Working again was a blessing, Daniel realized. Being cooped up had been driving him slowly insane, especially considering the fact that Eliza had become, essentially, the breadwinner. He’d worried at first if her employer would take umbrage with the fact that she had no valid form of identification, but clearly their hiring process and background checks weren’t exactly in-depth. All they’d required was an address and an account number. 

So she’d been working and he hadn’t, and he’d still been hesitant to touch the electric device in the room. The books, while giving an abundance of information that was almost impossible to wrap his head around, were physical, tangible objects he could pick up. The idea that all of human knowledge could somehow be accessed through a screen, a box with letters on, and something that could only be imagined to be a mouse with a lot of imagination. He’d quite literally wrestled a dragon, but that thing scared him. He’d booted it up once. Pressing the button with the circle and the line it had made a whirring noise at him that he hoped was normal, though he had regarded it with suspicion. Painstakingly he”d typed out the password, just like Sally had told him to. 

The computer had unlocked, and immediately several squares with moving pictures and a lot of noise had popped up, blaring music at him, and he slammed down on the power button and turned it off again. He hadn’t dared turning it on since, and he was, he had to admit, just that little bit too proud to ask Eliza for help. 

But now that he had work, he didn’t need to worry too much about the computer anymore because he didn’t need to constantly worry about having things to do. Sure, he needed to learn about, well, everything, and he and Eliza spent a lot of time quietly reading in the living room toge-- well, at the same time, but he was no longer cooped up. And the work was good, too. The class he taught was maybe a dozen or so people, all beginners, but all people who were motivated to, if not learn how to properly defend themselves, then at the very least get in shape while pretending to. He didn’t mind those. 

Over the years, he’d taught many companions how to defend themselves. Early on, it had been a slightly misogynist attitude to the less masculine of his companions, feeling that, as a man, he knew how to teach them. There hadn’t been a big confrontational moment that had turned him around. Just a lot of small ones that had slowly made it clear to him he’d been acting like a pig. But as he’d grown older and more experienced, he’d found that he’d actually had something to teach, something to pass on to younger friends and allies. And then there had been that time with the village. So he knew how to help. How to teach. 

And he really was good at it, and it was giving him satisfaction in doing something constructive, helping people, even if it was just to feel confident in themselves. There was a strange double-edged sword to his teaching. His students were, on the whole, receptive to what he had to show them, especially after he’d put Pat in an armlock for demonstration, but he also knew that the major reason for this was the simple fact that they thought of him as a woman. The majority-women class were comfortable being taught by a woman like them, and it made his skin crawl, even as he was helping them. 

His most recent class had just ended when Jenny walked up to him as he was toweling down. He nodded at her as she approached. Pat and Jenny had made him feel welcome there, and they both called him Daniel without a second thought, and they’d accepted his half-hearted attempt at a lie about partial amnesia, explaining things that he felt he should know but didn’t. They’d been more helpful than he would have expected, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. 

“Looks like that went well again,” Jenny said, tossing Daniel one of the bottles she was carrying and screwed the top off the other. “You doing alright?” Daniel nodded gratefully as he took a swig and sat down against the wall. Drinking more was something he still needed to get used to. He was a lot smaller than he used to be. Dehydration just hit harder. Jenny and Pat were professionals though, and they could tell, sometimes better than him, apparently, when he was pushing himself too hard. It was strange to know people again, after having only Eliza to talk to for so long, even though he couldn’t exactly relate to them in the same way he did to the Demon Queen. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Mrs. Hendricks keeps putting too much weight on her bum knee, but I think she is finally starting to listen to her body.” He gave Jenny a weak smile. “They are… getting there.”

“I meant you, Daniel,” Jenny said and sat down next to him, giving him at least a foot of space. Sure, she was being nice and making sure she wasn’t being overly close or familiar, but when you’ve just spent several hours working out, teaching several groups of people how to defend themselves, physical contact is the last thing you want. Daniel felt like a degree of gross and sweaty that made him feel like, if thrown at a window, he’d probably just stick in place. 

“Ah,” he said, and they sat in silence for a while. “I am… all right. I’m doing something productive. That is a great help, I will admit.” He grew quiet. There was a ‘but’ hanging in the air, like an obtrusive little thundercloud. 

“You… don’t talk about you, much,” Jenny said. “I know the accident really rattled your brain and all that but like, if you need to talk… Pat and I are here, alright?” Jenny chewed her lip for a moment in that way that people do when they try to find words that aren’t platitudes. “Look, I know a lot of shitty companies and stuff say that they’re a family, and I wouldn’t like, go that far when it comes to the gym, but we really do try to make sure that the people we work with are in a good space, you know? So like… if there’s anything you want to get off your chest…” she paused. “Sorry, unfortunate choice of words… If you ever want to talk… we’re here, okay?”

Obviously, Jenny had picked up on the fact that Daniel’s baseline comfort was somewhere in the ‘bobbing for apples in a sewer’-range, and his stilted way of speaking had hardly escaped her. It wasn’t something he was easily able to change. “Thank you, Jenny,” Daniel said. “Truly. I just don’t know if this is something you, or Patrick, can help with.”

Jenny nudged Daniel’s shoulder with a fist, a jovial little punch. “You’d be surprised. My boyfriend didn’t know he was my boy-friend for a while, if you catch my meaning.”

“Yes,” Daniel lied. “I… Thank you. I may want to talk soon, Jennifer. But I still have things to understand, first.”

“Of course. Take your time, Daniel. Now, not to be that chick, but we need this hall for Zumba in a couple of minutes.” Jenny got up and offered Daniel her hand. He gratefully took it, and let himself get pulled up. It was funny how quickly she got him to his feet. He was so small, even if he had been bulking up lately. 

After saying goodbye to Pat -- Daniel hated the idea of showering at the gym, where he’d not only be showering in the women’s changing rooms, feeling like a voyeur but where he’d be seen as one of them -- he headed home quickly. His head was a mess. Something Jenny had said had put its hooks in him. He’d magically been thrown into this world, but maybe there was the possibility that it wasn’t just him and Eliza. Were there others? The walk home was, as always, not an unpleasant one. After a thorough workout, the block-and-a-half journey back to their apartment was a great way to get some semi-fresh (this was still the city after all) air and stretch his legs. 

This time, however, he had his head held a little higher. Not for any particular reason, sometimes people just realize their posture has been bad, and they try to look ahead instead of at their feet. It happens, and this time, it happened as he walked past a store with a bad little graphic design of an old-fashioned gaming controller on the sign outside, with the two large windows that had human-sized statues of fictional characters, and a very large poster. Daniel caught it out of the corner of his eye, and he froze, and slowly turned. 

When one universe really likes another universe, it sometimes likes to share things, like ideas, words, languages, symbols, people and, sometimes most importantly, stories. When someone tells you that the pen is mightier than the sword, they are often not referring to the latest action movie where someone does something unspeakable with a fountain pen to another character’s head, nor do they mean that yelling insults is a better way to confront fascism than a good old-fashioned punch in the face. 

What they mean is that stories are immortal. Stories will drift through the world, gaining power until they live a life on their own and tell themselves, changing unfortunate details until it becomes the best version of itself. A story is a growing, evolving organism, always changing to be the fittest for its environment. And sometimes, a story is simply a series of facts told by one universe to another. And someone, somewhere, will wake up with a really good idea for a video game, and several artists will have the perfect image in their head of what the hero looks like, and a writer will know exactly what to name these characters. And sometimes, the other universe then shrugs and goes ‘might as well make it happen’. Which came first is anybody’s guess. 

There was a large poster on display. On it was Daniel’s face, as it once was, rendered in vivid detail, every hair on his kept (if not all that well) beard, the lines on his face of decades of fighting, the heavy brow, the short brown hair, the look of grim resolution. And opposite him was the face of the Demon Dragon Queen, smirking, a pair of ram’s horns curling and pointed straight at him, like a pair of daggers. In the middle of the page was a title. He ran inside and immediately bought a copy of whatever it was that had his face on it, then began to run home. Thoughts of the conversation with Jenny had left his mind completely. The only thing he could think to do now was to go home and show Eliza. He might even put the disk in the computer, actually braving the electrical monstrosity. 

When Daniel rounded the last corner, he broke into a sprint. He didn’t care that he’d just gone through a workout, he needed to know, and he didn’t understand. He wasn’t very good at figuring out problems like this. But Eliza could probably help. She’d be getting off work around this time, anyway. Well, she got off work an hour ago, but she’d been forced to do ‘sensitivity training’, which had infuriated her to no end. She had apparently intimidated some of her female coworkers, and had to take classes on sexism in the workplace. Daniel had helped her reframe it as helping her try to fit in, make people less uncomfortable, but it had only worked a little bit. Trying to make a body that isn’t yours fit in is like adjusting an ill-fitting mask. It wasn’t going to solve the problem, but it would make it less obvious for others, and that was going to have to be enough. 

He ran up the stairs three at a time and ran inside, tossing his bag to the side and then saw Eliza standing by the little living room table. To say that she looked shaken was an understatement. He remembered the night a little while ago when she’d been so upset, and he immediately slowed down. If she was going to come after him again, he didn’t want to fight her, but he was going to if he had to. 

“Eliza?” he asked, clutching the bag with the little box in one hand. Maybe he could brandish it to snap her out of it if she became aggressive. Eliza took a few steps towards him with an intensity in her eyes he hadn’t seen in a while, and then, very slowly, her face split into a wide grin. He was worried for a moment that she’d lost it. That she’d finally cracked under the pressure and had been waiting here like a slowly maddening predator for him to come home. But then tears were forming in her eyes again and she grabbed him by the shoulders. She held him like that for a moment before, clearly with a great degree of difficulty, she managed to find the words. 

“Daniel!” she practically yelled. “We’re transgender!”

Elamimax

The first step is figuring out what's going on!

Patrons get another 12 chapters that haven't been released yet ;)

If you like this story and my other works, consider subscribing to me on Patreon. it really helps me a lot, and lets me keep writing, as this is my full-time job. Patrons get a ton of benefits, like access to new stories, sometimes weeks or even months in advance, as well as cheaper commission rates, exclusive discord roles, and access to private polls about future projects. 

Regardless, I hope you like this, and I'll see you all soon. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!