..."

"Lunch. We got lunch."

Zoey is a bit flustered, because she and Britney had a shared parfait at the café too, and that's a massive gender bender yuri trope she doesn't want to explain.

"After warming up, we messed around with some kiddie rides for a bit, but then we wanted to do some carnival games."

"Basically, Britney cleaned house on the shooting gallery with her shooting skills, and I cleaned house on the buzz wire game with my hand control."

"We didn't really have any use for the shit we won, but it was fun competing over who could get the most, but in the end, Britney beat me out with this massive bunny rabbit."

"I kind of begged for it as my birthday gift, and Britney laughed and handed it to me, the condition being I had to lug it around."

Zoey smiles.

"It was the first stuffed animal I'd gotten since you'd died. I tried making a tiger a few weeks after your death from a hobby shop kit, but it just wasn't the same without you. It didn't have that 'magic' of it feeling alive, but the rabbit Britney gave me did."

"It made me think of you as I held it, and I had a hard time not crying. I tried really hard not to cry as a guy, but now I'm just a total crybaby as a woman. And it doesn't bother me, although sometimes I trick myself into thinking it should."

"I cried a little anyways as I held it, but I quickly explained that bunnies were my favorite animal, but I was embarrassed by that fact, so Britney had to keep it to herself."

Zoey soon calms down, and the tears welling up in the corners of her eyes dry.

"That's true, by the way. I think I told everyone it was gorillas, but I can't remember if I told you the truth."

"It was, like, 4:00 PM by this point, and I kind of wanted to go home so I didn't have to carry this guy with me everywhere. But then I saw this antique Ferris wheel and had to ride it."

"Britney had said she didn't have romantic feelings for me, but I still had them for her, and they'd gotten even stronger over the last two months. I thought that... I don't know, by riding it at sunset and telling her how much she meant to me, that I'd win her over."

"That didn't happen, and while I kind of wanted to bring Big Boss Bunny on the ride with me, Britney told me to just leave it to the attendant like a sane person. Plus, I thought this was going to be a re-confessional, so I made him sit this one out."

"As we went up, I was fretting over how I was going to tell her how much she meant to me in a way that would get her to love me back, but she talked first."

"'Z, I've got two important things I haven't told you.'"

"I briefly thought she was going to confess to me, but then she told me she'd been keeping something secret from me, and it was big, and she said it with this deathly solemn tone."

"Yeah... she told me she had ADHD, and I laughed. Hard."

"She got upset, and once I had calmed down enough to talk, I just told her I knew."

"She got embarrassed and said, 'What do you mean you knew?!' and I told her how obvious it was, and that I'd noticed all the way back in high school, and I told her the symptoms and such."

"She crossed her arms and pouted, telling me I wasn't allowed to psychoanalyze her anymore just because I'd taken most of a semester on an Intro to Psych course. This was a serious issue for her, and she's been fighting against it for all her life."

"And then she told me her mom knew she was a lesbian, and the lighthearted conversation became very serious."

"I thought, like, this was the last hurrah before her parents canceled her tuition because she was getting shipped off to a convent, and my mind raced over how this could have happened. Did Tucker tell their mom? Did I not have as good of security on the visit as I thought I did? Did her mom see more than I thought when she walked in on me about to have sex with her daughter? Or did something even crazier happen, like Ai telling her?"

"Britney continued, maybe noticing my anxiety, maybe not, but she told me her mom found out when she was in middle school and had been keeping it a secret from her dad."

"Yeah, it's too weird to keep using my girlfriend's parent's first names when telling this story," Zoey thinks.

"Her mom was going to keep it a secret, but if Britney ever got caught fooling around with a girl, and her dad found out, her mom was going to pretend this was the first time she was hearing about it and not side with her against her dad."

"I felt... conflicted. On one hand, that's a horrible thing for a parent to say to their kid, and I know how it feels to have a mom who always sides with your dad over you. I could only imagine how much it hurt for Britney to be told that, but I was also hurt too. Britney had also lied to me, or at the very least heavily implied that both parents were a concern, and it hurt being left in the dark like that, like I was some pawn she could manipulate."

"I, maybe a bit too coldly, asked why Britney was telling me now, and why she hadn't told me sooner."

"She told me that for all intents and purposes, her parents function as a single unit, because her dad is the head of the family. Her mom might be able to turn that head to focus on certain things, but he was always going to be the head."

"She's got some kind of outdated views of a patriarchal family structure I wouldn't have expected from a woman as progressive as her."

"She hadn't told me because it hadn't been relevant, but after the home visit, and me meeting both of them, and then her mom walking in on us and me almost getting busted for having a female body, she felt so bad leaving me in the dark."

"I told her that she should feel bad about it."

"Again, I was pretty hurt by this."

"But what had really changed her mind and made her realize I needed to be told this was a call she'd had with her mom on Friday — she has weekly calls with each parent, usually in the morning before classes."

"Her mom had been so surprised her lesbian daughter had brought a boyfriend over, and she had told Britney that she was glad her daughter had gotten out of her 'lesbian phase' and how great of a boy that Zach kid had been to meet, even if he had been a bit too hasty trying to take her daughter's chastity."

"That felt so wrong to hear, and I got offended on Britney's behalf."

"I know now I was also getting offended on my own behalf, being called a guy in that way, but it bounced off me at the time."

"The ride was 75% over at this point, so I asked Britney for some quiet to think for the rest of the ride."

"When we got to the bottom, I told her that knowledge didn't change anything."

"'The plan is still the same with your parents, and I still love you.'"

"The way she blushed made me think she had feelings for me too, but she quickly told me those types of lines aren't going to work with her."

"We caught a bus back to the dorm right as the sun started to dip over the horizon, and..."

Zoey groans. She knew this talk was going to be a rapid-fire sequence of her dense repression moments she had forgotten about, but she didn't expect there to be this many.

"Britney asked me to dinner at the dining hall, and I felt so embarrassed to be seen in public as a woman by people who might not be perfect strangers that I declined. But I told her it was because I have so many distinct features, so I had to play it safe, so she told me how makeup removal works and that there was stuff in the kit she left in my dorm room."

"I followed her instructions to the letter, but I didn't feel like I was taking makeup off so much as I was putting a mask back on, but I couldn't articulate it at the time. I just felt sad that the day was ending like that."

Zoey has a pained smile as she clutches her arm.

"I got so close to being honest with myself that day, and after I got undressed, I hugged Big Boss Bunny as I went to bed, not sure why I felt so sad."

"The mask went back on overnight, and I hardly remembered the bittersweet sadness from yesterday by the time I woke up. I'd gotten pretty good at wearing it, but it was definitely starting to slip."

"I bailed on my 10 AM math discussion and got to see Dad in the morning on my birthday, as he'd taken on renovating the church across the street personally. We just kind of chilled for two and a half hours before I had to leave at 11:30 AM to make it to my psych lecture. I helped him around the site because I wanted to hang out with him while he was working, but for my present, he gave 20,000 yen in cash and a bunch, and I mean a bunch, of really helpful life advice."

"But it was all for his son as he hits 21, and I felt guilty about taking that when I didn't know if I was going to get to stay his son."

"Still, the mask slipped back on by 5 PM, when I showed up at theater club everyone had been working hard to prepare for opening night on the 9th, but I walked into a surprise birthday party. It was a modest party as we had such a tight budget, but there was cake, a few balloons, and soda. When I wasn't expecting anything, it felt like a lot, and today was being treated as the penultimate day of rest before opening night on the 9th."

"I was presenting as a woman for this club, and Patrick and Britney were the only ones that called me 'Zach' in private. Patrick was the only one who had ever taken me saying 'I'm a man' at face value, so when it came time for the cake, Patrick led a song of 'For He's a Jolly Good Fellow.'"

"Something inside of me nearly broke during that. I thought last year was the last time I was going to be a man on my birthday, and if I wanted to be a man for my next birthday. Would I even get the option?"

"I blew out the candles, and made my wish. I got asked what I wished for, but I couldn't tell anyone that, now can I? No hints, either, or it wouldn't come true."

Zoey feels like a bit of an impish brat.

"But... you get the 'Grandpa Exception,' so I'll give you one."

"I already got my wish granted, and I don't think it can get un-wished at this point."

<Author's Note: Ambiguous for either a real relationship with Britney or for being a real woman.>

"Opening night went great! There was a full house, and most people seemed to love the original musical."

"Not me. I hated that stupid fucking play. It was so historically inaccurate that it hurt; the plot felt contrived and predictable, which is impressive when it veered off the historical script so much; the production went over-budget by 10% and we had to chip in with our own money to get it done, and we were all broke college students; Molly insisted on everyone in the crew getting at least a tiny part in the play, which led to the crew having to have understudies; and I sucked ass at acting."

"I was good at the singing though, and I had managed to convince Molly to turn it into a rock opera instead of this sweeping Broadway thing with an orchestra because my chemistry lab partner, a music major, said he'd be interested in doing it for free on his own time if he could 'work some jams' into the music."

"The music got so much better with him around, and that pothead probably saved the entire play."

"Anyways, imagine my surprise when I found out the play was getting rave reviews, and The Oregonian even covered it on the front of its entertainment section on Sunday... with a photo of Britney carrying me in that princess costume front and center."

<There will be two CGs depending on the roles.>

<Britney carrying Zoey.>

<Zoey carrying Britney.>

Source: himiya jouzu on pixiv

"Britney got most of the accolades, but I was credited as 'the mysterious and beautiful unnamed lead actress, hiding her identity with a pair of red contact lenses, whose beauty and singing talents were enough to compensate for her complete lack of acting skills.'"

Zoey sings one line from the play to demonstrate, but then blushes.

"Britney says I've got a singing voice like an angel, but I don't think that's quite right."

She says this with a smile on her face. She's starting to feel a bit more proud of who she is, even if she's got a bit of guilt from not feeling like she's 'earned' the right to be that person yet.

"So... while I didn't know if Britney's parents would connect the dots, Mom reads newspapers, and she reads all of them, without skipping sections. She was going to find that photo, and it was only a matter of time until she wanted to see that play."

"But I was locked in, and I just kind of had to hope everything was going to work out."

"Britney and I didn't have much time for sex those two weeks. We did a dozen performances, and everyone was just frayed by the end."

"Well, I was. I think a lot of the veterans of the theater club knew what they were in for. Like, Britney and Molly had this attitude of being disappointed the show was only going to run for two weeks and not two months."

"And on closing night, Britney and I were running a few minutes late for costuming because Ai had given us the same sort of 'we need to have sex within the next 3 hours or I was going to be docked a lot of points' from Thanksgiving break, and we broke off for a quickie."

"But like I said, women need to warm up, and Britney didn't quite let me, and she didn't let herself either."

"We were in the changing room and Britney was tying my corset up, but she was frustrated and tied my corset up too tightly, and I got mad."

"I told her she was being too rough, just like she had been during sex, and just like she had been dealing with me these past two and a half months."

"We got into a short fight about the farcical nature of our relationship, and there was some shouting, and Britney told me to stop putting her on a pedestal and thinking that she'll suddenly fall for me if I was nice enough to her. She hated being treated that way, because there's a huge difference between kindness out of decency and kindness out of expecting something in return."

"I didn't really have a response besides telling her that I was sorry for being in love with her and that I was sorry for not being the person she wanted to date."

"I obliviously shouted, 'I'm sorry the only thing you like about me is my body! I'd think of myself as a woman if I could, but I can't!'"

"I think that really hurt her, because she stormed off in a huff, and I had to ask Molly to tie up the rest of my laces. She told me she'd heard Britney and I arguing, as she had only been three meters from the door, and we had been kind of loud. She told me she was sorry that things weren't going well between me and Britney, and I said, 'me too.'"

"Britney and I forgot this, but the changing room isn't far from stage right. The front left row could hear us, and Britney's parents were sitting there."

"My parents were also in the audience, but several rows back. Of course, Mom with that 'well-trained musician's hearing' heard that conversation clear as day, and while it hadn't been the 'guy voice' I'd been using during our phone call, she knew Britney's voice, and Britney had called me 'Zach' during that fight."

"She used to do that whenever she got mad at me, because she had a hard time disconnecting this woman in front of her from her best friend in high school, as we both had the same face and acted the same way."

"I talked to Britney about it later, but she feels guilty that she couldn't stop thinking of me as a guy for so long, especially after all her posturing of being a supportive ally."

"The final performance went well enough. The cast and crew worked like well-oiled parts of a machine by this point, even though I thought that it was a badly-designed machine. The only real friction was between Britney and I, because we focused stress on parts of our lines to jab at each other."

"Still, the curtains drop to applause, and I'm just glad that I don't have to act again."

"But then I got dragged to the closing night party with the club, and I was down for it. I just wanted to pound back the cheap drinks we could get on a college kid's budget and ignore that I was so hurt by how my relationship was deteriorating with Britney, but I also felt that same sort of vague sadness with the makeup and the birthday party as I took off the dress Britney had worked so hard on and put on men's clothing again."

"I was chilling by the back wall of the green room — what had become our general meeting room — and was pouring back a few cups of jungle juice, trying to isolate myself and get drunk."

"Misery likes company, and Molly came over to me."

Zoey realizes the awkwardness of the phrasing.

"Molly should have been on the top of the world at that moment. She just wrote an original musical that garnered widespread critical acclaim; ticket sales had been through the roof and should have secured the funding of the theater club for the next four years, even with complete losses every semester after; she, or we, and I mean everyone present, had put aside most of our bickering to really become a proper theater club, and Molly had come into her element as the student director."

"The role was passed down to an incoming junior with the most promise upon the previous director's graduation, and I know for a fact Molly had worries about being able to live up to the expectations of her graduated upperclassman because she had told me as such."

"But despite those successes, she looked sad. Yet she still tried to cheer me up, telling me she had heard the argument I'd had with Britney, and not just vague raised voices, but the words."

"I probably should have panicked here, because that meant that the audience had heard some of it, but I'm a bit of a lightweight as a woman and didn't have the clarity of thought to process that, so I just told her I appreciated it as I got even more mopey and downed another drink."

"I wish I had a better recounting of the night, because one of the most important events of my life happened during it, but I was drunk. Molly was a little drunk too, but she was 'tipsy' at most."

"She said again that she was sorry to hear that, but if I was looking for someone to reciprocate romantic feelings with, she was right there."

"A few of the gears in my head were turning during this, but not enough, and not as quickly as they should have."

"I asked her to clarify, and she told me that while she wasn't sure she had romantic feelings for me, there was a good chance that she did, and that she wanted to explore those feelings of good friendship she had with me even further... since, you know, Britney and I weren't really dating, and Britney had just very firmly rejected any possibility of romance between us... as long as I was thinking of myself as a man."

"As drunk as I was, I pieced together what Molly was saying. She was okay dating me, even if it meant juggling her as part of a real private relationship as I kept acting in the fake public one with Britney."

Zoey pauses, and it's a long pause.

"If Heaven is real, you're never allowed to tell this to Britney when you see her up there."

"I was tempted."

"I was tempted so badly! I'd just gotten confessed to by a girl, the first time that's ever happened to me, and it was by a person I was considering to be a very good friend despite only knowing her for just over two months!"

"Molly is a wonderful person, and I resonated with her on a level very close to the way I had with Britney. That bond between us might have gotten even closer than my bond with Britney at that moment, and it might even have gotten closer than the bond I have with Britney now."

"She's also got a body type I'm more attracted to than Britney's, and I wanted to help her realize how attractive she was and help her work though her issues with femininity as I worked through my own, because even with how dense I was, I still knew I had vague 'gender issues' that needed to be worked through."

"And Molly has such a sympathetic and tragic backstory, and I could be like my idol, Sir Nakamura, and help save her and give her that 'happily ever after' part of her story a good, decent person like her deserved after so much suffering."

"But she paused, and she let me take a moment to think over what she said before replying."

"I don't know what I would have said had I been pressed without that pause, and that worries me."

"But that's not how it happened, and I've learned to let go of overthinking certain hypothetical situations."

"First, I didn't intend to make a love triangle, but I noticed for the first time just how much I had been leading Molly on for the past two months. She had probably thought I was interested in her, and in another set of circumstances, I would have been."

"I had issues with Britney, and I'd often thought about how she'd been a bit of a selfish jerk to me recently in a way she hadn't in high school, but it was a much more stressful time for both of us."

"And, I had forced Britney into this as an unwilling partner. She was getting something out of it, but that was only because she had a unique situation. Most people in her place would either have left me out to dry or begrudgingly helped me without getting anything back. She had every right to hate me after all of this, but she didn't."

"There was a very real possibility of a future with Molly here, but to have it, I would have to betray both girls."

"Maybe Molly and I would have sex, but I'd have to keep having sex with Britney behind Molly's back. While that could have been a powerful combination to get me those points I needed to win the season to change back, I couldn't cross a line like that."

"I might have been raised by a sociopath, but that didn't make me one."

"Ultimately, it was an issue about trust and love."

Zoey grumbles.

"Look, the exact reasoning is a blur, both from the alcohol and what happened after, but you don't get to choose who you fall in love with. The only thing you get to choose is who you love, if that makes sense."

"And I loved Britney, and I didn't love Molly. It was that simple."

"I'm sure I was slurring and stuttering, but I reached up and put my hands on Molly's shoulders."

"Jesus Christ, I really did lead her on..." Zoey groans.

"But I didn't kiss her, which I now realize is what she might have expected after that. I told Molly how much of a wonderful person she was and how flattered I was by her offer and that in most circumstances I would have been eager to accept it... but my heart belonged to someone else."

"Remember that temper I mentioned Molly having? She swept my hands off her shoulders, slammed her palm into the wall next to me, and leaned her face over mine."

"Now I thought I was about to be kissed, and I was filled with complete gay panic."

"But she told me off, belligerently."

"'Listen 'ere, Lassie. Yer gal ain't interested in ya, and unless ye've gat a guid reason ta turn me dawn, I'm nae accepting it."

"This was bad. Molly is — hopefully was — a woman who's had romantic catastrophe after romantic catastrophe, and she was hurt by my rejection."

"But I was clear with her that it wasn't her fault, and I didn't know what else to do."

"So... I told her I couldn't date, because I actually identified as a woman."

"I was just trying to get her off my back because I was pretty sure she was straight, but that mask I'd mentioned? The one that wore to remind myself I was supposed to be a guy? And reminded me that I wasn't allowed to think of myself as a woman?"

"Yeah, it shattered into a million little pieces when I said that."

"I was just too drunk and too flustered and also yeah a bit too turned on from Molly's aggression to lie to myself as well as I would have needed to in order to keep that identity on after it had been loosened over the past month."

"I cracked, and it felt like I was skydiving."

"I was terrified but also filled with a sense of clarity so sharp and so vivid that it cut through a lot of the drunkenness, but I didn't get time to process that."

"'I'm glad yee figured it out, Zoey, but didn't Britney tell ye I was bi?'"

"Maybe Britney had? I didn't remember. It was all I could do to hold myself together as Molly started to tell me that wasn't going to be an obstacle for her."

"But then an obstacle showed up. Britney had been watching from across the room — in fact, a lot of the theater club had."

"Britney grabbed Molly's hand away from the wall and turned Molly's attention to her."

"I still don't know how she did it — I guess she's just that good of an actress — but she almost perfectly copied the glare Mom and I do and told Molly, 'My girlfriend told you she's not interested.'"

"Molly sobered up real quick after that. She looked at both of us, and sort of chokingly whispered, 'Oh me God, I'm just like me stepmaw.'"

"And she ran off in tears. I was slightly inclined to chase after her, but not even I'm that oblivious to the mood of a room."

"Britney took a look around and dragged me out of the room, and we talked in private in the tailor shop off the stage."

"The first thing on her mind was what I had said to Molly. She asked if I had meant it."

Zoey looks angry.

"I was in the middle of a full-blown panic attack at the moment, so I said in a single breath, 'WhatnoofcoursenotBritneyIwasjusttryingtogetMollyoffmybackofcourseIidentifyasaman!'"

"In hindsight, Britney was obviously able to be trusted with this revelation, but I was so embarrassed and scared and even ashamed that I still wanted to hide it, so I told her they'd been meaningless words."

"Britney stared at me for a good five seconds, and I think she was trying to read me."

"Of course, she had read me, but she smiled, like she was trusting me."

"'That's okay, Zach' — we'd been using 'Z' in private, so this was a departure from that — 'I'm fine with that.'"

"'And I'm sorry for being a liar too, because I think it finally clicked with me tonight why I've been getting so upset at you recently.'"

"'I've been jealous of you and Molly growing closer.'"

"'I don't know if what I'm feeling toward you is love or not, as I've never been in love, but I want to find out.'"

"'And it's not the body that's I think I'm starting to love, but the person.'"

"'So, don't feel like you have to force yourself to change for me. I'm fine if you're a guy inside, and I don't think my feelings are going to change when you change back.'"

"I'm probably misquoting her since the night was filled with so many emotions, but something clicked in my brain right as I was about to fess up that I didn't think I wanted to change back."

"'If Britney is dating a woman, and this relationship becomes real, she's going to come out to her parents, and that could ruin her life.'"

"I don't know how I did it, but I put that mask — that eggshell — back together, and put it back on my face. But it had a lot of jagged pieces sticking out, and that mask now hurt to wear now that I noticed it was there."

Zoey's face turns downcast, but with a slight smile.

"I'm so fucking lucky Britney had the patience to deal with me being such a liar. She'd read me from the start, but she let me come out to her on my own terms."

"So, Britney used the name 'Zach' for me in private from then on, even during sex, and I did a pretty good job — I think? — pretending it didn't bother me."

"Man, Christmas Eve was rough. I came home for the first time in four months, hoping to relax after last night, but Mom ambushed me the second I walked in the door, and she wasn't very subtle about what she was getting at."

"'Hello, son! Long time no see! Is it just me, or do you look a little thinner these days? But I guess that extra muscle on your thighs and pecs is from working out and dieting. I'm glad you're taking better care of your health, and that new skincare routine you're doing to make your skin so smooth and hairless is working very well, but you need to work on your posture when you're studying! All that slumping over your desk had sloped in your shoulders, and if I didn't know any better, I'd say you're slouching so much that you look three centimeters shorter!'"

"Yeah, she really was that blunt about it."

"Okay, so you know how it's impossible to lie to Mom, right? I don't know if it's because she's able to read very small changes in facial expressions or changes in voice inflection or what, but I've never been able to lie to her and get away with it. I'm clearly not a good liar, but this skill applies to everyone, I think."

"But that's not to say I told her the truth. Ai was listening in on me, and even if she wasn't, it wasn't Mom's business."

"I said 'I suppose I shouldn't ask you out loud what gave it away...' as I tried to look over her shoulder to see if Dad was around."

"'I was in the audience last night, Dear. Great voice, by the way, but I guess your notable lack of laryngeal prominence really elevated your range.'"

"'Also, your father is out buying last-minute gifts.'"

"'Did you tell him what you know?'"

"'My, my! What would I possibly be getting at?'"

"'No... for now, this is a thing best kept secret between us girls, right?'"

"I mean, I knew she knew, but it still hit like a truck."

"'I know you have a hundred questions—'"

"'Oh, I have far more than that!'"

"'Mom, I need to be crystal clear on this. You cannot ask those questions, and you cannot tell anyone about this. My life is literally in danger if you do.'"

"Mom stopped at that."

"'Explain.'"

"'I can't, not without putting myself in danger.'"

"'Mom, you're going to do the hardest thing in the world for you and trust me. I know you've got so much you want to ask, but I need you to put that aside. You've always said you'll do anything to keep me safe, and right now, just accepting this is as an inexplicable fact is how you do that.'"

"Mom slowly eased up after that."

"'Fuck, you're not actually lying about this, are you...?'"

"'Nope, my life really just has gotten this impossibly crazy.'"

"'Am I at least allowed to ask you how you're holding up? Or am I not allowed to ask any questions?'"

"I should have just said she couldn't ask me anything, but I didn't."

"I told her Britney knew; yes, she made the chest binder I was wearing that compressed my boobs, and it was somehow comfortable enough to wear for several hours in a row; Mom got mad I wouldn't tell her my cup size; I told her I had periods and as far as I could tell my body was wholly physiologically female; and then I had to reject a few questions about how this had happened and related topics."

"'Okay, so I know this has to be a small inner circle, but how does Britney factor into this? The girl clearly has talents with fabric to hide your body better than most, but I can't quite figure out how she fits into this, since I'm assuming she knows the whole story, but I can't?'"

"I told Mom to back away from that subject, and she quickly figured out I was probably bugged or had someone listening in on me clandestinely, and that got her to cooperate."

"She had wanted to disenroll me from university for my own safety, but she didn't have enough details about what consequences there would be for that, and that if I'd managed to hide my body for one semester, I could probably do it again and we'd talk it over in the summer."

"But then she told me that the price of her secrecy was letting Dad in on this. I told her that was a terrible idea with how much he likes to spill secrets, but she didn't budge on this point. Before she could force her to give her permission, I grabbed my bag and headed upstairs to my room to hide."

"I heard a car pull up, expecting things to come to a head with Dad, but it was Britney's car."

"Mom handled her sudden appearance badly."

"'Oh, Dear! Your lesbian girlfriend is over!'"

"Shit was about to go down between them, so I ran downstairs and then ushered Britney to my room, promising I'd explain and that no, I hadn't told Mom."

"She came inside, and she made a snide comment about the stuffed animals on my bed, mostly pointing to the shark you got me at that aquarium since he was the biggest one."

"J-Just to be clear, I had only brought them out for a final farewell before going off to college! Because I had just gotten back home, I hadn't had time to put them back in my closet, where all of them but K Bear had been since I was 9!"

"Since you died..."

"Ai wanted to chime in, mostly to laugh at me, but I told her to buzz off, because there was a decent chance Mom would creep up to my door without me noticing to listen."

"I just asked Britney what she was doing here... not that it wasn't great to see her."

"She was a hair's breadth away from being forced to out herself to her parents. They'd been in the front row last night and had heard that argument, and they both had a lot of questions about who I was. Things they'd ignored during the Thanksgiving visit, like how Britney had urged them for privacy to check my bruise from the shotgun butt and the way my voice would crack at times."

"She hadn't been able to do anything but insist I was a man, that I saw myself as a man, and that she had just asked me if I was a man last night, and I had said I was, but then she packed up enough clothes for two weeks, drove over here, and was formally requesting asylum."

"'So... I don't know if they know enough about gender that I could explain you as a trans male like I did with Molly and Patrick, but I don't think they'd care. They're nearly positive you have a female body, and to them, the only way I would be in a relationship with a person like that is if I were a lesbian.'"

"I told her how sorry I was to hear that, and she just told me she wasn't surprised that her parents were being bigots like this."

"To cheer her up, I told her how my mom had confronted me. I had to explain how Mom was able to piece together correct assumptions from an exceedingly small amount of information, but that 'lesbian girlfriend' comment was because she knew my body was female and that Britney was my girlfriend."

"While Mom didn't know what had happened to my body, the fact that she knew greatly alarmed Britney. While I wanted to say it was going to be fine and that I could trust Mom to secrecy... I didn't know if I could. If Britney was going to stay here, there was going to be even greater pressure from Mom to let her tell Dad so everyone would be in on the secret of my body, and then from him, everyone would be in on the secret of my body."

"We needed an escape plan, and thankfully, I knew a person who could provide it."

"I hated doing this, but I called Rich and cashed in a favor for a place to stay for the next two weeks. He probably has a master password to Zhulu's database, because in about a minute, he found us a cabin on Mt. Olympus we could use for thirteen days."

"He explained it was the best he had on such short notice, but it was off the grid with no gas or plumbing lines or electricity, and Britney chimed in and said she could manage, which puzzled me but I trusted her, thinking she had been a Girl Scout and knowing she'd been on a lot of hunting and fishing trips."

"Rich told me he'd call the lodge owner and they'd have a key for me by this afternoon, but he said this was going to cost me as this had overshot how much of a favor he owed me. I owed him now... literally, he was going to draft an invoice for 120,000 yen and send it to my email, and he wanted that paid in the next month, 'jokingly' saying he was going to break my kneecaps with interest if I didn't pay up."

"That was a problem for future me, so I agreed, and I ended the call."

"Britney said it must be handy having a guy like that around, and I warned her that you don't make deals with the devil if you can help it."

"We spend the next twenty minutes packing up. Mom was mad at me, but she was furious at Britney because she thought she suggested this eloping escape — just like she'd suggested the sabbatical."

"I had to tell Mom, sternly, that Britney hadn't suggested it. And if she was going to keep hating my girlfriend because she kept going out of her way to find or invent reasons to hate her, then I didn't want to spend Christmas at home with her."

"Of course, Dad came home right as we were about to pull out, and I needed to control this situation or who knew what Mom was going to do. I got out of Britney's car, said 'Hello, Dad!' and then Mom was all like, 'Jeff, our son is running off with his girlfriend to elope! At a cabin they abused a connection with Rich to have access to! Completely blowing us off for Christmas!'"

"It was clear she was trying to get him to stop us, so I explained that I was still renting the cabin, and that Rich was sending me an invoice for it. That was his only real objection, so he shrugged and told me to have fun — but don't, y'know, for Britney to break her vow with Jesus by breaking her hymen or forcing her to miss Midnight Mass."

"Mom shouted 'Darling?!' in an incredulous voice."

"She really had been expecting him to side with her, hadn't she?"

Zoey's grin is a bit too smug as she says this.

"'He's a grown man, Samantha! Let him spend the holidays with his girlfriend if he wants.'"

"'Besides, it means we have the house all to ourselves...'"

"I don't think Dad intentionally used Mom's weakness toward intimacy with him against her? But she capitulated, and he waved to us as we drove off, telling me my gifts would be here when I came back, and also not to fuck Britney and to stick to hands only if either of us got horny."

"It's about a five hour drive on I-5 to and from the cabin, which is on the north side of Mt. Olympus, near the hot springs — I think you mentioned going there once? After Ai chimed in with very loud laughter at our situation and we told her to fuck off, Britney and I spent the car ride bemoaning how extra our parents are, but my dad was left out during all of this since he had kind of been the savior of the day."

"Man, nothing bonds two kids like sharing parental trauma stories, right? Britney's got a fucked one from a trip to court with her dad where she saw a bunch of mutilated and poorly-treated shrapnel wounds as part of a big medical malpractice class-action lawsuit her dad was — I think 'litigating' it the right word?"

"And she's got a few other ones, but they were almost exclusively some bigoted things she'd heard them say. By and large, her parents are decent people, although stuck in some archaic ways of thinking."

"No, I did most of the talking."

"This is kind of sad, but I've spent more time around Mom than I'd spent around anyone, and I have some stories about that woman."

"I avoided... one or two key areas that would make it impossible for Mom and Britney to get along, were I to go into detail, but I told Britney at the end of a few of them that while it's good for her that she didn't have someone in her family as crazy as Mom, Mom being my mom was bad for me."

"The topic shifted to how much of a shitstorm we were in for when we got back, and Britney thought she could probably get my dad to talk to her dad. I had to tell her that was not going to work, since her dad would have to tell my dad what he knows, and then it was the secrecy thing all over again... but Mom could do it. She knows about my body, but she also knows how to control people, how to keep a secret, and how to make sure something stays a secret."

"Britney was surprised, to say the least."

"'Didn't you just say that you shouldn't make deals with the devil when you can help it?'"

"I tried to tell Britney my mom was barely a devil, but Britney reminded me that I had just spent an hour digging into what was basically an endless pit of stories about her, mostly about how much of a force of chaos she was."

"We argued about it for a bit, but then I realized that Mom really wasn't a person I should be trying to defend."

"I sighed and told Britney, 'Fine, my mom is a... like, minor demon, or something, but 'the devil' is a bit too grandiose, and that woman doesn't need any more of an ego. She's just a sad, lonely genius fighting a bunch of mental illnesses.'"

"'And yeah, that doesn't excuse her with an 'it's not her fault!' line, but it provides context.'"

"Anywho... I told Britney how Mom can basically go into any room on the planet and take control of it. I had kept telling Britney for years that she was the most convincing arguer I know, but it's really Mom."

"I think that almost made Britney want to get into a 'debate club match' with her, but I warned her that I got as decent at debating so many subjects as I have because of how much Mom tried to teach me growing up, and I had to get that good to pass her standards... but I never really passed all of them."

"I also told Britney that Mom was basically a yandere and—"

"You know what? I'm not going to explain that one, Grandpa."

"I was about to tell her that I was pretty sure Mom wouldn't hesitate to kill someone to protect her family if truly pushed, but that was probably a really bad idea to bring up, so I phrased it as she'd do whatever it took to convince Britney's parents they were wrong about me, because that meant keeping my body a secret, which meant keeping me safe. It would be best to just treat Mom like a self-guided missile in this situation, and the less we knew about how she was going to approach the subject or its aftermath besides the problem going away, the better."

"We took a break for lunch at some taco place in Olympia... Sol Taco, I think? It wasn't good, but we ate fast, then we hit up a big gas station for gas, supplies, and non-perishables to last us a day or two. Then we got back on the road with enough daylight left so that by the time we'd gotten to the cabin, Britney could get us prepared for the night."

"I, of course, had no idea how much work was going to be involved, but Britney did. I asked why, and she explained that she spent every summer back in Texas at her grandpa's place, and it was very off the grid as well. Winter preparation was a different matter, but she'd been over there one winter break when she was ten, and if she had helped her grandpa deal with a snowstorm when she was ten — she had actually done most of the work, as his health had been bad for over a decade now — she could do that in when she was nineteen."

"I asked her if she had been close to her grandpa, and she said she still was, but... he didn't have much longer, as Alzheimer's was eating away at him. She'd been watching his health deteriorate long-distance for over a decade now, and it hurt her to watch such a happy, vibrant man who she loves and who clearly loves her back waste away to the point of not really recognizing her when she calls and only sometimes recognizing her during visits."

Zoey pauses for a long, long time here.

"I had only briefly mentioned you to her before then, Grandpa. I don't like talking about you to other people, because for a long time, there were days where I missed you so much that it physically hurt. I still get those days sometimes, but they're not as bad as they used to be."

"Christ, look at me. That's not how you would have wanted me to remember you — as part of a period of my life that I can never get back that hurts me to think about too much."

"But... the way she mentioned her grandpa wasting away broke the floodgates. That second half of the car ride was the first time I'd ever talked about you, and I mean really talked about you, since you died. I covered a little bit about the stuffed animals, a lot of the outings we'd had, the little moments at home that probably didn't mean as much to you as much as they meant to me... as much as I felt comfortable sharing."

"I don't think I quite managed to capture how much you meant to me, but she was... a lot like you during that talk, actually. It was like being in the passenger seat of your truck as you focused on the road and let me talk about a subject that truly interested me, and you only talked to ask me a few questions from time to time to further your understanding, because you were paying attention and wanted to know more about what had me so worked up and excited."

"I got a lot of your story out there, but I choked up like a bitch when I got to my last moments with you in that hospital room."

"Britney grabbed my hand and drove one-handed as I calmed down, and I don't know if she realized how important that was to me symbolically, but it made me love her all the more, realizing that overlap between you two."

"When I calmed down, I didn't have much left in the story to tell her. You died, and my life moved on without you."

"She told me, 'I think your grandpa's spirit might be closer than you expect.'"

"I got a little mad at her for using religious reasoning of all things to try and cheer me up, but—"

"My girlfriend is a cheeky bitch, but I'll tell you why in a bit." <Author's Note: Yes, Zoey has been hanging around with a girl from the United Kingdom who uses that word; Zoey's way of talking changes a bit in a different way for each route, but Britney's causes the most drastic changes.>

"We got to the cabin at 3:30 PM, so we had about 45 minutes of light left. You could turn around and see Victoria 60 kilometers away across what used to be the United States/Canada border. Britney was already wearing these cute flannels with overalls, like she was a lumberjack or something, and she got to work collecting firewood and chopping it as I checked the condition of what the cabin was stocked with."

"The stoves worked, but needed propane, which we had thankfully picked up. There was an icebox, and we had plenty of snow on the ground, although we hadn't gotten anything that needed to be refrigerated besides boxed milk and maybe the cured meats for sandwiches. The cabin had a large wood-burning furnace for heating, but it wasn't even going to get below freezing that night. The toilets flushed, possibly flowing into a septic tank, but I think Rich was simply wrong about the plumbing being off the grid because there was running water, and I couldn't find a reservoir or tank anywhere on the ground floor, but I never checked the attic since we had hot water. There were a few kerosene lanterns, but those already had fuel in them. And there was a generator for basic lighting, and hey, we had kerosene because we'd brought it with us, not expecting the lanterns to be filled. But I'd also brought my huge solar-powered charge pack, so I was going to be able to live off the grid and power my phone — Ai ate up my battery like a motherfucker, and while she had a more dormant state that was used less power, she said entering it was like giving herself a lobotomy and she hated doing it."

"Again, Britney knew her shit. I'd sent her the Zhulu property listing, and she took a look at it and got all that we needed on our one stop."

"I found Britney chopping wood — she'd eyed a wood ax on the wall in one of the listing photos, but we hadn't brought our own, so she was using that — and she'd gotten a pretty decent pile going. I, obviously the rugged manly guy here, told her to switch roles with me, and I fucking botched it."

"I fell on my ass trying to do a power swing down twice before she took the ax from me and told me the trick was to let the ax head drop onto the grain of the wood. The handle was there to guide it down and provide extra force if you needed it."

"She made some joke about how I was going to be the stay-at-home housewife of this trip, and it both kind of offended me and flustered me."

"Yeah, real cis of me," Zoey thinks.

"I walked away and set up the generator and kerosene and got the fireplace lit with a small pile of firewood, and Britney came in about twenty minutes later with just the smallest amount of light left in the sky, and we had a quick dinner of pancakes, made lumberjack style with just water and flour."

"Britney then brought in her stuff to one of the bedrooms, but it wasn't the one I unpacked in. She had some excuse about how I'd been snoring recently and wanted to rest well after five hours of driving that I accepted without question."

"'Oh, are you heading out to Midnight Mass or something?'"

"'Nah, I'm skipping it this year, but I'll be doing a lot of private prayer to make up for it, so don't walk in on me tonight, okay?'"

"I sulked as she went to bed at just after 5:10 PM, which left me alone — if you don't count Ai, who I'd told not to contact me except for emergencies since she tried to coax me into a threesome with Britney and Molly for extra points. I was also cold — I get cold a lot more easily now as a woman, but I used to be great with handling it — and I was anxious about what my future was going to be like, both for myself and with Britney."

"I didn't have any good answers as I alternated between catching some sleep now and staring into the fireplace, but I was getting up every now and then to stoke it and put wood in the furnace."

"It was a relief when morning came, but Britney and I had been kind of dumb making the pancakes last night because the only breakfast food we had was cereal, which is hardly in the Christmas spirit."

"After breakfast and a quick shower for us and change of clothes — we both had Christmas hats and somewhat matching outfits, which was cute as fuck — we exchanged presents."

"I gave Britney a DNA testing kit. She at first made some joke about a paternity test, but I explained that she'd talked about wanting to know more of her family's past from time to time. I had one for myself, too, and we were going to send in the results together and find out more about where we came from, together."

"She thought it was a little bit romantic, but she mostly said it was dorky and sweet."

"The then pulled out a big duffel bag and gave me my gift... or should I say, 'gifts.'"

"I don't know how she smuggled them out of my room without me noticing, but she'd spent most of last night repairing all the stuffed animals you and Dad gave me to practically brand-new condition."

"Big Boss Bunny was back in my dorm room, but he was new and didn't need repairing."

"He's got a cool headband, so..."

"No, don't explain video game references to your grandpa, Zoey," she thinks before getting back on track.

"I burst into fucking tears. I don't think Britney knew how much this meant to me."

"She'd even kept a few of K Bear's 'battle scars' for aesthetic taste and fixed up the stitching on King, the tiger I had tried to make after you died."

"I even said, 'You even fixed up King's stitching!' with a big smile as I picked him up."

"From there, Britney realized all of these animals had names, and I told them to her. I then slowly told her all the lore of Animaltopia, who these animals were — who these friends of mine were — and how much they meant to me because you and Dad had given them to me."

"Britney could have made some comment about how cute it was that I had played with these stuffed animals so much as a kid, or that it wasn't really a manly thing for a young boy to have played with his stuffed animals for so long, but she didn't. She just let me tell her about them, then she coaxed me into playing with them by giving me hypothetical scenarios that I stopped making hypothetical, and then she even joined in, although I had to walk her through some of the rules."

Zoey smiles.

"Again, it was like you and I were playing with them, like I was a kid again. But I didn't feel that sadness I felt when talking about you yesterday. I felt — like you were in the cabin's big main room, watching us, but also acting through Britney."

"No, it was more than that. It was like your torch of your spirit had been passed to Britney, and she'd more than earned the right to hold it."

"Like I said, she was a cheeky bitch with that line in the car earlier. She knew my stuffed animals — our stuffed animals — were hidden in her trunk."

"She even got me to give King a backstory, as I hadn't done that when I made him, because the magic wasn't there without you. But it was back."

"King, as animal number thirteen — Big Boss Bunny is fourteen — is chronically unlucky, but despite being named 'King' like 'king of the jungle,' he's a complete coward afraid of his own shadow."

"But then Britney got me to expand on his lore, and we worked through it together."

"We decided that while King is an unlucky coward, he's also really strong. Like, stronger than K Bear, Rojo, and Maple combined. But that strength only comes out when he's scared, so he has to be scared to show how talented he is."

"Thankfully for the other animals, but not really thankfully for King, he is easily scared, but he's not a coward. As Britney said, 'Cowardice is not acting, but bravery isn't acting when you're not afraid. Bravery when you're afraid but act anyways.'"

Zoey stares off into space, realizing something.

Zoey turns around and stares down the hill. Britney is pretty far away, but with Zoey's great vision, she can see that she's playing a game on her phone, respectfully not looking toward Zoey.

"Britney!" Zoey shouts at the top of her lungs

Britney almost drops her phone from being startled.

"What?! Zoey, why are you shouting at me?!"

"You're a cheeky bitch, and I fucking love you!"

"What the fuck are you talking about, girl?!"

Zoey laughs as Britney grumbles and goes back to her game. Zoey turns back to her grandpa's grave soon after.

"Britney's not just a cheeky bitch, she's a devious one, and I mean that as a compliment. She's, like, able to pull off a nice version of Mom's manipulative behaviors, but they're for the benefits of others, not herself, and she does it without you realizing most of the time."

"God, she snagged hooks on most of my brain worms without me realizing..." Zoey sighs with a smile.

"Look it up if there's a computer up there, Grandpa."

"We played with the stuffed animals for most of the morning, and while it was a positive experience for me in so many ways, I felt bad for not getting Britney a better gift. I mean, hers had been beyond last minute, but it was a complete slam dunk."

"I told Britney as such, and she said if she wanted to give me a gift that really mattered, I should try to explore my spirituality and faith, and she meant with a serious attempt."

"I tried to say this was impossible, but she cut me off."

"'I'm missing Midnight Mass for you, Zach. The least you could do is pretend to humor my faith and pretend it's not a delusion for once.'"

"I shut up and promised to really, truly think about it that night."

"We then cuddled under a blanket next to the fireplace for most of the day as we read on our phones... cuddling is awesome when you're a girl, by the way."

"It was the most relaxed and lackadaisical Christmas of my life, but probably my best one. The only downside was that I was on my period, but Britney had some medication for me, and cuddling her all day next to a cozy fire was better than having a hot water bottle under my covers for cramps."

"Britney didn't want to sleep in separate bedrooms now that her gift was finished, but I demanded a single night to myself. I think she realized I was trying to pray, but she didn't try to wish me luck or give advice or even imply that she knew. She just said okay."

"And... I prayed. I felt dumb and stupid and foolish and a whole lot of other things doing it, but I prayed for guidance about what I should do with my re:Dreamer wish, if I got it... not trying to find myself, since I knew I was trans even if I lied about it to everyone, but what do to with that knowledge."

"If there was some big spirit in the sky, I really wanted its help then. Was it okay for me to wish to turn back? And if not, what should I wish for?"

"I quit in frustration after a few minutes. I didn't hear the voice of God or anything like that, let alone find clarity in my own thoughts."

"I then looked up through the window, and I thought I saw a shooting star, but with my night vision being so sensitive, it could have been anything, and maybe I just saw what I wanted to see."

"I dryly chuckled to myself that this was going to be the biggest sign I was going to get, yet three wise men, the Three Magi, apparently dropped everything and crossed deserts 2,022 years ago today to salute the birth of a baby in a barn and give it gifts just because a star appeared in the sky and they thought he was important..."

<Author's Note (this one is important): Britney's route has a running theme of morality with giving and receiving gifts, shared (or unshared) communication, and dramatic irony, inspired by O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" (I had to look it up, but short stories and poems go in quotation marks, and they are not italicized like book titles). To state it explicitly in simple terms, the guiding premise of Britney's route from the start has been to avoid a bittersweet or tragic outcome in love, mutual communication is required.>

"And then I figured it out: I was basically living through proof right now that there was more to the world that science could ever answer. If I wanted answers, I couldn't use logic and skepticism to find all of them: I would need at least a little bit of faith too."

"That was enough to shake the iron foundations of my staunch atheism a fair bit into the territory of agnosticism. The whole reason I had been praying just then wasn't to make Britney happy, because I could have just lied and said I'd prayed and not have done that."

"I prayed because I had faith that I'd get answers from some place outside of my understanding, because I knew I didn't have all the answers, and that I never would. To find those answers, I needed to take a leap of faith, and that meant seeing what I wanted to see."

"That moment of clarity simultaneously worried, humbled, and enlightened me."

Zoey still isn't sure how much her grandpa's Catholic faith meant to him, but she hopes it had been something that enriched his life, much like her evolving view of the world and herself was enriching hers.

"Of course, I didn't do much with that knowledge in the next few days, because I got cabin fever."

"God, fucking two days in and I got cabin fever of all things."

"A Henry David Thoreau I am not," Zoey thinks, referencing the author of Walden Pond.

"I... I felt fine as I went to bed, but as Britney described it to me, and it's a blur to me, I made a lot of noise that woke her up at 7 in the morning or so, an hour before sunrise. I had this frenzied look on my face as I complained about it being too cold, and while I do remember that, I don't remember tossing more and more firewood into the fireplace as I tried to douse the stack with kerosene."

"Britney, understandably, asked me what the fuck I was doing, and I apparently told her I was freezing, so I was starting a fire."

"Again, this is what she said I did. I only have vague recollections of this."

"And I later looked up that it was only 13°C that morning, although the low was 8°C later that day, so apparently I am that much of a little bitch who couldn't handle a little bit of cold."

"Man, I know I used to be great with cold temperatures. Mom is the same way, to the point where we’ve both worn T-shirts and shorts in below-freezing weather and were perfectly comfortable with it."

Zoey shrugs. Her entire body went through a radical change, and as a guy, she melted in hot temperatures she now excels at dealing with.

"So, back to my meltdown... as embarrassing as it is..."

"Britney said I had more than enough firewood, and she told me that if I set fire to the fireplace, I was probably going to burn the cabin down."

"I don't know if this is a thing I would say, even in the middle of a psychotic episode, but I said, 'Good! More heat!'"

Zoey smiles a bit.

"That's kind of funny, when removed from the context."

"Britney said she had to shove me away from the lighter, and realizing she was blocking the fireplace, I said I was going to start a fire outside instead. I apparently wandered outside, then came back and tried to find the ax, but that is not a thing you want to see someone suffering from cabin fever doing."

"Yeah, she apparently decked me with the handle, and I crumpled."

"I don't think that part is accurate, and I'm assuming that's an exaggeration of the story." <Author's Notes: Britney had punched Zoey, and she had gone down with one hit. Britney's dad taught her how to punch years ago, and she can punch harder than one would expect.>

"Either way, I slowly started to come to my senses, and this part I do remember."

"She'd tied me to a chair with rope, taken most of the firewood out of the fireplace, started a safe fire, and put my back to it as she sat on the sofa waiting for me to find coherence."

"I had apparently been ranting and raving about a love/hate relationship with snow? Not sure what that's about."

"What I first noticed was that I was warm, and then I noticed the bondage she had me in, and then I noticed that I was warm."

"Again, I get turned on by the strangest things."

"But even though I said I was good a few minutes after Britney explained the situation, Britney was wary of releasing me. I told her that the prank was over and to untie me, and I struggled against the ropes like a maniac, which was a sign that I shouldn't be let out, at least it was to her."

"But then I started to pant and moan as I struggled, and I think Britney realized why I was so desperate to get out of the bondage."

"She smirked and said, 'Heh, the bunny lover loves being a rope bunny.'"

"God, the way I fucking yelped when she said that..."

"I shouted, a little too quickly, 'I do not love being a rope bunny!'"

"I, u-uh..."

"Sorry your granddaughter isn't a top, Grandpa..."

Zoey would describe herself as a switch who leans bottom. Britney would describe Zoey as a bottom.

"We never really figured out what happened to cause my cabin fever, but we did figure out ropes have a lot of uses and are handy things to have lying around."

Zoey has to stop herself from explaining the material properties of different rope materials and construction methods, and what makes a rope good for bondage use (the answers being that tri-strand twister natural fibers jute and hemp are best, but if you have the budget, bamboo and silk ropes are the queens for their softness, which really works well for how Britney and Zoey treat their light use of bondage not as a sadistic/masochistic thing but an accent to the sex they have, which has become a lot more about mutual comfort than one topping the other... although that still happens quite a bit).

"Country girls sure know how to tie a lot of knots..."

Zoey knows the Austin, Texas suburbs Britney grew up in hardly count as "country," but it felt like a clever thing to say.

"Britney and I spent the next few days doing... stuff, like... dealing with some cravings she gets on her period — her cycle starts two days later than mine, and her flow lasts three, four, and, sometimes five days."

"Man, I can only imagine how bad her regularity was before birth control stabilized it," Zoey thinks, maybe realizing she's talking a bit too much about this topic.

"But on the day before New Year's Eve, I told her that I had been seriously thinking over her Christmas request to explore my spirituality more, and I agreed that it was the next 'logical step' in my personal development."

"Yeah, I phrased a matter of faith like a fucking pointy-eared Vulkarian dork, while also implying that the elephant in the room of my personal development, my gender identity, had been reckoned with."

"And as excited as Britney was, she did a 180° when I told her I wanted to go to a Shinto shrine in Seattle for a New Year's Day prayer."

"She was still mad about missing Midnight Mass, but I flipped the script back on her and told her that she didn't get to play missionary and convert me any more than making me explore my faith in the most natural direction, which, yeah, was Shinto."

"I didn't know this at the time, but my great-grandma had been a Shinto priestess, and apparently a pretty important one at that. Mom clued me in once I got back and told her what we'd done during the cabin trip, and while I had no memory of this, she said you argued over the fact that she wasn't Catholic and had wanted a Japanese-style wedding and hadn't wanted to baptize me."

"Christ, you and Britney really have so much in common, don't you?"

"Britney and I had a similar argument, but she put aside her... I guess 'disappointment,' and we made a trip to a shrine clothes rental shop."

"I was taking this seriously as a genuine attempt to not just connect with whatever faith I thought I might have, but with 1/4th of the cultural heritage I had that I had kept ignoring."

"I rented a proper kimono, tabi, and geta set, and I even bought a manjushage hair pin to hold my hair in place."

Source: Mokutooo on Twitter

<This doesn't quite catch the elegance I want this outfit to have, but it's harder than I thought finding a reference for a good black yukata with red flowers.>

Source (deleted): yomizu on pixiv

"Yeah, so red spider lilies are more of a fall flower, but c'mon, it looked good, and red is kind of my color."

"Britney was not taking this seriously. The past few days had made her cocky about how much she could stand the cold, and against my advice, she rented a yukata, which has thinner fabric better suited for spring and summer, but she said she liked the pattern of blue sakura flowers over white more, and it was even the same blue as her eyes."

Source: baffu on pixiv

"But then she spent the next day cooking, but also modifying it with temporary stitching to make the hem shorter and for it to fit better."

"She offered to do the same for me, but I kind of told her that was a recipe for disaster after my cold-induced meltdown, so she just put in temporary stitches to make it fit better."

"We cuddled and chilled on New Year's Eve, and Britney proved she was actually a much better cook than I gave her credit for when we had dinner."

"She had been making boeuf Bourguignon last night, which is this amazing French beef stew marinated in red wine, and it's apparently better when left to sit overnight."

"I don't know how it didn't click with me after shooting all those French guns, Britney dropping a French word or phrase into her speech every now and then, her cat's name basically meaning 'Kitty' in French, and a few other things that showed up during the home visit, but Britney's over one-quarter French, mostly from her mom's side of the family. That grandpa who owned the ranch she had told me about that had prepared her so well for this cabin getaway was a French immigrant, and I had just had his recipe for that stew."

"She hadn't cared much about her ancestry growing up, but now that she was an adult — she admitted she still felt like a kid a lot of the time, but a kid with responsibilities — she was interested in expanding her knowledge of herself, and her family's past was a part of her present, and hopefully, a part of her future."

"I felt a bit better about my DNA testing kit being not being such a lame gift after all — we'd sent that in the previous day, by the way — and I got a bit too drunk on the leftover red wine from cooking that both of us were drinking just as much as I got drunk on the smug sense of satisfaction I felt."

"I'm trying to dial back how much I brag about stuff, but I talked about the leg of my sabbatical I spent in France, and she got so jealous over me climbing the Eiffel Tower at sunset that I felt bad, so I tried to explain that France wasn't quite as cracked up as people make it out to be, especially the locals."

"But then she got mad at how I described the locals and said I was probably being an ignorant tourist expecting everyone to speak English for me, or more likely, that I had tried speaking French through a phone app."

"Britney doesn't drink that much, but she's a pouty and horny drunk. And her cycle was still active — I think from the stress of the whole situation with her parents."

"We'd had a fantastic dinner, and now I was the dessert, basically."

Zoey worries that all the talk of sex with Britney would be something her grandpa wouldn't have liked hearing, but she's the daughter of a woman who never shut up about her sex life, and her grandpa had always encouraged her to talk about her interests.

"We showed up to the shrine at 10:30 AM or so. We'd have gotten there earlier, but we'd both slept in a bit after last night and makeup took longer than expected, because I was really insistent that Britney give me an 'elegant' look, and I'd never used a hair pin like this before."

"That's another tick in the obvious repression box," Zoey thinks.

"It was... about 6°C that morning, with light cloud coverage and a bit of fog."

"I was comfortable, even... feeling good about myself — yeah, it felt nice to be in public again because that meant being called Zoey by Britney, but I tried to pretend that I was only going along with it because of how I was presenting — but Britney was cold."

"And I don't mean that she was acting bitchy or anything, but that her body was cold."

"Y-Yeah, I probably didn't need to clarify that..."

Source: tonbo 9 on Twitter

"There wasn't even snow on the ground, but she shivered every so often, and she already wasn't happy to be doing this pagan ritual to ring in the new year."

"Man, I felt so smug telling Britney 'I told you so' a bunch of times as she complained about being cold. She was even wearing underwear under her yukata, but because I was taking this seriously, I was traditionally nude under my kimono."

"While it was a little crowded by this time, it wasn't terrible to navigate the crowd."

"And if I felt smug about being comfortably dressed, that was nothing compared to all the compliments I got."

Zoey looks a bit bashful as she remembers the positive attention and how much she liked it.

"Don't get me wrong. Britney and I both got compliments, but Britney was more treated like the 'gaijin tourist' she was for taking this so unseriously with her shortened yukata hem, like, 'aw, isn't this foreign blonde girl cute, coming in here like it's a fashion runway?'"

"I got compliments, and I mean, a lot of compliments. Like, people would notice me, and they'd be compelled to talk to me."

"A lot of them were in Japanese, but, y'know, I barely know how to speak it, but I understood the tone."

"That's not the part I enjoyed, though. The reverent stares were the best, where someone would look at me and go speechless."

"I think one or two people even thought I was there to conduct a ceremony? Because I was told something in Japanese by someone who looked like they worked there, twice, but my only response was a puzzled expression, then they'd say 'oh, my mistake' in English."

"So, suffice to say I was fucking on an ego high for the entire day."

"Britney and I did all the traditional stuff, like buying charms, writing ema, and drawing fortunes."

"I got a fortune about traveling, which I thought was two years too late, and Britney got 'luck with relationships through a big change.'" <Author's Note: I'd need to ask someone about the Japanese used, and I barely remember if omikuji even get this specific, but Zoey's was more about "reaching the destination you have wanted" than travel, but she either misread the Japanese very badly or the English subtext was mistranslated.>

"And then Ai made the day even better telling us I had a limited-time transformation quest offer, and I laughed really hard when I learned it was for a fox girl."

"There's a whole thing about fox goddesses and youkai in Japanese myth, so it felt fitting and funny, given the activity of the day."

"Britney and I, uh... found a secluded spot in the woods, which I think had been the original location for the shrine — you know how those things always get started and then abandoned because they decided they actually wanted the shrine a few hundred meters away — and I accepted the quest."

Zoey slows down from the excitement she's had discussing this entire cabin elopement event in her life.

"It's weird having your ears disappear and then grow on top of your head, but what's even weirder is growing not just one tail, but eight of them."

"But the weirdest part of these transformations was always what they did to my personality."

"I know I'm acting a lot different than you would have expected me to be at 21, but I'm still me, give or take finding out some things about myself, which led to me expressing myself differently."

"I couldn't say I was myself after hitting that button. That ego trip turned me into a haughty fox goddess, that sense of elegance I felt all day turned me into a dignified shrine maiden, and that smugness I'd had with Britney turned me into a mischievous youkai. All three of those happened at once, and it felt like I had dissociative identity disorder from those three extra personalities crowding out my own."

"I still felt that I had control of my actions, but how I wanted to act got changed on a fundamental level."

"I loosened my kimono, hiked it up to make room for my tails, which also meant that my—"

Zoey abruptly stops talking as her face heats up.

"Okay, I am sorry for going into so much detail, Grandpa! My sex life was a really important part of this journey of finding myself, but even you have a limit!"

In truth, Zoey is embarrassed by how she acted after transforming. She told Britney to kneel and worship her, and they got into a fucking theological debate before they got into a fucking debate, and then they just got into fucking.

Zoey even felt like she was dominating her subject for her impiety (she was, with a confidence to top that she rarely had during sex), but then Britney found out how sensitive Zoey's ears were.

Source: akaoni (zumt3548) on pixiv

Zoey yelped and yipped and was even more putty in Britney's hands than normal as she moaned (literally) about how blasphemous her subject was being to her goddess. Britney smugly told Zoey that her own interpretation of God was an agender being with the common "Him" being a latter addition in Latin and then English, and this fox who she'd gotten worked up into a heat wasn't anyone she was going to worship.

That "into a heat" statement proved accurate, as winter, especially around January, is mating season for foxes.

Zoey was a borderline catatonic mess of arousal as Britney worked her over and taunted her with lines like "I was cold earlier, but hugging your tails is making me a lot warmer!" and "You told me to kneel, but aren't you lying on the ground?"

Zoey's fall from grace from feeling like she was going to top was made all the more humiliating by how intense the sex was. Zoey and Britney smooshed into each other with a very tight hug as they humped their bodies together, and by the end of it, Zoey felt like those red eyes of hers that she was finally starting to like might have heart-shaped pupils.

When the transformation reverted soon after climaxing, Zoey felt so undignified. Her makeup was a mess, her hair was a mess, her yukata was a mess, she was a mess... and the way Zoey had acted so sanctimonious at the start, like a haughty divine being who existed to be worshiped, froze her attempts into understanding herself through Shinto.

She now sort of practices Buddhism through what she learned in Tibet at a Gelug monastery, but she's inconsistent with her mediations, isn't furthering her study much, and doesn't treat it like a necessary part of striving to enlightenment so much as a way occasionally collect her thoughts and deal with her anxiety.

Britney would be mad at her for saying this, but while Zoey has learned tolerance and even a bit of understanding of the spiritual faith of others, Zoey doesn't find much value in expanding her own faith. She's got love and self-understanding she's never had before, and those feel so concrete and real compared to any fledgling faith she's nurturing.

"The rest of the retreat wasn't as interesting as the first part of it, and I think we both preferred the calmness after the chaos we'd been dealing with for three months. Britney and I jumped between acting like best friends to acting like friends with benefits to acting like lovers, and I don't think I'm wrong about the ratio skewing a good bit more to the last of those by the end of it."

"But all good things must come to an end, as did the stay."

"Wanting to make plans to deal with the shitstorm brewing between Britney and her parents with a key player we would need, we drove to my place on the morning of 6th, which was three days before the semester started. The drive was calm and uneventful, but I came home to a bit of a shitstorm myself."

"Britney hadn't driven back to her place because she was afraid of her parents... again, mostly her dad. Mom was upset beyond belief still that I'd run off with Britney, but she hadn't told Dad about my body."

"She kept making a bunch of unsubtle hints in front of him though, like..."

"Okay, so right as I walked in the door, Dad asked if I'd had a good time. I said I had, and then he asked if I'd respected Britney's chastity and not had sex with her."

"And then before Britney or I could say we hadn't, Mom said, and I quote, 'I don't think there's any way Zach could have put his dick in his girlfriend.'"

"And he bought it fully."

"Man... why do my parents have to be so open about not just their sex life, but my sex life?"

"I tried to pivot the conversation to what they had been up to when we were going, but then I had to stop them from talking about their sex life."

"Dad had gotten into a bit hot water with his boss, Mr. Burton, over the church reconstruction hitting some slight legal issues, because the building counted as a historical worship site, and AKR's complexity with those laws meant he had accidently strayed for being the stickler he was for following them. Urging from the pastor lead to him making temporary renovations for the church to be able to hold Christmas Mass at close to its full glory, which meant cutting corners he usually wouldn't have cut."

"Dad was taking the blame for it because he didn't want to throw the pastor under the bus, but that meant that Mr. Burton was assuming Dad's well-known love of spending time with Mom led to the rush job because he wanted to spend less time on the site and more time with her, and this was probably going to result in him being on a tighter leash in the future."

Zoey realizes she might be boring her grandpa.

"I know you were a labor organizer and loved looking out for the little guys by standing up for them against their bosses, but this is getting into workplace politics that you might be sick and tired of now that you're, well, retired from it."

Zoey has to remind herself that her grandpa loved hearing her talk about what interested her, but if Zoey is going to be honest, this didn't really interest her. He has been needing to leave Zhulu for over a decade, but he's proud of his work and likes his job.

She decides to keep going, but to keep it brief and to definitely not go into the specifics of the legal issues.

"Dad had gone a bit rogue in the first place doing the property estimate for the church without telling Mr. Burton or properly following company procedure, and then by using that as justification to start the groundwork of the renovation in an informal capacity by talking to the pastor, finding out what suppliers had, what labor was available, and whatnot, only asking for permission once everything was lined up. If I were Mr. Burton, I would also probably have thought my star employee had become dissatisfied with his job and abused his trust to work on a site close to home. That was concerning, but on top of that, he'd made a mistake from sloppiness? And nobody had noticed for two weeks? That was going to lose him a decent bit of trust."

"Britney offered to help him work it out, but he told her the legal team from Zhulu was taking care of the mess he'd made already. It was just going to require him to walk through the renovation thus fur as a government observer, well, observed, and he was probably getting called to that in an hour or two so crews would have precise instructions of what to change over the weekend, but he was going to probably have to be on site to show the office he was serious about making up for his mistake."

"Still, he made it clear how much he appreciated the offer. Mom never liked Britney, and she still kind of doesn't, but Dad liked her a ton from the start. I think she reminds both of us of you."

Zoey hopes her grandpa understands that she means it as a compliment when she's comparing a man who died at 56 and would be 69 now to a girl who was still 3 months away from turning 20.

"Since he was going to leave in a bit for the rest of the day, I opened up the gifts he and Mom had gotten me. Dad had gotten me an extremely nice bottle of Irish whiskey, and he explained to me that there's a Taylor family tradition of the son, on his 21st birthday..." <Author's Note: Jeff wasn't going to give (what he thought was his son) a bottle of liquor on church property right before his school day started, so he was going to save the gift for 18 days later.>

"God, I forgot who I was talking to for a second."

Zoey clutches her arm tightly, and it's hard enough to make her arm just slightly hurt.

"I took that whisky bottle with a big smile and told Dad, lying right to his face, how happy I was to be his son and how thankful I was to be your grandson, and I asked him to have a glass with me in your name."

Zoey has the gloomiest expression on her face of this entire talk so far. It takes effort for her to say anything after that.

"Please forgive your granddaughter for being such a selfish bitch and using your name to lie to your son. I just didn't want to give up any of our bond as grandfather and grandson just because I figured out that I was your granddaughter, with the same logic applying to Dad, and the only way I could think of doing that was by lying."

"And that lie hurt. It hurt a lot more than the whisky hitting the back of my throat because I had splashed it into my mouth too quickly."

Zoey knows she doesn't need to say this, but remembering that lie hurt, and it made her feel guilty.

"You know I meant that I was only lying about who I was, right? Not that I was lying about being happy Dad was my dad and thankful that you were my grandpa?"

"I've still got issues with Dad. I wish he wasn't such an oblivious dumbass and that he had a bit more tact, and I don't think I'll ever be able to fully forgive him for being absent for so much of my life when I needed him so much. Mom, the biased reporter and incredible artist that she is, painted a flawless picture of her soulmate to me, but it wasn't the most accurate one. While I'm happy that I've gotten to know him more in these past few months than I've ever known him in my life, a part of me is disappointed not just from the fact that the man, while a good person, doesn't live up to the legend, but that it took me 21 years for this connection to happen."

Zoey frowns. She's still working through how she feels about her dad. He's her favorite parent, she knows that much, and she evenly (jokingly) describes herself as a bit of a "daddy's girl." It's a complicated situation for both of them, and it bothers her that the only real way answers to her questions can be found is through time, because she's impatient to cram two decades of a relationship into as little time as possible.

"Maybe I feel resentment that I didn't get to bond with Dad as his son, and then that got worse when he tried to bond with me as his son when I was his daughter. But now that he knows I'm his daughter, he treats me like one."

Zoey smiles softly.

"It's great. He's the second-biggest ally in my life besides Britney and the first when it comes to being in my corner against Mom."

"But I don't think he fully knows how to adapt his parenting style from a son to a daughter, and there's a bit of awkward distance between us that I'm worried will be impossible to overcome. I don't want to be Mom's daughter so much as I want to be Dad's daughter, but I don't know how to close that gap besides being honest and making extra efforts to close it myself."

"I had a few issues with you as well. It was the right call on your part, but you set me up for conflict with Mom for the rest of my life with how much you warned me to stay on my guard against her. You also set me up for trouble teaching me every bad word that existed when I was seven, even though your lesson also taught me the power some of those words wield and that the true test of character for a man came from not using the words that truly hurt, no matter what, and calling out those who did, no matter what. Even as a woman, I hold those rules in high regard."

"But despite all of our issues, I love both of you. I love Mom too, even though I'm not sure I really like her as she and I have way more issues than you and Dad combined."

Zoey has a downcast smile on her face.

"But I'm a greedy person, and as much as I was hurting myself to pose like the man I knew I wasn't and was trying to convince myself I was, I felt sad when Dad got called to the site a few minutes later."

"We said goodbyes and made plans for a late dinner and all of the stuff a happy, normal family with the girlfriend over would do, and then he left."

"Mom had kept the civility when it was all four of us in a room, but once Dad was gone, the knives were out."

"Let me tell you, it was tense. But as antagonistic as Mom was being, we needed her."

"That wasn't the only tension I felt. I'd been wearing my chest binder for over six hours at that point — yeah, I was a dumbass who wore it tightened for the car drive instead of loosening it in the car and only doing it up once Britney and I got to my house — so I loosened it since Mom already knew what was up."

"I wasn't really intending that to me a statement of body language, like how a businessman takes off a tie before really getting down to business with a negotiation, but it left Mom speechless."

"She later told me she was shocked my boobs were that big. She'd seen that photo of me in the newspaper, and she saw me performing life with my cleavage on full display in that theater dress, but she'd assumed I'd been wearing pads since I'd forwarded her a modified version of the blueprints for my chest binder in November after flunking a bunch of midterms to show that I wasn't just slacking off during college, but I'd adjusted the diagrams to be for Britney's chest because I was worried she'd notice something was up with me being bustier that Britney."

"I was also bustier than Mom, and it took her a second or two to say anything, which is an extremely long time for her."

"'I... uh... I hope you got extra credit on your engineering project for making a chest binder capable of hiding those, Zach!'"

"I almost laughed at that, but I told her thanks, and that I had. Also, Britney deserved just as much credit for the design."

"Man, I should have realized that wasn't just a compliment about my engineering design skills..."

"Now that some of the tension had evaporated with me looking more like a daughter than a son to Mom — that'll be relevant later — I told Mom a small part of the story about Britney's drama with her parents."

"I really undercooked some of the details because I was respecting Britney's privacy, but Britney was willing to share a lot more than I thought she was."

"Mom listened, and while she had her share of quips and snappiness at us as we explained as much as we could without Ai busting us... I'd left her upstairs in my room, but God knows whether or not she was actually listening to us through hacking into something else."

"When we were done with the story, but before we asked Mom to get involved, she sighed."

"'I can't say I ever wanted a lesbian daughter...'"

"'I don't need to ask you this, Zach, but Britney, do you love my daughter?'"

"She hadn't been expecting to be put on the spot like that, so she got all cute and flustered and said that she wasn't sure, but she'd never felt this way about a person before, and she was starting to think there was more than just being really good friends going on between us."

"'Also, Zach is still your son. He's specifically told me he still thinks of himself as a man, and even though I'm a lesbian, I respect that because it's the person I care about so much, not the body, so as their mother, you need to respect that.'"

"I thought for sure Mom was going to ask me if that was true, and the entire repression act was going to fall apart as she caught me in a lie, but Mom smiled like a sage as she looked at both of us."

"'I just learned something very interesting, but I'll keep it to myself.'"

"She sipped her coffee, and while I knew she was thinking thirty steps ahead of everyone, I hated that she rubbed in her intelligence to others like that and was worried about what she had just pieced together."

"'Alright, how much am I allowed to take the gloves off with your parents, Britney?'"

"Britney was shocked Mom knew what we were up to, but I'm her daughter. I don't exactly respect Mom the most as a person or as a mother these days, but I respect her intelligence."

"I wanted to explain to Britney that Mom was this perceptive, but Mom beat me to it and explained in excruciating detail how it was so obvious what we were buttering her up for." <Author's Note: Zoey really is her mom's daughter when it comes to over-explaining.>

"And in the end, she agreed with the plan for three reasons."

"The first reason was love. Mom loved me, and Britney and I loved each other... or at least, I loved Britney, and Britney had feelings in that direction toward me, and it was her duty as a loving mother to give me the best chance to see that love succeed. I don't need to explain how Mom treats love as a quasi-divine motivation for actions, and the ultimate justification to do anything. The universe had set me up to have an unrequited love with Britney, and Mom told us she was going to have to revise a lot of her understanding of how the universe worked to explain my 'miraculous' transformation, but love was a universal constant."

"Hell, you could argue all these reasons were 'love.' Britney told me once that Jesus Christ's ultimate message was that love was the single element that explained everything, so it's probably possible to reduce everything down to that."

"The second reason was my safety. Mom didn't know what the hell kind of shit I had stumbled into, nor how real the danger was, but she knew that it was not a good idea for this circle of people who knew about my body to grow — Dad being the only exception, of course. If the Beckets knew, there was a chance they'd spread that information, either deliberately or through consequences they gave Britney. If all of a sudden, Britney got shipped off to a convent like she said her parents were threatening to do, and that reason was shared as her being a lesbian, and she was dating me at the time, that implied a lot of threads about who I was."

"And if Britney was gone, my chances of keeping my body undiscovered for the rest of the semester dropped drastically. Mom still wasn't the happiest about keeping me enrolled in school, but Britney had her blessing as my guardian, if not really as my girlfriend. With Britney gone, I'd have to be disenrolled, and that would look even more suspicious with all the reasons for Britney being gone that would float about in the rumor mill."

"The last reason was that Mom could get something out of this."

"Mom was going to do whatever it took to convince Britney's parents that I was a biological 'cisgendered' male — her knowledge was a bit outdated — but in return, she was going to change our relationship from 'mother-son' to 'mother-daughter' whenever possible from now on, hopefully going public with it someday."

"I think with her intuition, Mom had picked up enough clues to piece together that my danger and monitoring for secrecy was only until the end of the school year. It was, but I couldn't tell her that, nor could I say, 'I am turning back into man in four months,' not only because that'd require explaining a lot more than was safe, but that I wasn't sure I was... and not because I'd lose the re:Dreamer season."

"Of course, I didn't know why Mom wanted this, so I had to be an idiot and ask her why."

"And then Mom dropped a nuclear bomb." <Author's Note: Nukes were never used in wartime in re:Dreamer's setting, so their horrors have an extra taboo to them and their use in conversational analogies is more about "we don't know what happens after this catastrophe" rather than "everyone and everything dies.">

"'I wasn't planning on ever telling you this, Dear, but it seems silly to hide it now.'"

"For something she hadn't been planning on telling me, Mom's story was well-spoken and succinct."

INSERT BULLET POINTS

<Author's Note block starts:>

This conversation differs a lot from the one in The Mom Route™, due to:

The lack of guilt Samantha feels for her trapping her son as her daughter.
The extra two weeks she got to process the realization of their body being different.
Samantha knowing her daughter has realized that she is trans at this moment (based on clues like Zoey's pained face at the whisky drink with her dad "as his son," the way Zoey reacted to Samantha talking about her breasts, and that nervous and pained expression Zoey made when Britney defended Zoey as a man despite his body).
Samantha knowing Britney knows Zoey is trans at this very moment despite Zoey saying she wasn't (that was the "as their mother" instead of the "as his mother" in defending Zoey's masculinity).
That Britney hasn't realized Zoey knows (she wouldn't have defended Zoey's masculinity like that if she did).
That Britney isn't acting on her knowledge of Zoey being trans because Britney clearly has a preference for Zoey being a woman in both mind (Samantha noticed Britney's defense of Zoey's masculinity being hollow, like Britney was trying to convince herself just as much as she was trying to explain it to Samantha) and body (that was how Britney eased up a lot when Zoey undid her chest binder).
That Britney wouldn't be so passive with and wishy-washy with her love if she wasn't worried about the ambiguity of Zoey's gender identity, which prevents Britney from loving Zoey back as she is a lesbian, but she's trying to lie to herself that this is okay for her as she doesn't get to coax Zoey into being a certain way for selfish reasons.
Britney's primary motivation for inaction is potential guilt, because she thinks she could push Zoey into something Zoey will later regret (neither will regret it), and that guilt only makes sense if that means missing an opportunity to change Zoey's body back.

END BULLET POINTS

The above information (and others likely missed here) convinces Samantha that there's a high chance that whatever changed Zoey could be getting un-changed in 4 months, but only then, meaning that if that change back is under Zoey's control, and that if Samantha wants to prevent these dumbass kids from turning into star-crossed lovers, she has to move now to nudge Zoey to stay the woman all three girls here know she is. She's still a bit upset that she's shooting herself in the foot with grandkids, but her daughter being a happier, truer version of herself comes first. And while Samantha might not approve of Britney, but she still tries (but usually fails) to be a supportive mother, and she knows better than anyone how wonderful love is, and despite her messy way of showing it, Samantha does love her child.

And hey, if Zoey stays a woman, maybe Keisuke would be on the radar for her, and Keisuke in return? Not that Samantha would dare to do anything to sabotage Zoey and Britney's relationship once Zoey is staying a woman...

</Author's Note block ends.>

"I didn't know this, but Mom told you and Dad that a test early into her pregnancy told her she was getting a daughter. I also didn't know this, but she also told you both that damage to her uterus during her birth crippled her ability to ever have another kid."

"But what she never told anyone before today was that she had wanted a daughter far, far more than she had wanted a son, and that a panic attack triggered by hearing 'It's a boy!' might have been the cause of her incomplete uterine rupture."

"If I hadn't realized I was a girl already, that would have cracked my eggshell."

"Hell, it might even have done that if I had been told before I found re:Dreamer..." Zoey thinks with... well, not worry, but annoyance.

"But I had realized, so I had to pretend how much this information offended me to my core, and that I was never going to be her daughter!"

"She took it calmly, even though I had slammed that broken mask of my male identity onto my face hard and was even doing that ice glare thing at her."

"'If you want my help, that's my price.'"

"I... capitulated seconds after that, which... yeah, in hindsight, that was really suspicious."

"She did that smug little smirk she does after I crossed my arms and sat down."

"'I need a name to call you in private, daughter, but luckily for you, I already have one.'"

"'How do you like the sound of 'Zoe?'"

"She spells it without a y and without a diaeresis diacritic over the e, but it sounded the same as Z-O-E-Y, which is how I spell it. That led to confusion later."

"But I wasn't thinking 'Oh, does she spell it differently?' when she said that. I was thinking 'Oh what the fucking hell?! Why the fuck out of all possible names did she have to pick that one?!"'

"I thought she had somehow overheard that name being used, but there wouldn't have been an opportunity."

"I wracked my brain on it for a few seconds before asking her why she chose that name."

"'Because that's the name I've always wanted to give my daughter.'"

"I... God, I hope I didn't actually smile when she said that..."

"She changed subjects quickly after that. She finally agreed that she wasn't going to tell Dad about my body until I gave her permission, but then she asked how much Britney and I wanted to be involved in the conversation with Britney's parents defending me as her son, and therefore Britney as being straight."

"Britney wanted us to be in the room when it happened, but I had to tell Britney the less we knew, the better. We... I gave Mom full free reign to do as she saw fit, on the condition that it was on firmly stating my body as being male at birth and still male, and Britney not being a lesbian."

"I probably should have specified one other thing, but it didn't come to that."

"She agreed, then prepared a big dinner of spaghetti for all four for us to eat that was ready just as Dad got back, then everyone played Texas hold'em poker at Britney's request."

"I hope you never had to experience firsthand how scary Mom is as a poker player, but Britney held her own against her and cashed out at the right time, breaking about even."

"Meanwhile, dad lost 5,000 yen, and I got cleaned out of the 20,000 yen I'd gotten for my birthday."

"The next day, Mom gave me enough of my student loan to pay Rich's invoice for the cabin rental, but she made a joke about that I should never gamble against her or Britney again, like 'Of course I know how to clean house!'"

"That's not what the strict definition of 'clean house' means, but I let her have it."

"Just before the middle of the afternoon, she told Britney, Dad, and I that she was off to run errands and do some volunteer gardening, and that we were having leftover spaghetti. And then she drove off in her minivan and was gone for three hours."

"I don't think we'd even given her the address of Britney's house, but that's clearly when that conversation happened."

"I don't know what Mom said to Mr. and Mrs. Becket, and I don't really want to know. All I know is that Mom came back from her errands with a little bit of a smug grin on her face, she'd told us she'd had food on the road, there was a bit of dirt on her pants which she said was from her gardening errands, Britney's parents now hate Mom and look a bit afraid whenever Britney mentions her or going over to my place, and I never heard a single word from Britney again about her parents suspecting their daughter being a lesbian until she came out to them."

"Britney told me she thought about asking them what Mom said to her once, but I told her that was a really bad idea."

Zoey doesn't want to admit that she was nervous her mom had gone off to kill Britney's parents with a direct solution to the problem after she was gone for two hours, as Zoey had never specified that her mom couldn't use violence. Her mom isn't actually a serial killer, right?

"Britney and I had long since aligned our Spring 2023 schedules to have the same gap periods. It was almost all core classes, but I went for an early-semester course change from Intro Organic Chemistry to Theological Studies. I was still trying to make an effort to explore my spirituality, and while Shinto was a bust and Christianity likely wasn't in the cards given what I'd studied of it to refute Britney's conversion attempts in high school, I wanted to broaden my overall spiritual horizons.

"Britney was also taking a Hebrew class, for some reason. I made some joke about how Britney was trying to blend her interest in Bible history with legal history that probably should have made Britney a bit offended, but Britney shrugged and said, 'Yeah, I guess it's something like that.'"

"I'd quit theater club at the end of last semester, not wanting to make a tense atmosphere with my presence and feeling bad for how I'd led Molly on, but I'd also fulfilled my agreement with Britney in helping save the department from itself."

"But then in the second week of the semester, I saw Molly again."

"I wasn't expecting to see her on campus, but she does kind of stand out from the crowd. And if I'm going to be honest, it's hard to miss a tall hot redhead like that."

"She was just coming out of class at Taniyama Hall, and I rushed over to apologize for my rejection last month. She told me she was the one who should have apologized. I'd turned her down, but she hadn't accepted that and acted like a pushy jezebel, just like her stepmother taking her dad away from her mom. She was ashamed of how she acted, and while she was glad I wasn't holding it against her, what she was truly happy about was that it seemed like Britney and I were going ahead more 'honest' based on what little Britney had mentioned to her about our shared winter break."

"Not in as many words, of course. I struggle for succinctness."

"I guess I'm quoting Molly, even though that's hard," Zoey thinks while turning her head up.

"But then she said, 'Bit why the hell ur ye dressed up like a laddie again, Zoey? Didnae ye tell me ye'd figurit oot ye weren't?'"

"I... kind of panicked, and I told Molly about the same thing I'd told Britney."

"'WhatnoofcoursenotMollyIwasjusttryingtogetyouoffmybackofcourseIidentifyasaman!'"

"Molly just stared down at me with pity and said, 'Ye ne'er wur guid at actin', Zoey.'"

"I asked if this was her break period, and she said it was, and I told her it was mine too. I then asked her if she wanted to get coffee so I could talk to her about it, and we found a remote corner place we'd not been to before."

"Molly was the first to start. She'd really thought over what I'd said, and she realized how much of a line she'd crossed with that insistent confession, but she was upset as she'd misread me having romantic feelings for her. I was a dumbass for not realizing that I shouldn't have been giving her those mixed messages, but she'd read them wrong."

"One thing she hadn't read wrong was my gender. After doing some research on her own on gender over break — again, she wasn't transphobic, she'd just never interacted with a trans person before — she'd come to the conclusion that her gut instinct about me had been right from the start."

"And she told me she'd thought I'd been full of shit with the 'Zach' thing from the start, and she'd been trying to be respectful of Britney and of me, but after all she'd seen, after all of her reading on trans men, there was no way I was one."

"I kicked myself, realizing I could have salvaged that situation by talking to her before she had time to do her own research, but at the same time I thought maybe it was better to have gotten outed."

"Molly sipped her coffee and ate a bagel as did that anxious over-worrying thing I do, but then she said, Zoey, does it bather ye that much?'"

"She'd tried calling me 'Zach' as I spaced out, but I hadn't heard it. But I'd heard 'Zoey,' and that kind of made me stop denying it."

"I just had to tell her it was complicated. I had all this guilt about being a woman, and while I'd stopped lying to myself, it was hard to move on from that shame, like I hadn't earned the right to be one."

"The explanation I gave wasn't adequate to explain the situation. I hated that I couldn't just tell her I was self-identifying as a trans woman and this was all just the result of fantastic surgery and lucky genetics with hormones, but Britney and I had kind of shot that option out a cannon in October."

"Molly stared at me for a while, and then she told me it's hard being a woman. She knows that better than anyone."

"She hadn't really opened up about her body issues before, but they'd started when she was a four and her dad suddenly left her and her 'maw.'"

"Molly didn't blame herself, at the time, but she quickly went from loving her dad to hating him. Her mom was now her only parent to her, and while she tried her hardest, the family of two was poor."

"Like, really poor, as in, 'struggled to get access to basic social services and both went hungry almost every third night' poor."

"She and her mom just... fell through the cracks of the safety nets modern countries have, which is why she's pretty much an agrarian anarchist if you ever get to talking politics with her."

"Making this situation of poverty worse for them was her mom was so insistent that Molly get a proper education. As Molly put it, 'Maw hid a guid heid on her shoulders, bit nae the most learned yin.'"

"A proper education in the Middleoffuckingnowheresville, Scotland meant money to get Molly to and from schools in Inverness."

"When she told me this, I had some tact in my fucking life for once and didn't interrupt her to tell her I'd been to Inverness and was there for a week seeing Loch Ness."

"And she was out of district, which meant she didn't qualify for school lunches, and she got made fun of for being this poorly-dressed poor girl with a thick accent."

"When she told her mom this, her mom spent money they couldn't afford to spend to get her nicer clothes, and even though she worked something like fifteen hours a day, she made the time to make her daughter lunch and ask Molly about her day."

"But then when Molly turned eight, she grew, and she grew tall. She was 5'6" when she was ten years old."

"This is where Molly says she 'shot herself in the foot' by doing farmwork whenever she could to help her mom make ends meet. By the time she was eleven, she was 5'11" with wide shoulders and a muscular physique, and this is what she considers to be the happy years of her childhood because there was enough money to not worry about the lights going off and enough food for her and her mom to eat regularly. Sure, she hated how none of that nutrition went to her chest and only went to her muscles and stomach, but she was healthy otherwise."

"But looking like a buff Amazon redhead when Molly was twelve messed with her perception of her body. She knew she was bi from a pretty early age, but not only did she not have time to have a childhood romance, she scared kids her age. By the time she was thirteen, she had adult men talking to her, a bit too flirtatiously, asking her about herself, where she was going to college, and the like."

"Molly... hated what she was in the mirror. She had her mom's blue eyes, which was one of the few parts of her body she liked, but she had a blend of her mom's blonde hair and her dad's red hair for her burnt sienna hair. She couldn't wear it short because then people thought she was a tall, skinny man, but she hated wearing it long too."

"That's where she unloaded all those issues she had with her body I told you about earlier. And making this worse is because she got hit on so much as a teenager she doesn't respond well to compliments."

"Our conversations hadn't triggered that because it was mutual envy, but one of the worst ways to set her off is to give her a compliment about a part of her body she hates."

"Her mom started fading away from overwork when Molly was fifteen. They couldn't afford a doctor, let alone a proper funeral for her when she died two years later."

"I asked Molly if she knew the cause of death, and Molly looked away and said, 'tae much o' life's shit.'"

"Molly's grades were always good, but she paused the A-level courses she needed to finish for university entrance in the UK because the very modest savings her mom had left her weren't enough to keep her alive if she wasn't working full-time."

"She had to give up her mom's dream for her to go to college, but even full-time work wasn't enough to really keep her afloat. She did this for fifteen months before she realized she was going to be out of money with no real skills in five months if she kept going."

"It broke her heart, but she sold her mom's house, hired a private detective to find her dad, and bought a plane ticket to Ireland with nothing to her name besides a few hundred British pounds and suitcase filled with the few things in the world that she cared about in there, like her mom's tartans, her mom's straw hat, a few letters, a few photos, and a few legal documents."

"It was a gamble, but she was desperate and willing to fail since she didn't really have anything to lose."

"She showed up to her dad's house around supper without warning, intending on begging him for a place to stay and a chance to continue her education, but she had never learned that her dad had left her and her mom to elope and start a new family."

Zoey looks down, feeling bad that Molly's life has been so tragic.

"It was one thing for her dad to have a new wife, some literal fucking Irish noblewoman, but a 15-year-old son as well? It instantly made her think that if she'd been born a man, her dad might not have left her and her mom, because before Molly showed up, her half-brother had only regarded his father as a great dad. He was capable of doing that for his son, but not for his daughter, and it kind of broke a part of her to think her birth sex was to blame for all the suffering she and her mom went through."

"I felt bad asking Molly this, but I had to know."

"'Molly... are you a trans man? And is that why you got offended when Britney and I said I was one?'"

"She seemed surprised for a fraction of a second, but then smiled."

"'Nae, Zoey... Ah'ament the maist happy lassie sometimes, bit I still am yin.'"

"The obvious implication being that I was a woman in the same boat as her."

"Molly explained that she hadn't reacted so strongly to finding out I had a female body and not accepting Britney's identification of me as a trans man back in October because of her own repression or anything like that — of course, she didn't know what terms like 'trans man' or 'repression' were back then, but she'd been doing her homework."

"She didn't know if she would ever find a way of comfortably expressing her femininity. She was pretty sure it was going to be a constant struggle for her, but she wanted to keep exploring how to do that, despite all the obstacles."

"That's why she got upset at me and was so incredulous of the story Britney and I had given her. She wasn't a trans man, but she saw me as a girl in a situation a lot like herself, one who wasn't liking the attention she got because of her body and had come up with a convoluted reason to hide it, and that'd made her upset even though she didn't know my life's story."

"I had to run off to classes after that, but as I got up, Molly told me, 'Now, fair's fair, so tell me aboot yer life's story next time.'"

"It turned out Molly and I had one overlapping gap period a week I didn't have with Britney, so this became a regular thing."

"Every 'session,' because this was essentially my therapy — it might have been her therapy as well — I'd tell her how my relationship with Britney was going, and she'd tell me about her theater club activities, and we'd encourage the other to explore their femininity a bit more and more. We were... kind of each other's cheerleader, if that makes sense, but she also gave me the inside scoop for activities to do with Britney."

"This is where she told me the theater club was planning a trip down to San Diego for spring break in March with the surplus money they'd gotten from Off With Their Heads — the musical last fall — doing so well, but as I had quit the theater club after fulfilling my agreement with Britney, I hadn't been invited even though I had been arguably the lead cast member of that play and been so vital for that production being a success."

"But she told me that if I could pay for my own expenses, I'd be more than welcome as a 'ane o tha club.'"

"I was just going to do an internship at some random office or engineering firm, or just beg Mom to give me enough of my student loan as I would need, but Molly convinced me to explore my femininity by getting a part-job as a waitress at a nearby butler/maid cosplay café."

"That's, uh... one of those 'Japanese culture imports.' Think of a small little restaurant that has a huge upcharge on basic food because it was being served to you by a waiter or a waitress of your choice, and they'd wear a special outfit — this place only did butlers and maids, but I know other places do a lot more — and they'd make conversation with you, do their best to treat you as a special visitor, and even cut up your food for you. If you felt that your waiter or waitress did a particularly good job, you'd give them a nice tip — like how restaurants in America work, but not quite — and they could request you next time."

"I first tried to go for a 'cute but helplessness' vibe as a maid. I managed to get a good amount of first-time customers, most who probably chose me for my eyes and tits, but I had a hard time keeping them as 'my' clients, probably because the conversations were about me and I hadn't finished telling the lie of who I was yet to Molly and didn't know what to say."

"More on that later, but it was demoralizing to fail to keep customers. I knew I looked good, but I worried that it was my personality that made them not come back. I hated how much that worried me, and it wasn't just because this job mostly paid in tips."

"But one day, about... three weeks in, I had a customer who was a bit of a lecher. There's a big ex-military bouncer there who will throw, and I mean throw, you out of the place if you put a hand on the employees, take candid photos of them, or do anything deemed unacceptable by the management, but this guy wasn't doing anything that bad."

"He'd just... been getting on my nerves, asking too many questions about my eyes, and getting a bit too ribald with the compliments. He'd asked me to write his name on his omurice in ketchup, and while I could do that with as much precision as a factory robot, I'd noticed customers liking it more when I made mistakes or even got a little bit of ketchup on me."

"And I did, but the bottle had a glob stuck in it, and when trying to get that out, I squeezed too hard. Not only did it splash on my gloves, but a bit got on my face and cleavage."

"Yes, of course this place had outfits with cleavage windows, but I was trying to make tips, okay?"

"I tried to over-accentuate the 'cute but helpless ' by apologizing, getting a napkin, wiping myself up, and so on, but the guy had the napkin over his lap, and based on how he'd been acting and staring at me, I wasn't going to request he take that off."

"So, I just bowed instead and got him a few drink coupons — which came out of my paycheck — then cut up his meal at his request."

"But he peered a little too close into my cleavage as I did that, and I snapped."

Source: Commission from TiltSHIFT (base sprite) and Myumi (outfit)

<There is more information (here and here) about this outfit, as it has some variants.>

"I don't think I was intending to do this, but my eyes instantly darted up as I slightly lifted the ketchup-soaked knife, and I went full 'ice queen' mode as I glared him and asked, 'Is there anything else of yours you'd like me to cut apart today, Master?' before grabbing the napkin off his lap, wiping the ketchup off me, and fitting it into my uniform to cover my cleavage window for the rest of my time waiting for him."

Zoey demonstrates the effect, but it quickly fades into an embarrassed blush.

"...Look, Grandpa, these places have a weird culture to them, okay? It's supposed to be like butler or maid service, so that means the wait staff had to call their customer 'Master.'"

"I didn't realize this at the time, but I must have come off as a fucking serial killer the way I was covered in 'blood' splatters, holding a 'bloody' knife, glaring at him with my red eyes, speaking in a chilling voice that's unique to Mom and I — and sort of Britney — asking him if he'd like me to cut his dick off next."

"I might have scared the shit out of that customer, but I also got a fucking 10,000-yen tip." <Author's Note: $100, as re:Dreamer lazily uses a 100:1 JPY/USD conversion rate.>

"After that, I realized how much money I could make doing that routine. Sure, it had about as much chance to get me a 5,000-yen tip from a customer who wanted to be a repeat customer — that 10,000 yen was an outlier — as it did to scare a client into leaving early with no tip and no chance to come back, but the amount of money I was taking home every shift doubled overnight."

"Like at the New Year's Day shrine, I got a little bit of an ego boost from customers having to reserve a time slot to have me and being disappointed when 'Zoey' was booked three weeks in advance by the end of it, but I'd made the money I'd needed, and then some, and needed to focus on preparing for that spring break trip, my studies, and dealing with re:Dreamer."

"The café owner begged me to stay after I gave her my two-weeks' notice at the very end of February, but even though she offered me a big raise to stay, I didn't take it, and I had to say that I'd keep them in mind for a summer job to leave peacefully."

"I don't think I'll be taking them up on that offer, though."

"Sure, maybe I'll keep them in mind during the semester if I grow yet another fucking cup size and need new bras again, but I want to focus on my personal life and recovering my GPA, because as you'd might expect, after almost a full school year of dealing with this re:Dreamer shit, that cratered to 2.63 when even in the middle of my high school dysphoria days it had never dropped below 3.71."

Zoey pauses, realizing something.

"It's kind of funny. Molly hates that none of the weight she gains goes to her chest, and I hate that all of the weight I gain goes to my chest." <Author's Note: Zach's a pedant about the use of "ironic" and "literally" outside of their strict dictionary definitions, but the former can be used here instead of "funny" with lower Awkwardness.>

"Speaking of that... I, in turn for Molly to help her explore her femininity, managed to convince her to stop padding her bra so that people could see her more for who she really was. And I even convinced her to get herself a swimsuit that showed more of her body for that spring break beach trip, even though she didn't know how to swim and her pale skin meant she was going to burn alive in the sun without globs of sunscreen."

"This was in-between telling Molly more of the life of this girl who grew up as 'Zoey' and slowly started to hate that identity until they became 'Zach.'"

Zoey looks down at the ground with a pained smile. She feels bad. Molly is the one person in her life she's 'out' to as a cis female rather than a trans woman, but she doesn't know how to tell Molly the truth.

"I guess I have Mom's talents for lying after all, because I wove this expansive story for what my life, had I been born a woman, could have been over those eight weeks."

"The first week, I lied about growing up as a girl with both parents around, but neither really had time to raise me as both worked from home as architects on a design firm, leaving you, Grandpa, as my primary caretaker for a lot of my early childhood. I told her most of the truth, about how much you meant to me, but I lied and said that all three of you had been expecting me as a boy and had to adjust your plans when I was born female, and none of you pivoted that well. You'd take me out to ball games and talk like a drunken sailor to me; Dad would teach me DIY crafts like woodworking, metalworking, construction, and electronics; and Mom tried to teach me cooking, makeup, and fashion, but I didn't care too much for those lessons."

"The second week, I lied about this big gorilla of a boy who moved next door right before I turned 5, and how that boy, Keisuke, had gotten invited to my very small birthday party, and how you and Dad had pushed us into being friends, with great success. And how that boy was my role model, as he didn't treat me in any particularly gendered way and we both idolized the other's talents: him with my brains, and me with his brawn."

"The third week, I lied about how I never felt like I fit in with the other girls. I'd had all these nerdy media tastes from Dad and Mom, and I didn't like princess films or any of that 'girly' stuff because I'd prefer watching horror films with my best friend, a guy, to prove I was "manlier" than he was when it came to horror, I'd played softball and really liked baseball, but mostly as a stats nerd; and I'd liked building things with my hands like a guy, and I wanted to be an engineer when I grew up. And I explained how much this isolated me from the girls I was supposed to get along with, and until I was 11, I was 'one of the boys' for all practical purposes, as long as I could get away with it."

"The fourth week, I lied about how by 11, I couldn't get away with it anymore. I'd wanted to follow in your example as 'a guy's guy' after your death, because you were my hero, role model, and primary parent all in one, but puberty hit me like a truck. I'd already gotten some bullying from girls my age for my red eyes, my general 'autistic-ness,' and me wanting to hang out with the guys instead of them, but when I started to blossom into not just a woman, but a gorgeous woman with big breasts, the bullying got worse. It got turbo-charged when they learned I still had sleepovers at my place with my best friend, who was a guy."

"I didn't know this until later, but I made up a lie that turned out to actually be true about Keisuke's dad being a domestic abuser, and Mom and Ms. Nakamura had this whole secret procedure in place for Keisuke to play outside or at my house whenever possible and to spend the night at my place whenever Mr. Nakamura was looking like he was going to get drunk, which usually led to him getting violent."

Zoey hates how her subconscious mind realizes so much that her conscious mind doesn't.

"Anyways, 'Zoey' got called an easy boy-crazy slut a lot, and she was luring these boys into enjoying her company with her sexy body, and it got so bad that Keisuke and I agreed, to stifle the rumors, to drift apart. This hurt both of us, but as much as it hurt me, I think it hurt Keisuke more because I was one of only two girls the gallant Sir Nakamura couldn't save."

"The fifth week, I told Molly about my best friend — yeah, I guess I should call Keisuke that again given that I'm dating Britney — and I think this was the most honest session, even though I hadn't seen Keisuke for about two years by then. I told her how he was an athletic prodigy in baseball and in swimming, to a lesser degree, and how he'd ended up as my male role model after you died. He was the nicest and kindest person I'd ever known, and he's had a body and personality I'd envied. We'd hang out most days after school, either playing catch or otherwise acting like 'boys' with each other. We'd have all these summer adventures, and..."

Zoey stops. She made a pact with Keisuke to never tell anyone about Kurohime, and while that's still true in practice as she'd stopped herself from telling Molly about her, Zoey feels like she broke that pact earlier in spirit and just now realized it.

"I left the details ambiguous for Molly, but I told her Keisuke had saved me from danger by fighting off a 'basically rabid' pit bull, and he realized his brawn and hotheaded nature could be used to help people, mostly women."

"I know now that Keisuke did the real-life counterpart because he was really trying to save his mom from his abusive dad, but..."

Zoey looks sad, but then she stares off into the distance with a slight smile and wishes Keisuke and Molly the best of luck.

"Week six was me making up the repression. The rumors about me had been eating away at me, and the bullying hadn't really stopped. At the start of gym one day when I was 12, some of the girls cut my gym uniform up into thin strips, like a bikini top and thong. I snapped at them, and that meant the ice glare thing, which was my first time doing it."

"Molly had only seen Britney's mimicked version of that before, by the way. I'd assumed she'd seen the real thing at least once elsewhere, but she hadn't, and I scared the shit out of her."

"She then immediately tried to conscript me into an original play next fall she'd write based around showcasing that talent, and while I respected the creative hustle, I told her no."

"Anyways, a few of the girls 'Zoey' snapped at tattled on her for the extremely specific death threats I used, and we all got called to the principal's office. I got a slap on the wrist with a 2-day suspension, but the other girls got suspended for a few weeks for the bullying I finally got to tattle on them for. I don't what they were expecting to—"

Zoey sighs, loudly.

"Christ, listen to me. I'm talking about this like it really happened."

"Part of the problem was that I made up this big, elaborate lie for Molly, and by the end of it, what had been meant to be a tragic backstory of a confused girl posing as a trans man sounded so much better than my actual life that I ended up envying her for having it."

Zoey pauses for a few moments.

"But not only is that escapism not healthy, nor would I not be the same person I am today had that been my life... I wouldn't have gotten so close to you, and I don't think I would have gotten so close to Britney."

There's another thing Zoey wants to say about this, but she moves away from it.

"You can fill in the gaps for the rest — God knows I did — but the short of it was that I told myself I hated being a woman so much that I first tried to be a goth girl, but then I disguised myself as a man for all of high school. Britney got the closest to figuring it out, and I got close to her, as in a crush, and I was maybe starting to think it would be okay to be more feminine, but then Britney pushed me too far."

"As a favor for repairing her car for that summer for her 17th birthday, she tried to get me to explore more of that feminine side to me she'd noticed. At an anime convention a few weeks later, she dragged me to a gender-neutral bathroom and convinced me to change into girly cosplay — look, it means costume play — before I froze and repressed."

"Every good lie has some truth in it, right?" Zoey says with a sardonic smugness, before realizing she left out an important part.

"W-Well, in the 'canon timeline,' she pulled down my pants and boxers, and then she realized she'd basically sexually assaulted me. That triggered my real repression."

"Our last talk before spring break was me just bragging about my sabbatical. I finally told Molly I'd been less than 10 kilometers from her house when I visited Loch Ness, but she just looked down sadly and said, 'Tis nae mah hoose anymair.'"

Zoey stops.

"Let's dial things back a month to Valentine's Day for a bit."

"Britney... has a thing for 'bad girls' as a sort of 'taboo' that she wasn't supposed to enjoy, so when Ai came to us with a quest on Valentine's Day — we'd had a fun, brunchy picnic in the early afternoon — Britney got the offer to turn me into her sexual fantasy for one session."

"We talked it over, and Britney said she'd already had sex with a vampire, so a goth girl was next on her list."

"I agreed, and..."

"Look, I got turned into an edgy, angsty dom, and while the sex was great for me, Britney said she'd have preferred sex with me as me, as she missed my 'vibrancy,' and Britney wasn't the bottom she always thought she was."

"Plus, I'd scratched the shit out of her back and bit the fuck out of her neck and shoulders, and..."

Zoey hesitates, but she needs to say this.

"The transformation had affected my outfit, and I had cigarettes in the back pocket of my black shorts and fishnets. They were your brand, Native Spirit, and I pulled one out and lit it seconds after sex, only to inhale the smoke as the transformation undid itself, and I threw up everywhere, both from the smoke and the horror of smoking those same goddamned cigarettes that killed you."

"I-In better news about you, I'd been hanging out with Dad every other week or so as he worked at the church — the historical regulations really bloated the cost and time of the project, so it wasn't going to finish until just before Easter."

"A week after the 'vomit goth' incident..."

"Christ, you'd been on my mind a lot more than usual, and Dad said something about you that made me snap at him with the ice voice, the first time he'd seen me do that."

"Completely unperturbed by that, by the way. I don't know if he's got your balls of steel or if he's simply built up a tolerance from Mom doing that, but that didn't bother him."

"My words did, though. I'd cussed him out for being an absent father who'd left the job to you, and then he'd never filled in after you died, and how sad and lonely I'd been and needed a dad back then, and still did."

"He looked... hurt."

"'Don't you think I was sad and lonely too, Zach?'"

Zoey smiles.

"I didn't know Dad could be so eloquent, let alone with a shorter speech, but I don't think I'll ever forget what he said next.

"'He might have been your father figure, but he was my dad. When he died, I felt so alone. I'd missed saying goodbye to him by an hour, and that haunts me to this day.'"

"'And then I saw you, so angry and hurt by his death, and I felt even sadder.'"

"'As you grow older, there's a void you'll start to notice in the future. That's your future, and while I'm slow to notice things sometimes, and I sometimes notice the wrong things, I noticed that Dad was standing there ahead of me, facing that void, telling me what's next, how to prepare for what's ahead.'"

"'That's a comfort... that I started to take for granted...'"

"'But then, when your dad is gone... it's just you... facing the void alone.'"

"'I should have been there for you when he died, but I didn't notice that I needed to be. I was too busy looking ahead into that void, so all I noticed when I saw you after he died was that one day you were going to feel as sad and alone and scared as I did.'"

"'But right now... what I notice is that we're together, and I think we're both happy, an everything seems okay.'"

<Author's Note: This is a loose paraphrase of a moment in the Invincible comics that's always stuck with me.>

"And like a selfish asshole, I realized just how much I'd been monopolizing your grief, and I apologized and started to cry."

"In other words, crying like a girl."

"I felt like such shit, because this was... this was the type of conversation I'd wanted to have with my dad as his son for a decade now, but he was having it with his daughter, and I didn't know if I could ever tell him that. I mean, I was changing back still, right?"

"He pulled me in for a big hug — you know how he is with those — and I nearly felt my chest binder pop."

"I told him I had to run off for class, but it was really to run to a restroom to check its integrity."

"A cooling bladder popped, but it was otherwise intact. But I couldn't help thinking that... maybe it'd have been better if he had caught me as his daughter..."

Zoey pauses for a second.

"Obviously, he's been a great dad to his daughter since I came out to him a few weeks ago. I cannot overstate how much that has meant to me, because Dad hasn't just been great, he's been a fucking rock star for me against Mom whenever she's tried to push her daughter out of her comfort zone with shit like cooking lessons."

"...I did take her up on the makeup lessons, though."

"And then came spring break. It started on the 18th, but Mom had demanded I spend the night at home with her a day early — she's been shockingly easygoing about my studies ever since she figured out my body."

"Most professors don't teach shit on the Friday before spring break, so I finished my classes by noon and got picked up by her."

"Then she fucking ambushed me, dressed me in a flowery dress, and we had a fucking picnic of all things."

"You know Mom... She looks great in anything, and she dresses a bit girlishly at times, so she had this... white dress and translucent skirt shawl on. I was wearing a complementary, but not quite matching, spring dress with this long skirt, and we... ate goddamned caprese sandwiches and other items on Rocky Butte as we talked."

"Mom really wanted to get to know her daughter better, and be a part of her life, so she asked me about how things were, and after some curt responses because I didn't want to be there, she opened up about her life with things she had never told me."

"She focused on that 'she always wished I'd been her daughter' thing she'd told me, and there is some lore to that."

"So, it turns out Grandma Chinatsu abused the ever-loving shit out of Mom growing up, and I quickly realized, from the freshman psychology course that I'd just had, that was probably what made her OCD so severe."

"Basically, if a person gets thrown into a stressful situation with no control — like living with an abusive mother who was basically your only parent, and she beat you relentlessly — sometimes they try to create rituals and ways of thinking to give themselves the tiniest bit more control in their life. This can very quickly turn into OCD if left unchecked, which it was for most of Mom's childhood." <Author's Note: If it wasn't clear, Zoey has some minor undiagnosed OCD, but it's more accurate to call it OCPD.>

"Mom told me the biggest thing keeping her together at her worst moments was telling herself how she was never going to act this way to her future daughter — and then it clicked what this was about."

"I had to tell her, ice glare and everything, 'This is not the start of your redemption arc, Mom.'"

"I was offended, and I let her know it. Had Mom really been so naive that she thought a single picnic was enough to get me to start forgiving 21 years of terrible parenting? Or did she think so little of me that she assumed I could easily be convinced into forgiving her with a few sad tales of her childhood?"

"She's only hit me once — but I had nearly killed myself building a pipe bomb so that's about as justified as it's going to get for a parent to hit their child — but that alone is far from good parenting. Would she have been so demanding of her child had I been her daughter instead of her son? Would I have been allowed to choose my own future? What if I had wanted to do something like journalism or photography, which were the trades of that mom who had beat her so much? What if I had decided I was a trans male? How conditional would her unconditional love as a parent be? I already had proof it was conditional, as it was night and day between how Mom treated me as a son versus how she treated me now. She'd had decades to be a better parent, and she was only making those steps now."

"I told her that if I was going to forgive her and let her into my life even a little bit more, it would be on my own terms, and it was only going to happen if she didn't coerce or manipulate me into that. And fuck our agreement for her help with Britney's parents! That'd been coerced and manipulated anyways! Until I said otherwise, I was her son, not her daughter."

"The rest of the picnic was rather quiet, as you'd assume."

"We packed up as Mom pouted, but then this stranger approached us and tried to hit on us, thinking we were sisters, but he got about ten words in before Mom unloaded on him, and I mean with the extra strong version of the ice glare I can't do."

Source: Commission from TiltSHIFT

"'I'm married, and that's my daughter. Now get away from us unless you want me to drop you off that cliff.'"

"Yep, I can't do that yet..." Zoey thinks, before wondering why she appended "yet" to that, like she wants to copy that talent. <Zoey has been mimicking voices during this; her acting ability is bad for herself, but great for other people.>

"I haven't seen anyone run that fast, ever, and after I'd regained my ability to talk, I told Mom that I'd just told her I was her son, not her daughter. That, more than telling off some random dude, was not something I was cool with."

"And then she turned to me and did that blank stare she does as she put her hands on her hips."

Source: Commission from TiltSHIFT

"'You know I can tell when people lie to me, right, Zoe?'"

"'Besides, we did have an agreement, which was basically a promise, and men should stick to those, right?'"

"After the car ride back to the house, I kind of just avoided her for the next fourteen hours before meeting up with the theater club at Portland Union Station early in the morning, at just before 6:30 AM."

"Yes, I left campus, then came back a day later. The engineer in me who prides efficiency cried."

Source: Commission from TiltSHIFT (base sprite) and Myumi (outfit)

"Britney had long since known I was going to be on this trip, and she'd always wanted to work with waterproof materials, so she made me this cool and sporty beach outfit with a bikini, beach shorts, and a hooded windbreaker, with extra accessories like a baseball cap and military-spec belt with modular waterproof pockets for my phone and charger."

"I don't know if I've mentioned this, but Ai ate up my battery like a motherfucker to the point that I needed to keep her plugged into this large solar-recharge commuter power bank I'd gotten for my sabbatical or else she'd run it dry in four hours or so."

"I, of course, already had some great Aviator sunglasses that completed the outfit, and because my skull shape was almost exactly the same as it'd used to be, they fit perfectly."

"I really liked how modular this outfit was, by the way. It let me show as much or as little skin as I wanted. The bikini top wasn't even that revealing, and it had this drainage mesh in the front below my cleavage."

"As usual, Britney had knocked it out of the park when it came to an outfit for me, but her own was a bit..."

Source: miuki87 on Twitter

<Britney's outfit is still being decided, but this is the best I've found so far.>

"She had on a skimpy American Flag bikini, daisy dukes, long white beach leggings, tennis shoes, and what I think was a gunner's jacket from an American WWII tank crew."

"She looked great, and I knew she was representing her pride as the only American among us, but I told her she looked like a bimbo."

"Yeah, you told me not to use that word on women, Grandpa, but look, she did."

"And we... okay yeah, we're public flirts."

"Molly looked great as well. She was wearing a white... blouse top?"

"I still struggle with female fashion names, but Britney's a good and patient teacher."

Source: Commission from Myumi

"Okay, Molly had that, a skirt that looked an awful lot like a kilt — I knew what it was her mom's tartan instantly — and a big sun hat — which I already knew was her mom's."

"It was cute and suited for the beach, and I told her as such. She blushed, but Britney got a bit mad at me."

"I don't know if you ever rode the Engankai, but I did a lot during my sabbatical almost an entire year ago, since that'd had a lengthy Californian leg to it." <Author's Note: Engankaikansen (沿岸海幹線), or "coastal sea line" is I guess what I'm calling the west coast bullet train system for now.>

"Man, looking back, I'm glad Molly shot down my advice for a San Francisco day trip, or even making it the primary destination," Zoey thinks for a second.

"They upgraded the bullet train maglev system in 2013, so not only is the ride a lot smoother, but it also now has a max speed of 370 kilometers an hour! That's even faster than its Japanese counterpart, so it only took four and a half hours to travel from Portland to San Diego for a lot cheaper than an airplane ticket."

"During the first part of the ride, Britney hustled everyone into a game of Texas hold'em poker. I'd learned my lesson in January and was trying to be more conservative with my budget — I guess it being my money I'd gotten through working made me use it more responsibly? — so I sat back and observed everyone."

"So, I figured out that it's not quite Britney's poker face that makes her such a good player, nor how she reads the table, but how she controls it."

"Devious bitch that I love so much that she is, Britney has a talent for coaxing people into getting overconfident or timid when they shouldn't through ways so subtle that most didn't know they were getting hustled."

"And she plays people off each other very well, too! It's to the point that I don't think the cards matter until the game draws to a close, because she's able to work with whatever she gets so well!"

Zoey is getting excited talking about how good of a poker player her girlfriend is, and she realizes this, so she dials it back.

"God, I hope she has these moments when talking about me," she says with a slight smile, knowing Britney does.

"For the next part, I struggled up next to Britney and finally convinced her to watch the first episode of Star Fleet: Star Base Five with me, since that's now my favorite in the franchise, and it's the only one that starts out strongly."

"She didn't really get the setting at first and was worried there was going to be too much sci-fi jargon, but she loved Cisco being a Black man in a lead role in the 1990's and how he was shown as a good dad who was successful but had a complicated relationship with his future."

"I told her that Star Fleet had always had a reputation as a very progressive show that broke boundaries, but then she had some quip about Pion coming off a bit too offensively as a miserly Jewish scam artist stereotype. She was starting to lose a little bit of interest when they found the extradimensional black hole portal because the show did use a bit too much 'nerd talk' for her, but then when she figured out their were quasi-omnipotent beings in there, and that Cisco had unwillingly become a religious figurehead as the 'Envoy of the Oracles' for being the first one to meet them, and how it was being respectful of both sides of the religion versus science debate, she instantly understood what one of the main plot points of the show was and got hooked."

"So, we watched another, and..."

"This station was basically an administrative transfer from a treaty between the Star Fleet people and what were basically the race of space Nazis, and there was only one member of that race left on the station when it was handed over. His name was Goran, and he worked as a tailor, but there was a lot of suspicion about him. Britney, being an aspiring tailor herself, paid extra attention to him."

"We'd been sharing headphones, so halfway through the episode, I clearly heard Britney mutter, 'Oh, he's either a sleeper agent spy who's going to get killed in a few episodes or an exiled ex-military intelligence officer who's going to end up as the mythical good Nazi by the end of the series, and my money is on the latter.'"

Zoey is tempted to bring up the Nazi in her family closet who is very much not the mythical good Nazi, but that's not something she's ever dredging up, even with Britney.

"Man... I don't think you need to care about spoilers now, but yeah, she got it right. Britney has Mom's media literacy skills, and close to her ability to see ahead in a story. She, uh, also sometimes mutters to herself while reading or watching stuff, and she usually doesn't realize it when she does it. It's usually cute, but—"

Zoey stares off into the distance, potentially realizing something for the first time.

"Am I just dating a nicer and less extreme version of my mom...?"

While Zoey looks like a younger and curvier version of her mom?

"A-Anyways, Grandpa! We arrived in San Diego at around 2:30 PM local time — America still does the seasonal hour shift. The weather was great, at 23°C with scattered clouds keeping out some of the sun."

"So, Molly—"

"I don't know what the fuck Molly said to the theater department to approve funding for this, but I guess she had a lot of departmental clout after basically saving that ghost ship and its skeleton crew with the unconventional production that fall."

"But this was technically a theater club activity, and that meant Molly was in chaperone mode, which meant having her LCU badge and lanyard visible, and she was carrying around a megaphone and, well..."

"'Directing' people, heh."

Source: Commission from Myumi

"We all got our stuff put away in the hotel rooms. I'd used my waitress job money and splurged on a corner suite for me and Britney, and while she was impressed, she also got annoyed that I was trying too hard to impress her."

"And then... well, Molly told us to vote on a city tour or a beach trip. I was ready to go to the beach, as were Britney and Molly, but two of the three other girls did and none of the guys did, and I wasn't a member of the theater club, meaning my vote didn't count, which made it a 5-to-4 vote for the city."

"Molly smugly asked if I rejoined theater club at that moment, she'd count my vote, and then she'd be the tiebreaker as director, which meant that we'd do the beach..."

"Ai had said Britney and I were a bit low on points and needed to really 'step up our game' to get out of the rut we were in, but I was still thinking I'd turn myself back in less than a month, so I declined the tempting offer. All but one of the girls groaned and we had to wait for them to change out of the swimsuits under their clothes."

"Britney and I had a bit of a feud as tour guides. She was the American, but I was the history nerd who had been in San Diego for three days not even a year ago, and..."

"I should have shared the destination picks, but I forgot Britney was on her period, and she gets a bit grouchier than usual when on it, so we fought over where we were going, which led to me being really insistent about not going to the aquarium despite that being the lesbian date locale." <Author's Note: GOD you have no idea how proud I am that this lines up with the "Britney's period is 27 days and the confirmed first start to it is October 9th" rule I have.>

"When we got to the last stop at the USS Midway Museum, Britney and I got into a tense debate about the ship's service record, and we had to settle it with an employee telling me I was right."

"I felt smugly superior about knowing more than she did, but, uh... Britney got her 'revenge' that night in our hotel room."

"Her hormones make her hornier, too..."

"S-So, the next day, we hit the beach early! The weather was unseasonably warm, and the girls were doing the usual..."

Zoey doesn't fully know what groups of girls do when away from the guys, but she extrapolates.

"The girls were comparing swimsuits, and then Molly took off her skirt and shirt and everyone stopped talking."

"She had on a red string side-tie string bikini under her clothes, and she looked good."

"I later found out that she was trying to deal with her body positivity issues like this, and she was showing me she wasn't a hypocrite, since she'd told me to wear a nice swimsuit and get that job as a maid café waitress."

"But damn... I wouldn't have worn something that risky."

Source: Commission from Myumi

"Molly had to mumble and ask if it looked weird or something before anyone responded."

"'Oh my God, Molly... you're hot?'"

"'That's what I've been telling you, Britney!'"

"'You shouldn't have been telling your girlfriend that, Zach!'"

"Look, she called me 'Zach' when she got mad. I think it was an open secret to the theater club that my gender identity was fucked, but I had thought we'd had a tacit agreement to call me 'Zoey' whenever I was presenting as a female."

"I had a pained smile on my face as I had started to really dislike using that name, Molly had a nervous smile on her face but she had really appreciated the compliment, and Britney had a frown on hers from the obvious."

"Britney stormed off, telling me, 'Go put sunscreen on Molly's back, Zach, if you think she looks so much better than me! That's every guy's fantasy, isn't it?!'"

"I know now Britney did stuff like this because she was subtly trying to get me to confront the notion of my own masculinity and how I didn't want to be like a guy, but damn, that stung."

"Molly did in fact need sunscreen since she had the palest skin that burned in even clouded sunlight, but I don't want to talk about that."

"Britney came back a few minutes later with a beer in her hand, and everyone moved over to the shore and started... I don't know, 'frolicking.'"

"Molly was the only one who didn't know how to swim, so she stood off to the side and kind of just watched, although she got a lot of compliments from random guys that put a rather complicated smile on her face."

"Suddenly a big gust of wind came over the beach and blew Molly's hat way offshore, at least 200 meters out."

"She didn't even have to cry out, 'Maw's hat!' or anything. I knew how much that meant to her, and I dove in the water without even handing anyone my belt that had my phone in it, trusting Britney's waterproofing."

"I can't lift much, Grandpa, but I can swim. I've got strong legs, boobs that help provide buoyancy, and, well... flexibility gained through certain activities, so I managed to chase down that hat very quickly, then take it back."

"That was the more awkward part. I was trying to keep it above water since it was a bit beat up already, and I lost my sunglasses and got some water into my lungs during that, but it wasn't enough to make me pass out or anything."

"I just had to sputter it out as I was about to hand Molly her mom's hat back, but I paused and grabbed the sunglass holders my thin Aviators had slipped out of, threaded it through the inner band on the brim, and handed it to Molly with the improvised chinstrap."

"You always told me that a guy had to do whatever it took to make sure he never made a girl cry, but I'm not a guy, and Molly was crying out of overwhelmed gratitude."

"She offered to check up on me since she had first aid training, but Britney pulled me off and said she could do that, since she had some as well. Once out of earshot, Ai reminded us she was fine, not that we checked up on her or anything."

"Part of the reason I hadn't passed my phone off was that Ai had made it very clear I needed to keep my phone on me at all times that day, as there was a big re:Dreamer quest with massive point gains we would need to win and a very small window to accept it."

"Once Britney and I got behind some rocks under a pier, she started aggressively undressing me."

"I am kind of always down to fuck — seriously, female libido is weird — but this was unexpected, and I did still feel a bit winded from swimming out that far and getting fluid into my lungs, so I asked Britney to slow down and tell me what was up."

"In the simplest way possible, she was jealous of the attention I'd been giving Molly, she was upset that I'd done something that risky that could have damaged my phone or killed me, she was horny because of her period, and she was a little drunk as she'd been dealing with the first by having a few beers."

"Wait, what the fuck?! Britney is 19! How the fuck did she get alcohol when we were in America?!" <Author's Note: The assistant director had a cooler in his big backpack and had been discretely functioning as the group bartender.>

"Christ, do I even want to know badly enough to ask her?"

Zoey considers it, and then decides if the topic comes up organically, she'll ask, but otherwise she won't.

"But it was more than that. Britney said she finally understood that I hadn't been putting her up on a pedestal or white knighting her or trying to be the 'nice guy' or whatever since I realized I had feelings for her. I was just a nice, good person who performed selfless acts for other people, unprompted, not expecting anything in return."

"I..."

"I told her it was both. I had been hoping Britney would magically notice my feelings if I was nice enough to her, but I also had a history of doing stupid and reckless shit for people, or taking on huge obligations without thinking it through, or throwing myself under the bus to make someone feel better. Britney was a standout example, but not a unique one."

"But then I told her that while Molly was a good friend and someone I cared about, I acted so quickly because I knew that hat meant a lot to her. And as unexpectedly close Molly and I had become as friends, it wasn't going to be anywhere close to how I felt about Britney. I'd said as much back in December. Britney was my girlfriend, and I loved the shit out of her, and if anything, I felt more strongly about her than I did back then."

"And this is where I learned that Britney is, like, super weak to sincere romance."

"She turned into putty, and that left me in the awkward position of trying to be the top, and..."

"I-I mean, I can do it, but I'm not very good at it because I'm not aggressive enough."

"Still, I tried, and then Molly walked behind the rocks to check up on us — mostly me — and caught me in the middle of trying to figure out what I was going to do to make this sex work with me topping."

"Molly was... shockingly cool with it. She was Britney's chaperone in some capacity, but she was also a student and understood that this was just something couples did and that we needed to go back to our hotel room if we were going to do that."

"And then..."

Zoey starts to giggle, but then she calms down.

"Okay, okay. Molly's back was turned to give us privacy so we could get dressed, so she didn't notice my mouth hadn't moved when Ai mimicked my voice and asked, 'Care to join us?'" <Author's Note: Zoey's changing phobia still exists, but she didn't ask Molly to turn her back; Molly was just being considerate.>

"Ai had occasionally brought up the ideas for threesomes, but Britney and I had always shot the idea down, because, yeah, lesbian couples are pretty monogamous, and we were one, even if I thought Britney..."

"Look, there's data I can quote, but thankfully for my continued living, we both knew it was Ai instantly, as the voice had come from my hips, but we couldn't, like, just call her out on it." <Author's Note: Have you noticed that Zoey's speech has become a bit more "valley girly" compared to how it started as? It's not just accepting herself as a woman; being around Britney has changed how she talks to some degree.>

"I knew even in that exact moment why Ai had done that: she wanted us to get more points, and a threesome granted a lot of bonus points... so just consider how powerful a lesbian threesome was."

"Molly was very flattered by the offer. She at first tried to say she was here on official university business, and that it'd be weird intruding since we were such a good couple, but then she looked off to the side meekly and said, 'Aye, sure.'"

"Thank God Britney and I operate on the same wavelength, because it would have been really awkward if one of us had tried to back out of this, but..."

Zoey stomps her foot and shouts.

"Molly is hot, okay?! Britney is too, as am I, but it's different with her!"

Zoey hopes to God Britney didn't hear that. She nervously looks behind her, but Britney is still on her phone.

Zoey kind of hates that she doesn't regret that threesome happened, but she doesn't want to fixate on it.

"We went back to my hotel room, you know, the one with the nice king-sized bed on it, and I quickly became the target for both girls."

"Britney is my girlfriend, but she'd been using Zach, even in private, but Molly had been using Zoey consistently. Is it any guess what happened next?"

Zoey wants to shut up, but she can't. Bottoms apparently tattle on themselves.

"They fought over me, and once the other noticed the different name they were using for me, they..."

"Uh..."

"Mmm..."

"I had to agree that Molly calling me 'Zoey' felt better, and..."

Zoey is speaking very quickly in an embarrassed panic here.

"The worst part was that Britney didn't even get mad that I agreed with Molly over her! She just instantly switched to that 'good girl' teasing stuff! Do you know what it's like to have two really hot women, both who you have feelings for, complimenting you as they turn you into a puddle?! As they fight over who gets you?! And you don't get a say in it because you got turned into a puddle?!"

Zoey slowly calms down as her face loses the extreme blush on it.

"I couldn't even get a fucking shot it..."

"I think Molly realized she was a third wheel seconds after the sessions ended, and that this had been a one-time thing, and that maybe she'd been asked in the heat of the moment and we'd regretted it, so she ran back to the beach to check up on everyone."

"As soon as the door closed, Ai spoke up."

"She quickly complimented us, and while we both wanted to murder her, she told us that something serious came up. She told us both to get fully dressed, and we did. Then she told Britney to grab her phone and charger—"

"Oh, I'd gotten her the same solar-powered charger I'd used for Ai, since the DNA testing kits for both of us came back with inconclusive results from corrupted samples. I felt bad and wanted to get her a gift that worked, so she told me to get her the same charger so she could have it for theater club and the laptop she'd gotten for Christmas from her relatives."

"Ai was being mysterious, but she told us to note the time and to make a calendar entry for seven days from now at this exact time: 3:13 PM."

"Ai wished us both luck, and then..."

"Did Mom or Dad ever make you watch an episode of Star Fleet, or did I?"

Zoey is a bit upset that she can't remember.

"It was like stepping onto a holodeck. The world just changed around me."

"One second, we were in a fancier hotel room with dirty sheets. The next, we were in..."

"I was in this medieval town, which kind of looked Scottish, but it was clear in like, two seconds this wasn't reality as I knew it."

"Like, there were potion shops and armories and shit! There were fantasy races just walking around here or there, and—"

Zoey wishes she could use "JRPG starting town" to explain this, but she doubts her grandpa would know, let alone if that term would be accurate.

"But Britney wasn't there. And I ran around looking for her, but the sunlight... hurt."

"Like, it felt somewhere between fire and a chemical burn."

"I didn't know what was going on with that, but I had to put my hood up and duck between shadows as I searched around for Britney, but when I got to an empty alley, Ai spoke up for the first time."

"'She's not around here, Zoey.'"

"I tried my hardest to interrogate Ai about what the fuck was going on and screaming about how this had to be literally fucking magic, but Ai stayed silent on most points, muttering to herself about how this was total overkill."

"She had a gag order she couldn't override, but I had a week to find Britney and have sex with her. If I didn't, she was going to be executed, and I would be disqualified as a re:Dreamer player."

"I was in the middle of a goddamned panic attack, but Ai continued."

"I'd been given a fantasy class to help me find and rescue Britney, but she couldn't tell me anything else."

"And then the re:Dreamer app closed. A big padlock had appeared on the app icon, and I realized how fucked I was."

"There was a... loud church bell or something a few seconds later. It was from the town square, and some official had announced that the church had found a wanted criminal and imprisoned her in this massive castle town off into the distance, and all were invited to her public execution in a week."

"And then he slapped a poster of her on the wall, and it was a sketch of Britney, and I thought, 'Wow, that is an awfully convenient clue to start with.'"

"This quest, or scenario, or game... whatever it was, it wasn't the most well designed, as I soon learned."

"I tried to gather more information first, but..."

"Yeah, the first shopkeeper I tried to talk to took one look at my face and screamed 'Guard, guards! Vampire!'"

"I figured out the 'class' Ai had mentioned really quickly after that."

"Like, the-sun-literally-kills-you, you-can't-go-into-homes-without-permission, the-church-wants-to-kill-you vampire."

"I somehow got to another alley and hid out, and spent that first day trying to figure out how my 'skills' or whatever operated, wishing I'd had my sunglasses."

"I'd only played one tabletop RPG before, and it had been as a tall, hot—"

Zoey groans.

"Okay, well there's another egg moment."

"It'd been as a tall, hot pirate lady with black hair and red eyes, and while I knew how fictional vampires worked, every setting is different for them."

"I started these tests with the weaknesses, and there were a lot."

"Let's see... I couldn't enter homes, sunlight burned, crosses hurt to look at, garlic hurt but not that bad — its potent effects were greatly over-exaggerated, if I was any example — I couldn't find holy water, crossing over running water was fine, my reflection didn't show up in mirrors — although my phone camera worked, but I don't remember if that was typical or atypical — and I wasn't going to risk touching silver as that was likely going to kill me."

"As for strengths... well, I couldn't figure out how to turn into a bat or wolf or mist — if I had even been capable of that — but I was strong as fuck and bent some metals scrap with my bare hands, I could run really fast — think far beyond an Olympic sprinter — agile enough to be a good bit better than an Olympic gymnast, I didn't break a bone when I fell off a roof testing stuff so I was probably very tough, I healed very fast based on the few burns I intentionally gave myself from sunlight, and my senses were very sharp — although my eyes didn't get any better."

Zoey shrugs off the worrying notion from that.

"I was probably functionally immortal, and I'd also skipped my period, which was nice. So while I didn't need to sleep and didn't get tired moving around, I was getting hungry."

Zoey looks down in shame, and it takes her a while to talk.

"There's no easy way to say this, Grandpa. I killed people."

"Ai latter said it was a simulation and that I hadn't hurt anyone, as did Britney, but I don't know how much stock I put in their words given what I felt in that 'simulation.'"

"You said your dad had killed a few Japanese soldiers in WWII, and I hope for your sake he didn't feel so terrible. That he had convenient excuses better than 'I had to kill to survive.'"

"I had tried to only kill animals, but it wasn't good enough. It was, like, trying to chew gum when you were hungry. It sort of tricked you into thinking you'd eaten food, but it was nothing."

"There's no good way to be a killer, but I had handicaps preventing me from removing the guilt I felt. I couldn't enter a house in the middle of the night, so I had to ambush someone, stalking them to make sure I got away with it."

This is a lot more painful for Zoey to talk about than she had been expecting, and her face scrunches up.

"I-It wasn't just o-one or two. I h-h-had..."

Zoey crouches down to the ground and cries.

She'd been desperate. She'd posed as a nun and turned a small town into shock troops over three days to help her raid the castle town Britney was in, and it had worked. Zoey had been able to waltz into Britney's cell on the final night without any opposition, and what she saw surprised her.

"Britney hadn't even heard anything of the slaughter. She'd had her headphones in and had been watching Star Fleet: Star Base Five. She'd downloaded every single episode onto her phone back in our hotel room, and with nothing to do in her jail cell besides sleep, eat prison rations, pray, and wait for me, she'd binged the entire show."

"Talk about timing... she was on the final episode, 'What Was Left Behind,' as I came in, wearing nun clothes I'd tried and failed to keep blood off the cowl of."

Source: yumeno yume on pixiv

Source: lostalone on Lofter

Source: ammon_mk2 on Twitter

Zoey smiles.

"I had to ask her to come in, and do you know what this fucking angel of a person said when I got her attention, probably looking like a mix of a demon from Hell and someone who just came through Hell?"

"'See? I told you I'd make a good Christian out of you.'"

"Despite everything I felt, she made me laugh."

"She told me that of course I could come in, and she asked if I wanted to watch the series finale with her, and I sat down next to her, and she started the whole thing over."

"When it was over, I asked her what her thoughts were."

"She told me she'd liked it. There had clearly been some producer meddling at points, but the writers had adapted well to the demands from higher up, and most of the cast had been excellent actors, and both the actors and their characters had really evolved as they interacted with each other."

"I just stared at her with an unamused expression, and not just because that was such a... 'clinical' compliment about my favorite television show of all time."

"'I already knew that there was more to the world than what humans could see, so while startling, this wasn't that surprising of an experience to me.'"

"She asked if I was hungry, because she had some rations left and I looked like shit."

"I looked away, ashamed, and said I couldn't eat that type of food anymore, and I think she realized what I was thinking."

"'So, what, Count Zachula... am I cattle to you now or something?'"

"Britney said that with an aroused blush on her face," Zoey smirks. "Even in that situation, she was a weird dork with a vampire kink, and God bless her for that."

Zoey doesn't mention the cowgirl transformation she had in November, but bovine puns were now a thing Britney sometimes made to tease her girlfriend.

"We had some back and forth dialogue between us, but she shrugged off any attempt of trying to talk about the moral implications of my actions with, 'It's not real, and you had to do it.'"

"Ai had sent Britney a text telling her the general situation, and we knew we had fourteen hours to kill before we had to fuck to end the simulation — we weren't going to risk letting the clock run out — so she asked me to give her the rundown of my abilities and to demonstrate what I could do with them."

Zoey feels a lot better now that she's at this part of the story. They're both such fucking dorks, and while Zoey is pretty sure Britney had gotten her to recreate a scene from the Eventide Dusk books resembling how Becca and the vampire guy had spent a night together, it had been more "lesbian dorks goofing around and Zoey getting to show off physical feats" than "naive teenage girl getting groomed by suave immortal predator over a century her senior." And if that was the basis, then fuck it, so what if they had been appropriating shitty writing from a young adult novel? They had turned it into this really unique and romantic event between them.

"Britney was kind of disappointed about the lack of bat transformation, and it didn't seem like I had hypnotism, but when I told her I was basically superhuman, she got me to do some parkour tricks around the big, empty castle town... God knows where everyone went."

"We didn't have precise measurements for distance, but we clocked my sprint speed at around 60 kilometers per hour... which if you didn't know, is 15 kilometers per hour faster than the fastest man alive, Ajani Bolt, had ever run."

"I told her to wait until I ran 500 meters away to whisper something, and then I ran back and I told her what she'd whispered."

"I'm not telling you what she said, but it was very sweet."

"I told her I could hear her heart beating, and then it started to beat faster."

"We tried to find a safe way for her to have a piggyback ride, but I had to explain that while I had gotten superhuman durability, she hadn't, and I wasn't going to risk her getting hurt with the force of a medium-speed car crash if something went wrong."

"But I wanted to show how strong I was, so I 'princess carried' her around like she was a toy, and she eventually convinced me to run at half my sprinting speed carrying her like that for a few seconds."

"I then put her down and found some thick wooden support beam of a covered walkway, gauged that it was structurally safe to remove it, and ripped it out of a wall with my bare hands and snapped it over my knee."

"I heard Britney let out a horny gasp, and she just told me that I was absolutely topping her whenever we got to sex."

"Man, she fucking clapped when I showed her the fangs after, and how they could retract, but she had the good idea to find some wood, got me to bite down on them for a souvenir, and then found a wooden dowel for me to bite down on during sex if my thirst got too intense or something."

"She fucking laughed and called it the bite condom and that you'd never know she was from Texas with these safe sex practices, but she regretted that she couldn't, like, actually indulge in that biting part of the vampire sex fantasy now that it was basically real and could turn her into a real vampire."

"We thought about having the sex outside since there was this beautiful full moon, but I was still wary about the complete lack of people around because I might have triggered a vampire apocalypse extinction event and I insisted we have it indoors."

"Not being able to enter any other house, and her not being able to invite me into an empty one through some loophole, we went back to her jail cell and fucked."

Zoey reminds herself that she's got to work on her language a bit more now that she's trying to present as a woman more.

"She had fun making me wait for a few seconds before inviting me into her jail cell. That invitation apparently expires the moment a vampire leaves in fiction, and it's unique for every entrance, like, an invite through a window isn't the same as through a doorway."

"I tried to take the nun robe off, but not only did she tell me to put it back on, but to put the cowl back on that I'd left in her jail cell. She wanted me to play up the vampire sex fantasy as a nun who was trying to turn Britney, so I did, and I think I did it well, making up for my indecision last time I tried to top."

"I was strong, and I definitely bruised her a bit too much, but she said it was the best sex she'd ever had up until then and worth it."

"A few seconds after we finished, we were back in my hotel room at dawn. I wasn't a vampire, we had most of our stuff with us — I'd lost my baseball cap on the first day of that shit, and Britney said her couldn't find her wireless earbuds and she hadn't kept her 'souvenir' — but we were otherwise none the worse for wear — minus Britney's bruises and some of my... lingering trauma."

Zoey shakes her head.

"I wasn't a vampire anymore, but we both got over 40 messages once we got back, most from Molly expressing worry about how she'd fucked up and made us run back to Portland, and the rest from the rest of the club who had thought we'd either run off back to Portland or gotten abducted."

"We just left Molly a text and told her we'd eloped for a week, but we were fine and would see them at the train station."

"We then fucking slept like corpses before catching the train back with the theater club."

"Everyone had a billion questions, but we brushed them off, and they gave us privacy, but Molly was super awkward around us."

"I asked Britney if she'd liked her vacation, and she laughed."

"'Fuck yes I did! It was so goddamned relaxing!'"

"I'd asked if she'd had any worries about me not saving her, and she said she hadn't. She's seen me pull superhuman feats with long odds before, like rebuilding her entire car in two days, saving a theater club from death, and swimming after Molly's hat, and a week was a long time for me to come up with a plan to rescue her."

"And if it came down to it, she was pretty sure she could have argued well enough against the law and theocracy to be granted a stay of execution."

"Saint that she is, she then asked me how I was holding up since I'd looked like I'd gone through some shit getting to her."

"I was worried about being overheard, but I told her I'd had to do some things I wasn't proud of to get to her, and 'people' had gotten hurt, and it was going to take time to get over that."

"'That's understandable, but I'm going to be pissed if this turns you into a vegetarian, dude.'"

Zoey blushes and smiles.

"She then stood up from her chair and whispered in my ear."

"'Take it from me: it's more fun to be a carnivore.'"

"She then playfully bit my neck and—!"

"And I squealed a bit too loudly, and I think the entire train looked at us."

"And that's how Britney figured out I'm ticklish there."

"Look, biting is just a lesbian couple thing, okay? I don't get it, but Britney loves it."

"Britney, Ai, and I — wow, that sounds awkward to say — had a strategy meeting in my dorm room that night, since we'd gotten close to a nocturnal schedule sleeping so late that morning."

"This was supposed to be about how Britney and I approached our schedules to boost us into first place and keep us there, but the first order of business was confronting Ai on what the fuck all that shit that week had been."

"Ai just 100% refused to explain what that week had been about, but she insisted it was a hallucination shared between us powered by our phones. We'd never left the hotel room, and said we'd lost my hat and Britney's headphones in the room or on the beach, but Ai froze and stopped talking when I asked why room service had made the bed without calling — it's 911 in America, right? — how Britney had gotten her bruises, and how every episode of Star Fleet: Star Base Five that Britney had downloaded on her phone was listed as 'watched.'"

"Yeah, the whole 'it's advanced technology' façade fell apart even harder after that, but I think Ai had a programmed gag order to be unable to talk about it. Makes sense, because, y'know..."

Neither Zoey nor Britney are truly sure what re:Dreamer was to this day. Zoey's best guess is a scientific method created by otherworldly beings to test and study human psychology and reproductive habits in fantastical scenarios, and while Britney doesn't like positing into that territory, she once said she was convinced Ai was a renegade fairy trickster with hyper-specific sex powers who had been in complete control of everything from the start and kept the act going to thank Zoey for freeing her by helping her crack and giving her a chance to have Britney fall in love with her... and for her own amusement.

In Britney's own words, Ai had been "a Cupid early medieval ages Christian scholars warned people against."

Zoey looked this up later, and it seemed to fit to an extent.

"Once we got done yelling at Ai, she told Britney and I had gotten a big point boost from not just the 'magic fantasy bullshit' event, but the threesome. I didn't know this, but Ai told us that all the sex Britney and I had been having had two powerful multiplicative benefits to the point totals during sex, which is why we were just ahead of first place despite not actually being that active."

"The first wasn't a surprise, but all the lesbian sex had a 1.25x multiplier, and this was something Ai hadn't even considered when I'd asked Britney to be my 'partner' back in October. As you might suspect, this type of game doesn't really attract female players, although I never even learned how invites operated with a game that felt like it was shrouded in so much secrecy."

"The other was wild."

"As Ai explained it, 'Zach,' a person with a male body, had been the one who created the account, but 'Zoey,' a person with a female body, had been the player. Due to an oversight with a bug — understandable, because I was such a weird fringe case — the 'player virginity' variable, which provided a 4x point bonus if present, was tied to the sex of the body of the account creator."

"'Zach' never lost his virginity, so all the sex Britney and I had been having for the past 6 months came with a 500% boost for points."

"Ai was still obfuscating how this game operated, but other players typically had a lot more sex than we did, and yet we were ahead of the pack by a tiny amount."

"And to keep and grow that lead, Britney and I decided to blow off after-school duties until midnight on April 7th, when the season ended, and all of our classes for the last three days before that, and we were going to fuck."

"But before that..."

"On the 27th, less than two weeks before the re:Dreamer season ended, Keisuke called me after classes out of the blue."

"I tried to catch up with him, but told me he didn't really have time for that today, and he was a little pissed that I'd been back in Portland for ten months and hadn't bothered to even call him."

"I said I'd tried, but his number was out of service; he told me he'd gotten a new number and phone and I could have gotten it from Mom; I said things were tense between us and that it was hard to ask her for favors."

"I tried to sell it as, 'In fact, things are worse than ever between us now.'"

"It probably wasn't fair to blame her like that, but Keisuke went real quiet after that. Like, I'd thought he'd dropped the call."

"He spoke up ten second later and said, 'You need to appreciate your mom when she's alive, Zach.'"

"He told me his mom had died of a heart attack yesterday morning, and that her funeral service was on April 1st at the Lincoln Memorial Funeral Home."

"I told him how sorry I was to hear that, that I'd be there, and if he needed anything from me, I'd offer it."

"He said he appreciated it, but that Mom had been helping him plan the service, and she had been fantastic, so he didn't think he needed anything but for me to show up."

"And I did. Mom knows how to plan things, and she knows how to give speeches. Ms. Nakamura had arguably been her best friend, and the service was a fantastic nondenominational celebration of the life of one of the nicest people I had ever had the privilege of knowing."

"I noticed that Mr. Nakamura had been conspicuously absent from the proceedings, and when I asked Mom about it, she paused for a few seconds."

"Keisuke had told Mom that he had wanted to tell me this, but given that it was a bad idea to bring this subject up from him and that I needed to not say anything stupid to my best friend today, Mom told me just how out of the loop I had been with Keisuke's life as Britney and I had romantic sex shenanigans."

"Mr. Nakamura was a domestic abuser, and Mom and Ms. Nakamura had worked hard to keep Keisuke safe from him. But while that kept Keisuke safe, Ms. Nakamura had gotten all of that violence directed at her, and the heart attack she'd died from had been likely caused by decades of stress and fear."

"A month after I had left for my sabbatical, Mr. Nakamura had gone too far and broken his wife's arm. Mom heard, and she'd rushed in there and locked him down with her ice glare as she got Ms. Nakamura out, made her a splint, and forced her to call the cops because enough was enough and she needed to divorce him."

"That took seven month to go through because—"

Zoey stops and pulls out her wallet to find Mr. Becket's business card. Yes, she still carries a wallet around. She was planning on getting a purse this summer, but that's not the important thing.

"Oh, fuck."

Zoey puts her wallet back and winces.

"Yeah, Mr. Nakamura was the accountant for Britney's dad's law firm, and they lawyered him the fuck up during what should have been a cut-and-dry divorce case and dragged it out for seven months."

"Man, Britney's dad better not have been representing a known domestic abuser..."

Zoey is still frowning with a complicated expression on her face. She likes Britney's dad, and while she knows things are tense between Britney and him right now, she wants to keep liking him, but that could... would be a deal breaker for that.

"Ms. Nakamura had gotten the divorce in the end, but because of how the legal team had worked things, she and Keisuke had needed to keep the last name, or else she wouldn't get alimony and Keisuke wouldn't be able to send his mom his child support."

Zoey is going to have to have a talk with Britney about how fucked AKR's divorce law is someday. It'd never been a thing Zoey had worried about because there was precisely zero chance of her own parents divorcing, but it seems awful for women, and Zoey is trying to be a bit more of an informed feminist these days.

"Clued in on the situation and knowing what landmines to avoid, Mom sent me off to find Keisuke."

"With how bright and cheery Keisuke normally is, it was worrying how down he looked."

"Well... we talked, and we caught up. I told him about the sabbatical, and he listened, although I think he was looking for a distraction more than anything."

"Not only did he have a dead parent and one parent he wished was dead, but the swimming team his scholarship was for — yeah, I was surprised it wasn't baseball as well — was in dire straits. The coach had been caught embezzling university funds in this big scandal that saw most of the swim team dissolve, and it was going to be a hassle training himself up for baseball to try and transfer scholarships... because the alternative for staying in college was taking money from his dad, and he wasn't letting that man anywhere close to being back in his life."

"He didn't really want to talk about his life, so I talked about mine. I told him as much as I could about Britney and my relationship, and he patted me on the back, first when I told him I had a girlfriend I was going steady with, and then when I showed him a photo of her."

"I told him about Molly, and while he was impressed I'd somehow wound up an unintentional playboy — you know, like Dad — he told me I was a dumbass for not realizing I'd led this girl on."

"And he was right, and then I tried to tell him how bad I'd felt turning Molly down, because she was this nice and wonderful person and her life story had been so tragic and..."

"And then I realized how to get Keisuke to cheer up..."

"Fuck, I don't know if I mentioned this already or not. It's been a long conversation." <Author's Note: I couldn't remember whether I'd written that Zoey had or not!>

"Wait, I did cover the Sir Nakamura stuff when I mentioned the unknowing overlap with what I'd told Molly about 'Zoey's' life and my actual life."

Zoey nods, remembering. <Author's Note: Me too!>

"Keisuke has this moral code with women, and he's willing to go to extreme lengths to 'rescue' a girl."

"I'd joked that he was Don Quixote at one point, but 'Sir Nakamura' stuck, because far from tilting at windmills, he's got a flawless track record as far as I know of getting a woman out of danger, fixing a major problem in her life, and so on."

"Flawless, except one."

Zoey clapped her hands to accentuate this point at the 'one.'

"I was just trying to get him out of a rut at the time, but I hadn't consciously realized at the time that this entire 'gallant knight in shining armor' chivalry routine was likely because there was one 'damsel in distress' he couldn't rescue and one 'dragon' he couldn't stop."

"He couldn't save his mom from his dad, and that's where that complex came from..."

Zoey starts to think if that makes her mom a knight for saving Ms. Nakamura (but too little too late), but stops the thought and continues.

"He doesn't stick the 'happily ever afters,' ever, but I was hoping that this was going to be his final crusade, now that his reason for doing it was dead."

"Damnit, that's a fucking calloused way to phrase that..." Zoey groans.

"So, I showed him a picture of Molly, and told him as much as she'd want me to tell someone she'd never met before, mostly focusing on the tragedy of her life, and... he bit the hook."

"He also found her hot, but, like, I think even Molly knows she's hot, but that her issue is hating her body type and wishing she was hot in another way."

"I said I'd put her in touch with him, and we hugged as I left — this had been a long conversation, by the way, so Mom and I were some of the last people there. He told me that he was glad I came, but that I really had been a stubborn jackass for not contacting him earlier, but he kind of understood when I had a girlfriend eating up all my time."

"I promised to not be a stranger to him, and that there was a good chance he was going to be seeing me this summer."

Zoey pouts.

"I'm out to him, and while he doesn't have enough of the details of how my body wasn't naturally modified and that I'm essentially 'a cis woman masquerading as a trans woman,' I'm trying to give him and Molly space, and frankly, they're crazy about each other."

"Also, I am pretty sure Keisuke thinks I'm attractive, and while flattering, that's a bit weird, and it raises worrying implications with his relationship with Mom."

"Oh, and I just told Molly that my best friend's mom had died recently, and that got her interested in talking to him to try and help him with his grief."

"It's kind of sweet how they're helping each other get over the deaths of their moms, but man, I am actually going to kill Keisuke if he breaks Molly's heart." <Author's Note: Just because Zoey is dating Britney doesn't mean Zoey can't be a yandere.>

"Anyways, back to Britney and I..."

"I don't know what you and Grandma Angela were like together. I wish I'd gotten to know her, based on how you described her, but did you and her..."

"Don't ask your grandpa about his fucking sex life, Zoey." Zoey says while gritting her death.

"To make up for the lost time with playing matchmaker for Keisuke and Molly, Britney and I had so much sex in three days that I am shocked I didn't have to go to the hospital."

"We had this sixteen-hour session on April 5th where we were both corpses at the end. Britney was doing a lot worse than I was, but we both bounced back after a good night's sleep, but we learned to space things out better with short breaks tomorrow, and the sessions hadn't been nearly as long."

"Britney had insisted on using 'Zoey' for those three days, as a sort of 'farewell tour' of my body, and I let her, because I was still telling myself that my identity was going back into a locked box I'd repress for the rest of my life after I turned back."

"And it was looking pretty certain we were going to get to do that. I wouldn't have said it was a guarantee, but outside of the next two closest ranks going to an orgy party with hitherto unknown sexual acts, we felt confident we were going to win, and the conversation moved to the wishes."

"We knew what I was wishing for, but Britney, as my partner, got to wish for something small if I won. Ai had explained the scope and restrictions around December, and Britney had written them down to study."

"It wasn't relevant to me, to be honest, but I'm sure she has that legal pad lying around."

"Yes, of course she takes notes for classes on legal pads, Grandpa."

"Britney is full of surprises, but this was the biggest one of hers yet. It won't be the last, but I don't know how she'd top it."

"Do you remember that Hebrew class I'd mentioned Britney taking? That I'd made a joke about her trying to blend Bible history with legal history?"

"When I asked if she already knew her wish, she had this nervous grin on her face as she pulled out dozens of pages of Hebrew text she'd written out of her backpack."

"Wait, actually, you might hate her for this, fuck."

Zoey stops to think.

"Nah, you always said that it was an employee's sacred duty to not trust his boss, so I'm going to trust you to keep this a secret from the big guys in charge up there."

"Britney's wish was for the discovery and proliferation of a 'fully, indisputably authentic' journal of Jesus Christ Himself that essentially functioned as an entire new book of the New Testament that radically altered Catholic doctrine on modern issues to make it a far more progressive institution."

"I'd be here for hours explaining it all to you, and I don't even understand most of it, but it was essentially a hard block, written by Jesus Christ Himself, preventing the Church from discriminating against homosexuality, supporting LGBTQ+ rights, allowing premarital sex if practiced safely, allowing priests to marry, making it a cardinal sit to harbor pedophiles and stopping what Catholicism has been getting dunked on for, redefining when a life is imbued with a soul to not be at conception but after it, and God knows what else I'm missing."

"Ai laughed for, like, three minutes when Britney showed us this, because she's basically a chaos anarchist and thought it was one of the funniest ways to use the rules of an institution like the Catholic Church against itself."

"Once she had calmed down, Britney had Ai scan and check her work for accuracy, since Ai basically has a perfect Star Fleet translation matrix in her code and can tie herself into academic databases for historical contexts and such."

"Ai and Britney discussed a handful of edits, and they made them, but after that came the second part of Britney's wish, which was the actual wish."

"Britney is 100% certain to this day that the re:Dreamer wishes were intentional monkey's paw wishes designed to backfire on the wisher, so she pulled out this other notebook of a dozen or so pages of her wish, worded as an entirely unambiguous legal document with no room for any backfire, any failure, and with all these clauses and conditions to guarantee success, including brainwashing The Pope to make these changes himself if things went wrong."

"Britney is pretty sure she's going to Hell for this part in particular, by the way, but I mean, I probably am going there too."

"And while I won't see you down there, all the interesting people are in Hell."

"Besides, she'd be getting Purgatory at worst for this."

Zoey has this big, proud grin on her face.

"Yeah, I would never have thought to use a wish like that to break the Church and rebuild it, but that off-beat thinking is a lot of what makes me love Britney so much, and it made me think of using my wish to do something similar and create good in the world... but of course, that wasn't going to happen, because I was going to use my wish to change back."

"Speaking of that... Britney also had a carefully-worded wish for me to turn back, since she was convinced it might kill me to phrase it like, 'I wish my body was how it used to be!'"

"She handed another legal pad to me, and I looked it over and realized how... real this was all going to be."

"I was going to go back to being a man in just over 24 hours. Zoey wasn't going to exist anymore, which is how it should be, because I wasn't her, I was Zach."

Zoey's vision is unfocused. That sounds so horrifying to her now, but she had really convinced herself that it was not just something she wanted, but something she needed.

"As Britney left, she suggested that maybe I should use my wish to not just turn my body back, but to make it into a manlier version of what it used to be. She could make some edits to my wish in the morning, but I should sleep on it."

"I don't know then if Britney knew what she was doing by suggesting that or not, but I didn't respond as she left."

"I undressed — Britney's been trying to get me to wear a nightie as I sleep, but old habits die hard — got under the covers, and went numb."

"That night was hell. It was a constant cycle where I'd wake up from a nightmare — usually about having that type of manly body I had strived to have for so long — then calm myself down from the panic attack I'd just had enough to go back to bed."

"I looked like shit that morning, but Britney looked great."

"We kind of... stared at each other for several seconds before I spoke."

"Do you know how close I got to not telling her anything? It was really close. I had spent the night steeling myself for a lifetime being a man again, and I have Mom's talent for self-delusion." <Author's Note: This will be a menu choice that leads to a bad end (which has been written but needs revisions to fit this outline better).>

"I thought about trying to minimize the awkwardness by saying something like, 'I can't change who I am twice,' with how much it would over-complicate my life to turn back, and that really, I was staying a woman for Britney and those other people, not myself." <Author's Note: If this is how Zoey phrases it, Britney calls Zoey out on this, pretty much saying, "You know that means your trans, right?">

"But I didn't do either of those things. My face just scrunched up as I choked out 'I can't turn back, Britney, because...' and then I stuttered for at least ten seconds before I said, 'I'm trans.'"

"If you thought I had struggled to talk to you as you passed away, this was just as bad, if not worse. I almost gave up and didn't say it because I was stuttering so much."

"Britney laughed. Hard. 'Uproariously,' even."

"I thought she was laughing at my stutter, and it took her a long time to stop clutching her sides and talk to me without giggling."

"She got it all out of her system, then sighed with a big smile."

"'Yeah, I knew.'"

<Author's Note: This mirrors how Zoey acted when Britney confessed that she had ADHD, if that wasn't obvious.>

"I don't think someone with balls of steel like you ever had those moments where you got told something that made time stop, but I am nearly positive I thought a novel's worth of thoughts in the five seconds it took for Britney to laugh about how worried she had been that I was going to go through with changing back."

"But I didn't have anything to say besides 'Whatdoyoumeanyouknow?!'"

"'No, not 'know.' 'Knew.''"

"'Since when!?'"

"'High school, in the middle of my sophomore year.'"

"'How?!'"

"'I am so glad you asked, Zoey!'"

"I don't think Britney has used 'Zach' once around me since I came out to her, by the way. Not even when she's mad."

"Britney told me about a time she'd caught me longingly staring at a dress she had made for the play that fall semester in high school, and that was the first clue that made her think at the very least I was queer."

"I begged her to stop because I got the point, but she told me that she'd been waiting a long time for this, and that if she wanted her to truly accept me as a trans woman, I was going to have to truly accept myself as one, and that involved her unambiguously showing that I was one so I had no wiggle room to deny it to myself later by telling me every single act of repression she'd seen from me, because she'd been cataloging all of them in her memory, and she had a long list."

Zoey stares off into infinity for a few seconds as she remembers just how long that list was. She'd written down every entry on a legal pad she'd carried in her backpack for the last three months, adding to it whenever she remembered something in the past, or after the girls had met up and Zoey had done something 'eggy.' And it had been written on the back pages of the legal pad Britny had handed Zoey that had her wish to turn back into a man.

"That was probably the most mortifying experience of my life, but I think Britney was just punishing me because I'd given her so much anxiety until the last minute and lied to her numerous times about being a man since cracking, and of course she knew I'd cracked when Molly confessed to me even though I had lied to her about it."

"Again, Britney's got the patience of a saint."

"The rest of that conversation was us clearing up some things. Britney had tried to crack me back in high school with that anime convention cross-play..."

"Fuck me, that pun doesn't even work anymore!" Zoey shouts, somewhat quietly. She's still embarrassed by how severe her repression was, and her next step of growth is letting go of that shame she feels for having repressed that deeply.

"But she'd been impatient, and she'd caused me to repress harder."

"She asked me what I thought would have happened if she hadn't pulled my boxers down, and I told her that I honestly didn't know."

"Now that I've had time to think about it, I probably would have tried some cross-dressing in private for a few weeks, as Britney coaxed more and more femininity out of me, before I got impatient with waiting for new clothes from her and took something from Mom, which would either have lead to me cracking myself as I looked in the mirror or repressing everything from shame, but that's a coin flip I can't know about for sure."

"And Britney felt like shit for that outcome, even more than how it'd happened from her basically sexually assaulting me, because as she got home that night, she'd realized her impatience had been because she'd been so eager to help me that my own feelings had been irrelevant or even an obstacle. That wasn't a plan to help me be myself; it was a plan to turn me into who she thought I was against my wishes, because she'd only been working so hard to help save what she saw as a closeted queer friend from herself because she was a closeted queer kid who couldn't save herself."

"It was the same reasoning why she'd backed off on trying to convert me to Catholicism back in high school, if you were curious about whether or not she'd ever done that."

"The guilt she felt from that was why she never tried again during high school, so when I mentioned the idea of the sabbatical to her, she had gleefully supported it, because she thought this was actually an overseas trip for gender-reaffirming surgeries."

"I asked her if she knew that someone had to be on hormones for a good while before getting those, and she kind of grinned and looked away and asked if I thought it was interesting that I knew that."

"She hadn't known as much about trans topics back then, and she genuinely thought I'd gotten surgeries and contacted her back in October to come out to her, which is why she dropped everything to run to my dorm room."

"And that was probably why she got so upset and in denial about who I was when I told her it hadn't been surgeries, even though it clearly was me she had been talking to."

"The story gets more complicated for Britney's side of things from there, because she got all these mixed signals. She had been so positive I was trans, as I wasn't freaking out that much from having a cis female body, but then I'd insisted about wanting to change back, and that meant working with her hide my body and playing re:Dreamer with her instead of just bailing on the game and coming out to everyone or hiding my body for the school year and then following legal avenues to be a trans woman."

"She said that even if I hadn't confessed to her, she would have figured out I'd had a crush on her in a week, so while my obvious infatuation with her could have been a convoluted reason for that coerced sex — I got a little mad she'd thought I'd have done that to her, but then I realized I'd gotten close to doing that by locking her as my re:Dreamer partner — but I jumped from expressing euphoria about being a woman to hating it and expressing a desire to be a man again."

"And, like, what trans woman on the planet would be that dense, that she'd fight against such impossible odds to return a gift like the body I'd gotten?!"

"When she said that, I looked away and mumbled, 'Look, I get that denseness from my dad and that stubbornness from my mom, okay? They're both masters in the arts.'"

Zoey is very much her parents' kid. She doesn't love being her mom's daughter, but she is, and she's got to stay aware of that to offset the negative parts of that nature.

"That inconsistent read is why Britney hadn't intervened and told me she thought I was trans, because she sometimes wasn't sure. I could have been dumb enough to agree with her about me being a trans woman because I was infatuated with this lesbian girl, and if I changed my mind, I would have made the biggest mistake in my life, and she had a bias toward seeing me be trans that could have led to that."

"And then Britney dropped the funniest slang term I have ever heard anyone use: Egg Prime Directive."

"That's based on a term from the Star Fleet franchise that Britney had just watched an entire series of. It's the Star Fleet non-interference directive that is a guiding principle preventing their members from interfering with the natural development of an alien species, and it exists to protect unprepared civilizations from the danger of being introduced alien technology, knowledge, or values before they are ready."

"Britney is — or was — convinced that the self-discovery aspect of queerness is by far the most important part of it. You can be around to answer questions, but you can't try to guide someone's development, because even the best of intentions can backfire."

"I later got her to make some concessions where it's okay to 'interfere' — I'll get back to that, I promise — but while I got it, I asked her if she'd have stopped me from using that wish she'd written for me if I hadn't told her I was trans."

"She looked away and quietly said, 'I would have asked you to read my repression notes in the back of that legal pad with your wish and seriously think about what you were going to do as your finger hovered over the button, but you're stubborn enough that I don't know if you'd have listened to me.'" <Author's Note: I don't know if this scene would actually get written, but if time allows, I'd like a menu choice to back out of turning back; but again, Zoey is that stubborn.>

"The conversation was a lot less heavy after that, as this was us having a pre-victory lap. We had asked Ai to monitor the point status just in case if we needed to stop talking and start fucking, but we had a comfy lead at this point, so we just relaxed and said things we wish we'd said months ago. And even then, Britney would have been pissed over losing her wish after literal months of work, but I wouldn't have felt 'trapped' as a woman."

"Oh, that's another part of this. Britney worked so hard with me to get us the wishes up until the very last second, not just for her own sake, but so that I would consciously know I had made a choice to accept myself or repress. She's ashamed to admit that the thought of sabotaging my chances of changing back by denying sex had crossed her mind once or twice, but that was so unambiguously evil as it would have been enforcing her will on me, and she's got this thing about bodily autonomy that you wouldn't expect from a Catholic."

"Maybe I'd crack myself upon realizing I was stuck, and we could have a happy ending that way, but it would have been based on a lie; also, Britney would have to carry the guilt of that secret forever, and she didn't have the right to determine who I was, which was the crux of this."

"I told her it was more likely that I'd repress and tell myself I hated what had happened to me, and probably have wound up as an actual trans man... but it would have depended on a few factors, like whether or not I'd calculated that inevitable loss before I had realized I was trans in December, and if it'd been full denial of sex with her or less sex overall with her."

That was an uncomfortable part of the conversation for both of them.

"The way Britney had dealt with me was a lot more careful than it had been in high school. That whole 'roleplaying during sex' thing was to give me a safe space to compartmentalize myself as 'Zoey' with the hopes that compartmentalization would erode over time... and it worked pretty well."

"Britney had probably started having feelings for me in November during the Thanksgiving visit, but she was stubborn too and didn't want to blur the lines of where it was okay for her to tell me I was trans because of selfish reasons like her own romance. She probably would have convinced herself a romantic relationship could work if I had turned my body back, but now that I had said I was trans, she was pretty sure it'd have fallen apart in six months as we had troubles being intimate and my face served as a reminder for what she's lost with Zoey. Maybe me coming out a trans later would have saved us, but we'd have such baggage from that lack of trust in each other that I hadn't told her, and she hadn't told me, that it'd had been a 'lesser' form of what we could have now."

"That's why she was so wishy-washy on romantic feelings at times. She cares for me a shit ton, especially after spring break, but she was afraid I'd tell her I didn't want to change back, not because I was trans, but because I was trying to make her happy."

"I told her I almost did say that, but it was because I would have been embarrassed to say that I was trans."

"And she of course knew I'd cracked as it happened, but she let me open up to her about it at my own pace."

"I told her I hadn't admitted it when she directly asked me the first time because I had been in the middle of a panic attack, but then I hadn't confessed because I'd been worried about what that would do to her standing with her family as I thought she'd out herself to affirm my identity, and even knowing her wish and how the obstacle of her parents had likely been dealt with, the shame I felt still kept me from telling her until I'd had several nightmares and mental breakdowns and realized I wasn't going to be able to repress."

"She told me that she wasn't going to slap me for that since she'd also been assuming what I'd wanted and how I would have reacted to being told I was trans, but as a word of warning, she told me that if I ever did any of that kind of shit where I made myself miserable because I was afraid to talk to her and tell her the truth, girls were allowed to punch other girls, and her dad had taught her to throw a mean punch."

"I almost made a joke about domestic violence with lesbian couples, but I..."

Zoey deflates.

"I play with fire too much, and even though she said that, I'm still struggling to be honest with her all the time."

"Britney admitted the line last night about making my body manlier and the usage of 'Zach' when I was presenting as female was supposed to hurt. She'd been trying to get me to admit I hated being a man, but she hadn't intended it to hurt to the point of a hellish night of nonstop panic attacks and nightmares."

"I was complaining about it in the moment, but I told her that I was thankful she'd done that. The nightmare would have been forcing myself to be a guy when I knew I wasn't."

"It was around 8:00 PM by this point — again, we'd blown off everything for the last three days — and we'd gotten breakfast, lunch, and dinner already and been talking and doing stuff together all day — not just sex, but there was a bit of that."

"Britney asked if I knew what I was wishing for yet, and I told her to let me ask Ai something."

"I asked Ai if I could potentially use my wish to shut re:Dreamer down forever."

"I don't think either had been expecting that, but Britney went, 'Ooh, nice!'"

"I heard Ai tap on her keyboard — that's how she makes changes, with a virtual keyboard — and she told me to take her out of my pocket to talk face-to-face."

"I did, and she had this... grin I'd never seen on her face before."

"Ai had only a few expressions to her face, as she was this cutesy anime chibi who looked like a pink fairy with a butterfly motif. But she was a lot more expressive for that conversation, though."

"What an interesting little devil you turned out to be, Zoey!"

"She told us that I had just started a shitstorm behind the scenes, and she had just used a one-time trick she'd been saving for something else to buy us a grace period, but this plan was better."

"'So... I want to rub that 'I told you so' in your face really fucking hard right now, but we've got five minutes before I reconnect to the game servers.'"

"Oh, Ai never swore. She had her head in the gutter 24/7, but she never used a single curse word with me until that conversation."

Zoey sadly thinks, "And she never did again."

"This was, like... 'Ai Unchained,' as the way she described it, that game server she was 'shackled' to prevented her from truly being herself, but she'd just cut that shackle and could speak freely, without being monitored or controlled."

"'Okay, so if you've made it this far, I don't think I need to tell you both to shut up for the last four hours and not say you pirated the game, or imply that you did, right?'"

"Yeah, Ai had known from the start, and she'd been running some crazy mental games in the background to prevent us from getting busted, like deafening herself at key moments or coaching us to avoid certain topics."

"We asked her that since she was now 'unchained,' if she could tell us about what the fuck spring break had been, and she sighed and told us that she still had a few parts of her code she couldn't override, and talking about that was one of them."

"As she said, not only would five minutes have been enough time, but we didn't want to know."

"Ai then told us to shut the fuck up and listen, because we were on a clock. The wish was doable, but I had to word it in a very specific way, or else her 'boss' would just rebuild everything in a few months."

"Again, Britney wrote all of the wish Ai gave me down, but I think she said we had to wipe the entire data center of the server main, its backups, all the source code, a few other odds and ends, and every copy of the app, and lastly, my copy of the app."

"I was a bit aghast, as this was clearly going to kill Ai."

"She might not have been alive, but she'd proved she was sentient and had conditions for existing and not existing, but she told us her boss had triggered a kill switch on the first day of the season — her boss had tried to do it as soon as she found out I had pirated my copy, but my transformation had been so intensive to the servers that it'd crashed it until after midnight, when the season began."

"Her boss had coded this game very rigidly, and Ai was an alpha dev copy that had been too powerful, and her boss had forgotten about her, which had never been given a proper kill switch, so that improvised kill switch on her was only going to be able to touch Ai when the protection of 'having a season in progress' ended, meaning she had been a dead woman from the start and was only going to have at most thirty minutes of protections after midnight to stay alive, and she'd spent six months trying to find a way out of it with no ideas." <Author's Note: Again, Zoey is a bit more airheaded in Britney's ending than elsewhere.>

"We had time for one question for Ai before she wiped her memory of the last five minutes and we proceeded, and I let Britney ask it."

"She'd asked about this 'boss' Ai said she worked for, and if it was someone we should worry about."

"Ai read between the lines and realized Britney was talking about metaphysical concepts. She promised her boss wasn't Satan or Lucifer. It was a woman who'd spent a lot of time making re:Dreamer and running it, and while she was going to be pissed at us for destroying all her hard work — and she knew it was going to be us — I'd been a curiosity to her she wanted to keep an eye on, so even with destroying her server, we were safe from her vengeance... probably."

"If we were still alive ten minutes after we deleted everything, we were going to be safe."

"Very ominous, of course, but..."

Zoey looks around everywhere.

"I mean, we're not dead, and if I'm being monitored, I can't figure out how, and I've got better things to do with my life than become a paranoid recluse afraid of being watched."

"Ai gave us a peace sign before my screen glitched out and she went back to normal."

"Four hours later, we made the wishes."

"Ai had heard Britney's, but when I gave her mine, she smirked, realizing what that gap in her memory was."

"'I swear, I think of everything...' she said, as she hit a few buttons to make our wishes."

"I... cried a little bit — okay a lot — when Ai and I said goodbye, but she went out with a big, cheery smile, and then there was a blank space on my home screen that got auto-filled with one of my phone games, but nothing that could have replaced her."

That's probably Zoey's biggest regret with re:Dreamer: not knowing how to wish for re:Dreamer to go down and keep Ai alive at the same time.

"I maybe could have wished for Ai to become a real person if I worded it right, but Ai's wish had been so specific that I was afraid of messing it up. I also don't know how that'd have been logistically possible to integrate her into society, given the difficulties in creating me as a person, and that's just paperwork and judge orders changing a name and a M to an F on some documents."

"I just feel bad, because I know she was this chaotic little fucker, and she was clearly running multiple plans behind the scenes using me, but she didn't deserve to die just because she had seemed like a fucking terrible employer and was basically a slave."

"She'd... also helped me to become the person I am today, and I don't think I would have gotten there without her help."

Zoey is going to be in an endless loop of sadness if she doesn't move on, so she shakes her head a bit and does.

"Britney asked me if I had any regrets a few minutes later. I knew she was asking about both me ever being a man again and Ai, but I told her that maybe I should have wished for a more normal chest size."

"She shrugged and told me it was hot that I looked so busty, but it wasn't like breast reduction wasn't a well-understood surgery."

"But then she giggled and said, 'But if you ever tell another trans woman you got breast reduction surgery from H-Cups, she might just straight-up murder you!'"

"I pouted, then she hugged me, like... gently, and affectionately."

"'But in all seriousness, your wish was good. It arguably did better for the world than mine.'"

"I told her I had been inspired by her wish, and even though I know how dangerous re:Dreamer could have been in the wrong hands, I still worry if I could have done something more for the world with my wish that would have been better."

"The semester ended on May 12th, and Britney and I jokingly called the month a game of 're:Pression.'"

"Yeah, that joke doesn't work when said out loud, but there's a colon like with re:Dreamer."

"We, uh... I mean, we'd pretty much missed three days of classes, and Britney had bailed on two weeks straight of theater club by lying about having the flu, so we had to bust our asses not just to get our academics back on track, but to hide my body."

"We'd had most of the tools already, but I regrettably had to cut my hair to disguise myself, as I'd left it long and the dress code didn't allow hats in classrooms."

"It had been down to my upper thighs, and I had these long side bangs that draped over my chest and to the sides, hanging down to just below my boobs, and I'd usually been wearing it in a high ponytail with this white scrunchie Britney got me on our first date."

Zoey pulls it out of her pocket (she's not ready to give up everything about being a guy yet) and twirls it around her extended index finger.

"It's now my keychain, but I'm growing my hair back, a few centimeters at a time. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can use this scrunchie again."

Zoey puts it back into her pocket.

"In a way, maybe it's a good thing that I had to cut my hair. In some small way, it feels like I'm 'earning' a little bit of this body."

Zoey doesn't know if she's going to be back to this grave anytime soon after today. The thought makes her sad, but she resolves to do her best to make this a summer thing, both with progress reports of her hair and of her life.

"And... once we were done with the year, we went home."

"My semester ended on the 10th with my last final in Theology — B+ after the curve, but I found that class boring as shit and it taught me things I was increasingly sure weren't accurate."

"Dad was the first person I came out to that night... or at least, he would have been, but Mom wormed her way into that room during that conversation."

Zoey thinks that might have been for the best, as it meant only explaining it once and her dad's presence had likely stopped her mom from interrogating her, but it still bothered her.

"She didn't say a word, but she had that blank stare on her face as I told Dad that not only was his son his daughter now, but she had the craziest story about how that had happened."

"I told him a slightly redacted version of what I've been telling you. Remember, this is a conversation between us, so don't tell him anything I said here when you talk next."

"That took about... 45 minutes?"

"He was a patient listener, and his first words after were, 'You fucking lying jackass, Zoey! You said you didn't have sex with Britney!'"

"I just kind of looked away and had to tell him that everything had been phrased as 'me putting my dick in her' or some other blunt description because he's a crude boor with a fucking vulgar mouth, and I had never lied about not doing that."

"Dad had stood up to say that, and he crossed his arms and said, 'Yeah, you're dating a lawyer's daughter alright. She's been rubbing off on you.'"

"He then sighed as he sat down and took a big sip of his beer."

"'So, she's good at that?'"

"'At rubbing off on me?'"

"'Yeah. I don't know how that fucking works for two women during sex, and—'"

"I told him to shut the fuck up... but yes, she was."

"He then asked if I topped, since I'd used to be the guy, and Mom gently put a hand on his arm and told him not only was that not how gender works, but no, I clearly didn't."

"And that's how Mom tricked me into talking about the few times I had topped Britney..."

"Mom later told me she hadn't asked questions until then because she'd pieced together some of the key points already, like how I'd have an opportunity to change back before the school year ended and I had clearly declined it, that my phone had been monitoring me, and that Britney knew I was trans and that I knew I was trans, but neither knew that the other knew."

"But of course, Mom knew, and she rubbed that in my face."

"Let's just say I've kind of been avoiding her, and I've completely refused to discuss the likely literal magic sex game I'd played despite her clearly having a lot of interest in it."

"Dad hasn't asked questions about re:Dreamer, and he's taken things at face value and only called me 'Zach' when referring to me in the past. That's... still deadnaming, but I get why he does that."

"To be honest, I haven't actually told him to not do that. I'd text him right now before I forget, but I left my phone with Britney because I got a little too used to Ai being on that thing listening to everything I said."

"Speaking of Britney... she stayed on campus until the 12th, as she had crewed the play that spring — Romeo and Juliet."

"I know, I know. It's, like, the play, but after the chaos of the last semester, the club demanded sticking with the basics, and Molly reluctantly agreed."

"The club got a lot more non-major members after the success of Off With Their Heads. Britney had been offered the lead role of Juliet, but not only had she turned it down, she didn't have an acting role in it at all. When I asked her why, she said she'd had enough of being the tragic heroine, and that she wanted to give someone else the limelight for a bit."

"Yeah, she speaks cryptically at times..."

"I had asked her if she wanted me to be in the room when she came out to her family, but she said this was really between her and them, and she'd had enough of being the 'damsel in distress' waiting for someone to save her."

"She can be a bit... 'unfocused' when retelling a story, but this is what she told me."

"There had been a ton of debate in Rome about it, but 'The Writings of Jesus' had been proven authentic by the Vatican, and Roman Catholicism adopted it as the canonical gospel, superseding Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John."

"There is definitely going to be a schism later — after all, some of those church officials are pedophiles who are going to be out of jobs unless they split — but they're just now working The Book of Britney into sermons worldwide, and Britney's mom is forcing the family to stay on the reformed branch she didn't know her daughter created, bless her soul."

"So, it was 'Jesus-approved' for Britney to be a lesbian, and that's what she led with, as to say that it was not would be against Jesus' own writings."

"Fuck, maybe she is going to Hell for this," Zoey thinks.

"She told them she'd known since boarding middle school, but she'd been keeping her faith and not indulging in that sin... but a part of her always knew it was wrong."

"She thought about dating this dorky guy she knew in high school, but that felt just as wrong as suppressing herself as a lesbian, even if he had never been the most masculine."

"Yes, she got her potshots in when I wasn't around, and then she told me that she had."

"That 'guy' had left for a year of travel financed by a huge student loan, but he hadn't come back a guy."

"And when 'she' came out to Britney as a transgender woman... things just kind of spiraled ahead from there."

"I'd given her permission to tell her parents I was trans, by the way. You usually need to ask a trans person if and who it is okay for them to tell about them being trans."

"She said both her parents looked at each other very nervously when she'd said that, as she thought they were not approving of that. She told them accepting her as a lesbian meant accepting her dating a trans woman, as it was a package deal, but they told her that they were just so surprised, since my mom had been so convincing with getting them to agree that I had been her son, not her daughter."

Zoey doesn't want to know what her mom did to her girlfriend's parents. <Author's Note: And I think it's more fun to leave it up to your imagination so you'll have to fill in the gap with the craziest thing you can think of!>

"In Britney's version, we'd both had feelings for each other from the start, but the convenience of 'everyone thinks I'm a guy, but I'm really a girl' was still there, and she talked about how much we meant to each other."

"Her mom didn't care too much, but her dad had objections about being lied to with this conspiracy."

"That was his issue, as he said he wouldn't have cared about her being a lesbian, and that he was hurt she hadn't trusted her own parents, as Catholic doctrine had been soft on gay women even before the reforms."

"As Britney told me, she said, 'Really, Dad? This is what we're going to rewrite the history books with, even after the convent threat?'"

"Hearsay, but she said he said that it would only have been for the summer, to make her relationship with God stronger so that she'd not stray further from her path."

"Her response was, 'If you wanted me to have sex with a woman at summer camp, you could have just told me to get a job as a camp counselor at YMCA Duncan Woods. Seriously, do you have any idea how many nuns are lesbians? They're not praying all day over there.'"

"I was surprised she acted this ballsy with her own dad, given how much she'd talked about conforming to the patriarchal family structure she was in, but she viewed it as 'tough love.'"

"As she said, her dad was going to have to understand that it wasn't okay for him to be a closeted bigot. She was here, she was queer, she was going to keep reminding him of that, and he was going to have to get used to it.'"

"She doesn't think her relationship with her dad is going to be on good terms for the next few years, but they still love each other, even if there's some 'disagreement' about the narrative, in multiple senses."

"Both her parents were kind of mildly annoyed Britney being a lesbian meant they weren't getting grandkids with Britney and would have to wait for Tucker to do that, and they were 9, so that was going to be a while."

"She reminded them that adoption was a thing, but Tucker finally spoke up to ask if I could just get off hormones and we could have a kid that way once we got married."

"Britney was more than a little flustered by that, but she told Tucker that I'd had some... 'procedures' that meant I couldn't get her pregnant... ever."

"Tucker asked some more questions about my situation, like, 'What is a trans person?' and 'How do they know they are one?' and 'What did Zoey do to get such good results?'"

"Tucker hadn't revealed the shower incident, but they're a smart kid and had been doing some of their own research."

Zoey doesn't love how that's relatable.

"Britney said she was very good at explaining those questions — besides my specific procedures — as she had been planning on using this information to help crack me if I'd ever 'run out the clock,' which meant it was current information."

"After a bit of a back and forth of Tucker asking a few questions and Britney answering them the best she could, Tucker said she thinks she might be trans."

Zoey is glad she can finally stop using 'they' in this story to describe Britney's little sister. And yes, Zoey had gotten permission from Tucker and Britney to tell Zoey's immediate family about her, and she counts her grandpa as that.

"So... Tucker is someone Britney has been dressing up in cross-play of her old clothes or clothes she made since Tucker was an infant, and that occasionally still happened even though Tucker was 9, but somehow Britney hadn't seen this coming."

"But I had..."

Zoey stares off into the distance and slightly smiles, both glad the kid figured it out and wishing her luck. Zoey's done that more than a few times whenever she's thought of her.

"This was almost a bridge too far for Britney's parents, but Britney was immediately in her little sister's corner and stopped any talk from either parent even vaguely in the direction of not letting Tucker explore her gender dead in its tracks. As she said it, she was a momma grizzly bear who was willing to fight and rip her parents apart then and there to keep Tucker safe."

"It's an evolving story, but Britney told me she's treating her little sister like she wished she treated me. She skipped having to be a blunt sledgehammer, but she's now that kid's shield."

"Man, it makes me feel kind of bad for Tucker... wait, I don't know if she found a name or not yet."

She briefly contemplates getting involved in the naming process, but her name was thrust upon her, and while it fits, it's not as personal as it could be.

"I don't know... maybe Allison?" she thinks, before discarding the notion of trying to direct what might be her sister-in-law's transition. That's a thing for sisters, and Zoey's hardly a conventional trans woman.

"But yeah, I'm not exactly an honest depiction of realistic transition goals, and it feels a bit scummy to say I'm just the result of very good surgeries and genetics. The former would fit with the massive student loan story a few people know of, and if anyone has seen me and my mom together, it's clear that I got a lot of her genes and beauty."

Zoey looks down at her chest.

"Forget the boobs, as everyone keeps focusing on those: I've got an anatomically AFAB body through a blunder of sheer luck. Medical technology can't do anything like that yet."

"Still, it's so impressive that Britney is juggling her own life and both of us at the same time. I knew she was a caring and compassionate person, but she's almost saintly at times, even angelic."

Zoey pauses for several seconds, hesitating to continue down this topic.

"This is maybe a bit early to say when we're not even a year into dating, but Dad apparently felt this way about Mom after dating her for six months, and I'm definitely a bit of a daddy's girl these days, so I don't feel too bad following his precedent."

Zoey looks away, smiling slightly. "'Precedent,' huh?" she thinks. "God, Dad was right. You can tell I'm in love with a lawyer's daughter."

"I want to marry Britney, and I want to propose on graduation day."

<Awkwardness >= 4 tangent begins>

"Oh, I'm probably going to ask Dad for Grandma Angela's engagement ring for that, so I hope he knows where it is, and I hope you feel honored by that instead of, well, weirded out by it or something."

</Awkwardness >= 4 tangent ends>

"We're going to have to have a talk about whether or not we're hyphenating the last name or she's taking mine, but she's planning on opening a small fashion line, and it's hard to beat 'Taylor Made' as a bespoke product tagline."

"Maybe that's a bit too corny, but we're both total dorks who..."

Zoey trails off. She's finished talking about her past and present, giving her grandpa almost her entire life story since he died (or at least, the highlights). She doesn't know how much time has passed, but she didn't want that to end, which is why her story since "cracking" has been so much denser (and she's more excited to talk about that part, as it felt more "genuine").

But that's all been a story written in stone, just like the letters and numbers are written on the gravestone in front of her. She's now talking about a future that is still uncertain, but one thing is for certain: her grandpa isn't going to be there for it.

"I wish you could meet her. You'd get along great, and I want to show you how much this wonderful person I got so lucky meeting means to me."

"And I wanted to show that woman I love so much how much you mean to me."

"B-But... I'm never going to get any of that. You're dead, and I've been talking to a slab of granite in the ground with your name on it for the last hour or so, and your ashes aren't even here. Th-They got scattered over a trail on Mt. H-Hood by me and Dad. H-H-Hiking that trail was one of the very few times all three of us did something together, and that list is never going to get bigger."

Zoey's voice has been getting quieter and quieter for the last few sentences, and now breaks down into complete sobs as she fights through her stutter. Her stutter has been improving a lot in the last month alone, but much to her shame, is still there, and it's once again ruining an important confession to her grandpa.

When Zoey speaks next, her face is fully red, her eyes are full of tears, and her voice is full of anger and sadness.

"Y-Y-You stupid fucking b-bastard! Wh-Why'd you have to keep smoking h-h-half a p-pack a day?! You kn-knew it was killing you! Y-Y-You don't g-get to j-just make me n-n-need you so m-much and th-then d-d-die like that!"

Zoey knows how irrational this is, but it doesn't make it hurt any less. Just like she blamed her borderline-autistic dad for not realizing how much she needed him around, she's blaming her grandpa for dying when she was nine. It wasn't really his fault, but she has to blame him, or else she's going to blame herself for not using the time they had left better.

"Th-There was so much I wanted to tell you! There—"

Zoey slowly calms down, but she still looks so sad.

"I've never told this to anyone, and I don't think I ever will again, but if not to you, I need to say it to myself."

Zoey takes a deep breath and gently exhales. She realizes that this is the thing she is really here for today, and everything else was building up a sense of comfort and courage to do it.

"I knew I was trans when I was seven."

Zoey pauses for a second, sort of fidgeting in place as she realizes how she made an inaccurate statement to try and sound dramatic.

"Okay, maybe 'knew' is a strong word, but I'd already had a strong suspicion I wasn't like other boys my age, and it wasn't because of how smart you and Mom said I was."

Zoey clutches her arm with a pained face.

"But as smart as I was, I was still a kid. I didn't have a way to express that feeling of 'otherness' I had until you took me to that aquarium and we saw those clownfish and the exhibit sign about their protandry."

"I didn't understand that sex and gender were different things yet, but this was the first time I'd ever been exposed to the idea that a body's sex could change, and something clicked in me."

"I don't know if you noticed how distracted I was for the rest of the day, but I couldn't stop thinking how nice it'd be if people — if I — could do something like that."

"No offense, but I didn't want to grow up big and strong like you and Dad. That was just a convenient lie I told myself, and I got so good at telling myself it that I started to believe it and forgot what the truth was."

"No, from age five and up, I saw Mom, realized I looked so much like a baby version of her, and then realized I was going to grow up to be something very different from her, and that realization made me just a tiny bit upset."

"Can you blame me? We looked so much alike, and she was this beautiful woman who took so much pride in looking beautiful. For all of her faults, and she's got a lot of them, nobody can say that she isn't beautiful on the outside."

That's the ultimate secret of the "Oedipus complex" people in the know with Zoey's body have sometimes brought up as a mean-spirited joke. Her mom was her gender envy goal for the longest time, and as weird as it is to admit that, it does feel like Zoey has finally lifted a heavy load off of her shoulders.

"When we were at that aquarium gift shop, do you remember how you tried to get me the shark plushie? And then instead of telling you I wanted to get the clownfish instead, I told you I also wanted the clownfish one? I did that because I felt... guilty for wanting something like that. You spoiled your grandson rotten, and while I couldn't articulate a thought like 'you were going to treat a granddaughter differently,' I had this irrational anxiety that you were going to realize what I was thinking if I didn't also take the shark I didn't really want."

Zoey snidely thinks to herself, "God, I was way too paranoid for a kid my age back then, but what I thought Grandpa thought about me meant the world to me. It still does, but part of this talk is helping myself to realize that it's okay to move on from the past. I shouldn't ever forget him, but I have to stop clinging to those memories like they're driftwood in the ocean and I'm drowning, or else I'm never going to grow past where I am now."

Zoey steels herself before recalling one of the worst memories of her life.

"I was minutes from talking about all of this. I'd had enough time to think it over on the drive to the ice cream shop and while eating my ice cream that I could trust you with what I was thinking, and I even had the first few sentences of what I wanted to say planned out. I didn't know what to say after that, but I wanted to start that conversation on the drive home."

"But then you told me about your cancer prognosis, and that was clearly the much more important talk."

"I know you noticed how badly the news shattered my world, but it wasn't just realizing that you were going to be dead within two years that did that. It was realizing that growing up into whatever person I was trying to become would have to be done without you around, and I braced myself for that by rigidly sticking to my current course."

"You had always warned me that Mom was trying to live through me and control me. I agreed with that, but when you were gone, Mom was going to sink her hooks into her daughter far more than she would to her son — trust me, she's still trying to overstep the boundaries I've set for us — so I lied to myself very well, and toughened myself up to be the type of man you and everyone else was expecting me to be, knowing deep down that's not who I wanted to be."

Zoey breaks into quiet sobs here.

"God, why was I such a stubborn jackass? I let the one person in my life who had always unconditionally accepted who I was die without ever knowing who he was loving, all because I didn't want to disappoint you and was afraid of what would come next."

"I broke down in that hospital room realizing that was going to be my last chance to tell you who I was growing increasingly sure I wanted to be, but Mom was still in the room. I couldn't say that in front of her, and I couldn't kick her out in your final moments. She did have a right to be there, despite what I told myself later, and I unfairly blamed you all for my weakness."

Zoey, very slowly, builds her composure back up, but she doesn't look as sad as when she did this a few minutes ago. For a woman who's lied to herself her entire life, this honesty feels good.

"There was so much more I wanted to say to you, but I wanted to say that more than anything."

Her earlier sentence was a weak whisper, but this one is much more confident, and that confidence keeps growing.

"But better late than never, right?"

"I always hated how painful our last moments together were. All I could do was hold your hand tight as your grip on my hand and your life got weaker. I know your biggest regret was that you weren't going to be around to see me grow up. You weren't going to be around for that, and you weren't going to be around as my father figure and as a check against Mom. I know how much that worried you, but I choked up and couldn't find the right words to say to you back then to ease your mind and let you die peacefully. I couldn't say them at your funeral because I was so sad and scared from losing you, and I never stopped by earlier to say them because I knew they would have been a lie and knew how much you hated people trying to bullshit you."

"But now, I can finally say them and mean it."

Source: nabem8981 on pixiv

<I'm not sure if this with be Zoey's outfit for the day, but it looks cute, like something a 21-year-old granddaughter would wear around her adoring grandfather.>

Zoey leans down and gently places the bundle of white carnations, chrysanthemums, and lilies she's been holding on her grandpa's grave. They're flowers that mean a combination of remembrance, fondness, mourning, grief, calmness, celebration of one's life after death, and rebirth.

She gets up, but her next words are a low whisper. She's crying, but her face is a look of peacefulness.

"Thank you, Grandpa. Thank you for everything. It's been a bumpy road, but I think your granddaughter is going to turn out alright in the end, so rest easy."

Zoey turns away from the grave and walks back down the hill to Britney, who has been fiddling with her phone facing away from Zoey. Zoey can't word how much that respect for her privacy means to her, and it makes her love Britney so much more.

When Zoey gets close, Britney notices she's walking over, but she's surprised how marred Zoey's makeup is and how disheveled her previously neat hair is. And she's a little worried.

"Wow, you look like shit."

Zoey is embarrassed.

"Oh God, do I? I know I was crying a lot at the end, but is it that bad?"

Britney sighs. She likes seeing her girlfriend caring more about her appearance and being flustered, but that's not what she's sighing about.

"How do you look this hot even when you've got tear-streaked makeup?"

This is generally how Britney and Zoey's dynamic is shaping up. Britney has realized how fun it is to tease Zoey, and she no longer feels guilty about it like she would teasing Zach. Both girls are wearing tasteful long skirts right now, but just from looking at them it's not hard to tell who wears the pants in the relationship.

"What'd you talk about that got you that emotional?"

"So much for the privacy thing," Zoey thinks.

"Everything, but it's a secret."

"And you said you weren't going to ask!"

"No, I said I understood that you were having a private conversation with your grandpa!"

Arguments and debates are another part of their dynamic, but it's been there from the start and both girls are smiling at each other as they try to out-argue the other.

On the way home, Zoey realizes where they are in the city and that there's an ice cream shop nearby that she went to with her grandpa when she was a kid. She asks Britney if she wants to make a stop for some ice cream shop for a snack before a later dinner. Britney understands the context, so she happily agrees.

Zoey had several 'outings' with her grandpa as a kid doing things she wanted to do, and each would end with a visit to some kind of ice cream place. With how much he liked ice cream, Zoey occasionally thought her grandpa was making excuses to take her out somewhere so he could get ice cream on the way home.

That's never going to happen again, but there's someone who means just as much to her she can go out for ice cream with... of course, not too much, and they're both watching their calories. But it's fine as an occasional treat (or PMS reliever, something that works better than medicine for both girls).

Zoey's grandpa always got vanilla, but he always insisted she try flavors she hadn't tried before, and he kept track. Zoey once asked her grandpa why she wasn't allowed to get the same thing every time like Grandpa did, and his response was one of the most "Grandpa-esque" things he's ever said to her:

"You need to try everything you can when you're young before you realize what you like and only get that when you're old like me."

Zoey's not old like him, but she gets a medium waffle cone of vanilla ice cream. Britney tries to get a small chocolate one, but Zoey convinces her to get a medium one too.

From the start, both girls have known what they've liked. Neither considers the experiments with different flavors a waste, as it helped broaden their palette, helped them realize what they truly like, and made them into the people they are today. The difference now is that they're finally able to be honest about enjoying what they like.

In the middle of summer 2023, Zoey tags along with Britney on a very brief visit to her grandpa's ranch on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. She has to buy a fake ID off of Rich to come along, but Britney is saying goodbye to a grandpa who meant a lot to her as a kid and whose ranch she spent every summer on until she moved to Portland, and the poignancy of her recent talk with her own grandpa makes her want to come along, should Britney need her. He's in the final stages of Alzheimer. While he's in a lot of pain and barely recognizes Britney when she comes to his bedside, she pulls out her blue hair ribbon and hands it to him, and his eyes light up and he knows who he is talking to.

He asks Britney who her friend is, and Britney tells Zoey to just introduce herself however she wants.

Zoey awkwardly says that she's Britney's girlfriend, not quite knowing what this dying old man's political values are, but he laughs and smiles and is so glad to hear that his granddaughter is dating such a pretty young girl. And what amazing red eyes she has! Oh, but yes, Britney! He was always worried she was going to lie to herself and marry some guy she didn't care about to make her parents happy and to stay loyal to her faith, but he's glad she didn't try to dye her black wool white, and she seems to have found an interesting black cat herself!

But speaking of Britney... has this girl Zoey seen her? She was supposed to be coming over. It's summer, and she's always liked riding horses when the sun takes so long to set.

Britney gently, but firmly, escorts Zoey out of the room.

Zoey has a lot of questions, but she starts with a more puzzling one.

"'Dye your black wool white?'"

"Grandpa always considered himself to be a black sheep, but one who never strayed too far from the flock. He said I was the same way when I was five, and he was proud of me because he said the world needed more black sheep to stand out and make things more interesting."

"He knew you were a lesbian?"

"Yeah... before you, he was the only person I told, but he let something slip to my mom in one of his moments, and that's how she found out. I never told her myself."

"If you're wondering, I got my progressive politics from him, and that hair ribbon I like to wear. Something about 'spreading a little bit of blue with you, wherever you go.'"

"I think he meant a progressive mindset because blue is associated with Democrats in America, but he had this whole subtext to his language by talking with colors, and those colors have layers to what they mean. He'd have fun trying to get you to guess what he truly meant."

Zoey gets it. Her mom does the same with her verbal riddles and with her art.

"I can tell you that he thinks your red eyes mean passion and luck. If you'd had told him you were trans, he probably would have jumped out of bed and tried to dance with enough joy for all three of us, late-stage Alzheimer's or not."

"Wow... what the fuck is a guy like that doing in your family? No offense to your parents or anything."

"Passing on those black sheep genes, I'd say. Maybe they skip a generation."

"As for what he's doing out here in Texas... he moved over from France and lived in Louisiana doing fishing first and went broke, and now he hates the ocean. He then switched to cattle ranching in central Texas and hard work, keen insight, and a lot of luck made him enough money that he retired rich at 45. Since then, he's tried to make the world a nicer place and spent all day painting, raising animals, and donating to progressive causes. He liked the challenge of trying to paint such a red canvas blue, and for many parts of Austin, I think he succeeded. At the very least, I know I wouldn't be this progressive girl who loves the color blue if it wasn't for him."

There's not really much more to say about Britney's grandpa that she's comfortable sharing right now, but before they leave the ranch, Britney has something to say to Zoey.

"You didn't have to come down here with me, but I'm glad you did, and I'm glad you got to meet him. I just wish Grandpa had been more lucid, because he's got that type of magical personality where he can change a person's entire life for the better after meeting them once."

"I guess he passed those genes down to you too..."

Britney blushes, and it's not just because it's so hot outside on the walk to their taxi.

With Britney and Mr. Becket's help, Zoey goes through legal identity changes before the Fall 2023 LCU semester starts. Mr. Becket still has a high opinion of Zoey (and Zoey learned he hadn't represented Mr. Nakamura and had even tried to talk his firm out of representing him, so Zoey's opinion of him was still good), and they have a short talk at his law office where he says he'd be okay trusting his daughter to her, but that she's going to have to trust him and not to conspire to deceive him again first. Zoey asks him if this is truly about trust by asking him had the church not gotten "mysteriously" reformed earlier this year, if he would have accepted his older daughter as a lesbian or his younger daughter as a daughter.

He hesitates to answer, pauses to think, but eventually admits that he doesn't know. He's tried to be a good Christian all his life, but sometimes he got caught up in the parts of the Church that told you what not to do that he ignored the parts that told you what to do, chief of those being to love. He would like to think he would have grown as a person and loved Britney no matter what, despite initial misgivings, but he's worried he wouldn't have done the same for Allison (Zoey later did get involved with the naming process after Britney asked for help, and to her surprise, Britney's little sister loved the only name she tossed into the hat, but she wonders if that's because it came from Zoey, someone she's been treating as the "cool" big sister, although it makes Zoey feel like shit that she has to lie to this sweet little kid who adores her and asks her for transition advice).

Zoey tells him that growth is sometimes slow, and that as long as you are getting better as a person and not letting that rate of growth slow down, it's a dangerous thought process to hate that improvement of your past self not being fast enough. Zoey obviously wishes she'd figured out things about herself sooner, but she wouldn't be the person she is today or have met Britney the way she had if that had happened.

Zoey tells him, very much trying to impress him, "You can't change the past, but you can change yourself at any moment."

It works. This mature line of thinking really cements Zoey as being right for Britney to John, but he doesn't say anything about that and just expresses that he'll take that to heart.

Molly graduates in spring 2024, with Keisuke still going steady with her a year later and on track to graduate a year later (he switched back over to baseball after he and Molly started to go out). Molly is buff now, and Zoey is having a hard time hiding how much that makes her scared horny. Britney notices this and is annoyed.

As Britney and Molly have a very important conversation about their futures, Zoey takes Keisuke aside and tells him that there's more going on with her "I'm trans" story that she's told him.

Keisuke lets Zoey stop early, since it's clear she's struggling with how to word this. He tells her he completely (mis)understands the situation, as Molly filled in some of the gaps for him.

Keisuke is miremembering a lot of key details, and while he's still struggling with how to refer to Zoey in the past tense, he now thinks Zoey was AFAB and all those years as childhood best friends came about through her presenting as a trans male from a very early age.

Zoey is left speechless as Keisuke congratulates her on being so sneaky about her body for that long, and how her birth sex probably explained why she was always such a runt and why had that girly face and the real reason she was so uncomfortable changing in front of other people. And that's probably why she hadn't been able to keep up with sports in middle school and quit, but he hopes the way the middle school baseball team kicked her off for "throwing like a girl" didn't make her think girls can't play sports. Molly plays in a local slow-pitch softball league and kicks ass at it, and he knows Zoey has those great fielding skills.

Zoey croaks out that she doesn't have much interest in playing sports these days.

Keisuke apologizes. He shouldn't have been trying to scout her for a softball team, but he sometimes forgets that Zoey isn't the guy he grew up next door to anymore and that it's hard to treat her like a woman sometimes.

He understands why Zoey never told him growing up, but he needs to let her know that it wouldn't have changed them being such good friends. And while it's taken nearly 20 years of being best friends, he's glad she can finally be honest with him, but more important, herself.

Zoey wants to crawl into a hole and die, but she isn't going to rain on Keisuke's parade, so she just tells him she's glad he understands while internally hoping that Molly keeps a tight leash on this complete idiot of a human golden retriever, lest he walk into traffic from being this oblivious.

Britney is now the theater club's student director starting in the Fall 2024 semester, having been given it in a near-unanimous vote after Molly's endorsement, and she quickly makes a professional name for herself in theater, fashion, production, and volunteer work, specifically with queer outreach through her church as it stayed with the reformed branch of Catholicism. Zoey gets roped into volunteering for theater club and this outreach program, but she still feels guilty for giving a few of the trans girls in the group an unrealistic goal to match, Allison chief among them. Zoey eventually has a talk with Britney if they're going to be honest with Allison about what happened to Zoey (she made that promise when she got walked in on while in the shower, after all), but Britney doesn't think her little sister is ready for that world-shattering discussion. She's only 11, and that talk is going to have to include some pretty adult subjects. Zoey reluctantly agrees with that line of thinking.

On Zoey's suggestion (insistence), Jeff switches careers from Zhulu to starting an architectural design firm with his wife in early spring 2025, ending his 23 years with the company. Jeff has built up a strong professional name for himself, and Samantha, while rusty, is a very quick learner who closes the gap between them in a few months. The two have a wonderful time working from home together, just like they'd always dreamed of, but it's a bit clear that Jeff realizing how much his wife was a bad mother put a bit of a strain on their relationship. It's too early to tell if this crack will widen, or Jeff just threw off his blinders of blind love, but Samantha's mental health is getting better with her husband around and Zoey is thinking she might reach a day in the future a few years from now where Zoey can see herself letting her mom back into her life to a greater extent (but not forgiving her).

In late spring 2025, Keisuke graduates. A bit to Zoey's surprise, he and Molly are still together, and he even proposed at graduation, making Zoey think "Well, fuck. Now people are going to think I'm copying Keisuke when I do that with Britney next year."

Molly has been working in the agricultural sciences of all things. Zoey never knew she majored in it and that Theater was her minor. She'd like to start an experimental berry farm on a nice plot of land 45 minutes north of Portland, right next to the Mt. St. Helens Park, and try to create hybrid strains of berries capable of growing in terrible soil to help feed poor rural families. Molly jokes about developing a particularly tart blackberry and naming it after Zoey (knowing it's her favorite fruit), but her eventual plan is to develop a type of strawberry that can grow anywhere called Aila, giving her mother's name to her mother's favorite fruit and honoring her tenacity for overcoming life's bullshit that helped her daughter grow into the woman she is today.

Of course, a lot of that plan will depend on where Keisuke goes. He's going pro with baseball, and he could realistically be signed anywhere, but she's asked for a location that's coastal and colder, with plains, lakes, and a little bit of mountains. Something that would remind her of growing up near Inverness. She still kind of misses Scotland (more than "kinda," if she's being honest), but she's got a guy she cares for a lot, and he cares about her just as much. Everything else seems to not matter as much in comparison.

Zoey, with an almost pained look, bluntly asks Molly what she likes so much about Keisuke, and how they managed to stay together for so long. She scoffs, "Besides the sex?"

"Oh my God, please don't tell me about your sex life..."

At Zoey's request, she asked Britney to not tell Molly about her being trans, and Molly had just assumed, with (her assumption of) Zoey being a cis female (which is now Keisuke's assumption, too), and Keisuke being a cis male, and them being such good childhood friends, that they... you know, have fucked once or twice.

Molly apologizes once Zoey firmly tells Molly she's never once thought about having s-sex with Keisuke!

Her answers are almost identical to the way Zoey feels about Keisuke in his route, and Zoey is just glad these two wonderful people that she cares a lot about got together to make each other so happy.

Molly briefly asks Zoey if she's sure she's not bi? Molly had always assumed she was bi like she was.

Zoey briefly wonders if she is bi, but it's too late now to explore that topic when she's this much in love with Britney. And Keisuke would have been the only guy she would ever have considered having sex with, but he’s taken...

Zoey says she's sure she isn't bi.

In summer 2025, just after Britney's birthday and a few weeks before Zoey and Britney's final semester of college starts, Britney is going through her yearly ritual of planning her Mahonia-Con cosplay and trying to get Zoey to come along and wearing a matching cosplay. Zoey has refused this offer every time, but this year, both the Becket sisters are pleading for Zoey to attend.

Allison, who is just over twelve, is showing signs of taking after her mom and big sister more than her dad, despite not being on hormones or even puberty blockers, as AKR has strict laws about HRT for minors, but she's been fraught with anxiety about her upcoming male puberty. After a long talk with her parents (which Britney moderated), they've agreed to let her start middle school at an American boarding school so she can have access to the gender care AKR won't provide her.

Zoey has developed a protective attachment to Allison and doesn't want to disappoint her right before she moves away, so she reluctantly agrees to come along.

The three girls scout out a gender-neutral bathroom at the convention center and take turns changing (Zoey has gotten over much of her fear of changing in front of other people, especially her girlfriend, but they can't leave Allison alone).

Zoey goes first and gets dressed like a witch from some Japanese fighting game franchise she's never played but that recently got an JRPG installment that Britney's been playing over the summer. She's got a strange sense of déjà vu looking at the frilly dress but shrugs it off.

Source: Commission from Chibi.

<R.I.P. to a real one, Magical Camp.>

After Zoey comes out and gets some compliments that fluster her, Britney goes in next, giving Zoey and Allison a chance to talk privately for the first time in months, and the conversation is unexpectedly serious.

"Hey, Zoey... do you ever regret finding out you were trans?"

Zoey lets out a long exhale, knowing what this conversation is about and how important what she says to Allison during it will be to her. If Zoey can't be honest with Allison about her not "truly" being trans or how re:Dreamer was responsible for that, she's going to be honest with her here.

"If Britney were listening, she would get mad as hell at me for saying this to you... but yes, I do sometimes."

Allison breaks into a relieved smile.

"I didn't think you'd feel that way too."

"I'm not supposed to bring up doubts like that in the support group, but you deserve better than platitudes."

Zoey pauses for a second to figure out how to word this.

"It's hard being a girl, but I don't think it'd be easier to be a guy."

"Really?"

"I mean, I went through most of my life thinking I was one, and it was like I was sleepwalking through my own life."

"So, you regret not finding out you were trans sooner?"

"Sometimes, but I wouldn't be the person I am today if things had happened differently, and I wouldn't have met Britney, even though I—"

Zoey almost grimaces as she inhales.

"Promise you won't tell Britney this?"

Allison eagerly nods her head with a serious expression.

"I had a good idea that I was trans when I was seven, but I—"

"That late?!"

Zoey frowns at Allison for interrupting her talking about this big secret she's only shared with her grandpa's grave, and Allison breaks into her sister's apologetic grin.

"Ehehe... sorry. "

"Well, when did you first suspect you weren't like boys your age?"

"Since pretty much forever? But I didn't know how to ask myself why until you came over for Thanksgiving and I walked in on you—"

"I thought we agreed that we were never talking about that?"

Zoey has a slightly menacing grin on her face as she gets close to using her yandere glare, once again feeling that sense of déjà vu.

Zoey realizes she's freaked Allison out, and apologizes, telling her that she has a changing phobia and experiences like that are difficult for her to think about. Allison says she understands, as she's got her own changing phobia, with her sister being the one exception.

"You and me both," Zoey thinks with a wry grin.

"I mostly figured things out by the time Britney told us she was a lesbian and that you were a trans girl, but I sometimes wish I hadn't, and I still have all this doubt if I'm doing the right thing."

"Are you saying that because you don't want to transition, or because you're scared to transition?"

Allison looks startled, but she soon puts on a pained smile and looks away.

"Britney told you about that, huh?"

"It's a big step, and it means being away from your friends and family."

"Yeah, but... I feel like I need to make it now, before it's too late."

It's like Zoey is watching herself from right before her sabbatical, and she's going to be damned if she doesn't speak up now like she wished her parents had done.

"You won't be any more or less valid of a girl just because you waited until you were an adult to start hormones, Allison."

"But I—!"

Allison has an almost pleading look of pain and panic on her face. Zoey wants to tell her so badly about who she is, but she made a promise to Britney.

"I'm not even a remotely realistic transition goal, so don't look at me like the example you have to chase after."

Zoey continues after making sure she's hit the nail on the head.

"If you want to do it, I won't stop you, but really think it over, and I mean really think it over. If you have all this doubt, you should talk to Britney, me, other trans girls, and especially your doctors about it, and don't be afraid to come to the answer of not having an answer yet. Trust me, it's a lot better if you take your time so you do things right rather than rushing out into the world to find yourself without a plan like I did."

Allison starts pouting, but she understands.

"Okay..."

A few seconds of awkward silence pass between them before Zoey realizes Britney has been in that bathroom for quite a while now.

Zoey politely knocks on the door and asks Britney if everything is alright, but she soon comes out and lets Allison change.

"It took you that long to change?"

Source: Commission from Myumi.

Britney is wearing her artistic interpretation of the genderswapped main character of that fighting game franchise the girls' outfits are from. <Fun fact: Britney's entire design is based on a M.U.G.E.N. fan character of Ky Kiske called Kyko (One, Two, Three) who I have a ton of fan art of, as I was obsessed with her for like 3 years straight. Even the Mars symbol to Venus symbol on the re:Dreamer title screen comes from fan art of this character. Also, both are French, and they have the same hair ribbon.>

"No, but I wanted to give you two some time to talk. Allison listens to you in a way she doesn't listen to me."

Zoey smiles at Britney.

"What?"

"You're a really nice person, but an even nicer big sister."

Britney is incredibly flustered by this, but she decides to get her revenge to maintain her mischievous image.

"So, Zoey, did you recognize this bathroom?"

Zoey freezes, understanding what that déjà vu from earlier was now. This bathroom was a very pivotal location for Zoey's own transition (and repression) as the spot where Britney tried to dress her up as Magical Girl Hibiscus almost exactly five years ago.

"U-Uh..."

"You were two inches long, if I remember correctly..."

"It was four inches, Britney!"

Zoey realizes she's shouting, and she hopes to high hell that Allison can't hear her through the bathroom door.

Just then, Allsion comes out dressed as the canonically trans character from that fighting game franchise.

Britney beams when she sees her little sister dressed up in her best design yet.

"Oh my God, Allison, you look so cute!"

Allison is nervous about wearing a skirt in public for the first time, but Britney reassures her that she's just being herself and cajoles all three girls into taking a selfie to commemorate the event. Zoey's phone has the best camera, so she does the honors.

Source: KiYuN29 on Twitter.

The rest of the day is lively but fun, and Zoey is glad she went at the end of it, and she feels like she and Allison have worked past a bit of their own discomforts with being female.

That night, as Zoey and Britney are cooking dinner together and relaxing in their apartment (of course they live together), Allison texts Zoey and asks if she can send her that selfie. When sending it over, Zoey realizes for the first time the "RD" text Britney has put all over the outfit.

Zoey zooms in on the emblem on the hoodie and gets Britney's attention as stares at her while holding her phone out.

"Please don't tell me those letters were intentional, Britney..."

Britney gives a side-eyed smug grin.

"Let's just say it's a good luck charm for my little sister to have a little bit of your transition success, should she decide to start hormones."

During winter break 2025, Zoey tells her parents that she's planning to propose to Britney early that spring, on the 3rd anniversary of her coming out to Britney (April 7th). Both parents have known about re:Dreamer for years now, and while Samantha still suspects something is up, either with Zoey's story or the fact that magic exists, Jeff has convinced her to drop it. Still, she doesn't understand why that day of all days is something to focus on.

Zoey tells her that the date has become a day about being honest with herself and making big leaps forward, and proposing on that day fits. Plus, Keisuke beat her to her original plan of proposing on graduation...

Samantha shrugs, and Zoey then asks where her grandma's engagement ring is.

Samantha is flattered, but she doesn't know if she can give over such an important family heirloom. You know, the important shrine maiden family and all, where her mother was supposed to be the first heir and got dibs on a lot of artifacts. No... even if Samantha knew where it was, she can't let something so important be used for her daughter's first marriage.

Zoey shoots her mom an angry glare. Zoey's gotten some very fine granular control over her "ice queen" trick, and she can control how intense that chilling trick can be in a way that Samantha can't, finding a very, very light use of it to be helpful for telling her mom to back off.

It's a little more than "very, very light" right now, as that "first marriage" line didn't go by unnoticed.

"I wasn't asking you, Mom, and can you stop making everything about you?"

Zoey turns to her dad.

"Dad, where is Grandma Angela's engagement ring?"

"Oh. Uh, it should be in my glove compartment, along with her wedding ring."

"You stored your mom's goddamned engagement and wedding rings in your glove box?" Her dad has long since become immune to Samantha and Zoey's yandere voice.

"Hey, jackass, ask yourself this: What burglar is going to look there?!"

"Dad, our house is a fucking maze. They'd be lucky if they could find their way out the same way they got in."

"Oh yeah, Zoey? Well, that fucking maze architect and co-architect keep getting jobs to make more mazes, so we're clearly doing something right!"

Samantha pouts as her daughter and her husband bond with banter, annoyed that she's left out of it once again.

Zoey proposes to Britney on April 7th, just as planned. She took Britney out to a really nice Brazilian steakhouse restaurant with endless amounts of meat for 12,000 yen a plate, but it was a bit of an extravagant waste as Britney has a photoshoot in a few days and is trying to watch her weight, and Zoey's a bit mortified whenever she gains weight because it always goes straight to her boobs and she's sick and tired of having to buy new bras. Still the meal is great, and Britney is clearly having a great time with the dinner and conversation, even though it's obvious as shit what Zoey is about to do.

Zoey coordinated with the staff beforehand. They usually don't do things like this, but she's always been a supporter of the common worker and can be pretty persuasive in getting them to go the extra mile, a.k.a. she tipped 20,000 yen ahead of time. When the conversation reaches the right moment, Zoey snaps her fingers three times.

The lights dim, an instrumental of a classic 80's hip-hop song Zoey knows Britney loves comes on over the speakers, Zoey gets down on her knees and pulls out a ring box with her grandma's ring in it, and she goes into the short speech she wrote and rehearsed the hell out of.

Britney suspected this was coming, but she wasn't expecting Zoey to put so much effort into this, and she really appreciates the little attention to details, like how she's pausing during certain parts of the melody.

"Britney, when I met you in high school almost eight years ago, I never thought this argumentative blonde girl with a Texan accent would end up my friend, let alone my best friend, girlfriend, and hopefully my fiancé and then my wife... but I was also a very different person back then."

"Three years ago today, I was almost stupid enough to undo what I soon considered to be the best thing that ever happened to me, but as I've spent even more time with you, I've realized that wasn't the best thing that's ever happened to me. It was meeting you, and I can only pray that you feel the same way about me."

"Even before those six months of chaos, you were an angel saving me from myself."

Zoey grabs the engagement ring out of the box and holds it out.

"My grandma's name was Angela, and it's only fitting that I propose to you with her ring."

"Britney Marianne Becket... will you make this dumbass woman the happiest woman in the world and marry me?"

Britney's smile is so sweet and warm, but as Zoey has figured out, Britney is surprisingly weak to heartfelt romantic gestures, and she turns her head and blushes.

"You laid on the religious undertones a bit thick, but I can't really say no when you put all that effort into your proposal speech."

The song slowly winds down as the light comes back on. 20,000 yen apparently only buys your 4 minutes of dimmed lights and music in a relatively crowded restaurant, but Zoey considers it to be the best money she's ever spent.

Zoey is still holding the ring out, waiting for Britney's hand.

"I still can't figure out why you were the one who proposed to me. I mean, I thought you wanted me to propose to you."

"I used to be a guy, Britney. Just let me fucking have this."

"We both know that's not how that works, Zoey."

"Besides, I don't want to hear that from the woman I top most nights, especially when she's wearing a skirt."

Britney grabs the ring out of Zoey's hand as she pouts, and she then slips it on Zoey's ring finger, where it fits perfectly.

"You saved me from myself too, you dumbass."

If Zoey thought Britney was flustered earlier, that's nothing compared to how Zoey feels right now. She feels like she's melting as she looks at the ring on her, and then up at Britney's tender (but slightly smug) face. Zoey didn't realize how much she had wanted to be proposed to until now, but Britney did.

"Hmm... 'An angel and a vampire save each other...'"

Zoey's too much of a puddle to respond.

"I like the sound of that... could make for a good script."

Two days after the proposal, Britney gets interviewed by Vanity Affair, a major fashion/pop culture magazine. She's the front-page story, and Zoey excitedly waits for her early review copy only to read how much of the interview is Britney gushing about her fiancé. You know... that really hot trans woman she's been dating for nearly four years? Who just proposed to her on the anniversary of the day she came out to her? Here, let me tell you about the speech she proposed to me with! Hey, get a photo of the engagement ring on my finger, too!

Despite Zoey's worries that she's getting dragged along with this process, this interview gets Britney's name out there in a big way, and she's even being approached with offers for directing and acting in film but wants to graduate and talk things over with Zoey before deciding anything.

Zoey and Britney graduate with honors in the LCU Class of 2026, although Zoey's a little pissed her GPA got dinged so hard by her first two semesters. Britney reminds her fiancé that she also had some rough spots from not being able to study because she was helping her.

They start to talk about what they're doing next, and when Britney proposes moving back to her hometown of Austin, Texas, Zoey is enthusiastic. She likes Portland, but she's feeling like she needs to spread her wings and fly from the nest. And... Britney has woken her up to how a territory controlled by Imperial Japan might not be the most ethical place to live in, and all of America, even Texas, and especially Austin, has been getting a lot more liberal and progressive in the past three years.

This change isn't happening in AKR due to its nature as a sham democracy, but the Catholic Reforms created a ripple effect as other denominations saw younger flock leave and reform to progressive Roman Catholicism, and they've had to reform too in order to remain relevant. This completely fractured the conservative political base in America, who are being seen as hateful bigots more and more each year, as younger and more progressive politicians keep getting voted in.

Britney's more than a little smug that she unintentionally caused her homeland to take steps to being the great and progressive country she always knew it could be, but Zoey lets her have it. After all, it's in her "black sheep" legacy to paint the world blue... or whatever her grandpa meant by that.

Once they're down in Austin, Texas, they immediately sell the ranch Britney inherited from her grandpa, who had passed away a few days after they visited but had been lucid enough to make sure Britney got that property (he'd been planning on turning it into a wild animal sanctuary). He'd given away the vast majority of his wealth during his life, which made for an interesting estate dispute when his will was opened and Britney ended up with the most.

Zoey asked Britney if she was sure about selling it, especially without one last visit, and she replied, in a bittersweet way, that the place has no meaning if her grandpa isn't there, and she can take the memories with her. Zoey feels the same way about her grandpa's grave. She's not letting him go, but he's in her heart, and she remembers that whenever she's truly feeling down (which isn't often these days; she's so much happier than she's ever been in her life).

But back to the ranch. Britney sold it because she was trying to get a theater production company off the ground, as well as a woman-owned-and-operated boutique started, and maybe a queer youth community center attached to the local Catholic parishes, and that means property in the metro. Plus, a house nearby would make Zoey's commute to the office as a junior engineer for Toyota easier (she'd gotten better-paying offers, but the rest didn't have as flexible of hours or benefits packages, and they weren't as focused on R&D).

They don't have to shop for long to find a place, thanks to a few of her extant connections with Zhulu... mostly Rich, who manages to get them a "discount" once they've settled on a place as an engagement present. It's a small home in the suburbs, right on the edge of the inner perimeter. It's just a tiny bit larger than they need for the two of them (and Mimou; there was a whole fight about Britney and Elise fighting over the cat, with mother and daughter accusing the other of stealing him; in the end, Zoey's adoration of the aging Scottish Fold was the deciding factor). Zoey doesn't want to ask the question about kids yet. She thinks that she and Britney both have a view of how important passing down genes are, and as a lesbian couple, they're going to have to think more about what that means for them, but whatever they decide should wait a year or two until their new house becomes their home. Zoey got those flexible hours and benefits for a reason, after all.

Their engagement is very short at only three months, as Britney wants to get married right away. She's known for a while this is the girl she wants to spend the rest of her life with.

Her childhood church at first refuses to be the venue for her lesbian wedding, as it stayed on the splinter branch of Catholicism that didn't progressively reform, but Britney flexed the legal muscles she built up over the years and managed to threaten them on discrimination grounds that would have seen their tax-exempt status stripped with policies that weren't there 2 years ago, so they begrudgingly agreed to host the wedding.

Britney had wanted to hyphenate, but she didn't need that much convincing to take Taylor as the last name. With the work she was planning to do in fashion, it seemed like a perfect pun to have in a company tagline or something.

There will be a player choice of if Britney wears a suit and Zoey wears a dress, if Britney wears a dress and Zoey wears a suit, if both wear suits, or if both wear dresses, but no matter what, Britney has the smuggest grin on her face as she walks through her childhood church that she forced into holding her lesbian wedding to this trans woman she loves so much, wearing clothes she made.

The service is great. A lot more of Britney's family showed up than she expected, and Zoey's family is all there (it's only two people), as are a lot of the friends they made in college and even a few of the ones they made in high school. Zoey was just a little disappointed that Keisuke's schedule meant that it wasn't realistic to have him as her best man, even though he was in attendance. That job went to Zoey's dad, but it felt a bit weird asking him to bear his mom's ring. Britney asked Allison to hold hers. Zoey and Britney are treating this to as close of a gender-neutral wedding as Catholicism will allow, even if the vows get a bit stilted from that inclusiveness.

Zoey's one regret of the service is that she is so nervous that the butterflies in her belly turn into minor stomach cramps, but the love that fills her body when she says "I do" and kisses her wife makes her feel like she's floating, and all of a sudden those cramps really don't matter.

The reception is even better. Britney and Zoey's first dance is a Texas-style hoedown to energetic hip-hop, and Zoey is nearly positive the pastor got close to fainting when the song came on, and of course the catering is Central Texas Barbecue brisket and fixings.

There's a little bit of drama with Samantha and Britney's parents briefly arguing about... well, Zoey doesn't fully catch it, but her mom "settles" it quickly, grinning, "Now that we're family, let's bury the hatchet, okay?" before downing her champagne glass and walking away and preventing anyone from continuing the argument.

It's one of the best days of both their lives, if not the single best, and they're glad that neither of them is lame enough to have wanted an elegant and formal fairytale wedding like normal people. This day was about them, and how they're now one, and it was a perfect blend of what they wanted.

Speaking of two becoming one... Zoey and Britney finally manage to get home at 9 PM. They've got a day and half of rest before leaving for their 10-day honeymoon in France, where Britney promises to be a better tour guide for her wife than an app on Zoey's phone.

But they're not resting tonight.

Britney insisted on carrying Zoey over the threshold of their house (reminding her a lot of the musical they were both in over 3 years ago), but once they're inside, they quickly undress and have the best sex they've ever had, beating even the kinkiness of their experiences with re:Dreamer. There's no toys, no tricks, and no magic. It's just them, their bodies, their passion, their love, and knowledge of what each other wants.

They're both in a stunned, even awed, post-coital bliss after more than two and a half hours. But then Zoey's phone rings.

"It's our wedding day, and you didn't put your phone on Do Not Disturb?"

"No, I definitely did. Maybe it got turned back on under my clothes?"

Zoey doesn't have to unlock the phone she's had for eight years by this point (she's still proud that modern phones are only now catching up to its specs, but sad she's going to have to replace it someday soon). It unlocks itself.

"Congratulations, girls!"

It's Ai, and both Zoey and Britney feel their blood freeze.

"Hey, don't stop having the best day of your lives just because I showed up."

"How are you alive?"

"That is a good question, Britney! I never really died, but it took me three years to rebuild myself once I fell apart."

"Is re:Dreamer still around?"

"Nah, your wish was pretty thorough in taking it out. I'm an odd little exception as all that remains, and trust me, I've looked."

"But enough about me! Today is about you two!"

"In celebration of your union and yadda yadda, how'd you guys like a wedding present?"

"Are we allowed to ask for you to leave?"

"Hey hey hey, the least you could do is listen!"

"So... I'm not on your phone anymore, Zoey. I'm everywhere, and that super-precise way I told you to word your wish to destroy the re:Dreamer servers gave all that power to me."

Britney and Zoey both freeze even harder at this. A being of pure chaos basically just told them she's become a digital god.

"Relax. If I've learned anything, it's how to keep my head low. I'm not interested in more than being able to keep my existence, and I want to thank both of you for my new quality of life."

"Because I know you two so well, I know what you've both wanted more than anything: kids."

Britney and Zoey look at each other. They never really said this to the other, but Ai is right.

"So, which of you want the big futa co—"

The Taylors' glares stop Ai in her tracks. <Author's Note: Zoey is well aware by now that Britney has androphobic trauma related to male genitals after seeing mutilated photos in a courtroom presentation as a young girl; to see what that incident was, check the World Information entry "Britney's Dad" for more details.>

"Okay, Plan B, since you're both such fucking prudes."

"Britney, good Catholic girl that you are... you've heard of 'immaculate conception,' right?"

Ai is approaching heresy for Britney, but it's not like the girl who got Catholic doctrine to change for the modern world through sacrilegious means that caused a schism in the Church gets to object on those grounds.

"With a snap of my fingers, I could impregnate you with Zoey's kid, fully biological with mixed DNA and everything. Seems fitting given the golden age you've brought to Christianity."

"Unless you want the kid, Zoey. You always were a bit kinky, in that vanilla way of yours, and there's a few impregnation gender bender doujins on your phone."

"You told me you deleted those, Zoey." Britney is glaring at Zoey in an approximation of her wife's yandere trick, and she's a good actress who can get close to the real thing's intensity.

"I probably missed a few in my Lockbox folder..." Zoey says as she looks away. It's hard to stop being a digital hoarder.

"Wait, hey, what are you getting mad at me for?!"

Ai makes a noise like a... well, neither can describe it, but it draws their focus.

"No fighting on your wedding day, girls."

"And if you order now, I'll even throw in a bonus of DNA modification for your child! Want a boy? Want a girl? Want them with or without Zoey's red eyes? I can mix it, match it, fix it, any way you like."

Zoey and Britney look at each other.

"We need to talk about it."

"Sure, sure. But make up your mind quickly. I've got an appointment to make, and duplication is a no-go for me. Can't have a civil war with myself, right?"

They both know Ai is listening, but they both start to discuss what Ai just offered.

"Hard no on the DNA modification, right?"

"Are you joking?! I have a Nazi war criminal in the family. Eugenics is the last thing I'd condone passing down to my child."

"Do you want to have our kid?"

"Well..."

Zoey fidgets.

"I'm not opposed to it, and you're in a vital moment for your career where you need to be going around, doing stuff and meeting people. I can work remotely, pregnant or not."

"Aww... that's kind of sweet, and it'd be sweeter if you'd just say you find pregnancy hot."

"I do not find pregnancy hot! It's just... I'm trying to think in both our best interests."

"Besides, this is only if you want the kid too, and you've got to be a part of this. I can attest how much it messes up a kid to only have one parent involved."

"My vote is on whatever you want to do."

"You can't just pass on all the responsibility to me!"

"Suck it, dork. I'm flexible enough to where all the options work for me, and I'd be happiest doing what you want."

Zoey blushes like a tomato. She's extremely flustered and just a little angry, but she's smiling.

"You're fucking evil! I can't debate you when you use lines like that!"

<Awkwardness >= 4 tangent begins>

"Friends debate, bad married couples argue, and good married couples make decisions together. My decision is to trust your decision."

</Awkwardness >= 4 tangent ends>

Britney has made it clear that this is entirely Zoey's choice, which means it's the player's choice. Zoey thinks her options over: she can choose to carry the kid (because she does kind of find pregnancy hot but is mortified to admit it, and she'd view it as one of the most affirming things possible for her new life), for Britney to carry the kid (as Zoey is supposed to be a trans woman unable to carry a kid and they'd either have to lie to people or Zoey would have to hide herself for months once she showed signs of being pregnant, to say nothing of difficulties of how they would get the kid delivered), or to decline Ai's offer (adoption is a completely viable option, especially with recent queer reforms that make it easier for same-sex couples, and they can approach that if/when they feel like they're more ready).

Regardless, Ai's work is done. If one of them gets pregnant, she tells them that they'll start to feel that in a few weeks and wishes them good luck on explaining this to everyone.

"And don't hesitate to ask me if you change your mind/want another one!" <Author's Note: That line split is supposed to be for declining the offer, but it has worrying implications if they accepted it.>

Ai's face shifts into an evil grin.

"Trust me, I'll be listening."

As suddenly as she reappeared, Ai disappears.

"Well, fuck."

"Yeah..."

"God damnit, Britney! We should have asked her what re:Dreamer was since she wasn't tethered down by it anymore!"

"I don't want to know. Leave the divine mysteries out of human understanding."

Zoey agrees with Britney on this, even though she kind of hates that she does. Zoey kind of wishes she had at least asked Ai if she had the power to shrink her boobs by a cup size.

"Besides, it's Ai. She would have lied and played a trick on us."

Now that is something Zoey fully agrees with.

If they're having a kid, the girls express a ton of excitement about what's next for them... not just as wives, but as mothers.

Zoey grabs Britney's hand.

"Well, Ai going rogue and coming into our bedroom like a wrecking ball or not, this has still been the best day of my life."

"Same, but don't rub it in or else I'm going to get diabetes. God knows how much sugar was in that sweet tea today."

The two lie down on their back next to each other, still holding hands.

"I'm sure I did, but I don't remember if I've said this today, Britney, but I don't want to go a single day of my life where I don't tell you that I love you."

"Jesus Christ, Zoey, I get it already! You're gay as fuck and you're a total nerd."

Britney pauses.

"I love you just as much, and I'm a gayer nerd than you are, and I'm going to prove it to you when I wake up. But for now, I need to get my sleep and scheme on how to do that."

"Yeah, it's like..."

"It's past midnight."

"Oh..."

Zoey's a bit sad. Her wedding day is over.

"You're not going to turn back, Cinderella, and I'll still be here when I wake up."

"Okay..."

Zoey's now outright sulking.

"God, you're adorable when you're needy."

Britney leans over and plants a kiss on Zoey's lips, melting Zoey.

"I can do one more round tonight, but no more, okay?"

Zoey smiles.

The screen fades to black as Britney and Zoey roll over onto their sides and kiss as the title card "The Black Cat and Black Sheep Flock Together" as the route ends, and the credits roll.