Nat And The Vigilante free porn video

Nat and the Vigilante (c) 2008-2010 by Trismegistus Shandy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it unmodified on any noncommercial site or mailing list. You can also create derivative works, including translations or adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story and release your own adaptations or new stories under this same license. This is a sequel to "Unpresentable Heroes", "Nat and the Telepath", and "Nat and the Haemophiliacs". There is one more story following this one (as of October 2010), "Nat and the Housesitter". I have an unfinished draft of a sixth story, which is on the back burner while I work on other, unrelated stories. === Prologue === Alan Voss had just gotten home from work when his ex-wife called. "Good evening, Margaret," he said in a carefully controlled tone, noting the caller ID. "Hi, Alan. I wanted to check with you about what time you'll be picking Jack and Cecil up for the weekend." "Probably about five forty-five or six tomorrow, as usual, depending on traffic. If I wind up having to work late again, I'll call you." He'd worked till six thirty tonight, till seven fifteen yesterday, till seven Tuesday... in fact he hadn't left work on time in a week, but he was pretty sure he could manage to leave promptly at five tomorrow, to pick his sons up for the weekend. Unless something new and surprising came up, he could easily finish the most urgent stuff on his plate by three or four, even. "Okay. We have some errands to run tomorrow, and I was planning to do them later in the afternoon so Jack and Cecil could play outside all morning while it's not too hot yet, but I'll arange things so we're sure to be home before you get here." "See you then," he said. "Wait," she said. "I have some news for you, too. I didn't want you to be caught unprepared when you get here --" "Another haemarthrosis?" he asked, his heart sinking; he regretted being out of town when Jack had that bleeding in his knee early last week and ended up in the hospital. "No, no, it's good news. But kind of strange -- are you ready?" "Go ahead," he said, puzzled and apprehensive. "Jack and Cecil aren't haemophiliac anymore." He had a clipping service send him all the news about haemophilia research. If there had been any treatment breakthrough, much less a cure, invented recently, he would have known about it within hours. "What? Is this another of your alternative medicine fads...?" "Alan, I never stopped taking them to their regular haemophilia specialist even when I was investigating all the alternatives. And Dr. Roche himself confirmed it, when I took them to him yesterday for their clotting factor infusion; he did clotting factor tests, and they're a hundred percent normal." "How?" "This is the strange part. You know the genetics of haemophilia, how girls can be carriers but they don't have the disease itself..." "I know it better than you do; girls can get haemophilia if --" "Don't patronize me, Alan." "I'm not -- Go on. Finish explaining." "Yes, girls can have haemophilia if their mother is a carrier and their father is haemophiliac himself. That doesn't apply here." "What the hell are you talking about? Get to the point!" "Jack and Cecil are now girls. Their father is not haemophiliac. Girls with only one haemophilia-carrier parent do not have haemophilia. Therefore Jack and Cecil do not have haemophilia." Alan was silent, stunned, throughout this syllogistic monologue and for several second afterward. "What the hell have you done to our sons?" Even in his anger and confusion, he was proud of himself for saying "our sons" instead of "my sons." "Have you heard of Nat Holcomb, the paranormal...?" ---- After Margaret hung up, Alan took his supper to his desk and did some research. He found a number of articles -- in _The Atlanta Journal_, _Atlanta Magazine_, _The Atlanta Business Chronicle_, _The Milledgeville Union Recorder_, _Paranormal Watch_, _The Weekly World News_, and Wikipedia -- about Nat Holcomb, a paranormal who could instantly and perfectly change people's sex. There were also references to her, or him, on the personal blogs of several transsexuals who had availed themselves of his, or her, services. The most illuminating, perhaps, was a long series of blog posts from a dot-com millionaire, retired at thirty-six, who had, apparently out of sheer bored-rich curiosity, hired Holcomb to change him into a woman and change him back into a man thirty days later. A week into the experiment, "she" wrote: I thought the weirdness, the sheer constant feeling of wrongness, would be gone by now. No such luck. I still feel off-balance when I walk -- and I haven't even tried wearing heels yet. My breasts are constantly getting in the way. I have to steel myself to walk into a women's restroom, though I have managed to avoid absentmindedly walking into the men's room. A couple of times, when I've been hacking or reading a really absorbing book, I've forgotten my body for a little while; but not for very long. Then when I come to myself, the wrongness hits me worse than ever. Is this what transsexuals feel all the time? Near the end, this: You might have heard your wife or girlfriend or sister complain about her period -- probably not very often, but once in a while, maybe when it's hurting her worse than usual. And if you're like I was, you've wondered how bad it could really be, something natural and routine and completely non-pathological. Right? It's much worse than you think. If they complained about it like I used to complain about the occasional illness or injury that hurt about this bad, our civilization would drown under a layer of complaining nine feet deep. Then, after he was restored to his true sex, he wrote: After experiencing gender dysphoria for a month, I feel deeply for the people who've suffered from it their whole lives. I've just made a contribution to the Caeneus Foundation, which helps out transsexuals of limited income who couldn't otherwise afford Mr. Holcomb's services; I hope some of my readers will do the same by clicking the Caeneus logo in the margin. If you've got change to spare and are thinking of having Mr. Holcomb change you temporarily like I did, here's a piece of advice: Don't. Alan bookmarked the page and closed the browser window, sick at heart. *This*, he thought, was what his ex-wife and that greedy, irresponsible paranormal had inflicted on Jack and Cecil. She was so obsessive about finding a cure for their haemophilia that she'd lost sight entirely of their psychological and spiritual health. Had Holcomb thought for a minute about how this would affect them deep- down and long-term, or asked any questions except whether Margaret's money was green? Alan found that about as plausible as the paragraph in the Wikipedia article (interrupted every other sentence with [citation needed] tags) about how Holcomb had supposedly beaten off the alien invasion two years ago by changing the sex of a few hundred aliens. Somehow he needed to get Holcomb to change them back. He noticed the time: 10:48 pm. He had to get to bed soon. But first he picked up his PDA and made two entries: a reminder to call his lawyer during his lunch break tomorrow, and another to go by the church to pray before the Blessed Sacrament for a few minutes on the way to Margaret's house. He would need a heap of grace to restrain himself from getting into a long, furious argument with her in front of the boys -- oh, God -- in front of the girls... and to stay cheerful and calm with Jack and Cecil all weekend. He had to treat them like the boys they still really were inside, and help them somehow with the "dysphoric wrongness" that blogger had described, until he could get them changed back. === Part One === One Wednesday afternoon in early July, when Nat Holcomb had just changed her third client of the day and was waiting for her fourth to arrive, her secretary called. Nat answered, expecting Melanie to say that the next client was ready. "Boss, there's someone without an appointment who wants to see you. Stefan something, I can't quite pronounce his last name. Um, he says he doesn't want a change, just wants to talk. And, he says he knows you but he isn't sure if you know him in this timeline or not?" "I think I do know him, slightly," Nat said, heart pounding. "Ask him if his business is liable to be quick or if it's going to take a while, and if the latter, ask him to wait until after my next client comes and goes." "Okay, will do... He says he'll wait, it may take a while to explain his business." "All right. Send him in as soon as the last client leaves." Nat hung up, her eyes going involuntarily to the bookshelf where her tattered copies of _Tom Sawyer the Pilot_ and _Tom Sawyer in Nevada_ rested. "What's that?" Zach Johnson asked. He usually hung out with Nat between teleporting clients between Nat's home in Savannah and her Atlanta clinic. On the Go board sitting on the edge of Nat's desk, he was winning, so far. "Did you ever meet the Worldwalker?" Nat asked. Zach's eyes got wide. "No, I sure haven't... You mean that's the guy you're making wait to see you until after your next client?" Nat shrugged. "I think so. Stefan Swartebroekx is his name." She got up and went to the bookshelf. Her Scholastic Book Club editions of those novels from a parallel world each had a foreword by Swartebroekx, who had brought them here from a world where Mark Twain had written them in the early 1880s instead of _Huckleberry Finn_. He noted in his foreword that he didn't think they would go over as well here as _Huckleberry Finn_ did in the world they came from, but he hoped readers of this world would enjoy them. When Nat had read those books in middle school she had been more fascinated by the hints at the whole alternate world than by the variations in Samuel Clemens' biography (much less disastrous than in our world, with no bankruptcy and only one of his daughters dying young). "I met him once," Nat said, after glancing over the foreword to _Tom Sawyer the Pilot_. "Back when I was living at the GSPA training camp in Toccoa, still learning to control my power..." ----- Nat was in her room, studying her geometry lesson, when someone knocked at the door. "Come in," Nat said. Polyphonia entered. She had been like a mother to Nat since she left home to get training in using her power; more motherly than fatherly even when Nat's still imperfectly controlled power made her temporarily male. "There's a visitor who'd like to meet you, if you don't mind," she said. "Who is it?" Nat asked. She had been shy around strangers, especially men, ever since the traumatic events surrounding the manifestation of her power. "Make sure they know my power is still kind of erratic, okay? I don't want them getting mad if I change them accidentally..." "It's the Worldwalker," Polyphonia said; "have you heard of him?" "No!" Nat said, meaning not that she hadn't heard of him, but that she was astonished he was here and wanted to meet her. "Really? I've read a bunch of his books, I mean books he brought here from worlds he's been to. And I wanted to see the passenger pigeons at the Atlanta Zoo but I guess that'll have to wait until I get my power under control... Why does he want to meet me?" "He didn't say exactly, but I'm guessing he's interested in your power," Polyphonia said. "You probably won't have to worry about accidentally changing him; I wouldn't be surprised if he asks you to change him a couple of times." "I hope I can," Nat said, putting away her geometry book; "I especially hope I can change her back before she's ready to leave...!" "I'm sure you can," her teacher said. Indeed, after five months under Polyphonia's tutelage Nat could almost always make her power work on command; the reason she hadn't left the training camp since she got here, four days after her power first manifested, was that she couldn't always keep it from working spontaneously. They went downstairs to the dining room, where a big, broad-shouldered man Nat hadn't met before was sitting across the table from Shaper and Fernspringer, talking animatedly. He interrupted himself as Nat and Polyphonia entered the room, and stood up. "Is this she, Sally?" he asked. "I'm honored to meet you," he said to Nat. "This is the one I told you about," Polyphonia said. "Natalie Holcomb. She's almost mastered basic control of her power; two or three more months should do it. Then she could go home, or enroll in public school here in Toccoa if she wants to stay at the camp for further training." "Stefan Swartebroekx," he said. "Your power is perhaps the most interesting I've heard of in all the worlds I've visited, Miss Holcomb." "Um, thank you," Nat replied, blushing. "I mean, it doesn't seem very useful most of the time, but it is plenty weird enough to be interesting. The doctors went crazy trying to figure it out. But, I mean, your power is pretty cool too... I've read a bunch of your stuff, I'd ask for an autograph but it's all in my room back home in Milledgeville." "Ah, don't give me credit for the books others have written," he said. "Give me credit for catching those live passenger pigeons! That was a little harder than walking into bookstores and looking for titles I'd never heard of by famous authors... But I wanted to talk about your power, and perhaps see a demonstration, if you don't mind." "Um, okay," Nat said, glancing around at the others in the room. Fernspringer was looking on with a broad grin; Shaper was politely ignoring them and finishing his lunch. "Maybe we should go somewhere else? And maybe you should change into something looser..." "Ah, yes, perhaps I should," Swartebroekx said, nodding thoughtfully. "The volunteers who helped Miss Holcomb test her powers usually wore bathrobes or hospital gowns," Polyphonia put in. "I think I can rustle up a robe in your size..." A few minutes later they were in the power testing room, where Nat had used her power on several volunteers dozens of times while Nat's brain was scanned and her changees were recorded with high-speed normal and x-ray cameras. The highest-speed cameras available couldn't detect a gradual change; it always occurred instantaneously between one frame and the next. Swartebroekx was dressed in a bathrobe that came just to his knees, and barefoot. "Okay, ready?" Nat asked. They weren't bothering with all the scans this time; they were just using this room for the privacy. "Any time," Swartebroekx replied amiably; then, in an alto voice, "Yes, I think this is the most interesting power I've ever seen." "It worked the first time," Nat said, pleased; sometimes she had to concentrate for a minute or two before she could get it to work. "How long do you want me to leave you like that?" "A few hours, perhaps overnight?" Swartebroekx said, looking at herself curiously, but not, thankfully, opening up her robe. "When would be a convenient time for you to change me again?" "Almost anytime, I guess. I sleep from midnight to eight, and I'm usually busy with schoolwork for the first few hours after breakfast. But I'm always here; Polyphonia says I can't leave the camp until I've gone two months without changing anybody accidentally." "That's sensible," she said; "I wish she'd been able to enforce that in my case!" "She trained you too?" "Yes. I jumped here from my home world the first time my power manifested; some older boys were beating me up, when I was on my way home from school in a city on the Oconee that doesn't exist in this timeline. Then suddenly I was in a pasture somewhere between Winder and Athens... Eventually, I ended up here and Polyphonia trained me to get my power under control, or tried to. I kept involuntarily disappearing into other worlds, and coming back to this one or something approximately close to it; sometimes I met a Polyphonia who'd never met me, and had to jump again once or twice to home in on this world." "Wow." "Well... I will leave you alone for a time, then, and ask you to change me back this evening at suppertime or tomorrow after breakfast; is that agreeable?" "Sure." Nat went back to her room and her lessons, and the Worldwalker went wherever she went. Nat didn't see her again until the next morning at breakfast; she was still wearing the bathrobe for want of feminine clothes in her size. "This has been enlightening," she said to Nat. "You may change me back whenever it is convenient, I suppose, here or somewhere else..." "I'll do it now, then." But in fact it took forty or fifty seconds of effort before she could get her power to work, this time. "Thank you," Swartebroekx said. "Sometime later, in a year or two -- when you have attained your majority, and have full control of your power -- I will need your help with something. For now I wish you well." Nat asked what the something was that he would need her help with, but he declined to speak about it. Nat didn't see him again for almost seven years; occasionally she heard that the Worldwalker had shown up somewhere, with an extinct animal or two in a cage or a stack of books and records from some other world, and then vanished again, but he didn't seek her out. ----- "So he said he was going to need your help someday, when he met you when you were seventeen?" "Right. And then he's visited this world I don't know how many times since then, and I never heard he was here until he'd already left again. I'm not sure what he wanted me for, exactly. Maybe he needed me to change him so he could fit in to some matriarchal world and work there unhindered, or wanted me to help destabilize a tyrannous sexist government, or something...?" "Ask him when you see him," Zach said, placing a white stone and eliminating six of Nat's blacks. Ten minutes later Melanie called again, saying the last client was ready; Nat signaled Zach, who teleported to the office to fetch him, and Nat walked downstairs to the clinic room to greet him, bringing the Tom Sawyer books. He was a transsexual from Minneapolis who'd just flown into Atlanta that morning; her return flight didn't leave until Thursday, and after Nat changed him they talked for a few minutes about things to see in Atlanta and ways to convince airport security she was the same person pictured on her driver's license. When Zach teleported her back to the clinic in Atlanta, Nat remained in the basement clinic. Five minutes later the Worldwalker entered from the dressing room in a bathrobe almost large enough for him. "Good afternoon, Ms. Holcomb," he said. "Have we met before?" "Yes," Nat said, gesturing for him to take a seat. "You came to the GSPA training camp when I was seventeen, and asked me to change you for a day or so. And you said you would need my help again in a year or two, but then I never heard from you again until now." "Ah," he said. "I remember that meeting, or something like it. You changed me into a woman at about one in the afternoon, and changed me back the next morning at breakfast, yes? And Polyphonia, Fernspringer and Captain Rapid were at the camp at the time, too?" "That's pretty near what I remember, except I think Shaper was there and Captain Rapid wasn't." "Well... there are as many of me as there are worlds. And there are many of you too. That was the first time I met you, but for me, it wasn't the last; I came back to a world fairly similar to this one a year and a half later, and found you -- you were living in Athens then, going to UGA; after the fall semester was over, you went with me to a world where genetically engineered plagues had killed most of the population, including all of the women." "Was that what you'd said you wanted my help with later?" "It was. I had first encountered that sad, apparently doomed world in 1996; I didn't stay long. Then a few years later, when I was on a visit to this world -- or one very like it -- to visit my old friends in the State Patrol here, and I heard from Polyphonia about her new pupil... I remembered that world, and I hoped you could help its men." "And I did, then? Some version of me went there with you and changed some of them...?" "Yes. We travelled around what had been the eastern United States for several months, and you changed at least a few men in each community we came to. In some places you changed only a few volunteers; in other places the men selected half of themselves by lot, or by vote. Then I returned you here, I mean to the world that version of you came from, and you returned to school. We'd become good friends during that long trek up the east coast, and I came back to visit a number of times over the years. You graduated from college and joined an architecture firm in Atlanta..." "Oh... I just want to remind you that you don't know me. I mean, I'm probably a lot like the me you know, but I'm not the same person. It sounds like she missed out on some fairly traumatic events that I suffered through here." "I'll try to keep that in mind. Well, I was busy with a long research project in a certain cluster of worlds a long way from here, and didn't come back to the world where I knew you for almost a year. When I jumped back there, I found, as usual when I'm jumping a long way, that I couldn't get to the exact right world on the first try. And I explored a bit in each world, jumping a smaller distance each time, closing in on the world I was looking for... All of them were worlds very like this one, with fifty United States, and no Soviet Union since 1988, and where paranormal powers had started appearing in 1972; but in some of them you'd never met me, in some you had no paranormal power or a different one, in some I could not find you at all. I found unusual conditions in one of them, which I'll come back to in a minute... Then I found the world I was looking for, where you were a UGA graduate and a junior architect. But you were dead." "How?" Nat asked, her heart sinking. "An auto accident; a drunk driver in an SUV ran into the driver's side of your Mazda. It had happened four months before I arrived there. So I jumped again, many small jumps, and I kept finding worlds where you had died recently, in that accident or some other way. I couldn't take it any more; I made a larger jump, and ended up here. It took me a few days to find you, since I looked in Athens and Milledgeville first before asking someone from the GSPA, who directed me to your clinic." "So... why? Did you just want to talk? Remember, I'm not the same Nat Holcomb you know." "Partly. But I mentioned unusual conditions I found...? I need your help again. There is a world not far from here where people need your power." "Why? A plague like in that world you and the other me went to?" "No. It's a world where there's someone with a power pretty much like yours -- they don't know if it works exactly the same, because they haven't found the person, but the results are about the same. And this person has been using their power much less responsibly than you; in short, she is a vigilante. She's changed a handful of rapists, whom we need shed no tears over, but also many other people of both sexes who were guilty of nothing very serious, as far as they can tell." "They?" "I mean, the State Patrol Auxiliary of that world. Many of the officers you know from this world, and some others who don't exist, or never joined the Patrol, or don't live in Georgia, in this timeline; and the equivalent agencies in the Carolinas and Tennessee and so forth... They've been trying to track down this vigilante, who is active all over the Southeast. Sooner or later they'll probably catch her, or him, and maybe they'll be able to get her to change her victims back in exchange for a light sentence... But that's far from certain. Her victims need your help." "And there's no me in that world?" "The Patrol officers I asked had never heard of you, and I looked for you but couldn't find you." "How many victims are we talking about changing back?" "Well... leaving out the rapists and child molesters, I think there are around eighty known victims." "It would take me three or four weeks to change them all, unless I exhaust myself using my power to the limit day after day, and that wouldn't be healthy... There are people here who need my help too, you know. But the way things have been going for the last few weeks, I've hardly been able to help them... This crazy lawsuit has had me in court more workdays than not, and I've had to cancel dozens of clients' appointments." "Lawsuit?" Swartebroekx asked. Nat explained about the formerly haemophiliac Voss girls, how she had changed them thinking that their mother had full authority to authorize the procedure, and how their father, long divorced from their mother, had then filed suit against their mother seeking sole custody, and against both Nat and their mother for changing them. "He claims they're liable to suffer all kinds of psychological harm from the change," she told Stefan; "he's suing on their behalf for damages and trying to get me to change them back. At first I wanted to settle out of court; I figured I'd tell him I'd change the girls back free of charge if he won the custody suit -- but after I talked to Ms. Voss and the girls again, I decided to fight it. The girls don't want to change back; they're keen on skateboarding and soccer and other things they couldn't do when they had haemophilia, and they seem to me to be adapting fairly well to being girls. First I had to miss a couple of days' work to testify in the custody suit, and then Mr. Voss's other suit against me and his ex-wife got rolling and I've been in court, or at my lawyer's office, more days than not in the last couple of weeks. "So I'm missing so many appointments lately that I guess I might as well go with you and help this vigilante's victims. It sure would be nice to tell the judge and Mr. Voss and his lawyer that I've got to disappear into another world for a few weeks, urgent State Patrol business you know, and let them stew for a while. I'll need you to talk to my commanding officer so he can talk to the judge and so forth, but, sure, I'll come. Anything to get away from this mess for a while." "Very well. I'll talk to you again after I've talked to Captain Rapid, then, shall I?" "Sure. Um, another thing. Before you go, could you autograph these books for me?" Swartebroekx laughed; a laugh as huge as he was and then some. "It's Mark Twain's autograph you want," he said; "but I haven't yet found a world where he lived past 1931, or anybody in any world who can jump backwards in time like I can jump sideways." "Please?" Nat said, pushing the best pen on her desk toward him. "Very well," he said; and, picking up _Tom Sawyer the Pilot_, he turned to the last page of the foreword and signed below his name, then repeated the process with _Tom Sawyer in Nevada_. A little later Zach teleported Swartebroekx back to Atlanta; he went to GSPA headquarters to tell them about the situation in the other world and the need for Nat's power. Nat talked to her lawyer by phone. Peter Flannery advised against her skipping out, even on the pretext of urgent police business; it could hurt her case to not show up at court dates. "Really?" Nat said. "If I were in the Army reserves, and got sent to Afghanistan in the middle of a lawsuit, would that prejudice the judge or jury against me?" "Maybe not so much," Flannery said. "But some ordinary people resent paranormals, even ones like you who use their powers responsibly and work in law enforcement. It's reasonably likely that the judge would declare a recess while you take care of this business, and you wouldn't miss any hearings if you weren't gone too long, but it's far from certain; and if he doesn't, well... Mr. Voss's lawyer is almost done calling his witnesses, I think, and we'll need to call you and Ms. Voss as our first witnesses right after he finishes presenting his evidence..." "You'll have a letter from Captain Rapid saying I'm critically needed for this job," Nat said; "how can the judge not call a recess?" "He probably will. I'm just pointing out what a disaster it could be if he didn't." "All right. I'll talk to Captain Rapid, or somebody at the State Patrol, and they'll send a letter to you and the judge. But I won't go until I hear from you that the judge is declaring a recess, okay?" Nat called the GSPA that evening, but Captain Rapid had already left for the day; she told his secretary her business wasn't too urgent to wait till morning. Late Friday morning, he called her back; Swartebroekx had already been to see him, and he said he was working on a letter attesting that the State Patrol needed her for urgent police reserve work. "Thanks," she said. "Can you fax copies to me and to Peter Flannery as well as the judge?" "Sure," he said. "The Worldwalker tells me you'll be meeting him here to travel to this other world?" "Right," she said; "just as soon as Mr. Flannery tells me it's safe. He doesn't think I should leave until and unless the judge has seen your letter and declared a recess in the trial until I get back." ----- It was Tuesday afternoon before Nat heard from her lawyer that the judge had, indeed, declared a recess of five weeks; that should be plenty for her to change back all the vigilante's victims. Wednesday morning, Nat drove to Atlanta, bringing a small suitcase with toiletries, several changes of clothes, and some books. He parked at the GSPA headquarters in Buckhead, where she'd agreed to meet the Worldwalker for their jump. He found Swartebroekx in the lobby, looking toward the door; but Swartebroekx didn't recognize him until he came right up to him towing his suitcase. "Are we ready?" he asked. "Oh," Swartebroekx said, in a tone that showed, Nat thought, something more than mere surprise -- disappointment? "You've changed yourself." "Yes, I figure I might want to be male for this trip, at least most of the time. But I brought some female clothes too, in case I need that form. Do we need to tell anyone we're about to go?" "Just a moment," Swartebroekx said, and turned to the receptionist, who'd been listening to their conversation. "Parvati, can you let the Captain know that Reserve Officer Holcomb and I are about to leave? We'll be back in probably about four weeks." "I'll let him know," she said, writing a note. Swartebroekx picked up Nat's suitcase in his right hand, slung his own smaller bag over his left shoulder, and held out his left hand for Nat. Nat took it, and a moment later they were standing -- -- in the lobby of GSPA headquarters. But not quite the same lobby. The walls were a paler shade of white, probably repainted more recently than those in the world they'd just left, and at the reception desk, instead of Parvati, there was a young black woman Nat didn't recognize. She startled as the two men appeared. "Worldwalker!" she said. "Shall I page the Captain and tell her you're back?" "Sure," he said, setting down Nat's suitcase. "Laura, this is Officer Holcomb, a Patrol officer from another world." Nat showed his badge. The receptionist, Laura, spoke to someone on the telephone, and a moment later told them: "The Captain will see you in her office." Swartebroekx led the way -- the Captain's office wasn't in exactly the same place as it was in Nat's world -- and knocked on a door. "Come in," came a familiar voice, and they entered. Flint was sitting behind the desk in a captain's uniform. "Captain Flint, this is Officer -- um -- Nathan?" "Nathaniel Holcomb," Nat corrected. "Sometimes Natalie; I usually just go by Nat, informally, or Officer Holcomb, on the job... I take it the Worldwalker has already told you about my power?" "Yes," Captain Flint said, studying Nat carefully. "We'll arrange lodging for you near headquarters during your stay, and assign you an office where you can meet with the local victims of this vigilante. If you don't mind, though, it would probably suit for you to do some traveling to meet the other victims outside of Atlanta. How often can you use your power?" "Normally I avoid using it more than four times a day," Nat said, "but in a crisis I can use it ten or more times in a day. But then I can't do much of anything for a while afterward, I need to recover. The most I've ever used it, I wound up in the hospital for several days afterward." "Well, we'll get in touch with all the known victims and work out a schedule," Captain Flint said. "Thanks for coming over to help us." "No problem," Nat said, "I needed to get away from home for a while anyway. Um -- you've never met me before, right?" "No. Do you know me in your home timeline?" "Yes, I've known you since 2001. Only, um, you're not the Captain there, just a senior officer. Captain Rapid is head of the Patrol in my world." The captain's face darkened. "He was badly injured in the line of duty two years ago, and had to retire," she said. "I was promoted then." "Oh," Nat said. He thought about asking for details, but decided against it. "May I ask how the search for the vigilante is going?" "We don't have anything definite yet," the captain said, "but we've made a bit of progress since Worldwalker was last here. We still don't know for sure if the vigilante is a man or a woman; we suspect they can change themselves, like you can, not just other people. "The first known cases were almost seven years ago. A few people of both sexes suddenly changed, all of them in more or less public places -- restaurants, gas stations, busy streets -- in Georgia, South and North Carolina. Some of the cases got into the news, some were kept secret; I'm still not sure that we know about them all. I suspect some people who were reported missing at that time actually found themselves changed, and ran off somewhere to establish a new identity instead of confronting their family and friends with their new sex. "Then there was nothing for several years. Four years ago there was an incident in San Francisco -- there was a transsexual support group that met in a restaurant there, and one evening everyone at the table changed sex at once. Of course reporting the incident to the authorities was hardly their first concern, and by the time the police learned about it and connected it with our troubles here in 2001, there was no chance of figuring out who had done it. "Then, over the next few months, some of the people who were changed in the first wave -- almost all of the ones whose cases were well publicized -- got anonymous letters like this one." She opened a file, removed a sheet of paper enclosed in a plastic sleeve, and handed it to Nat. "I am sorry, I did not mean to change your sex. If you want to change back, spend some time walking around in Piedmont Park between three and five p.m. next Sunday afternoon. Wear loose clothes, all blue, and a blue hat, so I can recognize you easily." "This letter didn't have any fingerprints or DNA on it besides those of the person who received it. Most of these people kept those appointments, and were changed back; they couldn't tell who changed them, as they were in a crowd of people at the time. Only one of them reported the letter to the police before going to the rendezvous. The local authorities in Columbia, South Carolina staked out the mall where the meeting was supposed to be, in plainclothes, and saw the change happen, but couldn't figure out who had done it. "Then nothing more for another couple of years; and a little less than two years ago, more people started having their sex changed. All in public places, mostly crowded. Sometimes the local authorities tried to seal the place off as soon as the change was reported, and photograph and fingerprint everybody before they left; but they rarely if ever got there quickly enough to effectively catalogue all the people who were on the scene when the change happened. And a lot of the changes weren't reported quickly enough for the authorities to even bother trying to cordon off the area. So far a comparison of the lists of people found in each place hasn't shown any useful correlations. There's been a little overlap, but the one person who was found on the scene of two different changes -- both of them in Raleigh, North Carolina, a few months apart -- has strong alibis to show he wasn't anywhere near several of the other changes. "Over time this phenomenon has gotten enough publicity that I think everybody knows what to do now: if you get changed, immediately make noise about it and have the store or restaurant you're in sealed off by the management, then by the police. But the vigilante has responded by picking their locations more carefully; wide-open places that we can't seal off effectively. Assuming they just have to have a line of sight on their target, as you do --" "I can do it with my eyes closed if I'm touching the target, actually," Nat said. "And if I exert my power full strength, changing everybody within range, I sometimes get people I can't see, behind me or in adjacent rooms or whatever. That happened a few times early on when I didn't have control of my power yet. But you haven't had any cases of all the people in a place changing at once, have you?" "Unless maybe that transsexual support group meeting... but there were other people in the restaurant who weren't changed, staff and customers at other tables. And once there were two people changed in the same place, but half a minute apart. In all the other cases we know about, just one person has been changed. Well, if the vigilante just needs a line of sight, then they probably easily got away from the scene of their last few changes before we cordoned off the street and started fingerprinting and photographing everybody. They could change someone on the sidewalk from a moving car, for instance, and be miles away by the time the streets surrounding the place are sealed off." "Probably so," Nat said. "Why are you calling the person a vigilante? What pattern do you see among the victims?" "There's no general pattern we can see, except that all were changed in public places, and about three-fourths of them are male-to-female. But several were under investigation for child molestation, or suspected of battering their wives or girlfriends. Two of them were accused rapists being transported from jail to courthouse or back. One is a well-known misogynist talk show host." "Hm," Nat said. "I suppose you aren't going to have me change them back, are you? Except maybe the talk show host." "Well -- I repeat that they were under investigation or accused or suspected. We don't really have proof that most of them were guilty of those things, except for the rapists. Maybe the vigilante has more proof, or maybe they're just going on suspicion, but we'd like you to change back all the ones that haven't been convicted of a felony. Even the ones who are accused or suspected of something are a minority of the eighty-six known victims." "All right," Nat said. That made sense. "Well, I'll have Laura set you up with lodging, and we'll have a few of the local victims in to meet with you tomorrow. Four of them, you said?" "Or five." After Nat and Stefan left, Captain Flint called in another officer. "Get Officer Holcomb's fingerprints off this plastic sleeve," she said, "and see if they match the other Miss Holcomb's prints, and Ms. Whitman's prints." "Will do," said the young forensic officer. ----- Laura reserved two suites at a residence hotel for Nat and Stefan. After they checked in, they went to supper at a nearby steakhouse. "So, tell me more about the time you and the other me went to that all-male world...?" Stefan hesitated. "Well... We left your world, I mean her world, from Athens. The Athens of that world had one of the largest communities of survivors in Georgia, or so I'd heard from various people during my brief visit in 1996 -- I mean a stable community. There were probably more survivors total living in Atlanta and Decatur, mostly scavengers rather than the farmers we found near Athens, but they were fighting each other all the time and we avoided that area. "It was soaked with despair when I visited there the first time. They just knew the human race was doomed, that their boys were the last generation there would ever be. The few who had survived the plagues had been healthy at first, but years of hunger and malnutrition had taken a toll, and in that atmosphere of doom there were a lot of suicides, and a lot more people who stopped just short of suicide, deliberately mutilating or even crippling themselves. Once a month or so they would get together to burn down a building, after they'd scavenged everything they wanted from it. They were using foreign- language books from the UGA library, even the Greek and Latin classics, for toilet paper and kindling, since hardly any of the survivors spoke anything but English or Spanish. "And then I came back there with you, and everything changed. The older men saw you and gaped; some of them fell on their knees, wanting to worship you. They hadn't seen a living woman in years. The young men were a bit puzzled at first, didn't understand what the fuss was about; you looked a bit odd to them but they were too young to remember their mothers or sisters. Then the older men told them what you were and it was like they'd said, 'That's a triceratops.' "And when we told them what your power was -- and you demonstrated, changing me twice in a few minutes -- lights went on in their heads. They threw us a party like I'd never seen in any world I'd ever been to; the accomodations were rough, but for sheer exuberance it beat the reception the Atlanta Zoo gave me for donating those passenger pigeons by a hundred miles. "And then the debate started. They all wanted there to be women, but none of them wanted to be a woman; everybody was hoping somebody else would volunteer. They were talking about drawing lots somehow, to pick random men for you to use your power on; finally one young man volunteered, and you changed him. Soon after that we got three or four more volunteers, in their late teens and early twenties, when they saw how deferentially she was being treated. The older men, the city council I suppose, were pleased to see that, but the stream of volunteers dried up pretty fast, and while you took the new girls off somewhere to give them lessons on feminine hygiene -- I think you found some tampons and so forth in a drugstore that had been left alone by all the scavengers who'd picked it over, nobody having had any use for them in over a decade -- they finally hashed out a plan to have all the men under thirty draw lots. Half of them would have to let you use your power on them. There was a lot of fuss kicked up after that, some saying they didn't need that many women, some saying everbody should be in the drawing, not just ones under thirty, and some suspicious about whether the drawing would be fair. Finally they let the volunteer girls do the drawing. One after another a man's name would be drawn, he'd get up and drag himself over to where you were sitting, and you'd change him; then everybody would give her a cheer. I think you did five or six of them the first night after they settled on that method; then they did two more drawings the next two nights, another dozen women. "Finally we set out toward Greenville, which we'd heard also had a good-size community of survivors, by way of Anderson. Anderson was a repeat of Athens on a smaller scale; we only got one volunteer before they started drawing names at random. The men in Anderson gave us a couple of horses; you hadn't ever ridden a horse before, so we stayed there a while to let me and some others teach you, and then we went on to Greenville. In Greenville they hit on a novel method; they voted on who would get changed, every man getting to nominate one other. Anybody who got two or more votes had to change, but that still left them with less than half the town female. I remember how one young man cried when he found out he'd gotten seven votes. "The men in Greenville told us there were bandits between there and Charlotte, and they gave us an escort on our way there. We got more volunteers there, six or seven, but after debating awhile they weren't willing to force it on anybody else since they had that many volunteers. "We kept going, mostly northeast, all winter and spring and half the summer. Then we went back to your world in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and you took Greyhound back to Athens." "We didn't go back to visit any of the places where I'd changed people?" Only after he'd asked this did Nat realize he'd said "I" rather than "she". "Not on that trip. I did go back to check on some of them a year later, but you weren't with me; I found two tiny babies and four or five pregnant women in Athens. Those mothers were being treated like royalty." "And -- the other me was female during that whole trip?" "Most of the time. You changed yourself into a man sometimes when we were going through territory we'd been warned about, like between Greenville and Charlotte, but you always made a grand entrance as a woman when we got to a new town." "That doesn't sound much like me when I was eighteen or nineteen. I wonder what all happened to her that was different from my experiences in those years? If I'd gone there with you I would have been a man most of the time, except when giving lessons to the new women..." Stefan looked uncomfortable and didn't say anything for a minute. "I couldn't say," he said. "You've been doing police work most of the time since you got out of high school, right?" "Yeah, but just as a reservist. The first couple of jobs the State Patrol called me in on were really stressful, and after the second one I almost resigned, but I finally talked myself into sticking with it. But after that I started living as a man most of the time. Then after a few minor jobs they called me in on the alien invasion a couple of years ago..." Nat spent several minutes detailing his experiences during the invasion, giving Zach due credit but not by name. "Amazing," Stefan said when Nat finished this account. "I've been to several worlds where those aliens invaded about that time, including one where they conquered big chunks of territory in the tropics and are still holding on to them, fighting with local guerillas and armies from temperate-zone countries. I think you scared them off faster than I've heard of the superheroes and armies doing in any other world. "The architect-you, the one I knew best, never did join the State Patrol even as a reservist; she went back to live in Milledgeville with her family for about a year after she got her power under full control, before she moved to Athens and enrolled at UGA." Nat sighed. "If it weren't for the getting killed by an SUV part, I would almost want to switch places with her," he said. "But not quite. I'm glad I was able to run off those aliens, with my teleporter colleague's help; I wouldn't give that up, even for the sake of avoiding... certain traumatic events I've suffered in this timeline." He fell silent for a while, and eventually Stefan, not wanting to ask what those traumatic events were, changed the subject, telling Nat about a world he'd visited where there'd been no Louisiana Purchase, so there was a big French-speaking, majority Catholic country in the Mississippi valley, and New Orleans had been New Rome ever since the Pope fled there during the revolution of 1846. ----- The next morning, after showering and breakfasting, Nat returned to the GSPA headquarters. Stefan said at breakfast that he had some errands to run, but promised he would stay in that world until Nat was ready to go home. Laura told Nat that Captain Flint was waiting for him in her office. Nat followed her there. "We've got five Atlanta-area victims of this vigilante coming in today; two of them will be here in the next couple of hours, on their lunch breaks, but the others are coming in the evening, around six o'clock. Is that OK?" "Sure," Nat said. "I'll want to rest a little while between changes. I guess I could go back to my hotel and take a nap between the afternoon and evening changes, and I could spend some time studying the reports on this case, too, if you think I could be any help." "Let's do that. I'll have Officer Carrington get the files together for you. We've set aside a room near the lobby for you to change people in." Fifteen minutes later Nat was sitting in the designated room, just starting to dig into the various reports filed by Patrol officers and local police who had investigated various "change incidents", when Laura came to the door. "One of the victims is here early," she said; "Is it all right if I send her in now?" "Sure, go ahead." A couple of minutes later she returned, escorting a woman about five feet ten, with short hair, dressed in loose pants and shirt and a jacket too warm for the weather. "Have a seat," Nat said. "I'm Officer Holcomb. I can change you back into a man right away if you want, if you're dressed comfortably. You're not going to be, um, too tight in the crotch if I change you now?" "No," the woman said. The way she had walked in, and the way she sat, Nat could have figured out she hadn't been female long if he hadn't known already. Nat exercised his power on her. "Thanks," the man said. "Five months and I still hadn't gotten used to that; don't think I ever would have. My name's Paul Hulsey, by the way." "Do you mind if I ask you a few questions before you leave?" "Sure, go ahead." "Where were you when this happened to you?" "I was just leaving the North Avenue MARTA station; it was ten minutes till nine and I was on my way to work, running a bit late. I'd come up the escalator from the train plaform and was getting near the exit turnstiles when it happened." "Was it sudden or gradual?" "As far as I can tell it was instantaneous. I stumbled, I guess from my center of gravity changing, but managed to not quite fall on my face." "Did you notice anybody looking at you just then?" "It was rush hour and there was a big crowd of people leaving from two trains that had come in from north and south almost at the same time. Right after I changed, of course there were people looking at me, but I hadn't noticed anybody in particular looking at me before then. I panicked at first; I'd heard about it happening to other people, and I knew I was supposed to stop people from leaving the area until the police got there, but as soon as I calmed down enough to think I knew that wasn't going to happen, not with everybody and his brother in a hurry to get to work, like I was. I left the station, sat down on a bench and took a few deep breaths, then I decided I might as well just go to work, tell my boss what had happened, and talk to the police after that." Not much help there. "I'm sorry," Nat said. "I hope we can find the person who's been doing this. One last question -- can you think of any reason someone might have wanted to make you experience what it was like to be a woman?" The man stared at Nat, uncomprehending. "No, it didn't make any sense. I heard about that rapist getting his sex changed right before the trial, but except for that they've all been random cruel jokes, as far as I've heard. Random people in random crowded places." "Thank you for your time," Nat said. "I guess I've probably asked you the same questions other officers have asked you several times..." "Mostly, yeah. But I should be thanking you; I was looking at spending the rest of my life sitting down to pee." "That's a real time-waster," Nat agreed, "especially when there's a long line for the ladies' room." The next victim, who arrived just before noon, was a woman only a few inches taller than Nat; she looked more comfortable as a woman than Ms. Hulsey, and it turned out she had been one of the first victims of the second wave, changed a year and eight months ago, and had had lessons in femininity from her then-girlfriend. He was glad enough to be changed back, though. Nat asked him much the same questions he'd put to Mr. Hulsey. When asked if he knew of any reason someone might want him to experience femininity, he hesitated, then said: "Well -- I was eating supper there" (in a Mexican restaurant in Decatur) "with my girlfriend, and we'd been arguing, and got kind of loud, and I called her some things I regretted almost as soon as I said them -- but not half as much as I regretted them later, when I thought that maybe this paranormal vigilante had overheard me and changed me because of that." "You said she helped you adjust to being female. Are you still friends with her?" "Kind of, yeah. But she wasn't my girlfriend after that, she's not bi, and after I'd been a woman for five or six months she started dating another guy. I haven't seen her in a few weeks, but she was really helpful early on and I think we're still friends." That whole incident sounded eerily familiar to Nat. She'd been eating at The Grill with her roommate and some other friends, one Saturday evening during her first semester at UGA; a football game had just ended with a signal victory for the Bulldogs, and rowdy fans of both sexes were celebrating raucously. A big guy with a clingy girl hanging on to him, both already half drunk, came in and were seated in the booth next to Nat and her friends, and before long they got into an argument; hearing the guy abuse his girlfriend, and her taking it meekly, Nat had wanted to use her power so badly she could hardly stand it. She'd gotten up and gone to the restroom and sat on the toilet lid until she got her temper under control. "I must not use my power in anger. I must not use my power in anger. I must not use my power in anger..." Twenty or thirty repetitions of this mantra later, she went back to her booth, to learn from her friends that the abusive drunk guy had started to get violent, and been firmly ejected by a couple of waiters even bigger than he -- followed closely by his doormat girlfriend. "Well," Nat said, after a few moments' reverie, "I hope you can still be friends, too." He returned to his hotel room after that, read more of the case files in bed till he fell asleep, then after a nap read more of them during a late lunch at a neighboring Burger King. He returned to GSPA headquarters in the evening and met three more victims, two women and a man, two among the early victims from the second wave a bit less than two years ago, and one who'd been changed seven years ago but hadn't gotten one of those offers to change her back that most of the other early victims had gotten a few years later. None of them could offer any guesses as to why the vigilante had picked on them. The same pattern continued Friday and Saturday, a few changes in the morning and more in the evening. Nat ate lunch and supper sometimes alone, sometimes with Stefan, sometimes with officers and staff from the GSPA. They gave him Sunday off, and Sunday afternoon he finished reading all the available case files on the vigilante and his or her victims, including the lists of people found at some of the scenes. He'd gotten into the habit of skimming casually over those lists, mostly just studying the officers' reports and their interviews with the victims and witnesses. But idly skimming over one of the last such lists, he suddenly stopped dead. One of the faces staring at him from the page looked familiar. She'd seen it often enough in the mirror. Or something like it, anyway, he told himself in a panic; it was a vague enough likeness, no better quality than a driver's license photo, that it could be anybody... but he knew better. After that he went back through all the other lists, more carefully, but didn't find his own (or her own) face again. This one, which had somehow gotten out of order, was from a list of people found at a Super Wal-Mart near Knoxville in February of last year; one of the earliest changes for which such photographic lists were available. The name attached to the photo was "Joan Whitman". The New England heiress Tom Sawyer saved from a steamboat wreck in _Tom Sawyer the Pilot_. Nat phoned the GSPA and got the weekend receptionist, Tandy. "Get me Captain Flint, please, if she's around, or whoever is in charge of the vigilante case this weekend." "Hold on a second..." A minute later Flint answered. "I know who the vigilante is," Nat said. "So do we," Flint said. "I should have told you earlier, but, well. It seemed kind of creepy and I wasn't sure how to break it to you. But we're probably going to need your help to catch you, I mean her... whatever." "How long have you known?" "Right after the Worldwalker told us about you, and how he hadn't been able to find you in this world, he left to go looking for you in other worlds, and we did some investigating of our own. We got your fingerprints from your birth record at Baldwin County Hospital and compared them with the prints of people found at the scenes of changes. We found a match, and compared the woman's photo with the last known photo of you, from your high school yearbook. Close enough. There was one place early on where she, the you of this world, didn't get out before the police arrived." "The last known photo of me was from my high school yearbook...?" "How much did the Worldwalker tell you? I asked him not to say too much. Your parents told him you'd run away when you were sixteen and they hadn't heard much from you since then, just a short letter every year or so, with postmarks all over the southeast, saying you were still alive and OK. And your brother was the first known victim -- I mean, once we found out about him a couple of weeks ago from your parents. Before that we thought Wanda Farrell, who was changed later the same day in Macon, was the first victim. At the time your brother's change was hushed up surprisingly effectively. And she was one of the people who were changed at that transsexual support group meeting in San Francisco, but we didn't make the connection until a couple of weeks ago. I told Carrington to leave his file, and the Knoxville Wal-Mart file, out of the stuff he gave you to read -- I was planning to tell you myself tomorrow morning." Nat was silent for a minute, taking all this in. "You still there?" asked Flint. "Yeah. Listen, I think I should go see my parents, and my brother, and talk to them. I'm not the same person as this vigilante; I guess I probably know her better than anybody else you've got access to, but our lives diverged at least seven years ago and I need to know exactly how, in order to make the best guesses I can about what kind of person she's become in this timeline." "I can give you a car to go to Milledgeville. Right now, if you want." "Do that. I'll be over to headquarters as soon as I get something to eat." "I'm not there right now, I'm at home -- I asked Tandy to transfer you to my cellphone if you called over the weekend. But talk to Shaper; he's in charge in my absence, and he knows almost as much about this case as I do." After hanging up, Nat decided he should shower before leaving, too. While showering he changed himself. After drying off she dressed in one of the two sets of casual feminine clothes he'd brought. After a hasty lunch at the neighboring Burger King, she went back to GSPA headquarters, bringing the files he'd been borrowing. "I need to talk to Shaper," she told Tandy. "May I tell him who's asking to see him?" she asked. "It's Officer Holcomb," Nat said, showing her badge. "I just talked to Captain Flint forty-five minutes ago. You transferred the call yourself." "Oh," Tandy said, disconcerted; now that Nat identified herself she could see the resemblance. "I'll let Officer Shaper know you're here." A minute later she gave Nat directions to Shaper's office. "The Captain told me you'd be here soon, but not that you'd changed," he said. "I decided to do that after I talked to her. I ought to be female if I'm going h--- going to Milledgeville to interview the suspect's family. There's something else I thought of after I talked to the Captain; I should call them before I leave Atlanta, and find out if it suits to go see them tonight, or if I should wait until tomorrow. But if I call them out of the blue --" "I see the problem. Do you want me to call them and introduce you, then put you on the line?" "Do that." Three minutes later Shaper handed his phone to Nat. "Hi," she said. "Nat!" her Mom said, choking off a sob. "But you're not *our* Nat? I don't understand." "You've heard about the Worldwalker, right? He brought me here from another world. I'm a lot like your daughter, but I'm not exactly her. We were the same person up until, I guess, about seven years ago. I need to talk to you and -- um -- and Dad, I guess. Can I come down there tonight, or should I wait until tomorrow...?" "Come as soon as you can." "All right. Do you still live at 814 Hope Street?" "Yes." "I'll see you in a couple of hours, then." ----- It was more than the usual couple of hours, partly because there was road work being done on a long stretch of I-20 east of Conyers, but mainly because of the stack of paperwork Nat had to sign before checking out one of the Patrol's unmarked cars. But she still managed to get to her parents' house before eight o'clock. They were sitting on the porch waiting for her, and were already getting up and coming to meet her as she parked and opened her door. "Oh, Nat!" her Mom said, embracing her, "it's been so long." "Mom, I know you're glad to see me, I'm glad to see you too, but remember..." "Give her some room, honey," her Dad said. "Let's go inside and talk." Nat was struck by how old they looked, although they were exactly the same age as her parents in the timeline she'd just left. This version of her mother's hair was almost all grey, instead of just having a few grey streaks, and her father looked older too, in some indefinable way -- slightly more wrinkles, maybe? When they were settled in the living room, Nat's Mom plying her with coffee and asking if she wanted anything to eat (yes, she said), Nat asked her Dad: "How much do you already know about this business? I understand the Worldwalker came to see you a few weeks ago, and then you talked to someone from the State Patrol...?" "Yes. The Worldwalker came here a couple of weeks ago looking for you. At first we didn't know who he was; we just told him you'd run away seven years ago and we'd had occasional letters from you, but didn't know how to get in touch with you. Then he apologized for bothering us and told us who he was and why he'd come -- that he knew you in another world, and in that world you had the power to change people's sex, and he was hoping you had the same power here and he could get you to change back the victims of that vigilante. Then light started to dawn on me, and I told him about Will -- just at the time when you ran away, he had changed into a girl, and we didn't know why. She left home right after that, too, moved to San Francisco and still lives there." "And then she got changed back, along with a bunch of, um, other transsexuals? At a support group meeting?" "Yes, he called us and told us about it right afterward. It was three years after he, she, had moved out there. When the Worldwa