DerbyGhost

Okay but what if, just what if, I released some chapters a little earlier than Friday, a nice midweek treat.

And so our schedule settled into a sense of normalcy, or at least as normal one could be in our situation. Apparently Kass had marked a ton of time off from hir coffee shop job to work on some personal projects post-graduation so zie was spending a lot of time around the house. And it’s not like I could really go out anywhere so we were both stuck together, for better or worse. It kind of felt like the pandemic all over again. The two of us sharing very intimate spaces. However since I wasn’t as big it made fitting together a little easier. No more awkwardly stumbling around and getting on each other’s nerves.

Well… Kass seemed a bit more reserved than zie normally was, something that I kept telling myself I’d think about and then would pretty quickly get distracted about. It’s not my fault! There was just so much to do!

First, I was getting pretty good at getting around. Every day I practiced jumping up to different spots around the house. For the first few days I could barely get onto the couch, but after a while I was getting even higher. I had to use chairs to get onto the counter to help with dinner or to do dishes, but eventually I could hop right up all by myself. 

I was actually kind of proud of my “mad jumping skills” as I called them. Kass said it was adorable when I was calculating the angle of my hops. Zie said that my face would get all tense and serious and I would hyperfocus on my goal. Sometimes I just zipped around the room for fun. I just had energy to burn, and it was really fun to see how high and far I could jump. I even designed (with the help of Kass of course) an obstacle course that I could test my speed. It was amazing how fast I could go without having to worry about breathing and all the ways that a body can kind of hold you back. Danged biology, I knew you were my enemy.

Over the course of a week I was also surprised by just how much I was growing! Not much compared to my previous height sure, but I was clocking in at about 2 feet before I even realized it. Of course this just increased my mobility and ability to help which I greatly enjoyed. 

We spent some time hypothesizing as well about just how KT bodies work, specifically how I grabbed things. While growing I still didn’t have fingers and everything just seemed to hover in front of my arms like it was being held on by a force-field. Kass theorized that potentially ambient magic just held it in sway and allowed me to control it using the memory of having fingers. Or maybe my essence didn’t fit into the KT 100% and that allowed me to manipulate the space around me. Regardless it worked, but it wasn’t the only odd thing about my new fluffy home.

It didn’t take long to discover that I didn’t need to sleep all night.Or really, much of the night. Or at night at all. Rather, I found that short naps over the course of the day were all I really needed to keep up my energy. Genuinely, kind of surprised that I had to sleep at all. I figured I’d just be awake 25/7 like some sort of creepy tiny goblin, protecting the house and trying too hard not to watch Kass while zie slept. 

But that’s creepy. And weird. And as hir friend I could never do that. That would be like Edward from Twilight level stalking. If I had any kind of standard in life, it was if Edward from Twilight did it, then to do the opposite of that. Well actually my other standard was if Robert Pattinson did something IRL, then it was probably a cool thing to do. As long as it wasn’t putting tinfoil in the microwave, obviously.

Anyway, these naps would just kind of happen whenever. No rhyme, no reason. I would just feel the need to sleep, and so I would find a nice cozy place and curl up. The fun part about being all tiny and cute was that I could fit pretty much anywhere and get comfy. The couch and bed were nice, but there was also this really good warm spot near the window that I could always chill at if I wanted an instant sleep. Sometimes I would curl up while Kass was reading a book or playing a game and just zone out and listen to the house. The whirring of the fridge whenever it was making new ice had this lovely little background rhythm. The lights had this distinct sound and after a while I could tell where Kass was in the house by what I could hear. Music had such a depth and I lost myself in chiptunes and sweeping soundtracks.

Before my untimely departure from this mortal coil, I never really was too keen on naps. Taking them, fine whatever. But waking up always felt like a rude slap back to reality. One, I was still just kind of myself and whatever dreams that I had slid into the subconscious only to be remembered as jumbled up imagery. Two, I always got hit by the post nap ‘feels like shits.’ My brain would be more tired than it even had been before I took the nap and my stomach would do flip-flops for fun. 

But now, every time I woke up it was like a brand new day. I was bright and invigorated and I didn’t even need to spend money on an energy drink to get rolling. All I needed to do was a big stretch where I pushed my limbs out as far as I could go and I was ready to attack what needed to get done! I made lists even! Look at me being all organized. Good for me. Organization was hard and little things could easily overwhelm me, so every little step I took helped keep my brain together and my tasks completed.

The other perk from taking these micronaps all the time was I could break my day up into little chunks which I thought was kind of fun. It meant that I could really take this time seriously and reinvest in myself as a person, something that I felt was already decided for me a long time ago. 

I didn’t want to get all cosmic high-falutin’ this is a sign from nature when it came to thinking about my death. But at the same time this was a unique opportunity. As soon as most people finish school they’re kind of shoved right into what comes next. You need money to survive and are so tired from work that you have to sacrifice other element’s of your time just to really feel like you’re getting anything done. 

But now I could just spend my time trying all sorts of things out. KT’s, apparently, got a stipend from Three Card Monty to use during and after this transitionary time. I was told that this was the case but didn’t realize how much it was actually going to be. A shocking amount of 0’s. So these wizards weren’t only dicks but they were hoarding wealth? Cool cool.

We set aside the majority of the money for clothes (because obviously I was going to be a little different than I was before the change) and for rent. But then there was still a pretty good chunk of change left behind that I could decide what to do with. And so, with that in mind, I started the great Jerrod Projects! I’m working on the name, something about it just feels kind of lame but that’s not important.

Kass was already doing so much to take care of me, so the first thing I decided to do was to pay hir back by being the best roommate zie could ever have. Every day I did a deep clean of a different room of the house. I started with the kitchen while zie was sleeping, making sure to clean out the fridge, bag up a bunch of trash, clean the dishes and paid attention to a lot of dust and hidden spaces. Turns out being really tiny is actually ideal for cleaning, since I could see all these spots that we normally would miss. And since I didn’t get tired I could just tackle things as much as I wanted until the job was done. 

It’s not like we were slobs. In fact we ran kind of a tight ship now compared to how we were when we lived in dorms. It was our space and Kass and I wanted to keep it looking all nice and shiny. But it’s not like we ever did a deep deep Spring cleaning in our two years of residency. We were too busy, but now I could tackle the house to my heart’s content. The only downside was I couldn’t take out the trash or really haul things away since I didn’t want to blow any normies’ minds by walking around outside the apartment, so Kass had to do the heavy lifting. 

But once you clean everything over the course of a few days, you kind of run out of things to deep clean. And I was booooored. I mean, who thought that 24 hours in a day was a good idea. Someone who didn’t nap all the time, that’s who. 

Not that I was fast at cleaning. It could be tough reaching spaces when you were only two feet tall and there weren’t any proper surfaces near it. The bathroom took a while to clean just because I wanted to get every part of the shower scrubbed and had to settle for not properly cleaning an area or two. And the mirror… well the mirror presented more problems. I hadn’t spent much time in front of a mirror since my first examination. I felt like if something major changed on me, Kass would let me know. But when scrubbing every surface of the bathroom, it was kind of hard to not catch my eye.

And by that I mean, literally notice my eyes. It was odd, but they seemed… bigger. More expressive. Reflecting the light of the mirror, even in their KT form my eyes seemed to glow with a life that I had never seen before. They were big, and round, and I think I even saw the beginning of delicate eyelashes. It was.. Cute. It was so cute that it was hard to not lose myself in them. I don’t know what brought about that change, but I liked it. I always felt that something was off about my face, who knew that it was just that my eyes needed to be a little bigger. A little more expressive. A little more me. 

After everything was properly cleaned and I had more time to kill then ever, I went into phase two of my self improvement plan. Learning to cook!

Our local grocery store had adapted this delivery service during the pandemic and it was so popular they decided to keep it going afterward, which I decided to take advantage of. The problem of ordering all your groceries online compared to going in person is you kind of need to assemble more of a plan on what you want to DO with the ingredients. Which meant that I fell down a rabbit hole of cooking tutorials on youtube. At first I started with ones that were more entertaining. There was this guy who recreated food that you saw on tv or movies in very realistic or fancy ways. That then lead me to check out all sorts of different food channels and it made me want to create!

Kass was a pescatarian, and I never had much experience cooking outside of the standard box mac ‘n’ cheese. The few times that I had tried much had ended in disaster. Not that I didn’t want to, it was just kind of intimidating. It was a big investment to cook, and what if I fucked up and it tasted terrible? And yeah, there was also still stigma about men cooking. I wish there wasn’t. I wish when I was a little kid I could have just walked up to my mom and had been like “yo let me help you.” Maybe then I wouldn’t be this anxious mess who was afraid to do anything super complicated. But she probably would have also told me to go pick up a football and not to ask her something like that again, so it’s probably for the best. 

And so, in order to face my demons, I realized I just had to fucking go for it. The only way I was going to get semi-decent at cooking was if I jumped into the deep end and did the damn thing. I started simple with some veggie dishes, saving the fish for later since it could be kind of temperamental. Kass set me up with some recipes for a nice veggie stir-fry, and some relatively low stakes pasta dishes. Zie even found a little doll apron for me to wear while I cooked and took way too many pictures of me standing on the stove stirring the pasta waiting for it to be finished. I might have grumbled a little bit for show, but it was so cute seeing how adorable zie found me. 

I still wasn’t amazing at cooking, but this was a start. A foothold into a world that I thought was long out of reach. And it made Kass so happy! I made sure to have breakfast and coffee ready for hir when zie woke up in the morning, and at night I had some new meal that I cooked all by myself. Sure, Kass was still down, but I know that all the effort and care I put into cooking meant a ton to hir.  

A couple of days in the first week Kass left to go to some of the magical stores to look for various ingredients. Apparently zie was trying to craft a rare spell or get a magical amulet or whatever  and a lot of ingredients had to be back-ordered since zie had bought them out of a few of them last time zie needed it for a class or something. These were the roughest of days. Kass just looked so hollow every time zie came back home and said that powdered-whatever-you-call-it was out of stock for a month and wouldn’t be ready until mid-June. It just gutted me to see hir like that, it made whatever minor crisis I was having with food seem silly in comparison.

The first time Kass came home zie locked their door and I heard hir crying again. It just hurts, y’know? It hurts to know that your friend is having a rough time and you don’t know why, and you don’t know how you can help. Kass didn’t even come out for dinner that night, sniffling through the door that zie wasn't hungry and I needed to leave hir alone. All I could do was leave a plate of food outside of hir door and hope that eventually Kass would eat it. 

On nights that Kass wasn’t upset, we would have a really sweet evening. We’d have dinner and then I’d try out my New Cocktail Of the Day. I had always wanted to learn about mixing drinks. I figured it was fair, if my roomie could craft elixirs of magic then I could concoct potions of intoxication. I had amassed a little bit of a bottle collection just because I thought it was cool and I liked making very basic drinks for friends. In fact, all of my lady friends enjoyed the drinks that I made because I made them primarily for taste rather than for getting fucked up. Apparently a lot of my gal pals had been to one too many parties where men shoved very alcoholic drinks in their hands to try to lower their inhibitions, so they appreciated that I wasn’t an ass about it. 

Like cooking, I was always afraid of going outside of a very specific box that I had painted myself in. Now, thanks to a very easy beginner’s bartender kit that I picked up off of the Bad Website That Gives a Billionaire More Money, I was crafting drinks with ease. It was just as much of a science as cooking, finding the right ratios and tastes that went well with each other. I’d make a normal size version of the drink for Kass, and then a pint sized version for me and we would curl up and watch some kind of gory horror movie and cuddle up close on the couch. 

Physically, Kass and I were closer than we ever had been before. I guess when you took away my massive size, I was less afraid about getting close to a friend. After our first night on the couch, I really looked forward to sprawling out on kass’s lap with a nice drink and relaxing at the end of the day. We’d talk about how out of date all the styles were in the movie and the combination of the booze and the delicious head scritches from Kass would just leave me feeling all floaty and happy. 

Mentally, however, I still felt guilty about Kass. My brain kept going over and over about if I had done something that had gotten hir so upset. I had made sure to not yell at hir again after the whole “pick-up” incident so that wasn’t the case. And I had been trying really hard to use the right pronouns to make sure zie felt as welcome as possible. Every once and a while I asked hir if zie wanted to transition physically as well and zie just gave me a wistful smile and said that zie was planning on it and oh my God I am the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. 

Why would Kass have had all the paperwork filed and ready to go to use a KT? Why would zie have just had one ready to go when “getting hit by a truck” wasn’t necessarily on my to-do list. Why would Kass have come out to me about both being a magician and non-binary on the same day? Zie could have just kept it hidden from me as long as possible. It’s not like I had picked it up over the course of four years. In fact I was so oblivious, I had a hard time figuring things out that was right in front of my face. 

My parents used to yell at me and tell them that I was so self centered. That I rudely never thought about anyone other than myself. And as much as I hate giving them the benefit of the doubt since we haven’t spoken since the Sophomore Thanksgiving debacle, they were kind of right on this one. Not that I had a hard time thinking about other people’s feelings, it all just kind of spiraled back to me in the end. If I knew a friend was sad, I would spend my time thinking about how I could help them rather than just, y’know, being present in the moment for them. It’s very easy to recognize a pattern with some distance, and yet here I was repeating the same motions over and over again and being such a self centered idiot when Kass needed my help. 

So Kass comes out to me about being a wxtch, not because I stumbled onto some grand secret. But because zie was about to do something that was very visibly magic and needed a way to explain it to keep me from losing my goddamned mind. 

Something like putting hir essence into a KT. The very same KT that I was inhabiting at this very moment. An instant transition device to give someone experiencing gender dysphoria the body that, oh God. The body that- The body that zie deserves. 

Fuck.

DerbyGhost

And so our KT has made a revelation! How will they deal with this discovery? Well I guess we will just have to wait and see.