Travel Agency: The Family That Plays Together free porn video

=== The Family that Plays Together === by Trismegistus Shandy This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe. It might help to have read Morpheus' "Free Vacation" and my "Scouts", but it should stand alone. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ This and thirteen other stories are included in _The Weight of Silence and Other Stories_, available in ePub format from Smashwords (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/435313) and Kindle format from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K5CL1B0). It's over 219,000 words of fiction, and several of the stories haven't previously appeared online. See here for more information: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/blog/50234/weight-silence-and-other-stories ----- "Won't you give us just a *little* hint?" Taylor pleaded. "We have to know what to pack!" "At least tell us if we're flying or driving," I asked, reasonably enough. "Should we bring our neck pillows?" "We're driving for the first stage," Mom said. "And maybe we're flying later on, but -- not on an airplane, I think. You can leave the neck pillows at home." "What about swimsuits?" Taylor asked. "Or other clothes?" "If I told you we wouldn't need clothes where we're going, that would seem like too big a hint. But you still wouldn't guess." "So it's a naturist resort?" "I won't say it's not," Mom said with a smile. "But it's not one we've been to before." "Stop teasing the kids, Stephanie," Dad said. "Taylor, Leslie, I wanted to tell you, but your mom convinced me it's best if you wait and see where we're going. It's going to be the biggest surprise of your lives. The one and only hint you'll get is that it's nowhere you've ever been before." "Nowhere *we've* been," Taylor said, pouncing on the crucial detail. "So you and Mom have been there?" "Possibly." "Are we going to be out of contact?" I asked. "I need to warn my friends if I'm going to drop off the net for a week, like if we're going wilderness camping." "You'd better assume so," Dad said. "Tell them you might be out of touch, and if you find out later that you can contact them, it will be a pleasant surprise." "We'll tell you as we're walking out the door whether you're allowed to bring your tablets and phones," Mom said. "How's that?" "That's fair, I guess. So I guess I'll need my sleeping bag and -- if we're not going on an airplane, I'll bring my hunting knife just in case." "I don't want to make you waste time packing things you won't need," Mom said; "but I don't want to give you any more hints about where we're going, either. Pack whatever you like. I don't think you'll be sorry if you pack light, though." ----- Despite that, my sister and I kept fishing for hints about where we were going all through the next week. Taylor spent a lot of time with her boyfriend Jarrod, and I spent a lot of time over at my friend Daniel's house, as much as his parents would stand for, since I wasn't going to see him for over a week. "And your parents won't tell you where you're going?" he asked me. "Not the slightest hint, except we've never been there before. It's not like it's the first surprise vacation we've ever been on, but the last one was when we were too little to do our own packing, so it wasn't an issue -- Mom and Dad packed our swimsuits and sand shovels and stuff for us in a secret suitcase and took them out when we got to the beach house." "Man," he sighed, "your parents are so cool." I sighed for a completely different reason. "Tell me about it." It wasn't always fun having parents who were so much cooler than their kids. "I wish my mom and dad'd let me come over to your house." "You've got a better gaming system than I do," I pointed out. "And the games we've got that you don't, I can bring over." "Yeah, but it was more fun playing them with your folks." I couldn't argue with that. Dad was great at getting into the spirit of any game, and being just competitive enough to make it fun and no more. Mom could be a little too competitive sometimes, but not as bad as she used to be, to hear Dad talk. They had a big collection of card games and board games most of my friends at school had never heard of, and before Daniel's parents had forbidden him to go over to my house, we'd played a lot of them. Daniel's parents weren't into games, and most of the best games at my house were for four or more players, so when I went over we mostly played two-player video games on his PlayStation or Xbox. I'd been worried that his parents would forbid me to come over either, but they apparently hoped Daniel would be a good influence on me if my parents weren't being a bad influence on him. And he was, sort of; at least, he was my main source for what normal boys were supposed to act like. Mom and Dad had tried to raise me and Taylor without gender stereotypes. They'd given both of us gender-neutral names, and had me wearing her hand-me-downs, skirts as well as pants and shirts, until I was old enough to rebel against them. And they'd given us all kinds of toys -- they gave both of us dolls and both of us toy swords and armor. At home, or anywhere except work, Dad was as likely to wear skirts as Mom was to wear pants, and Dad did more than his share of the dishwashing and vacuuming. They home-schooled us until I was eight, and then they put us into this Montessori school where several of the other kids had parents who were raising them the same gender-neutral way. It wasn't until Mom got laid off and they couldn't afford that anymore that we started going to public school. And all the books we were allowed to read and the movies we were allowed to watch until we were about ten or eleven were things that had been edited by the people in Mom and Dad's Gender-Neutral Parenting support group, with the characters renamed and given different clothes and hair to make them less stereotypical. Needless to say, although we'd learned enough from the kids in our neighborhood and the Montessori school to figure out that outside our family it mattered a lot more whether you were a boy or a girl, we were still pretty vague about a lot of the details when we were plunked without warning into public school, and we got picked on a lot. Me more than Taylor, because girls can get away with being a "tomboy" easier than boys with being a "sissy," but she suffered plenty as well. Basically I learned to imitate the boys at school as closely as possible, and to keep my mouth shut about my family and my home life. I didn't make any friends for my first year or so in school; it wasn't until Daniel moved to town, and didn't know the reputation for being a weirdo and a sissy I'd gotten the year before, that I made a real friend among the kids at school. And things were going really well until the day Daniel's mom gave me a ride home from a chess club meeting and found my dad clipping the hedges in an old skirt. ----- I did my packing Friday evening; Taylor, across the hall in her room, was packing too, and we kept wandering into each other's rooms to talk about where we might be going, to try to deconstruct Mom's hints about it. We never got anywhere close to the truth. I decided to pack stuff for a camping trip in one bag, and stuff for a hotel trip in another; I'd wait until morning and see what Mom and Dad were putting in the car before I decided which bag to bring. Saturday morning, I saw that Mom and Dad just had one small bag each, and no tents or sleeping bags, so I left the camping stuff and just brought the hotel suitcase and my satchel. Taylor had a bigger suitcase, but still everything fit into the trunk with room to spare; we didn't need the car-top carrier, and Taylor and I didn't have a pile of stuff on the seat and in the floorboard between us. It was nice not being crowded, but I was worried that I'd forgotten something important, something that would be obvious if I just knew where we were going. But Mom and Dad still wouldn't tell us, even after we were on the road. Taylor and I started narrowing down our guesses as we saw where Dad was driving. He got on the expressway going north, which eliminated half the places we'd talked about last night right off the bat. And he went past the airport exit -- which we hadn't seriously expected -- and past downtown and into the northern suburbs; not too surprising, after the initial turn north. We figured we were probably going to some naturist resort in the mountains north of the city, or maybe to one of the big cities further up the coast. When Dad pulled off in Turnerville, we didn't think anything of it at first -- it was about time for a bathroom break, though nobody'd said they needed to go. But he went past the gas stations and restaurants near the exit, fending off our questions with a "Wait and see," and turned into an office park three or four miles down the road. Then he parked in front of an office with a sign reading TRAVEL AGENCY. "You're picking up our keys to the condo or cabin or whatever?" Taylor guessed. "Watch and see. Everybody out." "This is going to be great," Mom said. We followed them in to the office. It looked like your usual travel agency, with a bunch of posters advertising exotic places, and moderately comfortable chairs, and a desk in front of a door to one or more back rooms. There was a black guy at the desk, probably ten years younger than Mom and Dad, wearing a light gray sweatshirt with darker gray slacks. He seemed to recognize them; he stood up and smiled as we walked in. "Ray! Stephanie! I've been expecting you. And these are your children?" "This is Taylor, and that's Leslie," Mom said. "Kids, this is Mr. G." "Your parents and I go way back," Mr. G. said. (What kind of name was that? And he didn't look old enough to go way back with my parents, unless maybe Mom babysat him when she was in high school.) Turning back to Mom, he asked: "Have you explained to them yet?" "No, we thought we'd save the explanations until you could demonstrate," Dad said. "Perhaps that was wisest. Well, go ahead and explain your side of it -- I'll pitch in whenever you like, and I can give you a very good demonstration" (he glanced at his watch -- an actual wristwatch, like old people wear, not a cell phone like everyone else uses) "at noon. Another forty-five minutes." "A demonstration of what?" I asked. "We'll get to that," Dad said. "Stephanie, you want to start?" "All right," Mom said. "Sit down and get comfortable." She and Dad took seats, and Taylor and I did the same, giving each other puzzled glances. "Not long after I met your dad, but before we'd really started dating, my friend Melanie told me a fantastic story about this travel agency she'd been working at. I thought she was pulling my leg, but she convinced me to come and meet Mr. G and see a demonstration, and it convinced me to give it a try." "How old was he then?" Taylor asked. "If that was before you and Dad started dating..." I did the math too; unless he was a lot older than he looked, he must have been just a kid. Mr. G. got a thoughtful look and said: "I think I was sixty-two that year, but it all runs together. Go on." There was no *way* he could be sixty-two now, much less twenty years ago. But I let that pass for the moment. "Give what a try?" "Melanie said Mr. G. could send people to another world," Mom said. "A world with a different history from ours, not just what if Napoleon refused to sell us Louisiana, but millions or billions of years' difference, and different laws of nature. She'd been there herself, several times, and seen amazing things --" "No way," I said. "Just listen," Dad insisted. "I didn't believe it at first when she told me, but then I saw it for myself... Go on, Stephanie." "You couldn't go to this other world as yourself," Mom continued. "You have to leave your body behind, and temporarily swap places with someone in the other world. You'd be in their body and they'd be in yours for a few days, and then you'd swap back." "You're going to demonstrate that?" Taylor asked. "You demonstrated that for Mom? Like, swapped her body with Melanie's?" "No," Mr. G. said. "In those days I was demonstrating my magic by levitating things -- usually a piece of gold, which won't magnetize but is very sensitive to magic. Impressive, but not too much of a strain, leaving me plenty of energy for the soul transference spells." "Spells," I repeated in a disbelieving, if not outright sarcastic, tone. "Listen to your mother," he said. "Well, to make a long story short, I convinced several friends from school to try it with me during Spring break. I wanted Melanie to come with us, but she'd just taken a lot of vacation and couldn't get any time off." She gave Mr. G. a little glare, and he smiled. "We went in to the office -- it wasn't here, he's moved a couple of times since then --" "More than a couple." "Okay, a lot. He can explain why later, maybe. Anyway, we went in and she cast the spell, and the next thing we know, we're all in another place, in different bodies!" "Really," Taylor said. "What kinds of bodies?" I asked, curious even though I was sure they were pulling some elaborate hoax. "Well, we were all guys, to begin with. And only three of us were human. Rae Nan -- you don't know her, I lost touch with her after college -- was a kind of centaur, but her lower half was like a camel, not a horse. And Natalie... she was an ifrit." "Like an Arabian demon?" I asked. "Well, I don't know about demon per se, but she wasn't human. At first she was shaped like Rae Nan, a kind of camel-centaur, but she was a shapeshifter, and after she got the hang of it she tried on all kinds of different bodies -- she looked like her old self, and like each of us, and a bunch of famous actors, and a dozen different kinds of animal... she had a lot of fun with that. We spent a week in those bodies, in that world, and then went home. I'll tell you more about that trip sometime, but it's your dad's turn now." "After we'd been dating a few months, your mom told me about her trip back in the spring. And I thought sure she was joking, but she was so serious, and seemed so sad and discouraged when she said she couldn't really expect me to believe her, because she hadn't believed Melanie at first. And she didn't mention it again for a few weeks, but then she asked me if I'd thought about what she'd said. I hadn't, much, but I saw how serious she was, and I knew she had to be either crazy or telling the truth -- I knew by then she couldn't keep a straight face when she was joking. So I agreed to go with her to Mr. G.'s office and see if he could do what she said. It was a Friday afternoon and we had the weekend free -- well, mostly; we wound up studying less than we should have and getting a B- and a C on a couple of exams, but it was worth it. "Mr. G. said he had a couple of hosts ready if we wanted to go right then, and if I was skeptical I didn't have to pay for the trip until I got back. So I said sure, and he worked his magic, and a moment later we were there. "And I was female, but that wasn't the first thing I noticed. No, the first thing I noticed was this additional sense, and all the things I was sensing through it -- it was my link to my tree, a three hundred-year-old oak. I was a dryad. "Stephanie was there too; she'd wound up in the body of an elf, and there was another elf there, who said she was our guide. She worked for Mr. G. -- they call him the Gray One over there -- and showed visitors around and helped them out if they got into trouble. Of course, she couldn't show me much, because as a dryad I couldn't get far from my tree -- barely more than a mile. But we were only going to be there for the weekend, and within a mile radius of my tree there was an elf village and a pixie village, and an amazing waterfall... it was the best thing ever, once I got over the shock." "So," Taylor said, "if you aren't just making all this up for some reason, and we go over there, we might be anything? Boy or girl, elf or dryad or camel-centaur or whatever?" "Or whatever," Mom said. "How many kinds of people are there in your world, Mr. G.? I know I've been eight different kinds, and I think Ray's been nine or ten..." "Even I don't know," Mr. G. said. "My firm has done business with members of more than forty intelligent races, who have visited your world in the bodies of local humans; but there are others who live only in certain regions where my magic doesn't work well." "So you've been there lots of times?" I asked Mom and Dad. They nodded, and Dad said: "After that, we went as often as we could afford it until Taylor came along. And then we made it a tradition to go on our anniversary... I think we've been there twenty-five or twenty-six times." Every year they'd go somewhere on their anniversary and leave us with relatives. When I was eight or nine I remember thinking it was strange that they were always so vague about where they'd gone and what they'd done -- they were always more interested in hearing about how Grandma and Grandpa had taken us horseback riding, or whether Uncle Dave had shown us scary movies that would give us nightmares -- or worse, icky gender stereotypes -- but by the time I was twelve, I thought I'd figured it out: they probably spent the whole time in a hotel room having sex. Well, apparently not. Not in a hotel room in our world, anyway. "Is it completely random?" I asked. "Or can you ask to swap places with a particular kind of person? Like if I wanted to be an ifrit or -- do you have kitsune over there?" "It's not random," Mr. G. said, "but I can't often fulfill specific requests, especially for group packages like this --" Just then the outside door burst open and a man a little older than Dad came in, puffing for breath. "Am I late?" he asked. "Sorry, there was an accident on Landon Avenue and traffic got backed up, I had to go around..." "You've still got eleven minutes to spare," Mr. G. said with a glance at his watch. "Chad, this is Ray and Stephanie Kendricks, and their children Taylor and Leslie." "Chad Nellis?" Dad asked, just as Chad said: "Ray Kendricks? I know you from the forum --" Of course there was an Internet forum for people who'd been to this other world. There was a forum for everything else. So then it was old home week, and three or four of the eleven minutes we had until some mysterious deadline were used up with introductions and reminiscences. Chad said Mom looked familiar, but she said she never put photos of herself online, and she didn't remember meeting him. Then Mr. G. got us back on topic, and said to me and Taylor: "As I was saying, I usually can't fulfill requests unless you're traveling by yourself, and even then it's iffy. I have to match you four with the group of four people in my world who have been waiting the longest for hosts, and to be sure of swapping each of you with a specific member of that group, I'd have to cast my transference spell four times... so I'd have to charge you four times as much." He looked inquiringly at Mom and Dad and they shook their heads. "Don't tell them, or us, who's waiting for hosts," Dad said. "We want it to be a surprise." "Well," Mr. G. said, rising from his seat behind the desk, "I promised your children a demonstration -- though it sounds as though they're taking it seriously already." "Let's see," I said. We all followed him through the door behind his desk, down a corridor and into a smaller room; it was crowded with all six of us. Mr. G. picked up a wooden staff -- I'd seen wizards carrying staffs just like that in movies I watched at Daniel's house, but it looked out of place with his sweatshirt and slacks -- and warned us to stay at the edges of the room, outside the chalk circle that filled most of the open space between the cabinets and shelves. He looked at his watch again, and said: "Just a bit more." Mom and Dad looked curious; Taylor and I were looking all around to see if we could see any wires or mirrors or other gimmickry. Chad looked excited and nervous; he was tugging at his beard and staring at the center of the circle as though it was a centerfold. And a moment later, it might as well have been. Mr. G. rammed his staff into the floor with a sharp crack, and a tiny naked woman with green skin and hair appeared in the center of the circle. What with Mom and Dad being naturists, I'd seen plenty of naked women -- Mom and Taylor at home, when the weather was hot and we didn't have company over, and other people at the naturist resorts we'd occasionally gone to on vacation. So I didn't react quite as you might expect a fourteen-year-old boy to react. She was pretty, but mostly I was just astonished at her being so tiny and green and -- *holy shit* she's flying right at me! No, actually, she was flying toward Chad, who was standing next to me. He cupped his hands and she landed in them, saying "Chad!" in a tiny high-pitched voice. He bent his head and kissed her gently. "It's good to see you again, Maella." With her sitting in Chad's hands, right next to me, I could see that she had a lock of white hair that hung over her left eye, and wings like a dragonfly's which I hadn't been able to see when they were buzzing so fast while she was in flight. Mom was staring openmouthed, and Dad was looking pretty astonished too. "You can bring people over *physically* now?" Dad asked, and Mom said: "*Maella*? Is that you?" "Not full-sized people," Mr. G. said. "And even to bring over a pixie is possible only when the magic levels here are at their highest. I won't be able to send Maella back until two weeks from now at midnight, and the next window after that will be... well, you won't want to miss this window, Maella." "Are you going to introduce me?" Maella said, and then: "Oh! I've been you before!" "And I was you," Mom said, "seventeen or eighteen years ago for six or seven days." "That's where I know you from," Chad exclaimed, and blushed crimson. "Um, you look different now..." I could figure out what he and Maella-in-Mom's-body had probably gotten up to that week, and I blushed too. "And Trikka was you!" Maella said, flying over and hovering in front of Dad. "I didn't recognize you at first without the beard." "It was a brief experiment," Dad said. "Stephanie didn't like it and I shaved it off a few weeks later. And none of us look as young as we used to -- except you, Maella." She turned a darker green. Was she blushing? "I'm older too, but your human eyes aren't sharp enough to see the wrinkles." Mr. G. cleared his throat. "Chad and Maella will be the local guides for the people inhabiting your bodies, while you're gone." "Oh," Taylor said. "What are they going to do while they're in our bodies?" "I was thinking of taking them to Muir Woods, and various places in San Francisco and Berkeley," Chad said. "There's nobody there that would recognize you, is there?" "Hardly anybody," Dad said. "Stay away from Mountain View, where my college roommate Wendell lives, and you should be fine." "We used to allow visitors to stay in their hosts' homes, and their guide would show them around to local tourist attractions, to save money," Mr. G. said, "but some years ago we had an incident that made us change our policy. Now we send them to a nearby city to stay in a hotel." Mom nodded grimly, and I saw that she knew something about that incident. But she didn't explain until much later, and this isn't the place for that very long story. "I suppose we're ready whenever you are," Dad said. He took his keys out of his pocket and handed them to Chad. "Our suitcases are in the trunk of our car, that silver Corolla parked right outside -- there should be plenty of clothes and toiletries for a week." "Right, then. I'll keep your bodies safe. Have a great trip!" "Step into the circle, please," Mr. G. said, and Mom and Dad did. Taylor and I followed them a moment later. "Oh," Mr. G. said, "I forgot to answer your question, Leslie. Yes, there are kitsune in my world." "What are kitsune?" Maella asked, but I didn't hear what Chad or Mr. G. said in reply. Mr. G. touched his staff to the edge of the chalk circle, there was a flash of blue light, and I lost consciousness. ----- When I came to, it felt like waking up from a normal sleep -- I held on to vague images from a dream for a minute or so, as I became aware that I was lying in bed, with a blanket drawn over me. But then I realized I wasn't in my own bed -- this one wasn't as soft, and it was wider but seemed to be shorter, because it felt like my feet were dangling over the edge of the bed. And then I realized my body felt off, and when I sat up, that felt all wrong -- the sensations from the muscles in my legs and hips and back were really weird. It was pretty dark in the room, but there was dim light coming from a window, shaded with something translucent. As I sat up and the blanket fell off me, I remembered going to Mr. G.'s travel agency, and realized exactly what had happened. I had breasts -- well, they'd warned me I might be a girl of some kind. And it was hard to be sure in the dim light, but I thought my skin was darker than it was in my real body. But the really important thing was that below the waist, I wasn't human at all. I pulled the blanket off completely and saw that I was scaly down there... was I a mermaid? If so, why was I out of the water? But no, once I got the blanket off all the way I saw that I was a snake from the waist down. Just as I was pulling the blanket off I heard a voice from off to my right, a quiet high-pitched voice not unlike Maella's. "Oh, you're awake. Stephanie? Taylor? Leslie? Is that you?" "I'm Leslie." I looked and saw a tiny woman, larger than Maella but smaller than a human baby. She was nude, like I was -- like Maella had been -- but she wasn't proportioned like Maella; she was more like a human with dwarfism, only smaller than any dwarf I'd ever met. "I'm your dad," she said. "I think I'm a dryad -- at least, I can feel a connection to my tree, and you don't forget what that feels like, even after twenty years. But I'm not sure because everything looks huge, and the dryad I was that first time was just a little shorter than your mom in her elf-body." "I think I'm a naga," I said. "Have you seen anything like me before, when you were here before?" From what he -- or she -- had asked me, I gathered she hadn't found Mom or Taylor yet. They hadn't said anything about us getting separated; we were supposed to swap with a group of four people who wanted to travel to our world together, right? "No, but like Mr. G. said, there are a lot of intelligent races here, and some of them only live in a few places, while others, like humans and elves and pixies, are all over." "How long have you been awake? Have you explored any?" "No -- I woke up just a minute or two before you did. I was wondering whether I should wake you... Let's find my tree, and then find your mom and Taylor." "Um... Is this it over here?" I'd been looking around the room as we talked, and experimenting with my new snake-tail, coiling and uncoiling and shifting around. In the corner to the left of my bed (which was very low, like a futon), there was a pot with what might have been a bonsai tree, or might have been some non-woody house plant -- I couldn't tell in the dim light. Dad eagerly scrambled across my bed, jumping over my tail, and touched its gnarly branches. "Yes, this is it! I was worried that I'd tie the rest of you down, not being able to go far from my tree, but if it's in a pot..." "Let me see how heavy it is." I leaned over -- with the leverage my long tail gave me I could lean way over without falling on my face -- and picked up the pot, which wasn't too heavy; it felt like lifting a gallon jug of milk would have felt, in my scrawny fourteen-year-old boy body, but I suspected this naga body was stronger. "Careful!" she said. "Don't drop it!" "Maybe I'd better put it back down," I said, and did so. "Do you think it's safe to leave it here while we explore? Where do you think Mom and Taylor might be?" "They're almost certainly nearby. I've gotten separated from her when we arrive, a few times, but usually we find each other within minutes. Let's go." "Should we find some clothes first? Do people wear clothes around here when they're not sleeping?" "I don't know," she said. "I've been to a bunch of places in this world. The elves and dwarves usually wear clothes, and the dryads and pixies and centaurs generally don't, and the humans can go either way depending on the climate and the culture, like back on Earth... I don't know about naga." I searched as well as I could in the dark, and I couldn't find anything that was obviously a shirt or blouse. "Come on," Dad said, going to the door and reaching for the latch, but it was too high for her. I opened it and we exited into a long corridor, where it was even darker than in the bedroom we'd woken in. "Did you see any kind of candle or lamp in that room?" I asked Dad. "No --" But just then we heard voices from behind the door directly across from ours. I knocked, and a few moments later the door opened. The man who opened it -- he looked human at first glance, until I noticed his pointed ears -- was tall and slender, wearing something like a bathrobe, and holding a lit candle. There was another figure standing behind him, whom I couldn't see as clearly. "Hi, we're looking for Stephanie and Taylor," Dad said. "I'm Stephanie," the elf said. "Which of you is Ray and which is Leslie?" "I'm Leslie," I said. "I think I'm a naga." "A nagini," said a voice from down the hall. We turned and looked; there was a tall woman, with Asian features and red hair, wearing a blue and green kimono and holding a lamp. "I see that the Gray One cast the transference spell while your hosts were asleep. I apologize, but when we have been waiting so long for hosts, it is difficult to be alert at every moment. Welcome to our world, and to my home." "You're our guide, then," Dad said. Mom came out of the bedroom, and I got a better look at the figure behind him. "Taylor?" I asked. "Yeah, that's me." He was shorter than the woman in the hall, but he had the same Asian features and red hair. And his ears were high on his head, and erect and pointed, like a wolf's or... a fox's? I glanced down and saw a couple of bushy red tails sticking out from under the hem of his robe. "You're a kitsune! I wanted to be a kitsune." He shrugged and grinned. "You look pretty cute as a nagini." "Thanks." If Daniel could see me now, or any of the kids at school, I'd be mortified. But with just my family around, I could handle being a nagini. It wouldn't have been my first pick, but it could be pretty cool. And I didn't mind Taylor seeing my breasts; I'd seen hers often enough. The other kitsune invited us to come down the hall into another room, where she gave us little gold bracelets that flowed like mercury and shaped themselves to fit our wrists perfectly. "They will show people that you are under the Gray One's protection," she said. "And they will help me find you if you get separated from the group." "The Gray One is Mr. G., right?" "Yes, that is one of the names he uses in your world. I am Kinuko, and I will be your guide for the next eight days. I know you're wide awake right now, with the transference spell having woken you, but your hosts' bodies had just gotten two or three hours of sleep, so you should probably go back to bed soon... we can talk in the morning about where to go and what to see." She yawned. Going back to bed right away might have been a good idea, but we were really wired, and felt like we wouldn't be able to sleep for hours. We bombarded her with questions until her yawns became so frequent that Mom and Dad apologized and said we'd see her in the morning. By "we" I mean mainly Taylor and me, but Mom and Dad had a few questions as well, since they'd never been to this part of the Gray One's world before, or seen a nagini like me, or a dwarf-dryad linked to a bonsai tree like Dad. "You're not actually a dryad," Kinuko explained, "but a kodama. Dryads usually link with oak or ash trees, and kodama with cherry or maple. Being a bonsai kodama means you have freedom to travel, but you also have to work harder to keep your tree healthy. Your host told me that her cherry tree won't need to be fertilized or pruned in the next eight days, but you will need to water it every day -- whenever you feel thirsty, she said." We also found out that we were in Kinuko's house, and that she lived on the outskirts of a big city, the capital of an empire. Mom and Dad had visited some outlying regions of this empire on their anniversary trips, but they'd never been to this city. There were a lot of kitsune in this quarter of the city, and a lot of humans in some other parts of the city. "And there are sea-elves like your host in the waterfront district, and tengu, and kappa. Watch out for kappa; the ones who live here in the city are more law-abiding than the wild kappa of the mountain lakes, but they're still predators at heart." "So are we, aren't we?" Taylor ran his tongue along his sharp canines. "And so's Leslie, I'm guessing." I'd noticed what seemed to be fangs in my mouth, and I wondered if I had venom sacs behind them. "We are *civilized* predators," Kinuko said primly. Naga ("nagini" were the girls, and "naga" were both the boys and the whole species -- so sexist) weren't native to this region, apparently; just a few had immigrated here within the last few decades. After Kinuko went to bed, the rest of us stayed up, drinking the tea she had made us, comparing notes, and listening to Mom and Dad's stories about their previous vacations in this world. "I can't believe I'm an elf and you're a dryad, just like our first time," Mom said. "You're so cute!" He was holding Dad in his lap by that point. "You're looking pretty scrumptious yourself," Dad said, tracing her finger along Mom's chin. Taylor rolled his eyes and said, "Should we leave you two alone for the rest of the night? I can take the other bed in Leslie's room." "Dad should probably sleep close to her tree," I said. "I'll come over to your room." So Taylor and I went down the hall to the room he and Mom had woken up in, and went back to bed, but we lay awake in the dark for a while, talking about how awesome and weird this all was. "I think I've figured out why Mom and Dad wanted to raise us the way they did," Taylor said after a while. "Hmm?" I was finally starting to get sleepy. "It's so we wouldn't freak out the first time we came here. So you wouldn't feel castrated or something if you wound up in a girl body like this, and so we wouldn't be embarrassed if we wound up in a culture where they don't wear clothes, like Maella's people or some others they told us about." "You're probably right. Man, we put up with all that bullying the first couple of years in public school for this?" "*Totally* worth it." "Yeah. Yeah, I think it was." ----- The next morning I woke and found Taylor had already left our room. In the sunlight from the window I could see my scales better, and appreciate the banded pattern, alternating blues and greens. I also noticed that I had no belly-button; I later learned that that was because naga hatch from eggs. I got up and slithered down the hall toward the room we'd had our tea in during the night -- the door across the hall was closed, and I didn't knock to see if Mom and Dad were awake. I found Kinuko and Taylor eating breakfast, laughing and talking. "Good morning, sis," Taylor said. "Kinuko's been telling me about us kitsune... watch this!" And his nose and mouth started protruding, and the red hair shortened and spread over his whole face and neck and arms, and all the while he was shrinking; his robe collapsed and a fox squirmed out from under it. "Awesome," I said. "Can I do that too? Turn all the way into a snake, or maybe all the way into a human?" "I don't know," Kinuko said, as Taylor grew into his near-human form (still with fox ears and two tails, though) and got dressed. "Your host was the first nagini I have ever known, and she was quiet and secretive. I have never seen a naga or nagini transform, but that does not prove anything." Taylor tried to describe how he'd transformed, and I tried it myself, but nothing happened. Later on I found out I was wasting my time; naga don't transform like kitsune. A little later Mom and Dad came down the hall, rubbing their eyes. Mom ate with us, but Dad said she wasn't hungry; she just wanted a small cup of water for her tree, which Kinuko gave her. She came back a couple of minutes later, and Kinuko told us what she'd planned for us. "I think it best, perhaps, to travel up the river. There is much to see in the city, but the longer we remain here, the greater the chance that you will meet people who know your hosts, and that is an awkward situation it is best to avoid." "But they'll see the bracelets and know we aren't really them, right?" Taylor asked. "If they are familiar with the Gray One's work," Kinuko said. "The Gray One has only been offering his services in this city for a couple of years, and not everyone knows what the bracelets mean, as in his homeland where almost everyone has visited your world or knows someone who has." "There was that time we were centaurs," Dad reminded Mom, "and our hosts had gone off to our world without telling their husband where they were going..." "Oh, that *was* awkward," Mom said with an embarrassed laugh. "Even though he knew what the bracelets meant, he was mad at his wives and wanted to take it out on us... Our guide had some work to do to protect us from him. Yes, let's go up the river if that will keep us away from people who know our hosts." "Then that's why Chad was going to take the people in our bodies to San Francisco?" I asked. "Among other reasons," Mom said. "But we can see a few things here in the city today and perhaps tomorrow," Kinuko continued. "I will begin attempting to secure us berths on a riverboat, but it may take time to find a suitable one. In the meantime you can see the city. Let us begin by going to the riverfront, and if we cannot find suitable berths on the first riverboat we try, then I will escort you to a public garden or some other place where you can amuse yourselves while I speak with various riverboat stewards." So after we finished eating, we set out. Kinuko delicately suggested that I ought perhaps to cover my breasts, and I said sure; did she have anything I could use? She went to the room I'd first woken up in, and showed me some long strips of cloth that my host had used to wrap around her breasts, loop over her shoulders and tie off; it took me two or three tries to get it right. My host apparently hadn't brought anything with her to Kinuko's house, except for the jewels she'd paid for her trip with, and two of those camisole-saris. Dad's host had nothing but her tree, but Taylor's and Mom's hosts had each brought a small bag of clothes, combs, brushes and so forth. They each got dressed in fresh clothes, and Mom brushed my thick hair with a brush he'd found in his host's bag, and they declared we were ready to go. When we set foot outside Kinuko's house, we saw that it was a long, rambling structure separated from the neighboring houses and set in a garden full of cherry trees; we'd only seen a few of the many rooms, apparently. Most of the houses in this neighborhood were like that, but we could see taller buildings in the distance, and she led us in that direction. Mom, Taylor and I took turns carrying Dad's pot. Dad's short legs couldn't keep up with their stride and my slither, so after a couple of minutes Mom gave her a piggy-back ride. It was a long walk to the riverfront. The buildings got denser and taller, and so did the traffic; there were rickshaws, and donkey- and horse-drawn carts and carriages, but mostly people on foot. There were more kitsune and humans than anything else, but a few elves and dwarves, and when we first saw a group of short greenish-blue skinned people with frog-like faces, Kinuko turned her nose up and said we must be closer to the river than she thought, if there were kappa around. We didn't see any people like me that morning, and I noticed that a lot of people stared at me -- maybe they were surprised at the diversity of our group, since most of the groups of people I saw traveling together were all of one kind, but I think they were looking at me in particular. Then, when we were close enough to the river to see the masts of ships in the distance where there was a gap between the taller buildings, Kinuko cried "Look!" She didn't point, but we followed the direction of her eyes, and saw a white dragon, long and sinuous, with feathery antennae or whiskers or something trailing from its head. I don't know how far overhead it was, but it was either flying low or really, really big. It wove through the sky as though it were floating and its wings were there just for decoration. We all stood still and watched until it was gone. "There will be a storm," Kinuko said. "I hope it does not delay our departure, but I fear it will." "You didn't mention dragons last night," Taylor said. "Are there a lot of them around?" "I'm surprised to see one in such an urban area," Mom commented. "It was probably one of the royal family," Kinuko said, continuing toward the river. We followed her as she went on: "Perhaps one of the emperor's cousins or aunts or uncles... Undoubtedly they were on an urgent mission, or they would have left the city in human form and then assumed dragon form when they were safely away from populated areas." Of course that raised another ten questions, and we asked them. She explained that the founder of the dynasty, the current emperor's great-grandfather, had married a dragon, and the family had continued intermarrying with dragons and half-dragons in the last few generations. The emperor and his children were more than half human, and couldn't assume full dragon form, but a lot of their cousins were at least half dragon and could shift back and forth more or less easily. But because dragons tend to cause thunderstorms when they fly, the emperor normally didn't want his relatives flying into or out of the city. Sure enough, as the dragon disappeared over the horizon to the west, storm clouds gathered in the east, and soon covered the sky from horizon to horizon. But it didn't start raining, at least not where we were, until later. By then we'd reached the riverfront, with its long array of docks and wharves extending out of sight in both directions, and ships pulled up to more than two thirds of them. I'm not nautical enough to be sure, but I think there were a mix of riverboats and sea-going ships; the river was pretty wide and deep at this point, Kinuko said, just a few miles from the ocean, but only the riverboats could go much farther upriver. So the riverboats and ocean-going ships would swap cargoes here in the city. Kinuko led us along the wharves, pausing in front of certain boats or ships (I couldn't always tell the difference; it wasn't just a matter of size, though the very biggest were all "ships" and the very smallest were all "boats") and calling out questions to the people working on deck. In a couple of cases someone would come down the gangplank and talk to her, and look us over, and they'd haggle over the price for five berths, and she'd say she'd get back to them soon. All of them said they wanted to wait and see what the weather did before they set out. And then we heard thunder, and Kinuko said we'd better get inside somewhere. She took us to a tea-house near the river, but it was already raining hard by the time we got inside. Mom and Taylor were looking pretty bedraggled in their soaked clothes, but Dad looked invigorated, bouncy even, and Kinuko still managed to look graceful though she was as soaked as Mom or Taylor. I'm not sure what I looked like to them; the strangers in the tea-house might have stared just as much at a nagini who wasn't wearing a soaking wet camisole-sari that showed her erect nipples. I think my tail looked nicer when it was wet, though, all shiny and glistening. Kinuko suggested that we all go to the privy, one by one, and take off our clothes and wring the water out of them before putting them back on. We did that, all except Dad. While I was back there I tried to figure out how I'd pee or poop in this body; it wasn't obvious. I didn't need to go urgently, but I situated myself over the hole in the floor and tried to go. But the pee came out further down my tail, where I wasn't expecting it, and I made a mess on the floor; I apologized to one of the waitresses when I came out. She nodded resignedly and said she'd go clean it up. After we'd eaten (all except Dad), when most of us were drinking another cup of tea, Kinuko spoke to the proprietor (a human) and borrowed an umbrella from him, and went out, saying she'd return soon. It was still raining hard out there, and the thunder was sometimes near and loud enough that we had to ask each other to repeat what we'd said. "What do you think so far?" Mom asked. "Best vacation ever," Taylor said with a grin. "It is pretty awesome," I added. "It's a lot to get used to, but being a nagini is starting to feel... well, not normal exactly, but a lot less weird." "You're not too uncomfortable being of the opposite sex?" Dad asked us. "My first time, I panicked when I realized I was a girl." "Why?" I asked. But then I thought about the way the guys at school talked about girls, and the way they'd made fun of me when I came to school wearing barrettes or even a pink shirt, and I realized Dad had been subjected to that kind of conditioning his whole life, not just for a couple of years. "Most boys are raised to think that they're better than girls because they're boys, and that the differences between girls and boys are hugely important. They might not be explicitly taught that -- nowadays they're often explicitly taught the opposite -- but they see grown-ups favoring boys over girls and treating boys' concerns as more important, and that implicit message is what really soaks in. I had to come over here several times in female bodies before I really unlearned most of that, and it still pops up in the back of my mind once in a while." "I guess it would be embarrassing to have Daniel or the guys at school seeing me like this," I said, "but then, if they were here, they'd probably have strange bodies of their own to get used to." "I'd like to bring Jarrod over here," Taylor said. "He's a pretty cool boyfriend most of the time, but there are times when he acts like you were saying -- like being a boy makes him more important. Having a penis is kind of convenient, but it's not as big a deal as he makes out." "Maybe you could invite him to come with us next year," Mom said. "Or if you save your money, you and he could go on a shorter trip later this summer." "You'd let me and Jarrod come here without you?" Taylor's eyes got wide, and I immediately asked: "Can I come over here with Daniel sometime, if I pay for it?" I had no idea how much Mom and Dad had paid the Gray One for our vacation, but it couldn't be too far out of reach if they were talking about Taylor paying for it with her wages from McDonald's. "Probably when you're as old as Taylor," Dad said to me, and to Taylor: "And we'd want to talk with the Gray One about the hosts he's matching you with, and where you're going, to be extra sure you're safe." "Merfolk should be good," Mom said, "since they aren't interested in sex outside mating season, and the Gray One doesn't swap people with them when the mating season is coming up." "Aww," Taylor pouted, then brightened: "It'll be fun to see Jarrod as a mermaid." "Too bad we can't bring home pictures," I said, and then: "Wait, if Mr G. -- I mean the Gray One -- could bring over Maella in her own body, couldn't he send us a camera, and bring it back loaded with pictures? We wouldn't be able to recharge it during the trip, but a couple of days worth of pictures would be better than nothing." "Let's ask him next time," Mom said. "I didn't know he could transport physical things until yesterday. I suspect it will cost far more than the soul transference spell, though." Just then Kinuko returned with more umbrellas, and returned the one she'd borrowed. "We can go now," she said. "Have you found us a boat yet?" I asked. "Not yet; there's no sense trying to talk to the stewards or captains while this rain keeps up. I could escort you back to my house, to wait out the storm, or we could go to the greenhouses in the Autumn Garden." "The greenhouses sound neat," Dad said, and we set out. Dad rode on my shoulders -- she hardly weighed anything -- and held our umbrella, while I held her tree, extending my arms way out at first so it would catch some of the rain. But Dad told me she'd had enough to drink for a while, and I pulled the pot back in under the umbrella. It was a fairly long walk to the Autumn Garden, though not as far as from Kinuko's house to the riverfront. There were a lot of people in the greenhouses, both gardeners and visitors, but they were vast, built on multiple levels, so we weren't too crowded. Most of the people there were humans and elves, but there were a few kitsune and others I couldn't readily identify. No kappa, though; they seemed to like being out in the rain. And then, when we'd been walking (and slithering, in my case) around the roofed garden for an hour or more, I saw a naga. Another naga. He was older, with wrinkled skin -- about as dark as mine -- and white hair, but his scales were still brightly colored. His snake-tail was about twice as long as mine, and had alternating bands of pink, yellow and blue scales; he was bare-chested except for a sequined sash that slung from his right shoulder to his left hip. When he saw me, he approached me. "Good day, Miss. There are not many of our kind in the city, and I do not think I have seen you before. I am Soradhapam." "Um, hi. I'm Leslie -- I'm not from around here. This is my Mom and Dad and my sister Taylor, and our friend Kinuko..." "You were adopted and raised by kitsune?" He looked shocked, and I realized I hadn't been very exact in my gestures when I was introducing the others. "No, see, we're all visitors, borrowing these people's bodies..." I held up my wrist and pointed at the gold bracelet, and Kinuko explained further, going into a sales pitch and telling Soradhapam how to get in touch with her if he wanted to visit our world. "I see. I hope you enjoy your visit... May I ask who your host is, whose body you now occupy? Is she new to the city?" I looked questioningly at Kinuko; for some reason I'd never asked her that. She said: "Leslie's host called herself Nenikha. She told me very little about herself; however, she spoke with a strong accent, so I suppose she was not born here." "Thank you. Good day." Soradhapam bowed low, then turned and slithered away. We continued going through the greenhouses. Dad kept wanting to stay longer at each exhibit than the rest of us, especially the trees; she'd brush the tips of their branches with her fingertips, if there were any low enough for her to reach, and close her eyes. The first time she did that, Mom said: "I didn't know you could tap into trees you're not linked to." "I didn't either," Dad said. "I think it's a kodama thing, something they can do that dryads can't. I can't get as strong a feel for them as I have for my own tree, but I can feel whether they're healthy and happy... This one is. She likes the gardener who smells like sage and mint; she likes living in the greenhouse where the gardeners don't let deer come along and eat her leaves." After that Dad told us something interesting about most of the trees she touched -- or at least it was interesting the first ten or fifteen times. Long before the rain stopped, Taylor and I got a little bored. When the rain finally stopped, an hour or two after our encounter with Soradhapam, Kinuko said she would go back to the riverfront and try again to arrange passage for us; she suggested we walk around the gardens until she returned. We left the greenhouses and started exploring the outdoor gardens. We'd seen from the trees in Kinuko's garden that it was autumn, though you couldn't always tell from the trees in the greenhouse. But out here the changing colors of the leaves made a fantastic spectacle; a few unfamiliar trees' leaves were turning shades of purplish-red that you never saw back home, and though most of them were the usual reds, oranges and yellows familiar from Earth, the trees seemed to have been planted in a deliberate arrangement so that their leaves would make neat patterns seen from a distance, or from a hill or observation tower overlooking the park. Before long, we came to a large oak; Dad, who was riding Mom's shoulders while I carried her tree, reached up to touch one of the lower branches, and then jerked her hand back as if she'd been shocked. A moment later a naked woman stepped out of the trunk of the tree -- she looked a lot like Dad, except that she was nearly as tall as Mom and Taylor, and she was proportioned like a normal human, not dwarfish like Dad. And her features were more European or Middle Eastern than Asian. "You're a bonsai kodama, aren't you?" "Yes -- for the moment. Are you a western dryad?" "Yes, though I have lived in this garden nearly my whole life. I was a small child when explorers from this country dug up my sapling and put it in a pot, like the one this snake-girl carries, and brought me on a ship to this garden. But they did not keep me in the pot forever, like you; they planted me in the ground here so I could grow tall and strong. Sometimes I have wished that they had kept me in the pot, so I could travel freely." "I wish I were as pretty as you," Dad said frankly. "Having one's growth stunted is the cost of freedom, for our kind. But there may be another way you can get the freedom to travel, at least for a time." Dad held up her wrist with its bracelet, and she and Mom explained how we were visiting her world. The dryad, whose name was Tiranella, and Mom and Dad got into a long conversation; they told her about our world and about the various places in this world they'd visited, and she told us more about her homeland and the trip across the ocean. Taylor and I listened with interest at first, but after a while, when Mom and Dad were telling her a long story about the time Mom was a ghoul and Dad was a cyclops -- a story which they'd already told us last night, and which wasn't as funny the first time as they seemed to think -- Taylor said: "Is it okay if we go explore that section of the garden over there?" "Sure," Mom said. "Meet us back here at Tiranella's tree in... well, we don't have watches here, but I've seen several sundials around the garden. Meet us here before they show the third hour after noon." ----- I handed Dad's tree over to Mom, and Taylor and I went off to explore. We crossed a high-arched bridge over a stream, and descended a steep zig-zagging staircase into a section of the garden planted in a deep gully. Not many of the trees growing in the bottom of the gully were tall enough to clear the rim of it. There were a lot of plants there that liked shade, and something about it appealed to Taylor's fox-nature; he asked me to take care of his clothes for him, and turned into a fox and slipped off among the trees and bushes. I followed him as closely as I could, though after a few minutes I found the shady sunken garden oppressive; my snake-nature wanted more direct sunlight, apparently. I thought about telling him I was going up the stairs to the other side of the gully to see what was over there, but I didn't want to get separated from him, so I tried to stay close. Not many other people were visiting that section of the garden just then. I'd seen a couple of elves walking hand in hand when we first arrived, but they'd gone up the stairs we'd come down and since then I'd seen nobody but Taylor, and only a glimpse of his tails from time to time. After a while I came to a bench by a wide, calm pool in the stream, and I called out: "Taylor, I'm going to sit here for a while. Let me know when you're done being a fox." I tried sitting on the bench as though I were a human, but it wasn't very comfortable. I coiled up my tail and rested on it, and sat there looking into the pool. I hadn't seen any mirrors in Kinuko's house, and this calm water was the first time I'd gotten a good look at my reflection. My skin was dark, as I think I mentioned before, and my features were like a woman from India or Pakistan -- not surprisingly, since if I remembered right our world's legends about naga came from India. I was young and pretty, or at least I looked like a fairly young human woman, late teens or early twenties -- I had no idea how long naga lived or how quickly they aged. I leaned way over to get a closer look at my reflection, with my hair dangling down on either side of my face, and suddenly there was a splash of water that blinded me for a moment, and something was grappling my arms and shoulders, pulling me down into the water. In a moment my human head and torso were underwater, though it felt like most of my tail was still on land; I uncoiled my tail and tried to lash it around the bench or a tree trunk or something and pull myself out, but I felt more and more of my tail getting pulled under as I struggled to breathe. I'd had no warning to take a deep breath, and I didn't think I could hold out long. I lashed out with my hands at whatever had hold of me, but the water was muddy and I couldn't tell if I was doing any damage. Then I felt someone pulling on my tail, and a moment later it felt like more than one pair of arms pulling. My torso and then my head broke above the surface, and I gasped, drawing in a huge lungful of air, collapsing on the bank for a long moment before I drew myself up to look around. Taylor, back in humanoid form but still naked, was standing over me, as was a naga, younger and a lot more muscular than Soradhapam, but a few years older than my host Nenikha. "Thanks," I said. "What was that?" Then I turned and saw, near the other side of the pool, a frog-like head raised just above the surface of the water. A kappa. "Leslie, Kinuko warned us about those things! Why'd you get so close to it?" Taylor asked. "I didn't even see it until it jumped out of the pool and pulled me under," I protested. "Um, hi -- thanks again for saving me." "What are you doing here?" the naga burst out. "You could have been killed! I am afraid this may be a terrible diplomatic incident no matter what happens next -- whether we report this to the authorities or take private vengeance... Honored kitsune, will you aid me if I attempt to slay that miscreant?" When he said "Honored kitsune," I suddenly realized he was switching to the language I'd been speaking with Kinuko, Mom, Dad and Taylor -- up to that point he'd been speaking another language, which I hadn't known I knew until that moment. Taylor gave me a puzzled glance and replied: "I'm not keen on tackling him in his own element. But nobody tries to drown my little brother and gets away with it. He can't get out of the pool without going on land or at least wading in the shallow parts of the stream, and then we can grab him... or we could keep him trapped in the pool until reinforcements arrive." "I wasn't trying to drown her," the kappa said. "Just scare her a little. She shouldn't have been leaning over the pool like that if she didn't want to play." "Um, what was that about a diplomatic incident?" I asked, holding up my wrist bracelet and tapping it. "The Gray One didn't say anything about the U.S. having a consulate here or anything..." "You, young lady, are coming straight back to the embassy. You've caused enough trouble..." He'd spoken that other language again. He took a small horn from a bag slung over his shoulder and blew it. "Um, you've got me mixed up with someone else," I said, unconsciously switching to the language he'd addressed me in. From Taylor's expression I was pretty sure he didn't understand us, and I deliberately switched back to the language I shared with him. "Probably my host, I think Kinuko said her name's Nenikha..." I wasn't explaining things clearly, I know, but I'd just suffered a near-drowning; cut me some slack. "Yes, a very plausible alias!" the naga said sarcastically, in the language we shared with Taylor. "To anyone who does not know our language! Well, Miss None-of-your-Business, your safety *is* my business and I take my business very seriously. You are not getting out of my sight again, unless it is in your suite at the embassy -- and be assured I will have guards posted outside your windows this time." Just then four more naga came slithering down the banks of the gully. "Seize the kappa," said the one who'd helped rescue me, and they slithered right into the pool, while the kappa dove underwater. There was a lot of thrashing and splashing, but a minute or two later they'd dragged the kappa out and were threatening to hold him upside down if he didn't stop struggling. I wasn't sure why that was such a dire threat, but he immediately subsided and begged them to spare his life. Meanwhile I was insisting that I wasn't this Nenikha he was looking for, and telling him all about the Gray One and Mom and Dad and Kinuko but not in any coherent order, and Taylor was pulling his robe on, which I'd left on the bench. "I don't want to hear any more excuses," the big naga said, and took me firmly by the arm. "Hey!" I said, but he was way stronger than me, and he pulled me along across the nearest bridge over the stream and up the other stairs. Taylor followed and tried to force him to let go, but at a command from the big guy, two of the ones who'd subdued the kappa pulled Taylor away and held him. He turned into a fox to slip out of their grasp, dashed a short distance away and changed back. "Go tell Mom and Dad what happened," I called out. "And Kinuko. She said the bracelet would let her find me if I got separated." But by then my captor and I were over the rim of the gully into the next section of the garden, out of sight of Taylor. The other four naga brought up the rear, two of them holding the kappa firmly between them. "What is this bracelet?" my captor asked. "And what has become of the pearl necklace you were wearing when you left the embassy eight days ago?" "Um, I think maybe Nenikha used it to pay for her trip to my world. Like I've only explained three or four times." "No more of this Nenikha foolishness! I am not as gullible as your chaperon. I hope you realize the disgrace she has suffered and will suffer because of your willfulness --" We were leaving the garden by a different route than Kinuko had led our party in by, and weren't anywhere near the greenhouses or Tiranella's oak as far as I could tell. As we came to a gatehouse, my captor broke off his reprimands to tell the park authorities about how the kappa had attacked me. "Your emperor shall hear of this within the day! This garden is supposed to be safe for distinguished visitors such as Princess S