I’d thought about this a lot over the years. “The three weeks?”

“Yeah. It’s not like there are rules, but she’s not stupid. She must have snagged you on the right day, then went back to set you up the night before, and somehow missed. Like something changed between A and B, or from your viewpoint B and A, and it threw off her aim.”

I tried to wrap my head around the idea that she’d slept with me before I slept with her, but found myself more focused on the girl beside me. “You’re not really twelve, are you?”

“Ten, technically; we’re early bloomers. But we don’t really change when we’re there.”

She shivered a bit as she said that, and I caught the implication: she’d been ten years old for a very long time, in a place she was glad to be away from. There was a lot more I wanted to ask her, but I changed the subject to try to lighten the mood.

“I’m Jack, by the way. And you’re…?”

She shrank inside her furs, suddenly looking lost and very, very young, and in a tear-stained whisper I could barely hear, begged, “please… give me a name”.

Well, that hadn’t worked.

I hugged her. She needed it.

She clung to me fiercely, and something shifted inside. She wasn’t the wrong redhead any more, not an underage replacement for the one I’d spent so much time wanting to screw or strangle or both. Suddenly I hated there, whatever it was, and whoever had made her live nameless and afraid. I wanted to destroy what had hurt her, protect her from being hurt again, and…

Huh. I wanted to be a hero. For the first time, maybe really the first time, it wasn’t about me.

Ji, ta, shizen. A phrase that mattered to my cranky old sensei, that I’d just memorized to keep him teaching me new things. Self, others, nature. Caring about more than yourself. Caring for more than yourself.

Turns out I’d been alone long before I got here.

“Angel.”

She jerked in surprise, then relaxed in my arms. “It’s… not entirely appropriate. Are you sure?”

“It was either that or Anchor.”

She laughed and pulled away slightly, staring at me with those older-than-she-looks eyes, understanding what I wasn’t saying. A tiny smile grew into a big one, and we finally met.

“Hello, Jack; I’m Angel. My name is Angel.”

“Hi, Angel. How do you feel about eating bugs?”

“Bugs?”

“Beetles and crayfish, mostly. Sorry, I’ve been away for a while, so the larder’s bare, and I usually have terrible luck catching rabbits.”

“This is a terrible resort and I shall be leaving a scathing review.”

It was good, not being alone. The dynamics were a little weird at first, with Angel being older and younger, more stable and more vulnerable, but we fit somehow. As partners, I mean, not physically. I’d be lying if I said that I never desired her as the woman she was rapidly growing into, but I never made a pass, and she never teased. We often slept together for warmth or comfort, touching-but-not-that-way as she’d put it, but while it occasionally came up, she never reacted to its presence.

Partners. Friends. Explorers in a world that didn’t seem to have anyone for me to save, or anything to save them from. A world that she didn’t know any more about than I did.

On the plus side, she was awesome at catching rabbits, which significantly reduced the amount of bugs in my diet. I was the better cook, which surprised us both, once we had a variety of things to cook. She was smarter and better educated, filled with ideas for how to improve our lives and extend the reach of our exploration together.

Always together. By unspoken agreement, we never went off on our own, never went out of earshot.

Sometimes, late at night, comforting each other, I told her about my life, and she told me about there.

How much of it was metaphor, and how much was real, I never understood. It was hard for her to put it into words, but somehow important to try. She talked about a room full of doors full of rooms, where the way back was never the way you’d come, and once said it was less a place than a “collection of layered experiences”, most of them imperceptible to a merely human mind.

Angel counted herself among the merely human, something I suspected wasn’t completely true. The others like her, the ones she wasn’t sure weren’t her future selves, were capable of navigating between the layers of there. I was pretty sure she’d done it herself at least once, escaping to here, but I never asked.

I didn’t care what she was, or might have been, or could become. She was my friend, my partner, my damsel-out-of-distress, my anchor. I believed she had the power to leave, but chose to stay.

I was happy, maybe for the first time. I think she was, too.

Angel was always trying to make our exploration more effective, so it surprised me one day when she said, “I think we need to go back.”

We’d been together for about two years, moving steadily away from the cave in a widening spiral, learning about our world and each other. I stopped picking fruit and gave her my full attention.

“I think we’re looking for the wrong thing. Or the right thing in the wrong way.”

“I tried smoke signals once; nobody turned up.”

My weak joke earned me an expected weak smile and an unexpected big hug, which lasted long enough to remind me that she was growing up fast. If at ten she’d looked twelve, at twelve she looked fifteen, but I was saved from further fifteen-will-get-you-twenty thoughts by her next words.

“I don’t think this world is real. I think it’s part of there.”

“I don’t understand. If we’re there, how come you’re getting older?”

“How come you’re not?”

I think most people carry an image of themselves that’s out of date. Younger, healthier, still able to fit in those pants, things like that. Me, I was a 26-year-old pizza guy who’d been chasing 20-year-old college girls until he caught the wrong one and ended up here. Twelve years ago.

“It’s not like we own a mirror, but I see my reflection sometimes, and I look older, more like my dad.”

“Because you know you’re supposed to. You came from a place where it happened to everyone, so you expect it. I didn’t, so I don’t. And you’re not.”

I carefully pushed her away, just enough to look in her eyes. She believed it, and it scared her a little.

“What if it’s not here being there, but me being here? How I got here. How I… died.”

I hadn’t thought about her much since Angel arrived, but she’d been very focused on my death, even if she’d gotten the date wrong. And she’d said she brought me back.

“I don’t think she has that kind of power. We’re not, well, for that, and it’s always bothered me about your story. Whisking a man away at the moment of his death to hump him back to life as a hero, like some kind of slutty valkyrie? Not a chance; she probably got that story out of a comic book.”

“I kind of liked the hero thing.”

She grinned, then hugged me again to soften the blow to my ego.

“I think she found a hero. Here, on that rock, pulled across by a real Power, but left unwatched and unguarded. She staked her claim, then used the connection to shift back along your lifeline and take the credit. That’s something we can do.”

Remembering precisely how we’d been connected when I arrived, I looked down to find Angel blushing furiously.

“When we’re older. So I’ve heard. Change the subject, please.”

“So you think she was, what, poking around in there’s dusty little corners, and stumbled across something she could use?”

“Exactly. And that rock is the way in. It’s where she found you, it’s where you found me, and it’s where we’ll find her.”

Would you believe we found another redhead waiting to pounce on us?

“I’m pretty sure this one isn’t her. Or you.”

I winced as Angel bandaged the bite on my shoulder. I’d managed to avoid the claws somehow.

“What, you think we don’t bite?”

I was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate any details about what she had done with her teeth, or with her…

“Oh, hell, the pronouns are giving me a headache. Does she have a name, or can we give her one just so I can keep it straight in my head?”

She snorted as she finished patching me up, and started listing off possibilities. “Bitch, Slut, Witch, Wackjob, …”

“Cruella, Satana, Sinistra, Sextina, …”

“No, I think she’d like those.”

“Virginia.” Our eyes met, and our grins widened into laughter. She’d hate it.

“am… i… virginia…?” A quiet, halting voice came from behind me, and I turned to find our newest redhead peeking out from behind a tree. She looked frightened, and I remembered lashing out with a fist when she’d jumped us from behind the rock and sunk her teeth into me.

She was tiny, maybe a foot shorter than Angel, who’d recently shot up to about five-foot-six. It wasn’t a child’s body, though; she was a perfect miniature woman, with gentle curves covered by short, rust-colored fur.

Yeah, we’d come home and found a stray catgirl on the porch, complete with ears, tail, and the same face as every other redhead I knew.

Angel moved toward her slowly, talking in a low, soft voice, like she was trying to rescue a lost kitten. Which she was.

“No, honey, you’re not. Virginia’s the big one who liked to break our toys. Do you remember her? Do you remember me?”

The catgirl moved so fast my heart stopped, but it wasn’t an attack, it was an embrace. They clung together for a long time, and then Angel took her hand and firmly pulled her over to me. I did my best not to look like the kind of guy who’d hit a girl, even one with fangs and claws.

“This is Jack, my very close friend. Like you. He was alone for a long time before I came here, because Virginia left him behind like a broken toy. He named me Angel.”

That wasn’t quite the scenario we’d been discussing recently, but there was certainly some truth to it. Not that it mattered, because her ears and tail had shot up at the word named. She looked up at me with huge, hungry eyes, like I was holding a fish just out of reach. Seriously, it was adorable, but I could feel Angel’s eyes as well, a quiet pressure begging me not to screw this up.

“You’re close like sisters, and you move like the wind. Would you like to be ‘Ariel’?”

Catgirls don’t hug, by the way, they glomp.

Ariel wrapped herself around me so tightly that the air rushed out of my lungs and the blood rushed straight to my… just-bitten shoulder, fortunately. At her size there was no safe place for my hands, and she was definitely all woman, and she was purring. The pain wouldn’t keep me down for long, and I desperately needed a distraction.

Which she provided, suddenly leaping back over to Angel with a question that turned our assumptions sideways. “Do names make you grow up?”

It hit her hard. “It… I don’t… maybe they do, for us. Maybe the reason we don’t grow up is because we don’t have names.”

“Or maybe that’s the reason you weren’t given names.”

As if we needed another reason to despise whatever Powers were in charge of there.

Ariel was physically about 17, emotionally about 7, and intellectually a cat chasing a laser pointer. Bright and clever, sure, but severely ADHD. She’d bonded with Angel early in both of their lives, but had been separated from the others a long time ago. Since they never changed physically, they didn’t know how long she’d been alone, but I got the feeling it was longer than I’d been alive. Maybe a lot longer.

Her presence disrupted our comfortable routine. No, that’s not accurate. She disrupted me, with her eagerness for physical contact and her sleek, sexy body. She craved affection, rubbing against us every day and sleeping between us every night. And the fur that covered her just enough for modesty (mine; she didn’t have any) was so soft it got me going even when she wasn’t pressing her firm breasts against me. And she purred; oh, god, the purring.

What made it even harder was that she clearly approved of my interest, and openly flirted and teased. Only Angel’s increasingly-silent presence was keeping me from trying for a piece of tail, and something had to break.

It was Angel’s temper that broke first, shoving us both into an icy mountain stream. Mind you, she’d had to trick us into going ten miles out of our way so that there was ice water to be shoved into, but her anger had been building up for weeks.

Central to the epic rant she delivered while we shivered around a fire was the fact that Ariel was obviously going into heat for the first time in her life, and it was obviously my fault because I’d named her.

Guilty as charged, sure, and after the cold shower it was obvious to me, too, but identifying the problem didn’t solve it. Ariel was a cat, and she couldn’t stop being a cat.

But we could stop being together, the three of us. The thought chilled me in a way the fire couldn’t touch.

Ariel suddenly burst into tears and began wailing, a high-pitched, hopeless sound. She was horny, not stupid, and had followed the same chain of logic I had, but to a different conclusion: she was the one who’d be abandoned. Again. We both scrambled to comfort her, ending up in a three-way hug, promising to stay together and somehow make it work.

When I woke the next morning, they were gone. Or maybe they were still there, together, because I was definitely gone. The satin sheets were a pretty big clue, and I had a feeling I knew who they belonged to. Sure enough, my least-favorite favorite redhead showed up as if I’d just rubbed her lamp, carrying a tray full of something she probably thought was breakfast.

Surprisingly, she was fully dressed. I wasn’t, but I’d been bathed and shaved, and all the little scars I’d picked up over the years were gone, like it had all been a bad dream.

She looked at me like she was expecting praise, and I was happy to disappoint her. “Take me back.”

“Wait, what? I told you, I resurrected you to be a hero. There’s no going back, you’re dead there.”

“Not to Earth, to the place where you really found me. The rock in the forest, in the world without people. The world with the only people I care about.”

“Take me back to Angel and Ariel.”

The names hit her like fists, and she dropped the tray in shock. She hadn’t known they were there, had never heard the names I’d given them, but I could see the recognition in her eyes.

“I came back for you as soon as I could. It couldn’t have been more than a few hours.”

“It was thirteen years. The first ten alone, then most of three years with Angel; Ariel joined us a few months ago.”

“I don’t understand. How could you have been there for so long? How could they have even gotten in? How could you have given them real names? Do you even know what we are?”

She was honestly bewildered, and there was panic rising in her voice. She’d walked in certain she was holding a Royal Flush, only to find out we were playing Twister.

“Yeah, I think I finally do. Seeing you drop the slutty valkyrie act was the last piece in the puzzle.”

“You’re a Muse.”

Her panic receded a bit. “That’s… surprisingly accurate. We’re not those Muses, of course, and not all about poetry and music and such. Although I make an awesome groupie.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you do. Maybe I should have said Catalyst, or in your case, Succubus. Whatever you call yourselves, your job is to make men change. Inspire, tempt, seduce, distract, mother, annoy, whatever it takes. You pick a target, or someone does, and then you show up in his life again and again, pushing him in a certain direction. And when you’re not around, he forgets you. Mostly.”

“Holy shit, you really have been with Angel for three years.”

I found clothes laid out on a table, and started getting dressed. “Every hour of every day, and you’re taking me back to her, now.”

“I can’t.”

She held up a hand to ward off my angry outburst. “I can’t go there any more, and I don’t know why.”

She slumped into the nearest chair like a person, not a professional temptress. Without the Manic Pixie Fuck Bunny pose, she wasn’t the redhead I remembered. Not necessarily someone I’d like, and definitely not someone I’d trust, but I thought I was seeing something real.

“I found it a long time ago. I don’t know what Power created it, but it felt abandoned, unused. It was my refuge when I needed one, my ‘fortress of solitude’. I kept it a secret from the others, and was careful never to leave behind any trace that I’d been there, that it mattered to me. We weren’t… nice to each other.”

“Angel said you broke their toys.”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh, I’m horrible to everybody, especially the new ones. We’re the meanest pack of Mean Girls in the universe, and we never grow up or grow old, but sometimes we get replaced.”

“When I got back from my last job, there were three new girls. I’d never seen that many at once before. All of them older than your sweet Angel, sexier than your weird little hybrid Ariel. Sexier than me, which meant my days were numbered. I ran away to my safe place, and found something I never thought I’d need: a hero.”

She counted it off on her fingers. “Slay the dragon, save the kingdom, bed the princess: Heroing 101. I always start at the end, to make sure they’re motivated and don’t ask too many questions.”

It had certainly worked on me. If she had come back in five months, or maybe even five years, I’d have slain any dragon she pointed me at, with a salt shaker and a butter knife if necessary. She’d been extremely motivating.

“Problem was, you weren’t one of mine. You were protected, maybe by the Power that made that world, maybe by something else that had just stashed you there. It took me three days to fuck you back to consciousness and forge a connection to your lifeline.”

“I’m sorry I missed that.”

The mental image of that magnificent body riding me for three days straight was causing a painful reminder that it had been thirteen years for me, and it had been her the last time, too. She noticed, and a raised eyebrow was enough to make the offer: Hero Wanted, Apply Within.

I forced some blood back up to my brain and focused on what I really wanted. “If you couldn’t get in, how did you get me out?”

She shrugged, her dress artfully falling open. She was recovering her composure, slipping back into character. “We’re connected, intimately, and you signed that contract at least a dozen times, in something better than blood. I can find you anywhere, and when I couldn’t go to you, I pulled you back to me.”

Her lips curled in a faint sneer as she continued. “Your little princesses never gave it up, did they? That’s why you left them behind. You’re my hero, and I’m going to make you forget them right now.”

She stood up; her clothes stayed in the chair. She was a wet dream walking, making promises that I knew she’d deliver on, again and again, as long as I served her needs. I thought of Angel, Ariel, and our hard life in that empty world, holding them up against the soft sweetness that was swaying toward me, and then I hit that. Hard.

In the face. With my fist. Bitch.

She fell back onto her glorious ass and her hands flew up to cover her face. “Yu bwoke by nodse!”

“You haven’t changed. I have. If you can’t send me home, take me to the entrance. Maybe I can get in without you.”

She dropped her hands and grinned wickedly. Not a mark on her. “I’ll just pull you out again, and next time I won’t give you the chance to say no. I’ll fuck their stupid names right out of your head, and when I’m done, you’ll do as you’re told. Forever.”

Names. Names had power over them. Power to change them, make them grow. And we’d named her, together, Angel and I.

“You’ll pull us all out, Vir-”

“Yamero!”

I stopped dead, reflexively obeying the command. After all, he’d drilled me mercilessly, back in the life I’d thought was so simple.

“Sensei?!?”

The cranky old martial-arts instructor who’d lived upstairs, who’d taught me more than I’d understood, strode in through the half-open door, swinging his cane like the prop I’d never known it was. “It’s not her name until you say it to her face; it will change her, and I can’t allow that, not yet. We need her just the way she is for a little while longer, warts and all.”

I’d expected that line to draw an angry remark from her, but a quick glance showed she was more stunned than I was. Apparently the game was four-dimensional Twister.

He misinterpreted my look. “Not physical warts, boy, character flaws. Ones that we’ve carefully nurtured for centuries.”

I didn’t know what he was, but I thought about all the pain and loneliness Angel and Ariel had gone through before I met them. He’d nurtured them, too.

My hands curled into fists. “And what were you nurturing me to be?”

“A hero, like your father before you.”

“My dad was a bank teller.”

“​…who gave up his dreams to love a woman he knew would die young, and raised their child to be a protector, once he found something worth protecting. We do have something like valkyries, son, and they’re never wrong about heroes. I liked him, so I picked up where he left off.”

“Time for you to get back to it, I think. Don’t worry about this one; I’ve got one last job for her before Graduation, and I guarantee it will keep her out of your hair.”

Where do you hide a world? In a room full of doors full of rooms full of… you get the idea. I was being sent back, but at least this time I’d been given a pair of pants. And a whole lot more. I resisted the urge to look in the backpack again; bigger on the inside gave me a headache.

“So there are people there now?”

The old man/god/whatever-he-was chuckled. “You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Elves, dwarves, goblins, dragons, Demon Lords?”

“That last one’s a bit comic-book for my tastes, but it could happen; you spent a few years looking for one, after all, thanks to her interference. Unfinished worlds are shaped by desire and expectation, which is why I’d left you in stasis. Mortal desire can change even finished worlds, though few ever try, and as the only one there, waking, sleeping, expecting, you shaped this one quite a bit.”

“Are we, then? Mortal, I mean, the three of us.”

“They weren’t, until you named them. They didn’t age because they weren’t finished yet, and you didn’t age because your world wasn’t; you were all missing pieces. It was your mutual desire for completion that reshaped the door to let them in and lock her out.”

“So you’re saying that deep down, I just wanted a loli and a catgirl?”

His eyes twinkled, and I mean that literally. “Is that really what you got?”

He finished making changes to the door, and it opened to reveal a familiar rock, with two even more familiar shapes curled up together on top of it, stirring softly.

“Go home, son, they’re waiting for you. You won’t need to wake them with a kiss, but I recommend it.”

There were still a lot of questions I wanted to ask, for Angel and Ariel as well as for me, but I knew he wouldn’t give me the answers, at least not today. A new one popped into my head as I stepped through the door, though.

“Hey, how did I end up on that rock in the first place?”

“You were run over by a truck.”

Okay, I admit it: I fucked the wrong guy. Do you hear me up there? I’m sorry I fucked your Hero, okay? Can I have my life back now?

I mean, it was my job to fuck Wrong Guys, wagging my amazing tail at them across years or decades of their lives until I turned them into Right Guys. I was designed to be a Grade-A Free-Range All-Natural Organic Fuck Bunny, and I had centuries of practice at turning boys into men and wrapping them around my little finger.

But when I came home from a tough job expecting praise and instead found replacements, I lost my shit and ran away to a hidden place I thought nobody else knew about.

Finding a good-looking naked guy playing Sleeping Beauty in my secret refuge felt like a birthday party, Christmas morning, and Easter Sunday all rolled up together. I knew a Hero when I saw one, and this one didn’t even need much breaking in. If I was going on the run to avoid finding out what happens when the Powers ditch you for a younger model, a Hero was exactly what I needed. So, yeah, I fucked him.

Unless you’re Anne Rice, you probably think Sleeping Beauties should be woken with a kiss. Not a chance. Stasis spells are a bitch, and this one was freshly cast by or at least for a major Power. I needed to wrap him around a lot more than my finger before I could wrap him around my finger.

After three solid days of bump-and-grinding my way through the stasis spell, I had my Hero. To seal the deal, I fed him a story about saving the world from demons and then slid back along his lifeline. I could feel his recent death through our newly-forged connection, so I went back to the night before, fucked him silly to convince him he was the white knight to my dream girl, and then snuck back home to there to steal every bit of hero gear I could get my hands on.

I still don’t know how I missed. I’d never missed before. I could nail a fifty-year-old has-been in a truck-stop men’s room, jump to a sixteenth birthday he’d never forget, and be back in his limo to congratulate him on his amazing string of business successes before he had time to zip up. Sliding up and down a man’s lifeline was as easy for me as, well, you know.

Apparently I was off by three weeks. Even the most satisfied man can figure out that something’s wrong if you give him three weeks to think about it. Worse, when I slid back to our mutual present to pick him up, I couldn’t get through the door.

I was the best in the business, a tough, seasoned pro with hundreds of years of successful “inspirations” under my belt, so I did not hide in a corner and cry my heart out over the unfairness of a universe that kicked me to the curb, held out one last tasty-looking carrot, and then slammed the fucking door in my face.

I dried my eyes and got to work. I needed a Hero, and a mountee always got her man.

He turned me down.

Fuck me, I can barely say it. In the three hours it took me to pull my new Hero out of that hidden world, he’d spent three years bonding with one of the other girls (Annoyingly Clever Little Sister Division). Worse, he’d also somehow gotten his hands on one of the experimental models, a severely fuckable cat-hybrid thingie the Powers had come up with a while back and dumped when she turned feral.

He chose them when he could have had me, and he’d even had me enough to make an informed decision. He hadn’t even popped them yet and still liked them better.

Even worse, he’d learned shit from them; he knew what we were, more or less, and he knew how to unmake us. I was in mid-taunt when he started Naming me, and I could feel it coming at me like a freight train. Names define you, limit you, change you, and he was really pissed off at me. Have I mentioned I’m a bitch? Yeah, keep that fact handy at all times, it’ll come up a lot.

Anyway, I was actually grateful when someone stopped him from turning me into a mouse, metaphorically speaking, until I looked over and saw a Power. One of the major players had tracked me down and caught me with my hand in the nookie jar.

I. Was. Fucked.

The Old Man gave me one last job, promising that when it was done, my Graduation would be nothing to fear. A new life, a fresh start, A Whole New World where I wasn’t stuck in a rut, pun intended. I’d still be me, but I’d be free; out of the game, on my own, no obligations to any Powers. I really, really should have gotten the details up front.

I did the job. I very thoroughly inspired an engineer to build a new kind of bridge that would connect two competing civilizations in a way that blah-blah-blah, seriously, who cares? Dull smart guy needed an ego boost and a major push, and nothing builds ego like banging a hottie who’s way out of his league. Pro tip: if you want to make absolutely sure you’re a guy’s type, give him a quick peek when he’s about 11, then come back and nail his 30-year-old-virgin ass to the floor. Never fails.

Like I said, I was made for this job, literally. Head to toe, inside and out, every curve, every gesture, every little freckle, everything went into making me an irresistible, inspiring temptation. I was looking forward to putting it all to good use, post-Graduation.

The son of a bitch gave me a new body.

My Whole New World was dark and fuzzy when I woke up for the first time. I fumbled around until my hands closed on a pair of glasses: big, chunky, thick-lensed things. Oh you are fucking kidding me.

Once I could focus, I saw that there wasn’t going to be any fucking for a long, long time. I was wearing flannel pajamas, the kind with built-in feet. I had a teddy bear. I had nothing going on from the neck down. I was a kid. A little kid. A sit-on-daddy’s-lap-without-making-him-squirm child.

I’d never been a child. My life started the day a Power pointed me at my first dick and showed me the ropes. Professionally, I mean; I learned about bondage on my own. I’d never been anything but an Inspirer Of Men, First Class (Succubus Division). Admittedly, I’d invented the title myself; we were just tools to them, and who names their screwdrivers? Muse was one of the things mortals called us, although they had some funny ideas about how we worked.

I found a light switch and a mirror, and started swearing. 68 inches of prime shaggy-maned redhead was just gone, and I didn’t even have my own face. I was short, skinny, and worst of all, cute. I had curly brown hair just past my shoulders, huge brown eyes, an upturned nose, and murder in my heart. I was six years old.

I was in Hell.

I had memories to go with the new body. Nothing unusual in my former line of work, but this wasn’t a job, it was going to be my life. I switched the light back off, closed my eyes, and started finding out who I was.

Name: Virginia Vesta White; for fuck’s sake, he might as well have just called me Chastity Cherry McPure.

Occupation: child; no shit.

Base of operations: Aunt Sally’s house; well, at least I didn’t have parents to deal with.

Known associates: Sally Sanders, unrelated legal guardian. Oh, great, I’m “living under the name of Sanders”; the fun just never stops. Let me guess, she’s cheerful and blonde and perky and eager to get involved with molding and shaping my future womanhood. Heh, that part could actually be fun, in the nasty way Classic Me had dealt with the other girls.

Tech level couldn’t be too bad, since I’d already found a light switch. Indoor plumbing was likely, which was good, since I’d just discovered I had a bladder the size of a teacup and desperately needed to pee. I still had plenty of Virginia’s memories to unpack, but they’d be easier to face without the risk of wetting the bed.

Naturally I knew my way around “Aunt” Sally’s house in the dark, which my tiny little-girl bladder was grateful for, because it took me a while to figure out the one-piece flannel PJs. I don’t think I’d ever gone to bed in something that was so difficult to take off. Clearly my wardrobe needed work, although I suspected my allowance might not cover a trip to Victoria’s Secret. If such things even existed here, and had an Adorable Moppet department.

Since I didn’t hear my new guardian moving around, I decided to scope out the joint and let it trigger my new memories more organically. Bad news: the appliances and decor absolutely screamed Late-Fifties American Midwest, an era I’d worked in a few times before and had zero affection for. Leaded gas, burnt coffee, fatty foods, cigarettes everywhere, and social mores to make a succubus weep.

On the bright side, if this Earth followed the usual pattern, I should have tits in time for The Summer Of Love.

No sign of a man, or any other house pets. Also no hint of cigarettes or booze, unless Aunt Sally had a clever hiding place a six-year-old couldn’t reach. Not that I wanted either; cigars had their suggestive uses and a good pipe tobacco was practically potpourri, but cigarettes were vile things useful only as props, and at my current size one drink would put me under the floor. Linoleum and wall-to-wall carpet, by the way, in patterns I didn’t want to see in daylight.

The jazzy-looking wall clock said it was just after 5 AM, so even if Sally was a morning person, I had plenty of time to go through her purse. My last visit to an America had been about sixty years down the road, so at first glance I thought we must be pretty broke, but then some of my new memories met up with my old ones. Everything was cheap these days, and the dollar was still almighty, and a suburban housewife couldn’t even get credit cards in her own name.

Hang on. All evidence pointed to it being just me and Sally in the house. No man’s coats in the closet, no pictures of an absent or dearly-departed hubby, no pictures of family at all, which was downright peculiar for the era. We had a nice house, a car in the driveway, a decent amount of cash, and no man; how did Sally support us in a way that didn’t shock the neighbors, and how did she manage to pull off a solo adoption of Yours Truly? What had the Old Man set me up with?

I needed more memories.

First up, money-money-money, where did Aunt Sally get her money? We’re living in the burbs, so she’s not rich or powerful enough to just break the rules, and if she had a sugar daddy, I’d have found some trace of him. Just because they don’t actually spray doesn’t mean human males don’t mark their territory. More to the point, unless he was a perv or had a death-wish, he wouldn’t want me around screwing up the screwing, so no, there was nobody paying for the privilege of being called “Daddy” by either of us.

Come on, Powers, throw me a bone here, and not the usual kind. “Sally Sanders Is A what?” Nurse, teacher, secretary, what? It couldn’t be something with weird hours or lots of travel, or something fun-but-disreputable like an actress, dancer, or model, because she’d managed to convince the local powers that she could be trusted to raise a kid on her own. She might have the only six-year-old in town who knew how to drive a truck, shoot a pistol, ride an elephant, and pull a train (eventually), but the law and the neighbors were going to expect her to wash me, feed me, dress me, kiss my boo-boos, and walk me to school. School?!

Aw, shit; today was my first day of school, and I was gonna be the Fucking New Kid. Thanks, new memories, that was just what I needed to learn right now. Well, I wasn’t showing up with a goddamn slice of toast in my mouth, so I set out to see what we had that I could turn into The Most Important Meal Of The Day.

I did not set the kitchen on fire.

Okay, maybe a little, but running around in circles screaming at the top of my little lungs was better than a smoke alarm, and a freshly-awoken Aunt Sally was sufficiently coherent to put me out first, before rescuing the stovetop from permanent damage and the fruit basket from, no, that was a total loss.

I got my first look at my new Adult Supervision through tear-and-smoke-stained glasses, and she was pretty much what I’d expected: young, blonde, perky, responsible. Respectably hot, too, despite the unflattering nightgown, housecoat, and hair curlers. If my little kitchen mishap had gotten out of control, the firemen would have fought over the right to carry her to safety and check her out for injuries. I’d pulled that stunt a few times myself, without the curlers. Or the housecoat. Or the nightgown.

I didn’t even have to try to babble out an explanation. She automatically assumed that I was a complete darling who’d just been trying her very best to be helpful and loving and show how much she appreciated her new life with her new family and dear god I wanted to smack her. It was like she’d stepped right out of a glossy magazine article titled How To Be The Perfect Young Mother In Our Modern Age.

Fortunately I’d put everything back in her purse before my ill-advised attempt at cooking with gas. No point tipping her off too soon.

Aunt Sally’s idea of breakfast put more calories on my plate than I had in my left arm. I mean, whipped cream and butter and jam and waffles and bacon and eggs and toast and she looked like she was waiting for me to order seconds. She probably wouldn’t even recognize tofu as a fucking word, and if she’d ever made a green salad in her life, I was willing to bet she’d used bacon grease for the dressing.

I tried not to look disgusted as I took my first bite.

(!!!!!)

Ohmygod why didn’t anyone ever tell me about this stuff? Did little kids have completely different taste buds? Was this some kind of bizarro mirror universe where saturated fats were awesome or had my old body just been broken? I cleaned my plate and ordered seconds; I had no idea where I was going to put it, and I didn’t care.

I mean, I’d always loved eating, and I could navigate the menu of a five-star restaurant in 12 languages and 37 entirely different civilizations, but while I’d picked up plenty of men in diners, I’d never actually tried the food.

How could she eat like this and be so thin?!?

Wait, how could she stay thin eating like this every day? Was “Aunt” Sally a plant, part of the setup for whatever game the Old Man was running on me? Was she one of us, a different model of Muse for a different kind of job? Was her just-in-time arrival to save the day part of their plan? Was I being given enough rope to hang myself out to dry or however that goes?

Or was she just a cheerfully hyperactive over-achiever who couldn’t stay still for more than two minutes at a time, who’d woken up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and raring to go on this Most Important Day? It was possible I was over-thinking this. I had a long history of not trusting other women, after all, even if I was usually the one engaged in pre-emptive back-stabbing.

I tentatively gave my new Cooking Mama the benefit of the doubt and focused on the good news: setting myself on fire had completely ruined my PJs, and I was determined that our after-school shopping trip would include finding a replacement without feet and a back-flap. Baby steps.

After discovering that I actually could put away a multi-thousand-calorie breakfast, I had another chance for recon. I was going to need some leverage with Dear Aunt Sally, so when she went in to take a shower, I quickly tossed her bedroom.

An unlabeled box shoved way under the bed looked promising, and whoa Nellie, look at the size of this thing! For fuck’s sake, did it run on steam? This was the state of the art in 1950s lonely-woman satisfaction-makers? Damn, if I were old enough to take it for a spin, I’d be scared it’d spin me. I put it back and retreated.

I’d struck gold. All Work And No Sex Makes Sally V-v-v-v-v-v-vibrate.

Getting her laid would take a bit of work, but I was sure it would pay off. The thing people in more libertine eras don’t get is that they didn’t invent sex, they just got to show off more. Great-great-grandma could work her tongue like you wouldn’t believe, but only maybe two men and four women ever found out about it, because people would talk. Sally couldn’t pick up a nice junior executive in a bar and bring him home for the night, because what would the neighbors say?

Hell, she’d be scared that I’d tell on her, and I couldn’t possibly explain that I’d fucked more men than she had brain cells.

After my own quick smoke-removal session in the shower, it was time to gear up.

Sturdy black leather shoes, check. White socks, check. Navy blue wool skirt well below the knee, check. Crisp white cotton blouse, buttoned all the way up, check. Matching wool blazer, check. Jaunty little uniform cap and row of medals, missing in action. Did they give out medals in grade school, or would I have to make my own to complete the effect?

Yes, I was a girl in uniform, and I hated everything about it. Well, I could do some damage with the shoes, and the skirt and blazer had actual pockets big enough to hide some useful contraband, which was a huge change from my usual barely-there fashions. It just seemed a bit too dark and formal to me; didn’t little girls usually wear colorful dresses? I definitely owned some. Hell, Sally was rocking a floral-print number that showed enough leg to stop traffic, while my getup made me feel like I should be directing traffic, or handing out parking tickets or something. Give me a whistle and a badge, and I could be the shortest policewoman in town.

Instead, I was accessorizing with a cherry-red plastic coin purse, a large plaid lunchbox, and three brand-new pencils. Oh, yeah, bring it on, world! Virgin V. White, reporting for duty!

Everything I knew about life as a first-grader could be summed up with the words “first” and “grade”. I’d been near schools before, sure, turning boys into men with a wiggle and a smile while staking out a target, usually one of the teachers, but I don’t think I’d ever been inside a classroom full of kids too young to be interested in playing hide-the-sausage, and definitely not as one of those kids.

What did they do in there all day? And how? I was pretty sure things were still pretty structured in this era, with a strict hierarchy that I was going to be at the bottom of, but what about between kids in the same class? I didn’t have a clue, and my Power-provided memories didn’t supply one. I was going into the jungle, and I needed a native guide.

Shit. I needed a friend. I needed to make friends with a little girl, right away. Damn, this life was going to be elephants all the way down.

Sally walked me to school, which turned out to be of the private just-for-girls variety, a brisk twenty-minute walk from the house. Naturally, she insisted we hold hands. By daylight, the neighborhood matched the house: late Fifties, solidly middle class. I was briefly surprised by the number and variety of men we ran into along the way, politely greeting Miss Sanders and her young ward, until I noticed one of them scrambling into his car and racing off to work as soon as Sally’s legs were out of sight.

Clearly this wasn’t the first time she’d gone for a morning stroll along this route. Perhaps I should assume the role of her duenna and begin evaluating suitors for suitability; I certainly had the age and experience for the job, as well as a vested interest in the outcome.

None of them seemed to attract her interest, which I thought boded well for her standards, and, distracted by my own evaluations, I was surprised when we soon reached the school’s surprisingly sturdy gates. The resemblance to a prison was hopefully only in my head.

I didn’t need to fake a cheery farewell, because I was honestly relieved that Sally’s mystery job hadn’t turned out to be at my school. More on that later, when I had some time alone with my new memories. I headed into the courtyard and started checking out my fellow inmates.

Priority one was Finding A Friend. The older girls were out, although I appreciated the way they’d subtly modified their uniforms to be less depressingly uniform. Apparently rebellion wasn’t taught until the fifth grade, though, unless I could take it as an elective. Unfortunately, this meant that my fellow first-graders were a pretty dull bunch, and I was having trouble spotting any that showed any potential.

“Your mom’s really pretty and sweet.”

“Huh? Yeah, Aunt Sally’s a peach. Excuse me.” Damn, I could barely tell them apart. What did women actually look for when making friends?

“My name’s Katherine, but I don’t like it and I wish I had a good nickname. What’s yours?”

So much for being able to focus. “Count your blessings, kid; you could do a lot worse than Katherine, trust me.”

“Kit? That’s a great nickname! Oh, we’re going to be such good friends!”

Seriously, Powers? Could you be a little less subtle, here? I turned to look at My New Friend, and realized that I’d have to (shudder) say my name out loud for the first time. “I’m Virginia. I guess it’s nice to meet you, Kit.”

I did not kill her for having the red hair and freckles I’d been cruelly denied in my reincarnation. At least the face bore no resemblance to my old one; I guess even the Old Man knew not to push me too far on my first day.

Katherine Elizabeth Margaret Pope, aka “Kit”, she of the ten zillion potential nicknames who’d ended up letting a stranger pick one by accident, was completely unlike anyone in my centuries of experience. Mostly because she wasn’t a Power to be obeyed, a man to be inspired, a rival to be crushed, a pest to be disposed of, a fellow Muse to be tormented, or Aunt Sally, to be figured out real soon now. I was starting to suspect that my understanding of mortals might be just a tad limited by my former lifestyle.

I made it through my first day of school by keeping my eyes on her and my big mouth shut. Which turned out to be a really good idea when one of the fifth-grade rebels said A Naughty Word during recess, and I discovered that getting your mouth washed out with soap was not just an expression. Fuck, that looked nasty. Um, gosh? Golly? Jeepers?

I added “acceptable language” to my long list of future discussion topics with Kit. I’d initially planned to interrogate her over lunch, until I discovered that Sally’s cooking was as good cold as it was hot. I didn’t share. That probably made me a terrible friend.

Sally was waiting for me after school, and she’d brought the car. Oh, right, shopping. Her already-bright smile brightened further when she saw that I wasn’t alone. Kit and I were holding hands; she seemed to like it, and it helped me keep track of her. First law of the jungle: stay with your native guide at all times.

“Oh, you’ve already made a friend! And who is this lovely young lady?” That would have sounded totally phony and condescending if I’d said it, but Aunt Sally was a different breed of cat, and Kit cheerfully introduced herself. This led naturally to an invitation to join our expedition, which suited me just fine; Kit was sure to know her way around children’s stores.

The two women in my life got along like a house on fire. Unfortunately, this meant mutual giggling over the tale of me setting the house on fire, or at least myself and part of the kitchen. I needed them both breathing, though, so I took it gracefully. I just thought about demonstrating the less-recreational uses of cotton rope and hot wax.

Our mutual torture session ended as we arrived at the mall, and we went forth into the land of wash-and-wear and off-the-rack.