Chapter 46 - Where I Was Myself
I came back the next day, looking into the untethered space now gray before entering. It extended as far as I could see, and felt endless. I was sure what I created here was a tiny blip within the whole of raw existence. It was impossible to change the space because it was the building material for everything that ended up in the Infinity Void. What I made here was a tumor. I burst forth my reality core, ballooning it as far as it could go within the darkness. I've had enough of the darkness.
I entered the library to a fanfare, a vibration of air with sound. It felt as though it was bellowed by a giant horn somewhere. I touched down on the floor of the library, welcomed by Lila. She ran up and jumped into my arms, almost comically. Tarne came over to put her hand on my shoulder. Kara remained at the desk.
“Hey,” I said, sounding strangely feminine. I inspected my body to find myself still female as before. I looked up with an excited grin. “I’m still a woman.”
“Yeah,” Kara said. “And I hear you orgasmed this into existence, right?” She motioned to the environment. I remembered the embarrassing moment of exploding armor off my body and getting off in the middle of a fight. I think I valued sexuality a little too much, but why wouldn’t I? Being a big guy suffering dreams of being female and small. Everyone had dreams of how they wanted to look like, and some were able to edit themselves into those forms. For me, it was just a dream. Only in here could I be who I really wanted to be.
“I guess,” I said. “That was pretty embarrassing, to be honest.”
“Impossible, more like,” she followed up. “You don’t have the power to do something like this.” I teleported Kara into my arms, and tilted her in a dance pose toward the ground while supporting her back. She was shocked for a moment, but then rolled her eyes. I felt her push off from my grip to the ground, then she stood up from a pushup like a boss. I loved her attitude and skill, even at her age.
“I mean, I had the seed of thought here before,” I said. “What happened to that anyway? And what about Akier Vil Moredo?”
“I’m sure he’s not done with this place yet,” Lila said. “From what Kara tells me, he has something similar to the Keir that can move him between worlds. That wouldn’t allow him to bridge into here, would it?”
“I mean, I got here,” Kara said. “But that’s only thanks to the Rahin. Now that I’ve been here, I can probably make a mark for it and have it as a ‘world’, for however long this lasts.” I frowned, and walked over to the couch to sit.
“You don’t seem to like it here,” I said.
“It USED to be interesting,” she said. “Then you started changing things. I worry that you keep pushing things to such a degree that you’ll really be erased from existence.”
“I’m fine not being recorded,” I said. It was a lie. Like everyone alive, I wanted to be remembered. The Infinity Void accomplished that for everyone, and every living thing. Everything had a story, and past the original run of it would be able to see stories of others for understanding at times in life where their life caused confusion. It would center around family at first, friends, then venture into undoing biases of hated individuals throughout history by understanding their thinking and what parts of their life failed them and led to the horrible things they did.
“That’s stupid,” Lila said. “OF COURSE you will be recorded.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, smiling. “If I am recorded, others will follow my idea of changing the Infinity Void and the inner workings, resulting in great upheaval. Even though the Rahin eat chaos, I don’t think they could handle such a… buffet of unrest. The Order of the Keir would also try to expand to right these errors, and bring in some people that aim to break more with the Keir. From one idea, the structure built around life crumbles. That’s why I’m ok not being remembered. I just need to know that Tarne will not cease to exist beyond this.” Tarne’s eyes welled with tears. She embraced me warmly on the couch. I could feel her breasts slide over mine, and felt my breath exhale warm on her cheek. If I was a guy, my penis would be hard, but instead I felt a bit of heat at my crotch.
“I have to go for now,” I said. “Work’s starting. See you guys later. We’ll take Akier on and suppress him. I guarantee it.” I flashed both hands in thumbs up and sank away from Tarne into the couch to exit.
break
I now existed there as I have wanted to. The next day, I came back into the library and delighted once more in my lack of male anatomy. I always hated it. I arrived to the same fanfare as before, and wondered whether it would play every time. I could change it, but this was nice. The sound played as an alert to the people staying in the untethered space for the time being that I was back. Tarne showed up first, walking over to the railing upstairs to lean over it.
“Hey, Tarne,” I said, still surprised by my voice. It was still mine, just softer. I almost wanted to try clearing my throat to get to my normal voice, before I realized this was how it was supposed to sound.
“Hey, Jack,” she replied. “Or do you have another name now?”
“Jack is fine,” I said, though I was partial to JJ. I felt it would make the kid feel too powerful. On a whim, I tapped my heart to release JJ from within, but he was a boy. He hugged me, and I absorbed him back in. “Huh.”
“All your childhood memories are that of a boy,” Kara said from behind me. “So your Kid is not going to follow your gender swap.” She stood by the door to the garden. Lila was nowhere to be found.
“Where’s Lila,” I asked.
“She’s—- Otherwise preoccupied,” Kara replied.
“Oh!” Tarne burst out. “Speaking of sex, wanna try out my robot guy now that you’re a girl like us? Come on!” She waved her hand toward her room, as I looked over at Kara. She shrugged. I took two steps at a time, feeling light again with creationism around me. My excitement was heat again, a blush, and moisture.
When I got to the open door, Tarne was already naked, mounting the robot guy in bed like the sex toy that he was. She moved for a few minutes, quietly sighing that was even more exciting to hear than moans, until she set down over the penis and arched her back to a gasp of climax. Her breath shuddered out after as she collapsed forward onto the guy’s chest, and the penis plopped out from her opening to rest erect between her buttocks.
“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist another go. Your turn. Here, let me wipe him down for you.” In my reality, and through the presence of sexually transmitted diseases and infections, using something right after someone else would be a dangerous and terrible idea. Seeing as this was the untethered space, or my mind, or a bubble of my mind within the untethered space, I felt no such fear or caution. I positioned myself over the guy, but wanted something else.
beast,
With a hand motion, the guy became a girl, with full breasts but still a penis below. It was a specific exciting point that my reality was just as unlikely to grant akin to my desired form, but here it was fantasy come true. I hovered over the erection, getting in place, before slowly lowering my hips until the very tip touched against me. I looked into her eyes, seemingly human. She looked fearfully excited, as if hoping for more but surrendering to the will of another. I felt the pressure on my opening, squeezing into a spot that never held something of that nature.
It felt too tight, and I wondered whether I was doing something wrong for a moment. The tip passed the threshold with an audible surprising gasp from my lips. The rest of the length inserted slowly as I lowered myself onto the erection and sat down on the robot hips for a moment. In reality, this could hurt the person on the bottom, but seeing as this was a robot, I put my full weight on it, feeling the length inside me throb against the walls of— well, of my vagina. It felt too good to be true.
“How does it feel?” Tarne burst out, shifting me away from the special moment. The quiet around me was gone, and Tarne was there, sitting on the robot’s face, while being right next to my face. I felt beast stir, but rather than a guy bound in a cage, he was a naked version of me sitting on a throne with legs crossed. Her face was animalistic, hungry, with eyes blazing fierce and focused. When our eyes met inside my head, she pounced, closing the distance to me in a split second and slipping a hand inside me.
In response to beast joining the party, I slapped a hand on Tarne’s neck and brought her in for a hungry kiss. She shoved her tongue down my throat, and I followed up by shoving fingers up inside her where the robot’s tongue was already making a mess. We rode the sex robot to orgasm, interacting wildly atop it until we were both satisfied. In reality, the person on the bottom would have been dead. I saw beast in my mind feasting on the naked breast of the robot we just fucked. The blood dripped down her chin, with eyes poised in my direction. It was… quite a predatory sight.
“That was amazing,” I said, and looked over to Tarne who was out like a light. I cozied up next to her for a cuddle, and rested my head on her breasts. I did not want this to end. Going back to reality after this would feel so strange. I sighed, tracing my finger over the soft skin on Tarne’s chest up to the nipple. When I circled the nipple, she stirred, and I slipped off her like the softest cloth, exiting the space where I was myself. When this place disappeared, a part of me would go with it.
break
I came back the next morning with a different mindset. I needed to find out where Akier was or what he was planning. I had not seen Fyntn the two times I had been back since the creation of the gray bubble within the untethered space. I had to question that little Goni. When I arrived into my female form again, I looked within myself to see the same vision of beast upon her throne, eyes looking up from a cold lowered gaze. It was strange. Outside of this place, beast was the same old creature in a cage, seeking hungrily and wild. The female version felt more like a lion huntress, seriously poised, determined to get what she wanted.
I shook off that scary look, and ventured into the garden to look for the others, though I was only interested in finding Fyntn. I ran into Kara right by the doors. She was sitting on a bench in the lush green environment. I sat beside her when she noticed me. She was focused on something in the green, not speaking for a few minutes of tense silence.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Shh!” She replied. I tried to follow her gaze, but only saw the green and brown of the environment. I remained silent for a few more minutes until her gaze relaxed, and she leaned back on the bench. “It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?” I asked.
“A specter,” she said.
“From the portal walking show?” I asked. “Didn’t that end? I thought James put a stop to it.”
“He did,” Kara said. “And we built a different sort of group out of it that gave the beings that died young extra chances to explore the dimensions. However, the network remained, and the specters, who once were some of those children, are still roaming the dimensions. It’s something I’ve been trying to fix while I’m still able to.”
“I can’t imagine you ever not being able to fix something,” I said, meaning it as a compliment. Kara looked at me with an annoyed expression, then shrugged it off.
“How are you liking being a woman without any of the shitty things?” She asked.
“Shitty things?”
“Well, I’m sure you must know how much of a pain it is to be a woman of this humanity,” she said. “You’ve done research. The monthly bleeding, the dangers of sitting in unsanitary places, the placement of the vagina close to the asshole that can be annoying, the urgency of having to pee, the period discomforts. And that doesn’t even begin to venture into how women are perceived in the majority of dimensions I’ve been to, the amount of creepozoids it attracts by simply existing out in the open, or letting skin breathe.
“You’d be surprised how many beings reproduce in a similar way. Damn, even James wasn’t actually a standard human. The very first iteration, he was a part of this dimension where children don’t grow UP when they grow up. Everyone there is like four feet tall, and it’s their standard. To reiterate, you wouldn’t like being a woman with all that involved.” I nodded silently for a moment.
“Even if I became a woman in my reality,” I said. “I probably wouldn’t experience half of this. It’s unlikely I’d have the whole reproductive system put in, and it would take a great amount of effort to turn me into someone pretty enough so that creeps would be interested in me. Then again, creeps aren’t picky. I know I’ll never be able to experience it fully, but I’m not about to put all those things into here to suffer through them.
“Additionally, are you sometimes thinking it would be better to be a guy?”
“I guess, a little,” she said.
“I’d launch into a tirade of the bad things about being a guy,” I said, “But again, there is no point to bring it up in this space. I do have a question for you though. Since you always seemed very sure of yourself and tomboyish, do you want to try being a guy?” Kara’s eyes opened wider in silent surprise.
“Hmm,” she said. “It’s true, you can make me into a guy in here. So could Lila. It’s strange that it never came up before, the times we’ve had sex even. I don’t know.”
“I could make it into a button,” I said, bringing the same red button from the time I turned Kara and James into birds. When pressed, the button changed the person into a bird, and when pressed in bird form, it changed them back to human form. I considered if this was an affront to the trans community, but I was sure some would love this existed in their reality rather than the arduous process of surgeries to feel like themselves. Now the button flipped gender between the two with specific anatomies. It was nothing to do with other genders that also existed alongside the two most archaic. “It’s up to you whether you want to press it, and it will always change you back with another click.” I handed the button over and watched Kara mull it over for a minute, tracing her thumb on the smooth red surface before pressing it.
In the blink of an eye, Kara was taller than me, brawny, with a short beard. I looked at her, and she looked over at me.
“Whoa,” she said, with a new voice. With another press of the button, she was back to her female form. I noticed a bit of blush on her cheek from the experience. “I don’t know— maybe I shouldn’t.” Kara held the button out for me to take it back.
“This is a safe space,” I said, pushing it back to her side with the hand. “Just— try it out. And by ‘try it out’, you know what I mean.” I looked down at my crotch, making Kara look down at hers. She clicked the button again, then traced her hand between her legs in the shape of her penis. It was quite visible behind the jeans for its size, and when she touched it, the part defined itself more when blood started pumping into it. Kara looked over to me, mouth agape in happy shock.
“Oh, damn,” she said. “James wasn’t even that big. Now what?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” I said. “I wanted to talk to Fyntn today, but I guess I’ll catch him tomorrow. You ok?”
“A bit embarrassed,” Kara said, putting a hand over the erection now clearly pressing up against the inside of the jeans.
“I’ll leave you to it then,” I said, and fell backwards through the bench rest and into the ground like water to exit.
break
I came back on Friday morning, intent on finding Fyntn. Last time I was near him, he flung me out of the untethered space to try to save me. Then we made plans to talk about Akier, but he had not been around. When I entered the library, Tarne was spread out on the couch alone in the library.
“Hey,” I said, forgetting I had the feminine voice now. I remembered I was female and smiled.
“Hey, Jack,” Tarne said. “Or is it something else now?”
“Still Jack,” I replied. “Do you know where Fyntn is? We need to do something about Akier Vil Moredo.” Tarne looked confused.
“Who’s that?”
“A bad guy,” I replied. “Probably the worst, and now he’s trying to alter the way things work beyond existence.”
“Or is it that you are supplementing your life with something exciting to cope with the boredom of your reality?” Tarne asked. I was confused. “Maybe the world you’ve built for yourself in your mind is getting too comfortable, and you feel the need to break it for a bit of excitement. It’s understandable. You’ve done it before. You did it with Rebecca, breaking her world because things were stale. Looking back, I think you did it to Finnelgamin as well. He wanted to live a simple life with the woman he met in the park, but you broke that by taking a deep dive into fantasy.”
I walked closer, confused how Tarne knew all of this. A slew of ideas circled my mind. What if this was Akier? What if he found a way to control someone within my bubble? Was I in suspended reality, or rather one not of my creation? Was it too good to be true that being my true self saved me and my corner of untethered space?
“Tarne?” I asked. Her expression was blank. She tilted her head slightly in response to her name. It worried me. She did not seem like herself, and I wanted to know what changed. Cautiously, I wove a ten-layer bubble of thick air invisible to anyone with a circular motion of my right hand’s pinky behind my back.
“The construct of yourself in a female body is just a ploy for attention, not a release of pent-up desire to exist as a woman. You always seek to entertain yourself at the behest of others, breaking the world so that you can prosper. That’s how I came to be, isn’t it? I was you. You were me. Why do you think there was another life there when you weren’t occupying my body?”
“Because otherwise it would just look like a dead baby,” I said.
“There were ways around that,” she said. “You could have turned into a doll when you left, or you could have disappeared completely from the library you’ve built for yourself time and again. This place isn’t a sanctuary. To you it’s a shell where you spent your adolescence. You hide away here, and you gave the same complex to another, or shared the common wrong with another story. The original space was just a place you spent time between lessons. Rather than live your life, you hid away, nose in a book, living vicariously through stories in the pages printed for that exact purpose. Didn’t you, Jack?” I lowered my brow in anger, putting other traps and protections in place around me, invisible and hidden.
“Who are you?” I asked. “You’re not her.”
“I AM HER, YOU DUMBASS!” Tarne shouted. “AND IT’S YOUR FAULT!”
I recoiled slightly at the change of tone.
“What’s my fault?” I asked, setting up a way to trap Tarne before something weird happened. A sliver of a notion circled my mind, but it could not be. “I divided out of Tarne to give her a shot at life, and the Rahin might erase you anyway. I pleaded for them to put you into the Nth Infinity instead.”
“Not that!” Tarne said. “What do you think Tarne was when you were in your reality? Was she a doll? Did she disappear with you? No, right? So what was she?”
“Somebody else,” I said. “That’s why—“
“No, she wasn’t someone else,” she said. “What WAS she?” The idea struck me like a bolt of lightning. I shivered at the thought of it.
“A shell,” I said. “So you’re a void leech just like that guy I met before.”
“Not just ANY void leech,” Tarne said. “My name is Akier Vilamones Moredo, and you trapped me in this body without memory of who I once was. I remember now, thanks to my pets finding me in the dark.” I shivered in fear, then sprung every possible trap to capture Tarne. The floor closed up around the couch, but Tarne just punched through that. Ropes caught her arms and legs to suspend her in the air, but she just set them on fire to free herself, or himself. I shifted bookshelves into her path, that he just exploded to send pages flying into the air, burning to cinders.
“You hold the key to my freedom,” Akier said, using Tarne’s voice. There was no Tarne. There was never a Tarne. This was supposed to be Akier Vil Moredo’s reset. That meant someone was able to defeat him after all. I was glad of that fact. I was not too glad that he remembered who he was. This was by far the most dangerous place to remember, right before starting anew as something else. If Tarne’s shell did not absorb him, he could have been a butterfly or something.
I threw bubbles of heavy air at him that stuck to his body to slow his pursuit while heading into the garden. His movement stopped about five feet away from the door. Wasting no time, I pushed a giant blob of heavy air over him to bring Tarne to her knees. Before he could think up anything else, I teleported to his side, and drew out the Queen of White Thorn to sink glowing purple vines into her skin, dulling his mind. She rolled her eyes and jumped up out of existence.
“Ok, ok, alright,” I said, repeating consoling phrases. “It’s ok. It’s going to be fine. Now just housing the Infinity Void’s most wanted disruptor in the bubble in untethered space. No sweat.” What worried me was that I had sex with him, her? Was this exactly what he was referring to? Was this world-breaking for entertainment? I sighed, shifting Tarne into a hidden cell made of bookshelves. I hoped Kara and Lila would not look for Tarne, but I would have to tell them eventually. The thing that really annoyed me was that Fyntn was nowhere to be found, and I did not get a chance to look for him. I put a hand over my face, and grabbed it to pull it off like a cloth on the surface, only when the cloth left, there was nothing below to exit.
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