The first chapter of Minikisa’s “Of Heroes And Villains” starts with a heist. The plant based supervillain, Dionaea, goes to a vault on a train to steal the goods, before being stopped by the teleporting martial artist, Shade. A fight ensues, a classic clashing of good and evil, completely normal, until Dionaea tears off a part of Shade’s uniform, revealing the vigilante’s dark secret to the world.

The superhero, Shade, wore panties.

This embarrassing moment was the start of a long journey for Shade. One of self discovery, of introspection, of healing, and of love. With help from Dionaea, Shade was able to find who she truly was.

One week ago Devin had an embarrassing moment that kickstarted his very own journey of self discovery. Through his own carelessness, his girlfriend had caught him on TG Storytime, revealing his secret hobby of reading TG stories to the world.

It went even further than that, however. After he was caught, he confessed to taking female hormones and wearing large sweatshirts to hide his growing breasts. He even confessed to having a female alias, Sierra, who every day, was becoming less and less of an alias.

Considering the circumstances, Devin thought Elise reacted to all this information extremely well. From her perspective, her boyfriend told her that he liked reading stories where guys turn into girls, that he took female hormones, that he had breasts, and that he had a female name, all in one day. And through all of it, Elise remained calm and collected. At no point did she freak out.

Devin had feared that Elise would hate him, or call him disgusting, or even break up with him, but she didn’t. She accepted him, flaws and all. In fact, recently she had even been encouraging him to step out of his comfort zone more and more, even going so far as to call him “Sierra” and wanting him to accept himself as a girl.

If Devin was told a week ago that all this would happen, he’d probably collapse in shock. What an insane week he had.

He told his friends on discord about it, and within an hour he had received a wide range of responses.

“Are you being serious?”

“Holy shit”

“lmao”

“Based”

“Really proud of you man… girl I mean.”

Devin smiled. Between Elise and his friends on discord, he loved all the positive feedback he was getting in discovering himself.

He could only wonder if this kind of reaction would translate to the rest of the world.

His parents.

God, his parents.

The day they would return from their vacation was coming closer and closer. As of right now, it was only three days away. Devin worrying about what his parents would do if they found out about Sierra was like a second instinct at this point. Something he did almost as much as breathing. He had lost track of all the possibilities he had come up with in his head.

Should he just tell his parents about Sierra? Upfront?

Surely if he didn't, they'd find out anyway. He'd been slipping up more and more, and it was inevitable that, if he didn't tell them, then eventually, he'd accidentally reveal Sierra to them. Maybe they'd find the silver necklace in one of his drawers, or take his covers off of him in bed, or catch him washing his bras. And then he'd have to confess. That just seemed like a mess to deal with. It might be better to just tell them outright, and rip the band-aid off immediately.

Devin paced around his house, constantly wondering what he would do.

And after a while, he made up his mind.

Some time this summer, he'd tell them about Sierra himself. He had to do it himself. He couldn't live knowing that some random accident let them know Sierra existed. He didn't know why, but he couldn't.

How he would do it though, he had no idea.

He'd just have to wait and see.

***

As the sun was getting closer and closer to setting, Devin spent his time taking another walk through his neighborhood, all the way back down to the shaded bench in front of the large field. And while he was walking, he wasn’t thinking about his identity, his long week, or his parents.

He was thinking about those damn TG stories.

Well, not the stories themselves, but rather, one of the sites they were hosted on, TG Storytime. The site he had gone on for years. The site that he now had nostalgia for.

The site that, at first, refused to take down hate speech.

Was it wrong to keep using it?

When a bunch of authors left, Devin tried to leave too, but found he just couldn't. The site occupied a permanent spot in his mind, and his browsing history. It only took one press of "t" on the keyboard to get there. So the temptation to keep going was too high to be ignored.

To be fair, TG Storytime was already problematic, even before the incident with the foreign troll. Its categories were weird, to say the least. For the longest time, it didn't have a trans tag, but it did have a "sissy" and a "shemale" tag.

Even beyond that, the way the categories were set up was just weird. They were entirely based on the means that the gender transformation is carried out, rather than what kind of genre the story was in. It felt like a really odd way to sort things out.

While thinking through all of this, Devin wondered, was he overreacting?

Maybe.

As of now, it seemed most of the people on TG Storytime had forgotten about the "foreign troll" incident. A lot of them probably didn't think anything of it, and some may not have even known it happened. Either way, the event was already becoming a distant memory.

On a freely available, public forum that few people knew existed, was it such a bad thing to keep using it? Was anything that actually happened on it a big deal? What harm could really be done by it?

So, Devin concluded that he would continue using the site. And that wouldn't be such a shameful thing.

***

Tomorrow was sure to be an interesting day.

Devin had talked to Elise’s grandparents only twice before. Her grandfather had been greatly overprotective, but as Elise had said, that was to be expected. Overall though, from what he had seen, they seemed to be a pretty nice old couple.

Of course, looks could be deceiving.

Devin knew from personal experience that grandparents could have some seriously messed up beliefs. He could still vividly recall being six years old and hearing his own grandfather tell him he’d beat him if he “turned out to be a faggot”. At the time, Devin didn’t know what that meant, but now, those words weighed on his mind like an anvil.

What his grandfather would do now, if he found out about Sierra, Devin didn’t even want to think about.

Devin didn’t know if Elise’s grandparents said anything like that to her when she was younger, but from word of mouth, he still knew they were messed up. Believing the election was stolen from Trump? Check. Believing vaccines are ineffective? Check. Believing nazi propaganda about Jews controlling banks? Check, Devin thought with a wince. Honestly it was a miracle that they didn’t entirely buy into the QAnon conspiracy. At least they weren't holocaust deniers.

Devin had spent the past two hours writing an outline of what he would say to her grandparents the next day, and what arguments he would use. He wanted to be as thorough and prepared as possible. And if he couldn’t do anything else, he could at least know not to be overconfident. He’d be sure to fail if he did that.

Devin shut off his computer and threw himself onto his bed. With what he had to do tomorrow, he needed to get a good night’s sleep. And since he had a long day he was glad to finally be in bed.

It then occurred to Devin that he still needed to do a voice training session.

“Fuck.” He thought.

Maybe he could skip it. Just for one day. Surely no damage would be done if he just skipped it for one day, right?

Yeah, no, he should probably do the session.

Devin let out a light groan as he got out of bed and turned on his computer. It looked like he was in for another miserable hour.