Throughout the summer of 2008, most Danny’s days were spent at his desk chair with his hands on his mouse and keyboard and his eyes glued to the screen of his bulky all-in-one eMac. Because of his limited exposure to computers throughout school, Danny was unsure how to use them properly, and with his parents gone during the day, he had to figure a lot of things out on his own. However, Danny eventually found various tutorials and instructions on how to do basic things with his computer, and was ready to explore.
He discovered that the internet was not only a bastion of freely accessible academic knowledge but a treasure trove of information on things he was passionate about. Everything he was interested in, he could learn about in exhaustive detail, and what drew his attention foremost was the medium of video games. Since his introduction last year, Danny maintained a passion for the medium, but now he discovered it to be so much more than a modest collection of titles.
He learned about the history of the medium, how it began, how it got to where it was today, and where it was going. He discovered video game emulation and gained access to entire eras of games revered as classics. He began soaking up information released by video game news sites, most notably Destructoid. And he also discovered countless videos about games, from series retrospectives, early forms of Let’s Plays, proper game review shows, or videos that spoke about games in a more comedic manner. It was almost overwhelming for Danny, but he still maintained his set bedtime of 9:00 PM and did whatever insubstantial homework he’d received from summer school before he played on his computer.
As he continued down this rabbit hole, taking in hours upon hours of video games and game-related content, Danny eventually looked up information on another one of his deep interests, that of body swapping. Through a simple search, he was able to find a multitude of content related to his interest, starting from catalogs of TV shows and films that incorporated the concepts, but as he went down the thousands of results before him, he stumbled onto contents more… erotic in nature. A concept that Danny did not understand. He delved into the realms of Fictionmania and the like, discovering unique stories, comics, and captioned images that describe scenarios of body swapping that Danny found immensely compelling as they explored a variety of premises, most of which he never even fathomed until then.
As he continued to immerse himself into this small world, Danny also began feeling something special towards things related to body swapping. The feeling of arousal. It was a strange sensation that Danny had little to no context for, and being antisocial towards his parents, he would not receive a proper explanation from an adult for over two years. Still, he recognized the feeling as a positive one, and continued to pursue body swapping content and satiate himself in this feeling as he branched out into subjects related to body swapping, the most popular of which went by the name TG.
TG, gender bending, gender changing, Trans-Sexual Fiction/Fantasy (TSF), and so forth can best be described as a concept that revolves around a scenario wherein one or more characters undergo some sort of fantastical transformation into the opposite sex. With the ensuing narrative, assuming there is one beyond the initial transformation, centering on how they adapt to this new situation. It has its own various tropes, subsets, and varieties, but the majority of this content is erotic in nature.
As Danny continued to delve into TG and body swapping, discovering more examples of both at an alarming rate, a thought appeared in his mind. What if he were to combine his interests in TG and body swapping with his love of video games? This led Danny to another deep rabbit hole of images, comics, and fanfictions that landed him onto a site called Paheal Rule 63, a pornographic imageboard full of TG fanart of characters from many video game franchises that Danny had been learning about, along with characters from various cartoons and anime that he watched.
It was an enthralling place that Danny sprawled through while having next to no context for any of the nudity and sexual acts he was witnessing while doing so. It was also here where Danny posted his first comment on the internet, one where he inquired about a sexual act. In response to his curiosity, an anonymous user called him a “retard” amongst other unpleasant terms. This also marked the last time Danny tried talking to somebody else online.
For the duration of the summer, Danny’s pursuits for content that satiated his interests and glutton for entertainment continued onwards and onwards. He continued to collect his favorite images, watch video game playthroughs, play through games on his computer, and read through TG stories, learning more about sex and sexual themes while doing so. He had found his own little world, one that brought him joy to be in. But outside of this little oasis, things were far less jovial.
For the last two years of elementary school, Danny was unable to form a proper connection with his teachers. He could not help but compare them to Miss Williams and they always came up short in his eyes. He still maintained fairly high marks, earning mostly B’s in his classes, but he did not enjoy attending these classes and enjoyed being with his peers even less. Danny truly felt like an outsider, more than ever before, and nobody at the school district really cared about Danny anymore.
This was because Danny had ceased being a major problem for the school district. Aside from a rare outburst, he was a fairly well-behaved student who blended into the background. He did his work, stayed quiet, and while he did occasionally stir up a fuss, it was forgotten about entirely the very next week.
As Danny did sufficiently well in school and was immersed in the wonders of the internet, his parents decided to shed yet another responsibility and abruptly stopped taking their son to the library, ending their most regular and intimate interaction together. Now, the only meaningful amount of time Danny spent with his parents was on special occasions. Doctor visits, dental cleanings, haircuts, and the like. Because of this divide, the two parties would often go weeks without exchanging anything beyond pleasantries with each other.
Part of Danny thought that some things in his life would improve once he began middle school, and entered a new environment, however that was not the case. If anything, things got worse. In fifth grade, Danny took a standardized test that would determine what classes he would take in middle school. A test that confused Danny due to its wide range of subjects and use of material Danny was unfamiliar with. He could not complete the test in time because of these issues, and as such, the school district placed him in many classes that introduced less material at a slower rate. Classes geared towards children with various learning disabilities. Or, as Danny’s parents and peers referred to them, remedial classes.
Danny viewed this as a punishment for being a ‘problem’ over the past 7 years, but in all fairness, this was probably the best decision the school district ever made about his education. With Danny’s disabilities and limited skills, he needed greater attention from his instructors and clearly belonged in a developmental class with a smaller size, slower pace, and more thorough explanations from instructors. Danny, however, had a different interpretation. He went in with a negative attitude, he judged every one of his instructors based on the high standard of Miss Williams, and he found all of them lacking in comparison.
Still, Danny fared well in these classes, kept up with the material, and had minimal breakdowns during them. If anything, the hardest thing about these classes was actually getting to them. Unlike in elementary school, each of Danny’s classes took place in a different room, and between every 42 minute period, he had 3 minutes to travel from room to room. A short interval where students were expected to visit their lockers to exchange textbooks, use the restroom to relieve themselves, and contend with hundreds of other students traveling through cluttered hallways, all within this .
Danny learned to dread these moments. They were disorganized, loud, and forced him to accomplish many complex tasks within a short timeframe. It was hard to find time to relieve himself between periods. Harder to manage the often lethargic pace of his peers as they moseyed through the halls. But the hardest part of all of this was visiting his locker. The act of visiting a designated location, entering a combination, exchanging books, and then heading to another location, all within three minutes, was a task requiring more coordination and composition than Danny possessed.
Accordingly, Danny began stuffing his backpack with all of his folders, textbooks, and supplies. It was exhausting to haul this much weight, but Danny was resolute about never arriving to class on time, even if he had to travel across the entire school, moving as fast as his body could without breaking out into a run.
He often viewed classes as a break from the furor of the hallways, with the exception of Physical Education. A daily class that forced Danny into changing into awful-smelling shirts and shorts that hung loosely on his thin frame amidst a room of stinky half-naked boys before needing to run about with these children. In elementary school, Danny detested this class whenever it came up and reached a mutual understanding with the PE teacher for him to avoid partaking in team games, as he clearly was not enjoying himself, and nobody wanted to so much as acknowledge Danny. So he spent the entire duration of these classes running.
His middle school PE teacher, however, was not informed of this arrangement and forced Danny to partake in sports he had no true experience playing. He did not know the rules, could not properly throw a ball, and had no coordination with his teammates. For Danny’s poor performance, his own PE teacher verbally chastised him, inspiring his peers to do the same, as Danny was an easy and vulnerable target for their growing pubescent malice.
This eventually led to a public breakdown one day during October of 2010, where Danny began bashing his head vigorously against a brick wall inside the gymnasium, continuing until his forehead started to bleed. After a visit to the nurse who found no permanent injuries with the boy, Danny was granted full permission by the PE teacher to “just run around or whatever” instead, allowing Danny to spend almost every day of middle school PE running around the indoor or outdoor track. Where he was often hit with balls, both intentionally and unintentionally.
As Danny ran during class, he would often look over at the other students as they played their various games, particularly the female students. After having spent so much time delving into his own niche of fetish porn, Danny had found it difficult to not think about lewd imagery as he looked at rapidly developing young women while they exerted themselves physically. This, combined with the fact that Danny himself was beginning puberty around the time, led to him spending most days of PE with an erection between his legs, staying rock hard as it gently rocked around in his one-size-too-small briefs.
While there was some part of him that desired traditional sexual activity with these girls, the thought that crossed his mind as he observed them play was that of swapping bodies with them. It was a desire that Danny had regularly explored throughout elementary school, but had become far more intense as he moved towards sexual maturity.
His desires eventually led to two things. Masturbation, something that Danny discovered after reading a detailed description in a Fictionmania story, and more detailed fantasies. As his brain developed and his knowledge about TG and body swapping grew, he began to explore more complex and long-term ideas about what it would be like to truly switch bodies with somebody. He began focusing on smaller details while running during gym or idly waiting in class, but that was not quite enough for the boy. In order to explore these concepts to their fullest potential, Danny decided to write a short body swap story, and he chose to predominantly write it at school.
Danny’s class schedule gave him multiple 42 minute class periods a day to work on his homework. These included Resource, a class meant to provide students with additional resources to study and do homework. Lunch, which Danny spent in an empty classroom. And a proper study hall that alternated with a 2 period English class. Being the diligent student he was, Danny completed much of his homework in these classes and was left with a sizable amount of free time depending on the day. Time that he spent writing a 30 page story over the span of three weeks.
The story in question followed Danny as he used magic to steal the body of an attractive Asian girl in his PE class. After securing her body as his own, Danny then brushed aside the girl in his body and claimed ignorance about the swap before ending his day of ‘normal’ non-remedial classes and returning to the girl’s home, where he spent the night reading her diary and experiencing key memories of her life via dreams. After waking up and relying on magical muscle memory to go about his new morning, Danny then arrived at school to hear from his new friend that the girl in Danny’s body committed suicide last night. The story then ended on a ‘happy’ note as Danny discarded his identity and old life, claiming that their life, their normal and female life, truly begins here and now.
In writing this story, Danny immediately developed a taste for hobbyist writing and wrote another story, and another, and another, and another twelve after that. Throughout his first two years of middle school, Danny wrote 37 short stories. Initially, they were all about body swapping, but soon he began expanding his scope, broadening his scenarios, developing his characters, and adopting more nuanced storylines. His actual writing was poor, awkward, and littered with grammatical errors, but he was steadily improving, happy with himself for creating something, and eager to explore new ideas.
This exercise helped Danny’s confidence, gave him something to strive towards, and kept him going throughout his days in a routine. Every school day, he would wake up, change, brush his teeth, comb his hair, and then leave his home with his lunch along with an apple of varying quality and a cheap granola bar for breakfast. He would walk to and arrive at school far earlier than anyone else and would sit himself down at an isolated bench and work on his story outlines, a concept he had learned about partway through sixth grade.
Once the bell rang, he would go to his morning homeroom class and then venture to his assigned classes. Math, social studies, English, science, and a rotating elective. He would take diligent notes when applicable and try to succeed despite his difficulties with certain units or concepts. During his free periods, he would do his homework, study, and most especially, write his stories via Google Documents, which his school introduced him to as part of his computer class.
From there he would return home, not saying a word to his parents beyond a ‘hello’ if they greeted him, and would spend his time doing his homework before watching children’s television shows, internet shows, or Let’s Plays, playing emulated video games on his computer, writing his stories, and looking more into his fetishes.
As night came, Danny would shower at 8 PM and then stay up just past 10 PM, after his parents would go to bed. He would do this in order to masturbate to images or writings that he discovered, wrapping his penis in one of the plastic sandwich bags that Danny’s morning apple came with. Upon ejaculating, he would clean his penis off using a tissue and then bury the bag and tissue in the kitchen garbage can. After brushing his teeth and washing his hands, he would go to bed to repeat the cycle over again. He might have been deprived of much in life, but Danny had become happy with his simple little existence. It was not a truly normal life, but he was able to exist in the normal world. And at least at that point in his life, he thought that was enough. Unfortunately, it was not to last.
At the beginning of eighth grade, Danny’s middle school saw two eighth grade transfer students by the name of Isaac and Olivia, a pair of delinquents expelled from their old school for reasons unknown. From day one, they started causing problems for the school, with the type of bad behavior that would typically define a ne’er-do-well or delinquent, but from week three onwards, their mutual attention focused on Danny, the quiet isolated kid who would always lug a massive backpack everywhere. A perfect target if there ever was one.
The two would verbally abuse Danny, stab his fingers or back with pencils, toss his backpack at him, steal his clothes and cut them up with scissors, rip up his textbooks, try to destroy his homework, or just straight up punch him in the dick. Danny had tried to ask teachers for help with the first honest to goodness bullies he encountered, but their attempts at taming these two bad seeds were ineffectual at best. They did not care about punishments, and the abuse only worsened as they identified Danny’s resistance. After two weeks of torment, on Friday, September 28th, 2012, class after the two stole and destroyed his in-class assignment, Danny snapped.
Danny lunged at Isaac and clamped his teeth on the young man’s neck, clenching them together as he tore his way into his esophagus, causing a fountain of blood to pour out of the boy’s throat. As he clutched his throat, Danny kicked the young boy’s head into a brick wall, before he redirected his attention to Olivia. Danny jammed a pen and pencil into her neck before bashing her head against a wall, only stopping once the teacher called in school security. They immediately restrained Danny and took him away from the classroom. He was then brought to the principal’s office, with tears in his eyes and blood on his face as he was promptly decried as a monster and expelled from school.
During the ensuing weekend, the school district, various government officials, and Danny’s parents debated and decided what would be done with this child after he nearly murdered two of his peers, giving them permanent throat injuries, concussions, and other damages that were still being determined. Normally, an act of battery like this would be punished severely, but Danny was a special case. Due to his previously observed mental issues, a record of past violent behavior towards himself and others, and violent behavior these two exerted towards Danny, the punishments he faced were to be more lenient. At least, that is what Danny was told.
Essentially, he was to be placed under his parents’ custody for the next three months, only leaving his home to attend meetings with a state-appointed counselor. As for school, Danny could no longer attend public school and needed to attend a school for ‘special children’ such as himself.
Throughout the meetings and discussions that continued until Sunday morning, Danny’s parents lied profusely. They had been neglecting him for years, yet claimed they both loved and nurtured him daily. They spun these lies for their own sake. To avoid accountability for their son’s actions, to skirt around any personal punishments, and to hide their specific brand of child abuse. Danny heard all of their lies, but kept his head down, not responding to anything they said, or really anything at all. He had shut down and remained that way until the ensuing Sunday.
Sunday, September 30th, 2012. Despite being Danny’s fourteenth birthday, the date had long since lost all significance to him, and even if it still meant something, he was not in a state to celebrate it. Instead, he spent the entire day holed up in his room, not even leaving it for food, water, or a bathroom break. He simply stewed in his room, hoping to get an answer to the question that was burning in his mind: “How do I return things to normal?” He could not find a valid answer.
Whatever hope he clung to for the future, the belief that things could conceivably get better in the future had vanished from Danny’s mind, and he fell into a self-encompassing veil of despair. An oppressive feeling of nihilism began to encompass him, and he accepted the fact that he had failed his life goal. That he would never be normal. That, in the eyes of society, he was something inherently worse than the average person.
As the clock struck 10 PM, Danny finally felt the need to exit his locked room to relieve and rehydrate himself. As he left to do so, he noticed that his parents were having a conversation in the living room. He hid behind a corner and listened in.
Their words expressed concern, worry, and regret over their only child, expressing their frustrations with raising him, a desire that their child could be normal, and the phrase “I stopped loving him so long ago.” The message was clear from just the snippets Danny heard. His parents thought that he was a mistake, an inconvenience, and something they viewed more of a burden than a child at this point. At the end of their tirade, they reached a solution.
For years, they had been considering getting rid of Danny. Either through adoption, murder, or ideally, by sending him to a specialized facility for people like Danny. For those who “have no place in normal society.” If they sent him there, they would no longer be responsible for his actions, they could reclaim their lives. They chided themselves for not doing this years ago, and claimed that tomorrow morning, they would bring this up to the government and acquire the needed paperwork to free themselves of this “wretched creature.”
Danny returned to his room upon hearing this, his mind already set on his next course of action. He wanted revenge on his parents. He tried to repress the negative aspects of their relationship. He tried to forget how they ignored him. How they failed to give him adequate attention. How they isolated him. And now, he was faced with the fact that his parents truly did not care for him, and wanted to be rid of him. Danny knew that this was wrong, that his parents had a duty to raise him, and they failed. They failed him, they failed the world, and for such malice, for such dishonesty, they deserved the most severe of punishments.
At 11:55 PM, Danny snuck into his parents’ bedroom with a serrated kitchen knife in hand and his pillow in the other. Almost mechanically, he approached his father, placed the pillow over his face, and began stabbing his neck repeatedly, severing the arteries of his throat and causing a stream of blood to seep into the bed and his lungs. After his body ceased its squirming, he moved over to his mother. She was slowly waking up from the muffled screams of her husband, but before she could so much as open her eyes, Danny was already in place. He jammed the pillow against her face and severed her throat. After much flailing, shouting, and bleeding, all life left her body. Without flinching, a sliver of sorrow, or a hint of hesitation, Danny had murdered his parents in their sleep.
Having achieved his goal, Danny thought he would be pleased, but his brain began rapidly wondering what would happen to him now. He had not considered that until his mother’s body ceased its squirming, but as he looked over the freshly made corpses before him, he determined the answer. His life would not be normal. It would be far worse. The best-case scenario would have him rotting away in either a literal or figurative cell, despised for his crimes, and treated like something worse than a human. He had not wanted to do this, but he knew, even before he took this knife, that his life was over. There was naught but sorrow left for him in this world.
As he accepted his only plausible future, Danny clutched his bloody knife once more and swiftly stabbed himself in the forehead. The knife penetrated his frontal lobe and stopped somewhere in the center of his brain. With several grunts and some light flailing, Danny tumbled onto the floor as blood began seeping through his forehead and his body ceased to function.
Everything he was, everything he could have been, was destroyed. With one forceful motion, Danny Verres died at 11:59 PM, September 30th, 2012.
However, this is merely the prologue to this saga, and the death of Danny was merely a dawn. A dawn of something far, far greater than he could have ever imagined.
