See Yourself Be Yourself

[3] Break

Brent just took a little sip of water because she nervously fretted that if she took more than that, she might have to use the bathroom in this state. Walking out of the break room felt like a terrifying balancing act in this strange body.

Girls walking past them, along with men, made Brent feel as if there was an obvious flaw in her features, and each lingering look exposed it. Clearly, they saw the massive G-cup breasts on her chest rising against gravity and dominating that sports top. Placing her hands around and on them seemed not only terrifying but also completely ineffective at downplaying them.

All too soon, they were back in the main waiting area, and Elle led her over to a comfortable spot off to the side. Dina still wasn’t around. It took a further twenty minutes before she showed up, her mouth running a mile a minute. She chewed out the company and cited all sorts of legal junk that neither of them could follow. She corrected her contact information and wasn’t fined.

Very few of her words were directed at Brent, except to say that “she looked good.” At Elle's insistence, she handed over Brent's wallet, cell phone, and everything else of his she had, and then Elle bagged them for safekeeping.

She framed the situation as that she had a terrible health moment and had to run to get supplies, then repeated that she would be back in "ten" because of another issue with her car. However, Dina left a toxic masculinity test linked on Brent’s phone, instructing her to do the questions as she felt normally and how she felt now.

Once she was out of the store again, Elle sighed and commented, “You may not see her again.” This puzzled Brent as she focused on the test in front of her. Elle assured her that it was fine, just an idle worry.

The test was similar to the ones she had taken before. It asked various things on a scale of one to five.

Should a boyfriend or husband know where a girlfriend or wife is at all times? She definitely wanted to keep in touch with Dina to make sure everything was okay, but she was afraid of being intrusive and controlling.

There were a lot of questions about gay friends and homosexual relationships and whether they made her angry. She didn't know many gay people, but she didn't have any problems with them. It asked about sexual partners. Things that made her angry. Spending a lot of time on appearance. Then there were strange questions about criminal activities.

In the end, the test declared Brent to be 20% more deceitful and arrogant than the average person. It said she was also more prone to anger and fixated on heteronormative metrics. She was less homophobic than the average person but far more predisposed to toxic masculinity.

“That test looks like total bullshit," Elle chimed in when scoping out the results. She hung around even while helping other clients, giving Brent little notes of encouragement. Brent made sure to take screenshots of all the results and then ran the test a second time based on her current feelings rather than her previous ones. To her disappointment, the results were even further from the population baseline.

More than ten minutes passed easily. Brent rested against the counter, especially with her new load. She just wanted to get out of here and get some explanations as to why Dina couldn't stick around. What Elle said about her never coming back stuck in her brain like a toothpick rattling around all the sensitive tissues.

She willed herself not to believe it and felt a little flash of annoyance that Elle would even say such a thing. She didn’t know her girlfriend. Yes, she could be a little bit high-strung on certain issues, and she had her quirks and peculiar philosophical positions. But she wasn’t going to just leave her here or anything crazy like that.

Eventually, whatever war Brent could fight with her new bladder had to end and concede reality. She appreciated that the main bathroom was gender-neutral so that she didn’t have to stare up at a little figure in a skirt.

Inside, it was an instant relief to just sit there. The stream was wild and practically impossible to properly control as it gushed out of her. Dripping from that delicate spot felt hotly embarrassing. She didn’t want to focus on the emasculation and sense of castration that so little remained outside her groin. It wasn’t that. It was something even crazier—that everything she knew was inverted and hidden.

It was unlike anything she was ever supposed to feel. Just experiencing it was like being severed from everything she knew before. And it wasn't ego, like she needed a big dick between her legs. It changed everything she could imagine. For every plaintive thought, she grumbled about how manly and reductive she sounded.

Wiping away the wetness, but not feeling quite clean, she made her way back to the seat to nervously await Dina‘s return. A further ten minutes later, she finally received a text message on her phone with a photo attached. Instantly, she felt as if every bone in her body had been shattered.

The photo was of a random curb with the crystal they had given them to restore her shattered into what looked more like candy-colored blue dust. She saw an accompanying message but couldn't look any further before she dropped the phone on the table and scrambled back to the bathroom. It took a long time to empty her stomach, even though it was smaller.

Only when it felt like she had nothing left in her did it stop. Some of the workers helped her to her feet, and Elle joined her as soon as she could. Elle covered her mouth in horror as Brent's eyes peered past waves of tears, trying to read the message.

“One less man in the world forever. Reducing the suffocating cloud of toxic masculinity. You should be grateful for this lesson in the sisterhood. I'm moving out; don’t try to find me. I'm taking everything that's rightfully mine and going on a sabbatical for spiritual enrichment...” At one point, she simply copied and pasted statistics about rape, sexual violence, and female genital mutilation overseas while ranting about men. Her text ended without any further explanation or postscript.

It was then that Brent finally, truly let loose and cried, despite the dehydration of her empty stomach. She cried beyond any point she could ever imagine with her body. Elle took her aside into a small room with bunks and chairs. She ran through the offered tissue like it wasn't there. Huddled in a fetal position, her face was raw red, and she looked even more fragile.

Elle had harsh words for Dina, but Brent shook her head. Brent knew there had to be something she’d done wrong to make Dina retaliate like this, to absolutely destroy his entire being, and to leave him like this without any further explanation. She could think of a thousand random slights she was learning from, but Dina had told her it was all okay.

"Don't try to rationalize this," Elle urged. "I've dated some crazy bitches in my time. There's no answer for it."

That admission barely registered a blip of surprise for Brent as her waterfall of tears dried up. Elle reassured her that $100,000 in insurance would fall on Dina. But revenge had no teeth for Brent. She just wanted things to be normal again. She just wanted her life back. Sadly, Elle informed her that since the crystal had been destroyed, especially so thoroughly, there was no way for them to reprogram the nanoparticle. Brent was stuck for the rest of her life.

Elle remarked, "I can relate. Because I've been there. Slightly different circumstances, but same results."

Now it clicked for Brent. Elle suggested that she used to be a man—a relatively good-looking man. Apparently, she got into a situation where her partner put the burden on her. They got caught, but the results were permanent. Elle crossed her arms and bowed her head. Brent apologized softly. Elle glared.

“Don’t apologize; you didn’t do anything. This is my thing. And we each let someone walk all over us at the wrong time. Now we have to live with it.”

Elle told her that it would be okay. How that was possible eluded Brent, especially when Elle seemed to tower over her dainty frame. The absolute mass of her boobs dominated every situation. And there was no getting around them. No reduction, no medical options.

She was Misty Amanda Hollins to the world. No other choice.

Elle encouraged Misty to curl up on one of the side bunks with as many blankets as she could offer. Her soul felt sick inside, eclipsed by a mere stomach upset and a raw throat. She felt as if a precise mechanism, violently smashed. Even the faintest action was impossible. Her springs had been torn out, and all her gears tangled.

All this time, she thought Dina had her quirks and pet peeves, along with her social crusades for equality and all that. They tended to argue about that, but Brent always thought it was cordial. They disagreed, but they talked about it and their separate points of view. Dina had to win a lot, and Brent didn’t care a lick about winning. But it felt to her that they always made up in the end.

Was she just a fool? Had she always been one? A simp? Brent heard rumors from Dina's friends that she spent a lot of time here and there, advocating and staying for several days. They always had this laugh when they talked about it, as if there was something obvious that he clearly missed. He didn't mind people laughing at him, though. He liked being the source of joy. He could take it.

But now he felt so small, soft, and frail. The only immense part of her was the pillowy swath on her chest. The striking contrast to her tiny torso and slim body felt so deeply absurd, like she stuffed a set of volleyballs down her shirt as a gag.

No. They were big. But they weren’t that big. She’d seen them during the transformation. Somewhere between cantaloupes and personal watermelons. The brief notion of making a fruit salad while trying to get a solid metric gave her a moment of morbid amusement. At least they didn't feel quite as heavy as those examples. But there was definitely a woozy, surreal tug when she leaned on her side. Standing, they pulled on her shoulders, back, neck, and pits. Like this, the weight stacked on itself with a twisting, sideways tilt. It was as if someone had attached memory foam pillows across her chest, and the aggressive adhesive wasn't just around the edges but deep inside and around her.

The jiggles as she shifted in place roused innately boyish thoughts. She hadn't really had fun with them. It was all fretful worry. Crossing her arms over them and holding as much mass as she could while seeking out the enlarged points of her nipples felt curious and strange. Like playing with a doll's body. The space between her full, long thighs gave off a vigorous note of approval. The slippery sensation of arousal was something she hadn't paid attention to. It was creeping and sneaking up on her with movements like waves on the sea, only it acted as if her entire body was made of shifting water.

Before she got carried away and did something naughty in the bunk, Misty leaned back and let the blankets surround her slim, soft form. The exhaustion of puking along with the drain of crying made it easy for her to drift off, wrapped up in soft blankets that faintly confused her senses about what soft parts were hers and which soft parts were something else.

Time passed without her knowing. She woke for a few moments, but with the vague confusion of what she was doing in a place with bunk beds and chairs. It had to be part of the dream drifting back to college. She shrugged off the strange sensations and went back to sleep.

[Welcome to the Seventh Book in the Cerberus Saga. This one has a particular goal in mind which won’t be revealed until the end of Chapter 4. So I’m gonna keep polls off until the end of the week. Provisionally, I am focusing on one chapter a week and we’ll see how things go from there. They might be longer or shorter and more numerous. Always feel free to offer suggestions. Reader response is going to be very important going forward. I’m open to anything. Although the squirrel thing is probably the closest I’ll ever get to furry. I’m gonna have some fun and funny characters this time too. Dunno how long this will go. It might be much shorter due to the different pacing. I hope you enjoy it. I plan to get the earlier books together and released in an official form. Look forward to that hopefully. As always, vast details, especially types of characters, character names, and more are wide open for this narrative. Feel free to add any idea which doesn't show up in the eventual options. Also, if you see any random typos or uncapitalized starts of sentences, please pass them along. I am currently using Quillbot and DeepL to assist with speedy editing, but that’s not 100%. Thank you for reading!]