CHAPTER SIX: INTERNET FAMOUS

Melanie's parents were out, but her brother Jackson was there to answer the door. He gave El an appraising once-over with his eyes, nodded curtly, and showed him in. As the two of them walked along the little entryway and into the Harmons' big, sun-filled living room, El was acutely aware of Jackson behind him. Scrawny fifteen year-old Jackson looming a full head taller than him and far brawnier than El had ever been. The boy cleared his throat and muttered in a voice an octave deeper than the one he'd had last week,

"Melanie's in mom and dad's bathroom doing her pictures."

"Her... pictures?"

Jackson scratched his hair sheepishly. His little glasses looked outsized against his rugged face and, in a few days, he probably wouldn't need them anymore. "Yeah. She's doing her Pixogram thing. You know about that, right?"

"Kind of," El shrugged.

He made his way upstairs and to the master bath - which, unfortunately, entailed making his way through the bedroom of the Harmon parents. The bedroom was a disaster area of decidedly sexual nature, a dim, musky sex cave strewn with toys, light bondage gear, lingerie, tubes of lube, and (for some reason) a snorkeling mask. They were scattered about the bed area like a big orgy bomb had just gone off. Much of it was smeared or crusted with congealed or drying residue that El didn't even want to think about. Bright lights shone from the bathroom, occasionally making little flashes. Within he could hear Melanie rummaging about and giggling.

He rounded the corner to the bathroom and his jaw just about fell off. Melanie was posing in front of the wall-length mirror in a lacy, peach-pink demi-bra that did an amazing job of lifting and emphasizing her already generously pneumatic tits. She'd styled her cosmetics with just enough restraint that it didn't look like she was doing glamor shots... but she was certainly posing to maximum effect. A dusting of bath bubbles skimmed across her lustrous hair and torso, a stream of foamy froth oozing down the channels of her toned abs. She turned so her profile was visible in the mirror, popping her ass out in El's direction. Its firm swell was truly awe-inspiring, and he was struck dumb beyond his previous muteness. It was plump perfection encased in scandalous yoga shorts that managed to be both hotter and more tasteful than bratty Mrs. Pinella's running shorts.

"Cheese," Melanie said. Her phone, mounted above the little shower nook, registered her voice and took a series of pictures with little flashes. Melanie started to turn, glanced into the mirror, and screamed. "Holy shit!"

Melanie almost brained herself against the marbled sink, only saving herself by virtue of fast reflexes and a bust buoyant enough to ballast a nuclear submarine. Her tits mashed against the counter, popped out of her demi-bra, and wobbled wildly as she struggled to rein them in. She covered her nipples (as if El hadn't seen them enough times) and turned to him with an expression approximating terror - as pretty and made-up as she was, she couldn't quite pull it off.

"Oh my god! You scared the shit out of me, El!" She laughed, her tears smearing eye shadow down flush cheeks. "I thought you were my parents!"

"Sorry!" he said, stepping into the bathroom. "What in the world are you even doing in here?"

"Pictures for my AHS account @SportyMel," she said, a smile quickly returning to her face. "People are going wild over it. I love Sporty!" she said. She flexed a bicep - not a manly muscle by any means, but her arms were legitimately solid.

"What is all this stuff?" El gestured around the bathroom and the area of bedroom just beyond it. There had to be fifty small boxes and packages piled there, with another fifty opened and discarded in an industrial-sized trash bag. Melanie had arranged the contents of the opened boxes into piles labeled:

Too Small!
Too Big (but keep if grow?)
Too Big!
Not Sexy/Classy!
Sexy/Classy! Keep!!!

They were clothes. Thousands of dollars worth of clothes, most of them trashy or sexy, some of them very clearly workout clothes of the revealing variety. They were everything from functional (but racy) to suggestive to frankly scandalous. One bikini top in the 'Too Small!' pile was a neon yellow thing with little triangular frames for the cups that had literally zero nipple coverage. What the point of that even was El couldn't guess.

"I asked my followers to help with my wardrobe problems and... well... the Internet delivereth."

"How many followers do you have?"

Melanie shrugged, divesting herself of her clothes and walking, completely nude, back to her piles of boxes. "How many? I dunno. A hundred twenty thousand, I think, but that was a few hours ago. It's probably higher now. I complained about not having enough stuff to fit my changing body and this stuff just started showing up yesterday afternoon."

El didn't bother to ask her how they'd known where to send it. He didn't want to know. Now that he looked around the bathroom, it was pretty impressive how she'd set up a little improvised studio in the area, with little reflectors strategically placed to scatter the lighting without being visible from the camera angles she wanted. The Harmon's garden tub was still piled high with bubbles, a champagne glass and half-empty bottle on the little dais next to the tub.

"That's for my bathing shots," she said. "I'm going to go to the Gardner's pool next door in a while to do some outdoor shots there, too... oh!"

Melanie grabbed El by the hand and dragged him all the way into the bathroom until they were side by side in front of the big mirror. He didn't bother to pull back - what would the point even be? Just standing in the mirror, it was pretty obvious that she had about five inches and quite a bit of muscle on him. Melanie looked El up and down in the mirror, biting her lip.

"We should do a shot with you!" she exclaimed. "People would love it! I mean... you're getting reeally cute. Not in a super girly way or anything... well..."

"Well not yet, you mean to say?" El said with a huff.

"Well... yeah. But that's fine! Either way, it's fine, right? We'll do a few pictures with the two of us. People will loooove it. Cheese!"

Melanie pulled El into a wet, bubble-bath-y kiss as her phone clicked away. He pulled back, pursed his lips, and stomped his foot - a gesture that looked far more feminine than he'd intended. "I am not doing a photo shoot!" he said. "I'm already not super happy about dealing with this whole... situation. And I have family members who would crucify me, some of them possibly literally, if they found out I was posting sexy girl pictures to Pixogram! What is wrong with you?"

El stopped for a minute to catch a second wind of anger, only to realize that Mel was on the verge of tears again. Her rose-pink lips were quivering with barely-constrained emotion. Great. This was Mel's fault and now he was going to have to comfort her...

"No, you're right," she said. "Fuck. I'm sorry, El. I'm a self-absorbed bitch!"

"You're not," he said, rushing back to hug her. Her warmth felt nice, even in the warm bathroom. "I'm just not ready for this. Okay?"

Melanie picked at the fabric of his slightly dingy, oversized Dodgers shirt and made a little sigh. "Will you at least try some of the stuff in the 'Too Small!' pile on? None of your clothes fit."

El wound up wearing some of his girlfriend's old clothes and exactly one item from Melanie's large and growing collection of racy donations - a pair of cotton-white deck shorts with a two-inch inseam.

"These would look amazing on me," she said with a hint of regret. She wasn't wrong - with the swell of her ass barely contained in them and her toned thighs filling the legs with no room to spare, she would have looked magnificent. But they significantly too small for her and, at El's size, the shorts fit perfectly around his waist but had enough give everywhere else to preserve a little modesty while being pleasantly breathable.

The rest of his ensemble he got from the guest bedroom dresser - notably, Melanie's old white trainers in a women's size seven and beige tunic top from sophomore year of high school before she'd filled out. That was a strange realization - that what Melanie had worn as a svelte fourteen or fifteen year-old girl now fit him pretty well. Strange times. The strangest realization, really, was that he was wearing some of her old panties... Melanie's pastel blue bikini briefs from her high school days nestled under the shorts, fitting far better than they boys' briefs he'd been wearing. El thought that ought to offend some masculine sensibility of his, but it completely failed to. After all, they fit.

"Do you want to come with me to the Gardner's pool?"

"Do you promise to not ask me to be in pictures and just let me watch?"

Melanie laughed and threw a wet towel at him. "I want you to take the pictures, El! Let me be your muse, senor auteur!"

That worked for him. They spent the afternoon lazing about the Gardner's poolside with its kitschy Hawaiian tiki theme and somewhat out-of-place koi pond. He happily clicked away with her phone as she tried on a dozen different outfits and then splashed with her in the shallow end of the water. They dipped their feet in the koi pond and the fish nibbled at his toes with their little sucker mouths. And, when she thought he wasn't looking, Melanie took at least a few pictures of El wading in the water and lazing in the sun.

"If you post those pictures!" He left the threat unsaid - realistically, what would he do? Sue her?

"Relax," she giggled. "I'm just sending them to you by DM. You'll thank me - it's adora-bora. Hand to God, I won't post these anywhere without your say so. Okay?"

"Yeah," he said.

He kissed her cheek. She kissed him on the lips, and then they just sat there by the pool. This was the longest they'd been together without fucking since the AHS started. Sure, he felt medium key horny from having just seen Melanie in and out of a dozen outfits of skimpy swim and beachwear. He'd gladly have jumped her bones then and there (if he was still capable of anything deserving that description). But the point was that they didn't have to, and that was nice. Melanie slid a hand up his smooth thigh, massaging the tender flesh of his inner leg, and was about two inches away from transforming their warm poolside afternoon into a steamy romp of an evening when El noted the time.

"Shit! I'm going to be late for my Team Gender-Bender meet-up!"

"Team Gender-Bender?" Melanie laughed. "Alack! My plan's foiled!" She splashed water high into the air. They kissed again and El dashed off to his car.

- - - - - 

El was in such a rush to not be late that, as he zipped past the community center and parked in the little lot just down the street, he completely missed the excitement in front of the place. He didn't miss it for long, though, because as he approached the rotunda entrance the excitement found him.

Fifty or sixty people were crowded around the outside of the building, some of them peeking into the rotunda and thrumming their palms against the glass. Some of them had signs and others wore garish day-glo t-shirts. As he approached on foot, El slowed down to read the signs:

'Repent abominations!'

'AHS is God's punishment on man!'

'God loves dead nympho's!' [sic]

Later, Elias would learn that one of the 'unusual cases' (several of whom were still being housed in B-wing) had unexpectedly died during the night. The word had somehow got out, leading to a media circus and a subsequent appearance by everybody's favorite fundamentalist hatemongers, the Coronado Evangelical Covenant. But Elias didn't know that at the time. All he knew was that he was suddenly surrounded and confronted by a dozen loud and angry people.

"Whore!" An overweight middle-aged man shouted, shaking his sign.

A woman was shouting inches from El's ear: "Go back to Sodom, you freak!"

"God's judgment is on you!" another cried.

"I'm just going to therapy," El said, far too softly to be heard over the crowd.

They swarmed around El - none of them actually physically attacking, though there was some incidental jostling from the press. He started to panic, pushing his way through the group. People were laughing and shouting. Photographers were snapping pictures and shouting questions. Just then a beefy, red-faced woman in the crowd grabbed El by the collar and dragged him forward and he stumbled against the ground. He cried out. People were bumping all around him with their signs, the push of the crowd threatening to trample him.

"Hell awaits all perverts!" the beefy woman shouted. She started to drag El back through the crowd - whatever her intentions might have been were unclear, but nobody was helping him and pull as he might, she was a lot bigger than than him and had a huge leverage advantage. He was dragged half-way to his feet and smooshed into the side of another sign-carrying protester.

"Get the fuck off of her!" somebody shouted. It was woman's voice, commanding and a bit on the deep side.

Before El knew what happen, a large, dark-haired woman pushed through the crowd. She pushed the beefy woman with a powerful shove and pulled El to her side.

"God loves dead freaks!" another protester shouted.

"Back the fuck off, pendejo," the dark-haired woman said. "We're here for a fucking therapy session! If I have to kick your teeth in to get there, I'm okay with that."

"Let us through!" a man shouted. "You asshats don't belong here!"

"We're allowed to be here!" a protester shouted. A dozen other Covenant members cheered her on.

The crowd jostled around El, but the dark-haired woman held him steady. A man in a green coat navigated them through the crowd. El was shocked, blinking in a daze and trying to process what was happening as people swarmed around them.

"Break it up!" somebody shouted. "You! Hands on your head!" El heard police sirens.

"Fuck, it's the cops. Hurry up," the dark-haired woman said. She ushered El into the community center rotunda. A frightened-looking CDC guard inside the building waved them in.

El stopped to catch his breath. He took a moment to get a good look at the woman who'd helped her and the man who'd pushed their way through the crowd. He gasped. The dark-haired woman looked vaguely familiar - dark complexion, broad of build, and well-muscled with expertly-styled dark hair streaked through with red.

"Diego?"

"I'm going by Petra," she said, patting the crotch of her pants. "Get it?"

"Get what?" The man said.

"Petra," El said. "A woman Peter, just like her junk."

Diego-now-Petra laughed. "Exactly! You get it!" She slapped El's shoulder a bit too hard, making him stumble. "Sorry... I don't know my own strength."

"Same," the man said. El realized it was Ash. With his (Her? Xir? El was unclear about the shifting pronoun landscape.) hair tied back in a man bun and the beginnings of stubble on his face, Ash was recognizable but decidedly masculine. The old army jacket had apparently given up the ghost and he now sported a slim olive-green coat with vaguely military surplus stylings. "How do you get used to these stupid muscles? I feel like I've got meat wound around inside my arms and legs. And my... well, it's a dick. Everything about this body is stupid."

They started toward their little area of the rotunda where Luci and Dr. Turcott were already waiting. Luci was sobbing over something as the doctor tried to calm her. They all slowed their approach to give the two of them time.

"At least you look like a grown-up," El said. Ash had a full head on him. Maybe a bit more. "I look like a damn twelve year-old."

Ash gave El a once over with his eyes. "You don't," he said flatly. "Sorry, but you look like a cute girl my age. I mean, you've even got make-up on. You might not have a built in life-preserver like Petra or Fran, but you don't look like a twelve year-old boy. Or girl."

"Fuck," El groaned. And he didn't have make-up on. That was sunscreen. It was just lotion-y.  "I'm not sure whether that's what I wanted to hear. But thanks. Thanks for being honest and thanks for saving my butt from those assholes."

"That's what homies do. No thanks needed." Petra said, adding with a wry grin: "But if you want to do me a favor, I've got one in mind..."

- - - - - 

Whatever Diego had been and done pre-AHS, he'd been a master schemer, and as Petra was even more so. His dark and confident good looks had nicely transitioned to the female equivalent: a seductress with dark, determined eyes, full, expressive lips, and a complexion so smooth you had to wonder whether she had any pores at all. When she plaintively requested help from Ash and El, Dr. Turcott had signaled her approval and they retreated into the little room that had served as their lounge a few days before. It was still mostly set up, with floor cushions, bean bag chairs, and a mini-fridge. A few multi-purpose tables had been corralled into the back of the room, but there was plenty of space for the three of them.

"What, exactly, do you need help with?" Ash had said.

"This."

In one confident motion, Petra pulled down her skinny jeans and midnight-black panties, revealing a glistening protuberance from her crotch. She stepped out of her clothes and stood there, hands on her hips, completely shaved and naked from the waist down, save for a pair of stylish and expensive-looking mules. Her lower body was completely feminine save for a jutting pink bulge that bobbed with her breathing, slowly extending and expanding before them despite the air conditioning.

"Is that a..." El said.

"Nope. That's Miss Cleo, not Mister Wizard," Petra said. She shook her hips and it rigidly swung back and forth. "It's a pseudohermaphrodite thing. She stays curled up in her home most of the time, and when I'm horny she gets a little bigger, and once she gets a little extra attention she can get pretty big. Not as big as my old papi, but I figure she's still growing into her own, yeah?"

El reached out in fascination, pulling his hand back before he actually touched it. "And it feels..."

"Fucking amazing. But I haven't had as much time to have her play with friends. That's a big change from my usual style, where papi got off to lots of activities. But mami here has been holed up while I've had to deal with a very disappointed ex-boyfriend or three since I got AHS. That's why I thought I'd ask a favor, seeing as how I'm a hero and everything."

El rolled his eyes. Petra had been brave, but 'hero' was pushing it. "I don't even have a... well, I don't have much of anything right now." He blushed. The little nub that had been his dick still felt great, but he couldn't really do much with it, and neither did he have a replacement entertainment system fully installed yet.

"You've got a mouth," Petra said flatly. "And Ash... do you have a..." she pointed up between her legs, "or a..." She pointed to her engorged clit.

Ash crossed his arms. They were a lot thicker than El's skinny things. "Do I have a dick yet? Yes, dingus, I do."

"Good."

What happened next was perhaps the most impressive display of saleswomanship that El had ever seen. Had El ever sucked a dick before? No, obviously not. Now that he was changing, had his thoughts on dicks been changing? Yes, he admitted with more than a little blushing, maybe a bit. Still, he wasn't about to suck a dick, nor cheat on his girlfriend, whom he loved. But he'd sucked clit before, hadn't he? Yes, obviously. And that's what he'd be doing here, right? But maybe he'd find out how he felt about sucking other similarly sized- and shaped-things. AHS patients were entitled to a little self-exploration, weren't they? Even if he sucked an oversize clit and really didn't like it, he'd have learned something. Didn't he owe that to himself? Whether it was Petra's golden words, her firm and bronzed-brown body, or her strangely alluring appendage that sealed the deal, the deal was sealt.

Petra pulled a similar bit of verbal Jiu Jitsu on Ash regarding self-discovery and trying new things, and Ash ate it up. Ash and Petra had already fucked the proper way when they'd still had the opposite parts, so there was a lot less psychological barrier-breaking to deal with there. They'd just have to reverse their roles. Within two minutes of their entering the lounge, Ash had his hands on Petra's sleek hips and was pumping away at her ass, grunting and groaning in a decidedly masculine timbre as he thrust. Meanwhile, El slurped away at Petra's front, pretending he was just performing cunnilingus (true!) on Melanie (not true!) and that it might not look to an outside observer like he was eagerly deep-throating a convincing she-male (not true!).

As much as El hated to admit it, he actually kind of liked going down on Petra. Something about the softly pliant and tumescent mass of her member was appealing. At first he gagged as Petra thrust, especially when her and Ash's thrusts lined up and he got a double-dose of mega-clit thrust. But he quickly learned to suppress the urge to gag and found he liked pleasuring a rod just as much as eating pussy. Mostly, he liked looking up and seeing how Petra responded to the little things he was doing with his mouth, whether it was suction, tongue action, or the thing he'd just figured out how to do with his throat. He'd always liked seeing Melanie squirm and thrash to his tongue-lashing, and this was no different, except there were more and different options for what to do and something about the pose, about kneeling and worshiping at the Altar of Head, that titillated part of El that he hadn't even known was there. Was he gay?

Come to think of it, he felt less and less like a 'he', as if the thump and slide of Petra's swollen clit was knocking bits of the old Elias loose. No, he... she. She appreciated the hell out of Petra's wobbling tits, loved the feminine keen of her moans as El swirled her tongue around the slightly veiny and bulbous head of Petra's clit. He loved the trim efficiency of her feminine musculature. Maybe that would make her gay on a technicality. But if she was anything now, she was bi. Because her little snapshot glimpses of a fairly ripped and rugged Ash grunting and prospecting for Petradollars with his throbbing shaft was also hot as hell. In that moment, there was nothing about their threesome that El didn't like. She stuck her hands down her cotton-white shorts, down her baby blue panties and found warm, slick wetness there. She rubbed her little remnant of a cock until it burst with pleasure and she moaned, hips rocking to a phantom lover as Petra thrust down her throat. The sensations of El's moaning set the bigger woman off, too, and fluid leaked down Petra's thighs as her oversized clit pulsed in El's mouth. Nothing came out, but she could imagine it as a mighty cock pumping its seed into her as she slurped and gurgled around its throbbing girth. And when Petra held El's shoulders and pushed her free with a wet pop, El plopped onto her ass, her crotch soaked and her legs still spasming in the aftershocks of her own orgasm. She wiped her mouth and giggled.

"Wow," she said.

"Wow," Petra agreed.

"Wow," Ash added.

They all laughed. They all cleaned up. They all wandered out to their therapy session with the guilty grins of thieves caught red-handed - they hadn't been at all discreet.

Dr. Turcott was a good sport about it, though, and Luci was seemingly oblivious. She had the vacant, raised-brow stare of a girl who hadn't been doing her mental exercises. Her make-up, and she was definitely made up, was streaked with tears. El reasoned that she'd had to push through the same crowd Coronado Evangelical Covenant assholes that the three of them had and Luci was more psychologically iffy than any of them. Doctor Turcott rummaged through her purse and pulled out a travel pack of wet wipes, handing them to El. With a blush, she dabbed at what she'd missed in the bathroom.

"Did the protesters give you any trouble? I suppose you've discovered that vigorous... exercise and other activities... are good release valves for stress."

"They had me a little on edge, yeah," Petra smirked. "I'm feeling pretty chill now, though. Looks like they're gone too. Good riddance."

"The police broke them up after the scuffle. They're allowed to protest, but they're a danger to the well-being of the folks still here. I suppose you heard we lost one last night... very tragic, but these things sometimes happen."

"Who was it?" Ash asked. "Anybody we've seen?"

Dr. Turcott shrugged. "That depends upon who you've seen. But it wasn't one of our more extreme cases - we had one woman with a vestigial twin, that's a little undeveloped twin inside her body, that split into a whole separate and fully-formed person. That's never happened before - not ever. But this was one of our B-wing patients."

They all knew who the B-wing patients were because they were basically a sister group. They were also Team Gender-Bender, but in an altogether different way - the handful of mid- or post-transition transsexuals who'd contracted AHS. For them, it was a nightmare, at least at first. Whatever operations and other transitions they'd undergone were quickly and completely reversed by the disease.

"It must be awful," El said. "To go through all that, to finally have the body you want and then have a disease just take it away."

"You seem to be taking it pretty well," Dr. Turcott said. "Haven't you just shifted into a body you never wanted to have?"

"Isn't it different?"

The doctor shrugged. "Maybe so. All I can say is that the research is inconclusive. About half of the patients who capitulate their transitions... that's the technical term... about half the patients are fine with it. They were never happy with their birth bodies, but after AHS they're happier than ever. The disease smooths over whatever issue they had and they're happy as clams. The other half aren't fine with it. Quite the opposite - they're miserable, and most of them don't make it."

"Suicide?"

The doctor dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. "Yes. It's never easy... the poor woman. It's hard to blame her, but I don't know what we could have done." She straightened her posture and took a deep breath. "But I shouldn't be talking about this. Not in front of you - I'll ask you not to repeat anything I've said and apologize for putting you in a position to do so. We should talk about you. Who wants to share? Anything about the protesters?"

"Um... sorry," El said. "But this is kind of related. I just realized that I'm a woman. I mean... not just the obvious, but it's been kind of creeping up on me, this realization. I was never unhappy as a man, never felt like I didn't belong in my body or anything, but I don't feel bad about this, either. I don't feel like a man getting sealed up in a woman's body like the Casque of Amontillado. I feel like a person who used to be a man and who's pretty much a woman, and I'm still me. Does that make any sense?"

"I feel kind of the same way," Ash said. "Half the time I'm annoyed that I have to lumber around in this stupid dude body, but I'm mostly annoyed that I'm a noob who hasn't figured out the mega-combos yet. The rest of the time I like it. The size, the strength, the big dick energy. I feel like I'm still me."

Dr. Turcott's smile was genuine. "That's great! I've actually written a paper on this if any of you want to read it."

El found herself nodding vigorously. "I do!"

"Great! It's a meta-analysis where I basically argue that genderfluidity is far more common than we usually think of it because the evidence points to at least half of all people psychologically adopting their body's gender through a combination of..."

"This is boring," Luci huffed.

"Luci hasn't been doing her exercises," Ash said.

"Yes," Dr. Turcott sighed. "And I can't for the life of me figure out why. I've told her she's to do them, and with a PH-05 she should do whatever she's ordered to do, but even when I'm watching her and urging her on, she won't do them."

"Huh..." El said, tapping her foot. "I think she's imprinted to her brother. PH-05 can imprint on a person if they get a lot of commands during the critical window."

Dr. Turcott's delicate brow creased in puzzlement. "How do you know that?"

"I read it online."

Fran rolled her eyes. "Of course you did. But you're not wrong. Why didn't I think of that? Luci, you can't do the exercises because Ben said so?"

"Yeah. I'm not allowed to do them. I want to, but I'm not allowed..."

"Shit." It was the first time any of them had heard Fran Turcott curse. "I'm going to need to get permission to undo the imprinting."

"Luci, does Ben make you do other things, too?"

Luci blushed. "Yeah, but I'm not allowed to talk about that either," she said, almost too quietly to hear.

Dr. Turcott started putting her things away. "Shit, shit, shit. Okay, folks, I've got some phone calls to make. I'm very sorry, but I have to end our session early. I'll see you again in two days."