Sagitta woke me up the next morning. Once I managed to clear away the drowsiness fogging my mind, I showed her the items I had gathered. She pointed to Pleiades.

“That,” she said, “has to stay.”

I looked from her to the figure. “Why?”

She shrugged. “When you train to use a power like mine, there’s certain things they tell you not to use. Dried flowers, locks of hair, computers with a certain level of autonomy, anything currently living, recordings of Bowie, and anything to do with Thanatosia, to name a few.”

“What’s Bowie?” I asked.

“Doesn’t matter. The point is, there are certain forces you don’t want to mess with unless you’re way more powerful than me. The rest of this looks good, though. You have any Monster City cards?”

I shook my head. “I never got into that.”

“Too bad. They tend to be useful. A lot of sentimental value spread over a huge number of items. Good for quick, predictable effects. Anyway, let’s hit up a secondhand store and then grab some food.”

We grabbed the bags and made our way to my old sedan. It has chipped green paint, the front passenger door is missing its handle, and there’s more than a little rust, but unexpectedly, Sagitta didn’t comment on how shitty it is. I drove her to the nearest secondhand store, thinking she meant that she was going to pick up more items with sentimental value, but it turned out she wanted clothes that would let her blend in a little more. She quickly selected a pair of jeans and a too-big flannel shirt. She had no money, so I quickly realized that I was going to be paying for everything on this trip, including gas and hotels. But what else could I do? She had magic and, like she had said, I wanted to be as close to that as I could for as long as possible.

I chose a diner for breakfast. I ordered waffles and she ordered something called the XL Haystack whose price made me cringe. While we waited for food I tried to press her some more about her power.

“No, there are lots of different effects,” she replied to my question. “It depends on a number of factors. What the item is, what it means to the owner, how much sentimental value they place in it. There’s always some guesswork involved, but you get a feel for it. With the right item, I suppose you can do just about anything.”

I watched her idly arrange the packets of jelly according to fruit and color. “So, you could, say, change someone’s shape?”

She looked up at me suspiciously. “With the right item, yeah.”

My heart began to pound. I was about to ask her the question that had been on my mind since the moment she had first demonstrated her power. It almost felt as if there was a barrier between the thoughts and the words, as if saying them would require more physical effort than usual, and if I failed nothing would come out of my mouth but incomprehensible sound.

“So you could turn a boy into a girl?”

She cocked her head. “I guess, but why would I do that?”

I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Well, like, if a boy really wanted to be a girl, you know?”

I could feel her glaring at me as I stared at the seat of the booth. “You have to be born a girl. You can’t just turn yourself into one.”

“But you can,” I protested. “You said so.”

She sighed heavily. “Why do you want to be a girl?”

How could I answer that? It was something so arbitrary, just a slight change in the body. It shouldn’t matter to me, and yet it did. “It would be easier.”

“Easier? You honestly think women have it easier than men?” she asked coldly. “You have no idea what it’s like being a woman in a patriarchal society. You would not find it easier.”

I opened my mouth to protest. That wasn’t what I had meant. But…what had I meant? In that moment, two absolute truths existed in my mind. First, that life was more difficult for women than for men. And second, that I would find it easier to be a woman. Those truths had always been there, but it had never occurred to me that they contradicted each other. Neither fact could be denied, so there had to be something to reconcile them. Desperately, I grasped at anything that could make sense of this contradiction.

My response was not the most graceful. “It’s because girls are pretty. And they get to wear pretty clothes.”

“So that’s what womanhood is to you?” It was more of a statement than a question.

“No, it’s not just that.” My voice came out more whiny than I meant it to.

“Then what?” Sagitta asked. “What is womanhood to you?”

There was a loud beeping from Sagitta’s backpack, like an old pager. She reached in and pulled out the adding machine, frowning at the display.

“False alarm,” she said, then pressed a button, causing the beeping to stop.

A moment later, our food arrived, relieving me from Sagitta’s casual dismantling of my deepest desire. I didn’t bring up the subject again during breakfast.

Sagitta ate her entire huge breakfast. I wondered when she had last eaten. Afterward, we hit the road. I did all the driving, Sagitta never offered to take the wheel and I didn’t ask her to. I didn’t even know if she knew how to drive cars like mine. The drive was peaceful. The rolling hills I was familiar with eventually gave way to bluffs, huge hills that looked as if they’d been sliced in half. After that, everything was flat for several hours until mountains began to peek over the horizon.

We spoke little during the drive. I tried to ask her more about where she came from and how she was going to save our world, but her answers were noncommittal and unsatisfying. She asked me a few questions about my sentimental items and I answered to the best of my ability.

As the afternoon drew on, we stopped in a small city and chose a cheap-looking motel. It was still more money than I wanted to spend but, again, the world apparently depended on it. Once we had settled in, Sagitta grabbed her backpack and wandered outside to lean over the railing and watch the family swimming in the pool. I called a local pizza place to order us some food, then joined her outside. She had dug a pack of cigarettes out of her bag and was smoking.

We were silent for some time, then I said, “Look, I don’t understand why, but I just really want to be a girl. I want it more than anything. Sometimes I think it’s going to drive me crazy knowing that I can never be one. Isn’t that a good enough reason?”

She exhaled a long stream of smoke, still staring at the pool. “You may not know the reason, but I do. It’s because you’re a pervert.”

"I'm not a pervert," I protested. "I mean, I don't want it for perverted reasons."

"Oh, really?" she replied incredulously, looking at me, finally. "Then give me your phone."

Confused, I pulled my phone out of my pocket, unlocked it, and handed it to her.

With her free hand she typed something in and then held it up for me. "See?"

She had typed the word "sissy" into the search bar causing a list of web pages I had visited in the past to appear. Titles like “Her Ladyship’s Sissy,” “Hypnotized into Being My Girlfriend’s Maid,” and “Force-Femmed by My Giantess Wife.” They were erotic stories of women forcing their male partners to dress as girls.

I could feel my face heating. "That's not...But it's not like I would do anything bad..."

"I'm not going to take part in your sexual fantasy," she stated coldly.

With a stab of shame I realized that that was exactly what I was asking of her. It was a sexual fantasy after all. I couldn’t deny that I was turned on by imagining myself as a girl. Asking a girl I had only just met to help me live out that fantasy wasn’t just wrong. It was disgusting. I could never bring it up to her again.

There was a high pitched beeping from Sagitta’s bag. She snatched it up and pulled out the adding machine.

“Shit. The universe is destabilizing,” she said, putting out her cigarette on the railing.

“What does that mean?” I asked nervously. It sounded like my universe was about to fall apart.

“It means we’re about to be attacked.” She rushed into the room and started digging through my bag. She returned a moment later holding Tisiphone. I felt a stab of regret knowing I was about to lose her.

Sagitta looked above, then to either side. She was waiting for something, so I looked around too. I was the first to spot them. They were little white spheres, each about the size of a basketball, alternating between zipping through the air and pausing like hummingbirds. There were dozens. Each had a single black eye slightly offset from the center. They matched the design of the previous robot.

“What’s the name of this thing’s pilot?” Sagitta asked, holding up the toy.

“She doesn’t have a pilot. Tisiphone is sentient,” I replied.

“Tisiphone, who has loyally stood guard over Abner, now it’s time to protect him,” Sagitta hastily announced.

Tisiphone vanished from Sagitta’s hand and a moment later, the robot hero herself stood before me. Or perhaps Sagitta was wearing Tisiphone-shaped armor. After all, she was looking very Sagitta-sized instead of her usual giant self.

I realized that Sagitta probably needed information again.

“She can turn into a jet,” I shouted. “And fire lasers. And missiles.”

The eyes of the robot swarm were glowing red.

“I’m not turning into a jet,” Sagitta snapped, her voice slightly muffled by Tisiphone’s head. “That would crush me.”

Just then, lines of bright red light flashed between the robots and Sagitta, leaving so many afterimages in my vision that it became hard to see what was happening. Sagitta stumbled backwards, grunting with what sounded more like shock than pain. Her armor was covered with smoking scorch marks when the robots finished their barrage. Their eyes were already starting to glow again, preparing another set of attacks. I had no idea how many of those attacks Sagitta could take.

“Then use Fury Salvo,” I shouted.

Sagitta recovered and hopped up onto the railing, balancing there with unnatural ease. She shouted “Fury Salvo,” and pieces of her armor opened up on the shoulders, sides, legs, revealing dozens of tiny missiles. They seemed to defy spatial reasoning, with all of those missiles inside of her, how was there any room for Sagitta herself?

There was no time to wonder about that, though, because the missiles were already firing, curving and twisting through the air, each seeking out a different target, leaving trails of smoke in an elaborate tangle. One-by-one, the robot swarm was blown up in a cacophony of light and sound and smoke that left me blinded, deafened, and overwhelmed with the smell of fireworks.

When my senses returned I could see that all the robots had been destroyed. The suit had crumbled into ash which now coated Sagitta who had dropped off the railing and stood looking over the destruction. Miraculously, the family at the pool seemed to be unharmed, despite the debris that surrounded the corner of the pool they had huddled together in. However, a stray missile had hit someone’s car, leaving it a smoking husk. Nearby was a man in a baseball cap with an embroidered pizza slice on the front who cowered by the side of the building. Next to him was a pizza bag.

“Hey, food’s here,” Sagitta announced.

She ended up going inside to shower and attempt to clear the ash off her clothes while I went and collected the pizza and attempted to comfort the delivery man. I realized that not so long ago I had been in his position, a random person wrapped up in dangerous events that defied my sense of reality, but already I felt like I had a certain level of authority. Due to my proximity to Sagitta, I was part of things now, and that made me react differently to things like robot attacks.

Then we ate and watched television and went to bed. I supposed someone must have called the police because we saw flashing lights outside of our room. But we kept the curtains drawn and no one came to our door.