Ice-cream not the most filling lunch, we ended up cooking a meal, then I went back to my room alone. Waking up in another world was pretty exhausting and the whole gender crisis didn’t help.

So I lay down, trying to think, but ended up asleep. Only, in my dream, I was still lying on my bed, trying to sleep, something strangely familiar about it.

Then I heard a voice and remembered—the echo of a voice.

“Who do you want to be?” the voice asked, a woman’s voice, sweet and vibrant.

And my mouth opened, answered her, but I couldn’t hear what I said, couldn’t remember, only knew I had answered her honestly.

Jerking up, awake, my heart pounded. I tried to hold onto the dream, but it slipped away. A memory of a memory. Looking around, I had slept an hour or so, sun still high. But sleeping hadn’t helped, so I got up.

I was still wearing the outfit Crystal picked out for me. Going to the mirror, I remembered what she told me: men didn’t get happy from wearing women’s clothes.

I wasn’t an exception. I wasn’t a drag queen, or a cosplayer. I wasn’t really someone who would get happy from wearing any particular clothes. When my sister got married, I wore a fitted suit. Everyone had told me how handsome I looked in it. But, when I looked in the mirror, had I smiled?

Because I was smiling now. Maybe I was smiling because Crystal picked it out for me, maybe because I liked looking at women’s bodies, maybe because it reminded me I had a chance with her now. Excuse after excuse.

I sat down and stared at my reflection, learning what my new face looked like. A boyish face. The sliders didn’t let me make Alexa look like a man, only boyish. Thin lips, fat nose, a kind of strong jaw.

There were so many layers of irony, I felt like. How Crystal and I swapped roles. How she was now the cis person and I was sort of a transman. How I couldn’t pass as my body’s sex, a transman confused for a transwoman. I didn’t know if any of that was funny, but I had to laugh, otherwise I would’ve fallen apart.

Thinking of it so much, the words were starting to lose meaning to me. So I looked at myself and watched my lips move. “Alexa,” I whispered. “Alexa.”

It felt like me and not me, like I was still playing a game, my character’s model opening and closing her mouth when I used voice chat. Except it was so realistic, her lips copying mine exactly. A super immersive game.

“Alexa,” I said, over and over, the word losing all meaning. But, slowly, I felt myself merge with her. Lost myself in the game.

“Alexa?”

Crystal’s voice cut through my trance, waking me up. I carefully stood up, legs a bit numb, and said, “Yeah?”

“Oh, I just heard you talking. Is everything okay?”

Turning to the mirror, I saw myself in it—for a second, then it flipped back to Alexa. “Yeah.”

For the rest of the afternoon, we talked over life plans since we were living here now, not bringing up my gender in an unspoken agreement. Things like if we wanted to stay in the city, starting a monthly budget to see how long our money would last, what work we might be interested in doing. We never really played for the fighting content, so going off to hunt monsters or battle in arenas wasn’t something we wanted to do. But we both liked resource gathering, always had fun talking to each other while we picked herbs or fished or whatever else.

In the end, we considered moving out of the city. Since it wasn’t a game any more, the convenience for items wasn’t a big deal and the property taxes in nearby towns and villages were much lower. There was no point living here if we eventually had to spend all day working just to pay for it.

But that wasn’t urgent, just something to think about for now. It wasn’t a bad place to live.

After dinner—something like spaghetti with a bean bolognese—she finally brought up my gender again. “Um, I’m not rushing you or anything, but I wanted to know if you’ve… got anything to share about you. Like, do you still want me to call you Alexa?”

“I feel like I’ve got a lot of questions and no answers,” I said lightly, but neither of us laughed. “For now, Alexa is fine.”

“I don’t want to push my experiences onto you, but, if you do want to talk, I’m happy to listen.”

Smiling, I said, “Thanks.”

Still pretty tired, I went for a bath and planned to go to bed after. But it wasn’t quite so simple. While the bath filled up, I undressed, then looked at myself in the mirror above the sink. Crystal said something about wiping off my makeup, so I dragged my gaze away. There weren’t any wipes like my sister used to leave around, but there was a bottle and small face cloths like Crystal told me. Little by little, I wiped away her hard work until there was just my face, even more boyish.

Well, there was my chest too. Small boobs, puffy nipples—so much bigger than when I was a man. Maybe it felt like that because my body was smaller now, not really sure if men and women had different nipple sizes. It made sense that women’s were bigger.

The bath full, I got in. She’d told me that, for today, all I needed to know was not to use soap on my “pussy”. I smiled, remembering that she’d used that word this morning too. It was even funnier because I didn’t know what words women liked to use for that part. I knew a dozen different ways to say it, in our native language and in English, but I’d never used them to actually talk about a woman’s private parts.

Like we really were living in two different worlds, and she was my bridge between them.

None of the other words feeling right, I looked down at my naked body through the water, and softly said, “My pussy.” I reached out and touched it, not really feeling anything, like touching anywhere else on my body.

But I kept fiddling and it gradually became an urge. There wasn’t a moment where I decided to do it, my hand just found a pattern, rubbing up and down, falling into a rhythm that got faster and faster. My other hand came up, squeezing my boob. Breaths deepened, eyes fluttered closed, legs opened wider, knees against the edge of the tub.

There was no thought, no real feeling. I knew that because, as soon as I did feel something, I froze, realising what I was doing.

The weird feeling in my gut faded quickly, but the shame didn’t. I felt like I was taking advantage of someone else’s body. Like this was exactly what any normal man would do if they ended up in a woman’s body. That I was a straight man, so of course I wanted to touch a woman’s naked body.

Excuse after excuse.

Sobered up, I washed quickly and got out, feeling ashamed of how the towel felt rubbing against my nipples, reminding me. At least my pyjamas were loose.

I couldn’t bare to talk to Crystal now, so I brushed my teeth, then said goodnight to her and went straight to my room and crawled into bed.

Thankfully, there were no weird dreams. I woke up in the morning feeling refreshed. Well, until I remembered everything going on, then the existential dread set in again. Pretty early, I didn’t hear Crystal when I brushed my teeth.

Back in my room, I opened my wardrobe and hesitated, so many clothes waiting for me. But there was really only one choice I had to make.

Crystal’s words coming back to me, I picked out men’s clothes, dressed, then stood in front of the mirror. The person there didn’t really look like me or Alexa. Boyish, but… still a woman.

I had to laugh at that. Because, sure enough, I changed into another outfit—a sleeveless dress with a loose jumper, both pale green—and I looked like a man in women’s clothes. I joked that it was a mirror cursed to always show you as a crossdresser.

Maybe because of that joke, I noticed I was smiling.

To distract myself, I made breakfast and, by the time it was ready, Crystal had woken up. Apparently, it wasn’t that exciting waking up as a woman again, looking sleepy when she came through.

“Morning,” I said.

She mumbled something that I guessed was supposed to be, “Morning.”

We ate in silence, her sleepiness slowly melting away.

Eventually, she asked, “So… is there anything you want to do today?”

It took me a moment to find my courage. “I… want to practise being a woman.”

“You do?” she asked, maybe trying to not sound too excited.

I didn’t know what to say, felt like I owed her an explanation—an excuse. A reason why I needed to be a woman. “If you want to go shopping, I don’t want to cause any problems.”

She didn’t smile like I thought she would. “I understand that, but you aren’t causing the problems, okay? Those rules aren’t in place for you, they’re there because anonymous men online believed it was okay to barge into virtual dressing rooms. Honestly, I never even heard of a single issue like that with… men playing female characters.”

Wanting to move on, I just nodded.

After a bit of silence, she brought up getting out of the city. “For a break,” she said, and I knew what she meant a break from.

We talked it over and then headed out. I stuck close to her on the streets, not ashamed to say I was basically hiding behind her, which was hard since I was taller. But I could tell she was glaring at anyone who looked at us funny, no one staring like they did the day before.

Not looking at the ground the whole time, I noticed what I already knew. Most of the men were big and muscular. If they weren’t wearing armour, their tight shirts showed off their huge chest muscles, usually had a beard or a scar or both on their faces. Half the women were short and cute, wearing frilly dresses and bright colours. The other half were tall and slender and pretty much had their boobs out, only really covering their nipples, clothes tightly fitting.

And they were all kinds of races, from different colours of human (including reds and greens and a few blues) to elves and orcs to beastkin—humans with animal ears and tails. Those were the popular ones, some rarer ones here and there.

We were boring old humans. Well, Crystal’s character was sort of her personal avatar, so something more realistic made sense. I just copied her.

Unlike a real city, there was a wall around it and, past that, open meadows and woodland. No urban sprawl or farming. The city wasn’t even built on a river. I remembered how, back when we first played, I wanted to tell her how badly made it all was, how it made no sense. But I hadn’t said anything, not after I heard her quietly say, “Wow.”

Games didn’t have to make sense, only make us feel.

We walked into the woods, both more herbs and rarer herbs growing there, not to mention mushrooms too. Like with cooking, our skill in foraging seemed to make us notice herbs easier and we just knew how to harvest them, cutting the important part and leaving the rest to grow back. It probably wasn’t realistic, but even roots would regrow here.

As we went around doing that, she taught me how to talk more like a “woman”. It wasn’t as simple as raising the pitch of my voice. We did start with that, though, and I quickly realised I had been making my voice deeper, trying to sound more like I did before.

“It’ll surprise you, but, if you keep practising, it really does become normal,” she said.

Trying to relax my voice, I found a comfortable pitch and practised. It was weird at first, needing to focus to keep it there, but it did get easier, especially since talking with her was so fun.

Then she started talking about inflections and pushing my tongue forward and I barely followed a tenth of what she said. But she didn’t care, the two of us saying, “Lalala,” at each for minutes as she kept giving me gestures that I was supposed to understand and absolutely didn’t.

A lot of fun.

On the way back, she showed me a sort of exaggerated walk—like she was on a catwalk, turning her hips and walking along an invisible line. That was easier for me to understand, but still hard to do, the result more like I was tipsy.

Trying not to laugh, she said, “Focus on your hips, not walking in a line.”

Once we got back to the city, the lessons ended and I went back to hiding behind her. The marketplace was as busy as it always was in the game, which helped because there wasn’t the digital market to sell stuff, so we had to find someone buying herbs. While we were there, we bought groceries. It was kind of funny, suddenly very important that we actually had food—and that the taste mattered, not the stat boost or other effect it had.

Back home, I calmed down, not realising how stressed I was until it left. A sad thought, I wondered if that was how she had always felt.

After lunch, we trained some more, her telling me how to do some makeup stuff and me barely understanding what language she was speaking. She did do my nails to match my outfit, though, and that was nice. My fingernails were short, so some colour helped.

That sort of became our routine.

We went picking herbs in the morning, working on my voice and posture and things like that, then she’d teach me about makeup or stuff like that in the afternoon. It was a lot of fun finding out how much waxing hurt, and she even said it was worse in our old world. Just the thought of waxing my pussy was enough to make me cringe—women were incredible.

I would’ve been happy if we could’ve stayed like that, but life is always moving.