“Wait, damn, really? Holy… wow…” Sally blew raspberries into the void, lying on her back on a mildly uncomfortable bench in the space between worlds. “I thought transgender was for like… people who were born that way,” she said. “I wish I had a ball to throw, you know?” Daniel leaned against the back of the bench, looking out into the void. He’d learned by now to let Sally go on her tangents. Like a homing pigeon, she usually found her way back to the original sentence, she just needed some time. “This place is boring,” Sally, continued. “I just need something to do with my hands. Speaking of which, good job on finding a job, my dude!” 

“Thank you,” Daniel said with a little smile. “It’s helped a lot.” It had been a little while now, but these little ‘visits’ were irregular and hard to predict, but it was still welcome. She was a good source of information that wasn’t going to be judgmental.

“Awesome possum,” Sally said, causing Daniel’s brain to briefly stumble, like the feeling he’d had going up a flight of stairs and expecting there to be one more step. Keeping up with Sally’s vernacular was the verbal equivalent of trying to assemble a puzzle on a rocking ship while someone threw kittens at him. “But yeah, good on you, man. You got hormones and all that stuff?”

He nodded. “We did. For a few weeks now. The effects are minimal, of course, but we have been told to be patient. It will take some time, but I think it will be worth it.” Sally sat up and wrapped her arms around her bouncing knees. 

“It’s gonna be weird, you know?” she said, bobbing her head left and right, listening to music only she could hear. “Like, I know we’re probably gonna find a way over here to put us back, and the mages here assured me they can undo whatever you’re doing over there, but it’s like… You’re doing things to my body that would make me really uncomfortable, you know?”

Daniel nodded, and then cocked his head. “What did you do to mine? What do I… well, what do you look like now?”

“Oh!” Sally bounced up. “Pretty much like this. No cardigan though. And uh… redder skin. And wings.” Daniel briefly had to wonder in stunned silence if this was one of her weird sayings, or if she really was… “Yeah, there was a weird little mixup, but I don’t mind it. And it helps me blend in with Lizzie.”

“Lizzie.”

“Yeah, the girl in the old demon queen’s body. She really is a total sweetheart. That’s going well, by the way! We moved back into the old castle. Not cozy, of course, you two really did a number on it, but repairs are going well, and sure, like, people are noticing the difference between her and the old one, but the ‘previous’ demon queen wasn’t big on the whole death and destruction either. She was more of a middle-manager type, you know? Anyway, there’s a snake-y -- like, top half girl, bottom half fourteen feet of scale and slithers -- advisor here, and she’s been huge help, but you really could’ve warned me about that mage, tho.”

“Warned you? The mage? What?” Daniel was well and truly lost in the deluge of nonsensical information. 

“She’s an absolutely useless lesbian. Her and the advisor are dating now and they’ve both clearly got a crush on Liz, and I’m just here like ‘no thanks’ on the whole dating thing and it’s just such a saccharine mess -- not that I mind, but I would’ve liked a heads up.”

“I’m… sorry?” Daniel tried. 

“It’s cool. Just don’t have someone to talk about with some of this stuff, you know? Lizzie is too obtuse and dense to pick up on it. Anyway, how is the original doing? She still eeeeeevil?”

Daniel cleared his throat. “She is… doing quite well. Not all that evil, no. She works selling things and she’s good at it. I don’t think she enjoys it, but that is a different story. She is delighted with the… changes, now that we are on these supplements. She seems to get more comfortable with herself every day.”

“Daniel~” Sally said with a singsong voice, leaning her elbows on the back of the bench, her chin on her hands. “You’re smiling,” she said with a smile that could’ve given any Demon Queen a run for her money. “Why are you smiling like that, Daniel?”

“It -- It’s simply good to see her denounce her old ways, and find happiness in little things,” Daniel said, not knowing what was being implied and not appreciating the implication. There was also a big part of him that felt he was having to defend and/or justify himself for some reason, which was preposterous, because this wasn’t about him. 

“Uh-huh. Sure thing, Pinnocchio.” 

“Who?”

“Never mind,” Sally said sweetly. “So what’s this about a video game? I don’t know squat about games, so I had no idea.”

“I found it advertised in a storefront some time ago. It… took some time, but Eliza and I have finally managed to get it running on the personal computer. We are… having trouble with it, but from the looks of things… my life’s story has become a game in your world.” This was mostly true. In fact, Daniel and Eliza’s story had existed long before either of them had. They had merely provided the details. 

“That’s weird. I mean, cool, but also like, a little bit of a mind-warper, you know?” She scratched her head. “Find out anything cool? Could be fun to see how your story is supposed to end, you know? Maybe find out some things about your lady friend.”

Daniel, oblivious to her tone of voice by choice, crossed his arms. “We would have, but neither of us is very good with these video games. The way to control another person by use of keys and a little mouse is… counterintuitive. I don’t know how people do it.” He sighed and looked up. “At least she knows what my parents look like now, I suppose.”

“Why don’t you look it up?” Sally asked, kicking her legs. “Like, how the game goes and stuff, if playing it is too hard.”

“Look it up where? I doubt we’ve also made it into the annals of literature.” That was a thought Daniel hadn’t considered yet. The idea that his story wasn’t just some toy for electric machines but a novel, written in a world that didn’t even know it had him in it, was mind-boggling. 

“No, online, silly. Didn’t you check out the Internet like I told you?” Sally looked at him in a way that made him feel well and truly old for the first time in a while, and enjoyed the strange experience of being chided by someone who had, by all accounts, a lot less experience with life than him. 

“Well… yes. We have used it to find maps of the local environment. It is how I found out Pat and Jenny were hiring.” He paused, looking for more examples, like a student trying to find proof that he had most definitely done his homework. “Eliza regularly uses it to look up recipes.”

“Oh my god, you sound like my grandmother,” Sally said with a little laugh. “You can look up anything on there. Like… music, movies, games, everything is on the internet, my dude. Just look it up. Like ‘game name full playthrough’ or something like that will do.”

“Just like that?” he asked. Sally just nodded. 

“Just like th-- oh, looks like I’m fading. I’ll see you in the next one, yeah?” She waved at him. He felt the pool of consciousness against the back of his brain as well. 

“See you again, Sally. Take care of yourself.”

---

Many people under a certain age know exactly what it’s like when they have to explain the Internet -- or computers in general -- to people who have no idea what they’re doing. There’s a lot of shuffling about and explaining core concepts (“What is a click?’, “How do I drag?”, “My computer is right here, what do you mean, go to ‘My Computer’?”) and much like trying to get a sleepy cat into a carrier, it’s generally an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. Such experiences are universal whenever a new technology is introduced anywhere. 

However, Daniel and Eliza didn’t have anyone to show them how to use the Internet, or the computer, other than what Sally had told Daniel, and they were both trying to keep from screaming whenever the other did something they didn’t fully understand or made an easily avoidable mistake.

After a while, it became clear that Eliza was more comfortable behind the keyboard, as she also had to work with one at her job, albeit sparsely. Daniel took a backseat, letting her fingers rattle across the keyboard, trying not to be too frustrated with the fact that there was nothing he could do but watch. He would prefer to take charge himself, but the number of problems in this world that could be solved with swordplay and swashbuckling seemed to be painfully small. 

After a while, huffing to himself slightly, he went into the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea and turned the coffee-maker on too. Sure, Eliza would argue that her coffee was better, but he’d seen her face whenever he brought her a cup he made. He knew what was going on, when her eyes lit up like that. Secretly, he knew, she liked his coffee better. 

He leaned against the counter as the water began to boil, crossing his arms. It was strange. Just minutes ago, he’d done the same thing, in that space-that-wasn’t-quite-space, and there it had felt normal. Natural. Here, there were things in the way that made it impossible to get quite comfortable. But, he reminded himself, he’d have to have patience. His skin would get oily and he’d even been prescribed some cream to help with acne, something he hadn’t had a problem with since he’d been a little boy. But what he was mostly looking forward to was the body fat redistribution. Feeling more like himself was the goal. The doctor had mentioned possible surgeries, but those were too far into the future to even think too much about right now. 

The coffee maker went off with a ‘ding’ and he poured out a cup for Eliza, and some tea for himself, then made his way back into the living room. Eliza wasn’t typing as furiously anymore. She seemed to be looking at walls upon walls of text, using the little mouse-thing to scroll through it all. He sat down in the chair next to her and handed her the cup. There, the expression on her face, where it became softer and her eyes filled up with gratitude, was exactly where he’d expected it. Proof that his coffee was superior. He smiled back. 

“Have you found anything yet?” he asked, looking at the screen. “It certainly looks like a story of some kind.”

“Well,” Eliza said, sipping her coffee, “yes and no. I thought I’d found it, but then I ran into a lot more information than I thought I would have. It’s been difficult to make my way through all of it, because there seems to be a lot of nonsense on here.”

“What do you mean?” Daniel asked, leaning back.

“Well, at the start of the game, the player got to choose, well, your gender, right?”

“Yeah,” Daniel said, grumpily. It had made him more than a little uncomfortable to think that the people who had created the game had made that part of his identity multiple choice, and Eliza’s insistence that they probably hadn’t been aware of the fact that he was a real, living person had helped only a little bit. The players could even choose his name, which was deeply strange to him. “I remember.”

“Well, a lot of these seem to assume that this is the right version of the story,” Eliza continued. Daniel grimaced. “There is mention of the actress doing a better job.” She looked at him, saw the sour look on his face, and cleared her throat. “Regardless, a lot of this seems to run contrary to how you’ve described your own experiences, and I can’t help but wonder if this is something else entirely.”

Daniel nodded. “What do you think?”

“Well… it depends,” Eliza said, thoughtfully. “Everything I’ve found here… Has Sally, in your conversations…” Eliza scrolled up to the title of the webpage she’d found everything on. “Has she ever mentioned ‘Fan-fiction’?”

Elamimax

They've found a rabbithole, and it goes DEEP

A reminder that this story has almost a dozen chapters that have yet to be released on scribblehub, and that you can already read them through my Patreon, and you get a whole bunch of added benefits! On top of that, it keeps my lights on and even lets me eat! 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!