Five young adults sat around the fire quietly. They were relative strangers, only having met on a public Discord server for transgender authors. This was the first time they have met in person.
Each of them sat there nervous looking around the campfire at the real people. Each of them was nervous about being visible in real life and not being able to hide behind their online persona.
Finally, Amanda, the oldest of the group, and the one who organized this get together got up and started circling the campfire. “Thank you everyone for coming. I know each of us had talked about finally meeting each other offline, and I know each of you have brought a story for us.”
“Thank you for organizing this, Amy,” Evan smiled.
“Yeah, Thank you,” the other 3 campers echoed.
“So let's get down to business.” Amanda said, pacing around the fire. She looked at her audience and smiled. “Air moves us. Water shapes us. Earth heals us. But Fire. Fire transforms us.” She then threw some saw dust into the fire-pit and a small fireball erupted. “Welcome to the first meeting of the Fire Society.”
“We should go around and introduce ourselves.” she said. “Hi, I’m Amanda.” She looked to her left.
“Hi, I’m Stella!” the young trans woman squeaked out before making herself as small as possible.
The ruggedly handsome Native American man nodded back to his trans friends. “I'm Evan.”
The young Asian girl gave a small smile. “I’m Flora. It’s nice to finally meet you all in person.”
Finally, the lithe boy with light brown skin smiled, “I'm Jose.”
Amanda then sat down on her makeshift seat, a cooler. “Each of us has brought a story for our approval. Who would like to go first?”
Interesting start to a TG mix tape. But it feels a bit out of character that especially a meeting of trans authors would skip pronouns during introduction?
Huh, we didn't consider that. When we wrote the intro, we assumed those characters were author-inserts that already knew each other from a common Discord server.
@tfes8 yeah I got that they knew eachother online. I'm just kinda assuming that in real life meetups you'd add pronouns. People could also have changed their pronouns and that's usually why I don't wanna assume anything and add it to introductions.
Somewhat funny story: a colleague I work with for a LGBTIQ+ student volunteer organisation changed their pronouns and I only learned that weeks later during a meeting where we introduced ourselves. They didn't tell me before but I still felt bad for not knowing.
@tfes8 Mine's not a self insert, but a brand new character :D
@Lizzie If you could comment on the other stories, we'd greatly appreciate it. Authors work for nothing and even one kind word can make our day
@Cabbitgurl I usually try to leave comments on the stories I follow. That is if I have the energy and I somehow make it through my backlog of stories I wanna read.