Somewhere, a figure sits upon a fabled mountain. She is beautiful; regardless of who sees her or what they picture her as, she is their perfect image of beauty. She is, however, bored of what she does. She watches one of those clicky ball desk toys bounce back and forth, the highlight of her day most of the time.

Perhaps it's time to rectify that...

* * *

I yawned and couldn't wait for my eight hours to end. Standing over the same grill, frying the same burgers was more than annoying, but it was a job and it paid the bills and gave me a decent amount of spending money. Not gonna lie, I wouldn't have minded getting the server's pay, in addition to the tips, but Holly didn't hire men to work in the front. I would have considered it sexist if not for the fact that people genuinely didn't come if certain girls weren't working the dining area.

Sometimes, the waitress stereotype was pretty much the only way to go.

I yawned again, and so did Carlos. He said something in Spanish, then repeated it in English, "Stop that shit, man, you're giving 'em to everybody!"

I laughed. "Yeah, I've been here since five o'clock this morning, you can bitch when you're almost about to punch out for the day."

I flipped the current burger to fry up the other side. There was a basket of fries in the grease right beside the grill and some hot dogs on rollers beside the fries. We were busy, more so than usual on a Thursday afternoon. Then again, a lot of people were probably exactly where I was at the moment: Tired and and in need of something to get them through that day. The unfortunate thing was that I still had to wait before I could just settle down and eat something.

I yawned again, but this one didn’t catch on. Instead, I just continued doing what I was doing. The sheer boredom of it all was close to killing me, but I kept at it.

My mind wandered, as it often did, to what it would be like to work the dining area. Sure, taking the orders would likely be boring as hell, but the opportunity to talk to the customers would be nice. Granted, if I could be out on the floor, I’d be a woman, which meant that any guy would likely be staring or groping. How the girls put up with it, I’d never know.

I looked up at the clock and saw I only had five minutes left before the end of my shift. And lucky me, my burger was just about finished. I scooped it up with the spatula and dumped it on my bun. After that came the cheese, the lettuce and the tomatoes, and I followed that up with ranch dressing and topped it all off with the top bun. I put my burger on the plate, then plopped the fries down beside it.

I called out to Holly, “Goin’ on lunch!”

She poked her head through the window that separated the dining room from the kitchen and shouted, “One of these days I won’t let you take a lunch break at the end of your shift!”

I smirked and tossed my apron in the hamper beside the door to the locker room. “You don’t need to now, you just do because you love me that much.”

I saw her smirk as I walked past her with my tray and my food. Holly owned the place, 100%, worked for herself and herself alone. She put up with my shit because she could, because she’d always been a friend to me, ever since I’d moved to town with my folks when I was sixteen and she was the cranky old neighbor who yelled at me for leaving my bike unchained. It’ll get stolen, dumbass! she used to say. She’d hired me without an interview right out of college, because she knew I’d need a job and she needed a cook. If I’d known my birth mother, I hoped she would have been like Holly.

I sat down at an empty table and exchanged glances with Mary, Holly’s daughter. She and I had dated for a short period of time before we found out it couldn’t work and decided to stay friends. She was a mother herself, now, had a pair or twin boys that her fiance looked after when she wasn’t home. Holly had given me shit for that. Why aren’t they yours, Joseph? she’d asked. My daughter needs a man I trust, not that hippie shitstain. I knew she didn’t really feel that way about Paul, but I also knew she would rather I be her future son-in-law.

I took a bite out of my burger and immediately regretted the ranch dressing, but I was stuck with it, unless I wanted to go fry another one and work during my overtime-guaranteed lunch break, which simply was not happening.

At least the rest of the burger was good.

* * *

The figure enters the mortal feast hall and immediately sets to work examining the mortals. She sees several who wish they were elsewhere, several who want nothing more than to tell the person across from them how they truly feel. Most are simple, most are exactly what they appear to be, exactly what they choose to be.

The soul is female, but the form is not. The figure doesn’t understand how this is. In her long history, she’s never seen one whose soul and form are so radically different, and this piques her curiosity. She picks a seat close to the man/woman, and prepares to learn everything she can.

* * *

I took another bite out of my burger and then looked up from the food when the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen walked into the restaurant. She was probably five-foot-three, on the slim side, though her breasts were good-sized. She wore a sleeveless, orange turtleneck sweater and a plaid green skirt that didn’t quite reach halfway to her knees. Knee-high boots and a red scarf tied around her waist completed the outfit, but her face was my main focus. High cheekbones, a cute little button nose and large green eyes that seemed to take in everything. The package was topped off by blonde hair that stopped just below her ears and shined thanks to how the lights were positioned around the dining room.

I wasn’t the only one that noticed her, either. Most people in the room turned to look at her, men and women alike. For whatever reason, this woman enticed all of us.

She walked over to a table close to me and crossed her legs as if she were waiting for someone or something. Hell, for all I knew, she was waiting on someone. Woman like that probably had men hanging off her to the point of annoyance. If I was interested in a relationship right now, I’d probably try and ask her out and likely fail because if she didn’t have a boyfriend, something was truly and deeply wrong with this world.

And so I returned to my lunch. I only had about twenty-seven minutes left before break “ended”, though I never actually took all thirty minutes. Holly still paid me for it, though. Sometimes, she treated me all too well.

The woman caught my eye again. She wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there and, strangely, watching me. Her eyes weren’t directly focused on me, but I could tell it was me she was looking at. It was both creepy and flattering at the same time. The idea that a woman that gorgeous would have her eye on me was both a shock and a welcome surprise, but the way she was looking at me disturbed me something awful.

I considered talking to her, asking her what it was she was so interested in, but something about her made me rethink that. I wasn’t a superstitious or spiritual person, but the only thing that came to mind was that there was a strange aura surrounding her. Why that was how I felt about her, I didn’t know, but it was the best way to describe it.

I finished up my burger and moved onto the fries. I had to put her out of my mind, but that wasn’t the easiest thing to do. She was hard to take your eyes off of, and that was without the weird sensations I was getting from her gaze. I wished I’d grabbed a drink, now, if only for something to give my hands to do that wasn’t just the fries. My phone was in my locker in the back, so that wasn’t happening.

The fries didn’t take as long as the burger, so I stood up, picked up my tray and walked back into the kitchen. Holly gave me a weird look, as if to ask me why it was I hadn’t tried to flirt with that woman. For some reason, I didn’t want to tell her that the woman freaked me out.

I got back to the locker room and breathed a sigh. Now all I had to do was get home and I’d be able to put that woman out of my mind for good. That was little more than a five minute drive and then I was sitting in front of my TV playing some Far Cry 5, that whole thing just another weird day behind me. No different from when Carlos brought that ferret in.

I shut the locker room door and pulled my key out of my pocket. I was just about to unlock my locker when I froze.

I wasn’t alone.

* * *

The figure examines the man/woman, uses her power to truly see what it is she’s looking at. Though physically male, this being is so obviously female, a great anomaly. In her centuries of existence, the figure has never seen this.

This is her most interesting day in millennia.

* * *

Everything about this was confusing the hell outta me. From this woman just showing up to the fact that I couldn’t move to just what the hell she was doing to me, there was no part of this that I really understood. And when she put her hands on my face, I understood less. I couldn’t even see anything aside from her. The room around us was nothing but shadow.

That shadow didn’t last long, however. It was replaced gradually by a white void, which only served to highlight that woman. If not for the fact that I was so damn scared by what was going on, I’d be entranced by the idea that I was this close to her.

I felt some kind of numb tingling, spreading throughout my entire body. It seemed to come from her hands, as if she was… Warming me? That couldn’t be what it felt like, but it was the best way to describe it. There was a warmth to it, but that wasn’t what it was. I wanted the feeling to go away, wanted this woman to go away.

The numbness began to recede, and in its place were new sensations. I felt an odd weight on my chest, and yet overall I felt lighter. Following that discovery, I could somehow tell that my body was shaped differently. I still had two arms, two legs and a head, and I didn’t have any extra limbs or a tail or anything, but overall, I knew my body was not the one I’d entered the room with.

The woman let go of my face and backed away from me, and then I could really feel the differences. I wasn’t the man I’d been, in any way. I knew I was lighter, by what had to be a hundred or so pounds, and definitely shorter. I’d been at least a foot taller than the woman, but she was now a few inches taller than me. The most immediate differences, of course, were the breasts that now hung from my chest. They would look small on someone like Mary, who was almost as tall as I used to be, but seemed huge to me, especially from this angle.

“You have been freed,” the woman said, her tone sounding nothing if not triumphant. Why the hell had she even done this to me?!

To my surprise, I actually screamed, “What the fuck did you do to me?!” Though, honestly, I knew what she’d done to me, it was why I was having trouble with.

She looked genuinely surprised. “You did not know? You knew nothing of the beauty hidden within you?”

Beauty? Was her idea of beauty just turning men into women? “I wasn’t the best looking guy, but I kinda enjoyed it!”

Her eyes widened. “You poor thing… You were not meant to be the man you believed yourself to be. Certainly, you knew this?”

“I…” I stopped myself. I’d often had a curiosity toward being a woman, but never anything that would have led me to want to be one.

“You know of what I speak.” That wasn’t a statement. “You are now that which you should have been, that which you were meant to be. You are now complete.”

I took a wobbly step forward, my center of balance off just a little, and tried to grab for her, but I came up a little short. Instead, I just groaned and said, “But I didn’t really want this!”

She touched my face again, but thankfully she didn’t freeze me again. “You will come to see, come to understand.”

I sighed. I guess changing me back wasn’t something she wanted to do. “Look, I can’t… People know me as a man!”

“And they will come to know you as your true self. They will see you as you are now.”

I wanted to hurl this woman through a window. “You… You really don’t seem to understand me,” I said. It was about then that I realized just how different my voice had become.

She scowled. “I have not visited the mortals for your entire history to be told I am wrong, my dear.”

Mortals? Our history? What the hell was she… Why the hell was I even questioning this? She’d just turned me into a woman, for fuck’s sake, maybe she really was some sort of immortal something. “Fine,” I groaned out, “maybe this is for my own good.”

“That is exactly right. And now, I shall go and see if there are any others such as you.” She turned away from me toward the door.

“Who even are you?” I asked.

She turned back to face me. “Venus, of course. You mortals seem to be far too ignorant of your own history.” She added a smile and a wink to the end of that.

Not two seconds after that, she was gone and I was alone with the new me. I took stock of the woman in the mirror and saw that she mostly resembled me. I could pass for my sister if necessary. Venus, whatever the hell she was, had even changed my clothes, too. The outfit felt awkward, but didn’t make me look out of place.

As I was about to go out the back entrance, Holly burst into the locker room. “Joseph! If you and that woman are still going at it back here, I’m gonna havta charge you for it!” When her eyes locked on me, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

After a long silence, I nervously asked, “Can I switch to dining room for about a week?”