*** Catherine ***

I dropped the wilted leaf with a frustrated sigh and pulled the newly sprouted shoot up by the roots. Another failure. I didn’t need to let it fruit to tell me that. The photosynthesis reaction wasn’t creating the appropriate molecules.

With another, now defeated sigh, I sat down heavily in the grass and stared about at my grove. Less than one twentieth the size of Ryn’s behemoth, it was nevertheless kinda cozy. I even had a little house now, with a bubbling brook to provide some cute aesthetics.

My grove was a vaguely teardrop shaped island sitting within a vast and misty ocean. The small area around my little house was sort of tended to, but the rest of it was an ugly nightmare of random experiments and stuff. I hadn’t gone for anything close to aesthetics like Ryn had, because I liked hanging out in her place more. It was nicer and everyone else was there too.

I had been worried about there being too many people running around over there when we’d first started thinking about putting the order’s headquarters in her grove. Luckily, that hadn’t been an issue. Ryn, for all her newfound extroversion, was still a shy girl at heart.

Also, Ryn’s grove had internet.

Anyway, it was a week since the whole James thing and I had been tasked with figuring out how to make bioidentical hormones for those transgender people who weren’t as lucky as Ryn and myself.

So here I was, trying to figure out a way to get some of the chemical reaction within a plant’s green bits to like, do what I wanted. Maybe I needed to go at this in an entirely different way. Throw out the normal plant stuff and make a plant out of more arcane materials.

Time to go and get Esra’s help again… okay maybe not. I think I’d rather go and ask Ryn, maybe consult her little library of magical texts. I loved the library in that tree, it was so good. We had one of the new recruits working on getting some of the university biology books copied for us too. She was a nice girl, but it had become apparent very quickly that while she had a good heart… she wasn’t up to the task of slaying evildoers. So she was now the order’s librarian.

I left my latest failed experiment to rot on the ground and pushed myself to my feet. Closing my eyes, I summoned the necessary mental command to push myself out into the Nameless Garden.

Rather than immediately push off towards the massive orb that was Ryn’s grove, I hung there in zero gravity. The fractal and ever changing plants of the Garden were so fascinating. I loved watching them, the way they seemed to be trying to perfect themselves through pure trial and error.

Before I got too distracted, I shook myself and made for the edge of Ryn’s grove. It was so massive now, dwarfing my grove like the sun does the earth. Pushing through the outer membrane placed me in the edge of her inner grove, the area surrounding her tree. That had been my biggest worry when she expanded the grove to accommodate for the Order, having to walk for an hour or two just to get home each day.

Thankfully, with a little bit of experimentation, we’d found a way to create a sort of personal guide. I had a little effigy, a strand of my hair wrapped around a bar of iron. I could feel it when I pushed against the membrane of the grove, personal to me.

A small hedge now circled Ryn’s tree, and within that was a sprawling decorative garden. Each of the plants used within this little garden did have a purpose, but she’d made them with aesthetics in mind too. It looked sort of like those hedge and rose gardens that rich people had around their houses back on earth, except with magical plants.

On the lawn at the base of the ramp up to the tree, I found Ryn face down on the ground. For a microsecond my heart stopped, but then I saw she was breathing and stopped panicking so hard.

“Are you okay?” I asked timidly, sitting down next to her with my legs crossed.

A wordless groan came from her and I saw chlorophyll green and purple suffuse her skin. Flowers sprung up out of her hair while young roots dove into the ground.

“I uh, didn’t get that sorry,” I murmured, reaching out to tentatively pat her shoulder.

Shifting her head to face me, she grumbled, “So tired. So many things to do.”

“Oh, okay.” Made sense why she was all plant mode right now. Easier to recoup energy when you could take it directly from the sun.

I stayed there with her for a while, enjoying the peace and serenity of her garden beneath the shade of the big house tree.

She caught me cleaning my new glasses when she finally sat up. “Those look good on you,” she said with an affectionate grin. Her hand reached out to fluff my already messy bronze hair. “Make you look like the cutest little nerd.”

“I used to be a tall badass nerd who could throw punches,” I grumbled, but my feigned irritation quickly dissolved into a grin to match hers. Yeah, I just… as empowering as that had been, the current iteration of the person who had been Kit was much better.

“So did you need anything, or are you just hanging out?” she asked, changing the subject.

“I failed to make estrogen again,” I blurted, my smile toppling off my face.

Ryn’s face dipped into disappointment, but she quickly shrugged it off and shuffled around to sit beside me. Bringing me into a sideways hug, she told me, “That’s fine, you’ll get it soon enough.”

“I think I need to turn to non-organics for the project. Normal plant stuffs just isn’t cutting it,” I said with a sad sigh. “I mean, it should, but I’m just not good enough.”

“What plant are you using as a base?” she asked thoughtfully. “Because I hate to suggest it, given the memes and shit… but you could modify a um… glycene max plant.”

“A what?” I blinked, confused.

“Soybeans,” she coughed, giving me a big grin.

It took me a moment, I guess because I used to avoid the types of guys that would make those jokes, but then it hit me. “Is that actually a thing?”

“Well, the actual use of phytoestrogens seems to be reducing fertility in female mammals, it’s very similar but also different enough that it fucks with things,” she explained. “It binds to the receptors instead of estradiol. I don’t understand it much more than that, but the end result is less babies in sheep or whatever. If you could mess with the creation of the phytoestrogens to make the process actually create the real thing, you’d be golden.”

“I’m going to look up what other plants do this too,” I grumbled, fishing my phone out of my pocket. “It’s a great idea, but I am absolutely not doing something that on the nose.”

“Trans girls are memers, Cate, trust me, they’ll see the humour in it,” she laughed, rocking us both from side to side with her arm.

I ignored my shit-stirring sister and stared at the article I’d found. There was a lot of stuff that produced the chemical, but it was all weird herbs and sh— “Wait, oranges?” I’d blurted the question, but I showed her the screen afterwards.

“Yo… okay, the soybean thing would have been kinda funny, but that’s actually good…” she said, looking down with an excited expression. “I say go for it! Hell, make it in a few different flavours while you’re at it!”

“That would be hilarious… but we’re also uh… we’re forgetting something,” I said as Troy approached. “Testosterone”

It was kinda crazy how T worked. Troy being trans had been a massive surprise to me, especially because back when I’d been Kit, we’d shared a room and stuff. Goes to show how much hrt really does I guess.

“Oh fudge,” she pouted, pulling out her own phone to do a search. “Wait… no. Ginseng.”

Troy arrived, and she grinned up at him. “How do you feel about drinking ginseng tea for the rest of your life?”

Looking as though he’d been running around training a bunch of kids how to swing steel, Troy just stood there processing Ryn’s question for several moments. “What?”

“Ginseng apparently makes something close to testosterone, so we’re going to try and modify it to produce bio-identical human testosterone instead,” I told him, filling in the blanks for him.

“If it works,” he said with a big, happy grin. Wait… Troy was grinning! Big Troy Grin! “Thanks girls. Glad you have a plan. I’m out of hormones now and it’s doing a number on my muscle density. Not to mention my mood…”

“Alright, the sooner the better then,” Ryn said, dropping her joking tone in favour of a more businesslike one. “I’ll take some time off the building to get that sorted. Our leader can’t be dealing with that type of shit.”

His smile was hopeful and open. “Thanks so much girls. Seriously.”

“Not a problem,” Ryn said, giving me a squeeze with the arm she still had around my tiny shoulders.

My tiny shoulders reminded me yet again of my recent transformation and a little bubble of happiness formed in my chest. It was so beautiful, the emotions that my new form brought up. I loved how big, full, and fluffy my hair was. I gave it a little swish, just for the joy of it, and had to duck and hide a happy blush when Ryn threw me a knowing look.

“I guess we have some work to do, huh sis?” she asked, dropping her head down onto my shoulder for a moment. “So much work. It never ends.”

QuietValerie

Surprise! But actually tho weow. That semi-break I just took for a few months has really rekindled my interest in writing, especially my already established stories. Of course, I did uh... start another project so yeah. Shhhh. It's on my patreon if you want to see it, just like all my other WIP stuff.