“You’re heavy. Did it make your bones out of osmium or something?”
Just after Britt hung up, Steph got back from the restroom. (Jada had waited to call when Britt and Lauren would be off work and Steph was out of the room.) I crawled out of Jada’s lap (she was sitting propped up on her bed) and over to the end of the bed near Steph’s side of the room as she approached.
“Hey, Steph,” I said, “my girlfriends said it was okay if you pet or snuggle me.”
“Oh!” She gingerly picked me up and gave me a wonderful hug. I spread my soft, dull claws and my wings around her neck as far as they would go. “This is okay?” she asked.
“This is very nice,” I said.
Steph put me down on the foot of Jada’s bed again, looking happier than I’d seen her yet. “Thank you. I needed a hug.”
“I like hugs.”
“She gives great hugs,” Jada said with a wink that made poor Steph blush.
After that, when I would sit on Steph’s desk helping her with homework or study when Jada was out, she would sometimes stroke my back between my wings or scratch my head, which felt really nice, and when we finished our study session, she’d give me a hug.
The next day was a Saturday, and Steph’s parents came to visit. After some discussion with Steph, we decided I’d pretend to be a regular plushie while they were there. Steph’s dad was carrying a baby carrier with a tiny baby in it; she’d told me her little brother was just three months old. He was awake when they arrived, and looked around and waved his arms as Steph introduced her parents to Jada and me. (She didn’t tell her parents I was a venned person. She just said, “This is my roommate, Jada, and her dragon, Lydia.” I was sitting in Jada’s lap at the time, next to a textbook she was reading.) Her mom had long hair a shade redder than Steph’s, a light scattering of freckles, and three breasts. Her dad was in a male form again, though not as muscular as when he’d been helping Steph haul stuff in from the car.
Steph went out with her parents and didn’t return for a couple of hours. Jada studied for a while longer, and then we watched an episode of Carmilla before she started studying something else. The episode was near over when her phone rang. “Hey, this is Jada... Oh, sure, that would be fine. No problem. See you in a bit.” She hung up and said, “That was Steph. She asked if it would be okay for her mom to nurse Liam here.”
“It’s cool with me,” I said.
Steph and her family returned a few minutes later, and Mrs. Merricks sat down on Steph’s bed with the diaper bag while Mr. Merricks set the baby carrier down next to her. Liam was fussing, not wailing exactly, but making his displeasure known. She unbuttoned her blouse and started nursing him, starting with her left breast and then working through the other two. That was one hungry baby. While she did so, she and Mr. Merricks continued a conversation with Steph that seemed to have started some time ago.
“I’m not saying you need to be a social butterfly,” Mrs. Merrick said. “But it sounds like you’ve hardly gotten to know anybody except for your roommate. Thanks for being a friend to Steph, by the way,” she said, turning to Jada.
“Steph’s a sweet girl,” Jada said. “She reminds me of a friend of mine from back home.”
“Where are you from?” Mr. Merricks asked.
“Brocksboro. It’s a little town about halfway between Greensboro and the Virginia state line. It was the first place in North Carolina to get a Venn machine.”
“All I’m saying is,” Mrs. Merricks resumed, “you could make some more effort to get to know a few people. You said you hadn’t gone to any student organization meetings. Have you tried going through the list of clubs to see if any of them might suit you?”
“The student life web page says the name of the organization and where they meet and all,” Steph said. “It doesn’t say how many people there are. I tried a book club and there were way too many people.”
“How about try sending an email to the contact person for some of those clubs,” Mr. Merrick suggested gently, “and ask them how many people go to a typical meeting? You might find one that’s manageably small that way.”
“Okay,” Steph said. “I’ll try.”
He gave her a hug. “I’m so proud of you, Steph. You’re making perfect grades so far, and we’re proud of you for doing that, but it won’t wreck your future career or make us love you any less if you earn a B now and then because you’ve spent a little time making friends rather than studying.”
Steph nodded.
* * *
Three days later, early in the morning when neither Jada nor Steph were awake yet, my plushie venn expired and I merged with my other self. She’d been asleep, too, and we woke up remembering the last month from two points of view. It was the longest period we’d merged memories from yet, and anticipating that it would take some time to get used to, I’d arranged things so I wouldn’t have to go in to work at the usual time. My shift today wouldn’t start until eleven.
I lay awake on my futon, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Jada, Britt, and Steph. I missed Jada and Steph already. I’d gone to bed snuggling with Jada, and I wanted to be with her again, but I wouldn’t see her until she came home for the weekend, four days from now. It was silly; I’d already gone a month without seeing her, another four days should be nothing... but I’d also cuddled with her every day and night for the last month. The cuddling hadn’t been sexual at the time — at least for me as the plushie — but thinking about it now was getting my dragon-girl body revved up.
Time to get up and shower.
Twenty minutes later, I was fixing breakfast. Bianca, who’d been doing something on her laptop in the living room, came into the kitchen and helped out, then sat down with me and chatted as I ate.
“So you just got back your memories from the plushie, right? How was college life?”
“Really nice in some ways,” I said, “especially after we told Jada’s roommate Steph who I was and I asked Britt and Jada... and me... if it was okay for Steph to pet and cuddle me. Being a plushie, I really liked hugs and snuggles. A lot more than when I was a statuette or a ceramic doll. But with soft plushie claws, I wasn’t strong enough to lift most books and turning pages wasn’t that easy, either. I wound up spending a lot of time listening to Steph’s audiobooks with her.”
“Hmmm. We’ll have to refine the design a little. Sophia and I have been thinking about some ways to make soft doll bodies stronger, giving them some kind of rigid internal structure like a skeleton.”
“As long as I’m still soft and cuddly. That’s the whole point of going to college with Jada as a plushie.”
“We can test it out later. Not you and me, I mean, but you and Sophia.”
Speaking of whom, I’d heard the shower running for a few minutes. Sophia was up and getting ready for school. She came into the kitchen and served herself a plate of the pancakes and sausage I’d made. Bianca told her I’d gotten the plushie memories back and how I’d had trouble with books.
“Yeah, plushie bodies tend not to be very strong. We’ve been thinking about giving them some sort of skeleton —”
“Bianca told me,” I said. “You want to try working it out some evening this week, before Jada comes home?”
“Sure.”
* * *
Thursday evening, after I got off work and Sophia got home from school, she gave me a ride to the library and we set up the Venn machine for a two-day change. (We were planning for her to change me back sooner than that, but I liked to give myself some leeway to make sure I never had a venn expire and leave me in my original body.) I waited while she called up my history and picked the two plush dragons pair from a few weeks earlier, then tweaked it so there would be only one plushie, then tried to give me a skeleton and more dexterous hands or forefeet.
“There’s no way to be sure if this works except to change you and see if you’re stronger than before,” she said. “I can’t see the skeleton inside you. But your wings in the image do seem to be less floppy, so that’s a good sign.”
“Give it a try,” I said. She pressed the button and I was a cat-sized dragon plushie again. But something felt different. I tried flapping my wings, twisting my head around to look. They were holding their shape better, not just two expanses of cloth sewn onto my back, but they seemed to have a web of bones defining their shape.
“I think it worked,” I said. I didn’t exactly have muscle memory in this form, but I could try to remember what it had felt like to fly in my small dragon bodies and use my new, stronger wings to fly. It didn’t go well; I couldn’t get off the ground.
The button phased out and the doors opened. Sophia came around to look at me as I waddled out of the booth.
“You look just as cuddly as before,” she said. “Mind if I pick you up?”
“Go ahead,” I said. She did, and gave an oof.
“You’re heavy. Did it make your bones out of osmium or something?”
“How heavy?” I worried.
“I can barely lift you. Let’s try this again and I’ll try to specify lightweight bones.”
Someone else had arrived and wanted to use the machine, a straight white couple, so while they were changing each other, Sophia sat down on the bench and snuggled me. She decided my bones were not only too dense, but too near the surface in some places, so hugging me was like hugging a skinny person and getting poked in uncomfortable places by their bones.
When the couple came out, having switched each other’s sexes and given each other a few animal traits — cat ears and a tail for him, webbed fingers and fins for her — Sophia and I went in the machine again and she tried to give me lightweight bones with plenty of padding around them. After she pressed the green button, I tried flapping my wings and managed to get off the floor for a moment, which augured success. I also poked myself in a few places and couldn’t feel the bones as close to the surface as they’d been before. The green button phased out and we came out. Sophia did the lift test and the hug test and pronounced me much more snuggly than before, as well as lighter than an organic creature of my size.
“So how long do you want to be like this before I change you back?” she asked.
“If you don’t mind, we could go home and I could try my strength and dexterity on various tasks like picking up a hardback book and turning pages, or typing on a keyboard. Then if all goes well, I could stay like this overnight and you could change me back to a dragon-girl on your way to school tomorrow, or if not, you could change me back tonight.”
“Either one would be fine.”
So we returned to the house, and Sophia set me down just inside the front door, where I walked to my room. The door was closed and I couldn’t reach the doorknob, but I found I had the strength to jump up and grab it, and did so, managing to get it open. Pushing it completely closed again behind me was more than I could manage, though. I climbed up onto my bookshelf and picked out one of my heaviest books, a one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, then pulled it off the shelf and read a few pages, finding that my modified claws were good enough for that.
So I stayed a plushie overnight, hanging out with Bianca in the living room a good part of the night, alternately reading and chatting about what we were reading, and fuguing out at about the same time. Early Friday morning, Sophia took me to the library on her way to school and venned me into my two-headed dragon-girl body for work. I sat in front of the library, trying to read two books at once without much success, until some of my co-workers showed up to venn for work, then rode to work with them.
Toward the end of my shift, I got a text from Jada saying she was done with her last class and was heading back to her dorm to pack up for the weekend trip home. She texted again less than an hour later saying she was on the road, and a few hours later saying she’d arrived at her grandma’s house and would call after supper.
I’d arranged to have a short shift Saturday and to have Sunday off, so I could spend more time with Jada and Britt that weekend. We called and texted back and forth that evening about our plans for the next couple of days, and the next day after work, Britt and Jada came to pick me up.
“I love your two-headed form!” Jada exclaimed when I got in the car.
“Do you want to just scale it down?” I asked. “I was thinking I’d venn into something more human for tonight.”
“Yeah, more human would be nice,” she said. “But maybe still with two heads?”
“Okay,” I said, laughing.
“What about if y’all don’t scale down quite as much as last time,” Britt said. “I want to be able to cuddle you without worrying about crushing you.”
“About kitten-size?” Jada asked.
“That’d be cute.”
At the library, Jada and I venned each other into eight-inch forms, mostly human with two heads and a scaly tail in my case, and human with fluffy kitten-fur and whiskers for Jada. Then Britt picked us up and and brought us home.
“Look what followed me home, Mom,” she announced as she brought us into the house, one of us cradled in each hand. “Can I keep them?”
“Pets are a lot of work,” Mrs. Boyce commented. “Especially strays.”
“We’re housebroken,” I piped up with my left head, and with the right, “We’ll be very quiet.”
“Mrow,” Jada remarked.
Mrs. Boyce smiled. “Hi, girls. Supper will be ready in an hour, but I don’t suppose you’ll be eating much, will you?”
Britt took us to her room and we snuggled, chatting about Jada’s college experiences, Sophia’s experiments with venning me into a plushie with a skeleton, and Britt’s project of rebuilding a 1973 Ford Mustang. After a while, Britt’s mom called us to supper, and Britt scooped us up in her arms and carried us to the dinner table.
Jada and I shared a plate. We were just strong enough to lift one of the child-size forks from when Britt and her older siblings were little, but small enough that fitting it into our mouths was impossible, so we ate with our hands, which was pretty messy, as Mrs. Boyce had cooked macaroni and cheese and fried okra — plus a pot roast, which was too fibrous for our tiny mouths to chew even after Britt patiently cut some of it up really small. She had to cut the pieces of okra up small, too, as they were half as big as our heads.
Mrs. Boyce asked Jada some questions about how she was finding college life, whether she got along well with her roommate, and so forth.
“Steph’s a great roommate,” Jada said. “She doesn’t leave her clothes lying around and she doesn’t complain when I do. She’s pretty shy, but she’s just starting to come out of her shell. She promised me when I left for the weekend that she’d go to a meeting of the chess club and wouldn’t stay in the room all weekend.”
“Great,” I said. “That shouldn’t be too overwhelming for her. She was pretty freaked out after going to the book club meeting and seeing how many people there were.”
“That’s right, you were there, weren’t you?” Mr. Boyce said. “I remember you told us you’d gone off with Jada as a little stuffed dragon. We’ll have to try that sometime, honey,” he added, turning to his wife.
“Maybe,” she said. “I hear it’s difficult to venn someone like that and still have them able to see and hear and all, and I wouldn’t want to be just a thing.”
“I’ll show you my friend Sophia’s YouTube series,” I said. “She did a science fair project on how to get the Venn machines to give animate dolls specific properties. She venned me into a plushie and in the last few days we’ve been experimenting to improve my strength and dexterity in that form.”
The conversation drifted to Sophia’s year-long living doll experiment, then to other strange things people had venned into for long periods, then to Poppy and Lisette’s motorcycle racing, then to NASCAR, then to Boyce Automotive, the family business, and back around to my work at Metamorphoses and Jada’s job hunt in Greenville. After supper, we went back to Britt’s room and watched a short movie; then Britt left us on her bed while she sat in her desk chair with headphones on and watched YouTube videos while Jada and I made love and then cuddled for a while
A couple of hours later, Britt drove us back to the library and we venned each other into dual forms. Jada picked the plush dragon with a skeleton from my history and turned me into two copies of it, one larger than the other, and then I did something similar with the dual plushie forms from her history, telling the machine to give her a skeleton like mine, lightweight and not too close to the surface at any point. It worked pretty well, as we found after emerging from the machine and testing our strength and dexterity, so we went back in with our larger plushie bodies while Britt snuggled the smaller ones, and venned each other into the bodies we wanted to sleep in and use the following day.
We went home carrying each other’s plushie selves, and I snuggled with Desiree that night for the first time in a week, knowing that Lydia was snuggling with Jada a few miles away, and remembering our lovemaking at Britt’s house.
My new short story, "Carpet-Bound," is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed stories by trans authors for $8.
The third book in the Launuru and Kazmina series, Like Bees in Springtime, is available for free in epub format from Smashwords and for $0.99 in Kindle format from Amazon. Amazon didn’t allow me to set the price to zero. I’ve also reduced the price of the first two books in the series, Wine Can’t be Pressed Into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, and the spin-off in the same setting with different characters, A Notional Treason, to zero on Smashwords and $0.99 on Kindle.
I’ve been charging money for this series for a decade, and made some decent pocket change off of it, but as my understanding of gender and sexuality has matured in recent years, I’ve felt vaguely guilty about making money (however small the amounts) off of a book or books that I no longer feel quite right about. There is a lot to like about the first two books in the series, but the first one and the spin-off have enough compulsory heterosexuality and gender essentialism baked into the plot and worldbuilding that I don’t really want to charge money for it anymore. I considered taking down the earlier books and leaving the third unpublished, but finally decided that enough people liked the first two that I’d keep them available, while editing the last one to match my current understanding of gender better, and finally releasing it.
