The Farside of Never -Book 1- Daphne -2- Themis (Patreon)

I woke up with the feeling that my head was caught in a vise. I wasn't wrong. When I tried to move I found I couldn't, not anything except to twitch my fingers and wiggle my toes, even my thumbs seemed caught in some unyielding hold.

My mouth was stuffed with someone's old socks or possibly a dead prairie dog. I could open my eyes but what I could see from the light that leaked around my cheekbones looked like layers and layers of gauze. Was I paralyzed and horribly burnt? I tried to grunt to get someone's attention but all that came out was sort of a weak whine.

Someone spoke in a language I did not speak myself but recognized as possibly Greek. You don't kick around the world like I had without learning what other languages sound like even if you never pick up more than a few cusswords. This wasn't the pretty island Greek that some of the stewardesses on Air Olympia spoke among themselves but a guttural version suitable for deckhands on The Pequod.

I tried again to attract attention. Something touched me on the temples, both sides, hard and coldly metallic. And I went out like someone had turned off my switch. While I was out, I thought -- or dreamed -- that I heard voices but I could not tell whether they spoke a language I had ever heard before.

The next time I woke up I was lying with my face in a pile of drool on a wooden floor. Someone spoke. "What?" I said, unsure if they had been talking to me. Not even quite sure if I were awake. My voice sounded odd.

Another person spoke, German or maybe Dutch this time. I tried to get my hands under me but I felt weak and dizzy. "Maybe I'll just lie here for a while longer," I said. What was wrong with my voice? I closed my eyes because floors are covered with grit.

"Ah, English," said another new voice followed by a string of the Greek-sounding language. Someone poked me, since I was lying on a floor and the voices were above me, probably with their foot. "Are you English?" the voice asked.

"American," I said. Not always a safe admission, the world being the way it was, but I was too sick-feeling and confused to claim to be Canadian. If I did, some rabid Quebec nationalist might stick a knife in me just for the hell of it, with my luck. I felt like I was talking with someone else's throat and mouth, anyway. Maybe I was Canadian now.

The toe poked me again. "United or Confederate?"

"Say what?" I asked. I opened my eyes and tried to roll over again. I looked up.

What a sight, three naked women stood above me, two au naturelle and one with a shaved look like something from a centerfold. "The hell?" I asked. I raised a hand to push some wisps of straw or something out of my face.

"United or Confederate States?" asked the one on the right, the one with the red bush.

"Uh, United?" Was Oregon even a state during the Civil War? I thought I ought to know but wasn't sure.

She nodded. "Who was the eighteenth President?"

"Huh?" I blinked. For a naked lady she acted like a middle school civics teacher. "Who knows? Lincoln?"

She frowned, "Lincoln was the sixteenth."

My head spun. "So, Grant?" I guessed.

She shrugged. "Sheridan in my world, Grant committed suicide. I thought we might be from the same place but I guess not."

"What are you talking about? Your words make sense but the sentences are coo-coo!" I said.

She smiled. "I guess no one has told you yet, you're not on your own world anymore. This is Naon, a city named Themis. Most people speak Greek here except for slaves imported from other worlds by the Travellers. Slaves," she repeated with a gesture that took in the other two women -- and me.

One of the other women knelt and stroked my head. "She's so pretty," she said in Portuguese so bad I barely understood her. Maybe it was Spanish.

The third woman, the one with the shaved groin sneered down at me. In Dutch she called me a whore, I got that much. Amsterdam is quite a place.

Red laughed and said something in Greek then in English said, "The ones from her world always are, tiny and pretty and built like brick shitters. And dumber than fenceposts."

I finally looked down at myself and could only squeak. I had tits, and the hair I kept having to brush back was from my own head. She? More squeaks, I couldn't seem to make words come out. I used my hands -- my tiny, pretty hands! -- to explore and found that the pronoun was undoubtedly correct. Either that or I was having one hell of a dream, hallucination, what-have-you. Squeaky squeak squeak, again.

The excitement got me sitting up and looking around; we were in a long dingy room about the size of a Winnebago with benches along the walls and high windows like slits up near the ceiling along one side. It must have been dim in there but I could see fine. Lots of naked women sat on benches or the floor or stood around in groups talking. A few nervously covered up their groins or breasts but most seemed not to notice the nudity. Two or three were weeping it looked like and some of the others seemed a bit battered.

Was this a jail cell? I've been in jails in a few places but never one where they stripped you naked. And sure as hell not one where they gave you an impossible sex change.

All the women were young and healthy and at least attractive, if not exactly clean; a few were real stunners. Yesterday, I figured, I would have been panting with my tongue out to see such a collection of feminine charms—bruises, smudges, dirty feet and all. I glanced down at my chest again and did a little covering up myself. What the hell? I got stuck on that thought for a bit, but it didn't lead anywhere.

I looked around again. More than half were brunettes, and half of those with truly black hair and olive skin or darker but no one actually African black. Two girls looked vaguely Asian or American Indian. The rest were two redheads, including the one who told me we were all slaves, and a handful of blondes. Including me.

One girl had lilac hair with large ears that came to a point, she looked like a Hollywood elf. A second look made her even more odd; she had a tail. A real, fleshy tail about two feet long that came up in a curve from just above her ass and ended with the same lilac-colored hair in a little tuft. Her bush was pinkish, too. At least two of the brunettes had big ears and tails, also; though theirs hung down like real pony tails.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out. I reached back and felt of my own ass. There seemed to be more of me back there than necessary, but no tail. And my ears were small and close to my head -- which was different than the jug handles I'd had yesterday.

I think I made a gurgling noise and the red-headed girl said something. I looked up at her.

Red still stood over me but the Dutch girl had wandered away. The one who had spoken Spanish or Portuguese knelt beside me. I made out what she was saying after two repetitions. "Maybe we will go to the same boss," she cooed. "We must be friends."

I blinked. A lot. She was coming on to me?

Yesterday, I would have been muito agradável, very agreeable, but her long dark hair, cinnamon-colored skin and cocoa nipples did nothing for my libido at that particular moment. It actually sounded disgusting!

I wanted to scream at the thought that a pretty woman was making a lewd suggestion and my reaction was to feel my lip curling and my stomach ready to flip-flop. What the hell, what-the-hell, wottahell?!

She must have seen my expression because she shrugged and stood up. Red and she exchanged a few words in Greek and she waggled her eyebrows at me before wandering away. Red laughed.

"Not into girls, huh?" she said.

"I -- I don't know," I said, as lame as anything.

"Oh, I've never known any of you Grant-Unionists who ever was. Not at first, anyway."

I looked at Red again and she didn't do anything for me either. And her nipples looked like little pebbles, she was either turned on herself or it was colder in there than it felt to me. But what she said gave me a little hope that I might be able to -- oh, yuck! The mental images I had of some girl-on-girl porno I had once seen almost caused me to toss up a Cookie Monster.

Instead I started crying! At first I just leaked a few tears then the sobs started and when Red reached for me and started saying, "There, there," and such, I truly lost it. I hadn't cried like that since my dog died when I was eleven, I hadn't even cried so much when my parents were killed by a wrong-way driver in my one year at college.

Red helped me up and we sat on one of the benches and she held me while I cried. She was several inches taller than me with arms and legs that made my new ones look like twigs and we sat with arms around each other while I wailed and hiccoughed and gasped. I'd never had a sister but this was like that, not sexual at all, even though we both were naked.

"This just isn't happening," I think I kept saying.

And Red said, "It'll be okay, you'll see, it's not so bad. At least, none of us will starve."

"You don't understand," I said, weeping. "This can't be happening, it's impossible." I wanted to tell her what I meant, that I was really a man but the words just wouldn't come out. When I tried, I choked up and when I choked up I just kept crying. It was frustrating at first and scary the longer it went on.

"Let her lie down," someone else said.

A bigger blonde girl stood over Red and I.

"I'm not usually like this," I tried to explain when I could stop crying and was just sniffing and snuffling. Being naked, neither of us had anything to wipe away snot and I finally used my hand and wiped it on the bench.

"It's okay sweetie," she said. "It's quite a shock. I remember when the Travellers first grabbed me from my daddy's farm."

"They grabbed you?" I said. I forgot to ask who they were. "Travellers" as a name meant nothing to me then. A vague memory of some Gypsy-types that I had read about somewhere, maybe.

Red kissed me on the forehead. "Bastards, they don't get many women volunteers for their schemes," she said.

Oh, great. Maybe that explained why I ended up female, they had a quota to meet? But if they had that kind of power... why mess with schemes?

"They tricked me," said the blonde. "I answered an ad in the newspaper."

They still had newspapers where she came from? Well, they did in my world too, but who looked at them? I tried to say that something like that had happened to me, but I just made more silent mouth-motions and almost ended up crying again. It began to sink in on me that I could not tell anyone who I really was or what had really happened. It scared me so bad, I started crying again.

I let them lay me down on the bench. It freaked me out to feel my chest jiggle when I moved but in a way, that was not as big a deal as what they seemed to have done to my mind. My hair fell in my face, too but at least I didn't have a tail to worry about.

"You're just a kid," said the blonde.

Red shook her head. "All the Unionists from her world come in looking like they're teenagers," she glanced down at me, "except for their chests."

I sighed. My tits were bigger than Red's or the blonde's, it just wasn't fair since I was so much smaller than them.

The blonde said, "I'm Carol, Carrie."

Red said, "I'm Joan or Joanie."

"I... I...." I tried to tell them my name but nothing came out. I was glad to have names for them, though. So far I felt like I had made two friends, even if it was just because we all spoke English. Then, just as I stopped trying to say, "My name is Larry," something else came out of my mouth.

"Daphne," I heard myself say. Wottafuck? Daphne? I hadn't even known I was going to say that! Daphne was a name from a sitcom or a romance novel. Who names a kid Daphne? Even for a girl?

The blonde giggled. "Does anyone call you Daffy?"

I shook my head. "Not until just now," I said.

They both laughed and I guess I smiled. It had sounded kind of funny, like if I really were named Daphne why wouldn't some people call me Daffy? I felt sort of daffy at the moment.

Joan and Carol talked a bit about where they were from. Carol, the blonde, had been born in Australia, grew up in Hawaii and ended up in Drakesville in the Dominion of California. Say what? Drakesville sounded like it must be where Oakland was on my version of Earth, an idea that was beginning to sound plausible.

In Joan's world, an influenza epidemic had started and killed off so many civilians and soldiers that the Civil War dragged on for years before sort of stopping due to lack of people well enough to fight. U.S. Grant committed suicide because so many of his soldiers had died for nothing. Abe Lincoln caught the flu and died from that and Johnson nearly did. Sheridan got elected president on the platform of finishing the war. By that time, some of the Confederate states were trying to rejoin the Union.

I never did hear the end of Joanie's story because the big wide double doors at the end of the room opened and three guys came in. They were dressed like Old West cowboys except for the kilts, and they had what looked like clipboards in their hands.

The brighter light from the doorway did not improve the looks of our jail. But the guys! They were huge and muscular and the bare legs under their stupid-looking skirts were hairy where they weren't covered by heavy, patterned socks and fancy boots. They had full beards and mustaches, various shades of brown.

I couldn't take my eyes off them. It was as if I had never seen men before.

"Those are probably the lots for the auctions," said Joan. I guessed she meant the papers on the clipboards.

"Auction?" asked Carol.

"We're going to be sold," Joan said.

I started crying again and I wasn't the only one. I didn't hear what anyone said for some time. Except, someone kept repeating, "This can't be happening," over and over. I think it was me.