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Chapter Text

 

A Rousing Origin

"A superhero can only do what people generally agree is good for superheroes to do.
If you stray too far off the beaten path in search of how best to use your superpowers to actually help, you could easily end up doing things that look, at first glance, somewhat to incredibly evil.
And if people are going to turn against you once you start actually making a difference, you might as well just be a supervillain to begin with.
They look like they're having more fun anyway."

These were words of wisdom that she'd believed in, before it all began. She still did, truthfully, even if it turned out that, like many pieces of wisdom, this one was a lot more complicated and full of hazards in practical application than it sounded at first blush.

---

Wednesday, April 25th 2007
Berkeley, California
Endel Residence

The screeching of his ten-dollar alarm clock dragged Cameron up out of a dead sleep for the third time in thirty minutes. Rather than reaching for the snooze button again, he let it screech at him as he tried to summon the willpower to move and get out of bed. He really didn't want to. He wanted to turn the alarm off entirely and go back to sleep, but he was already verging on being late for school. Again.

Once he was sure he wouldn't just fall asleep again as soon as the noise stopped, Cameron shut the alarm off and dragged himself into the bathroom to shower, bumping against the doorframe as his balance wavered. It was like this every morning. It didn't seem to matter when he went to bed, or how long he slept for, or what he'd done the previous day. Falling alseep always took forever, and waking up always felt like crawling out of a grave.

There were times when he worried about that, but everybody hated getting up early, didn't they?

Cameron's hand missed the lightswitch a couple of times, then he winced as the painfully bright lights and obscenely loud fan came on. There his naked self was in the mirror. Fifteen years old. Five and a half feet tall. Just enough muscle tone to hide his ribs, and just enough fat to hide his muscle tone. Pale skin with a faint reddish-olive cast and acne everywhere. Dark wavy hair with six inches of bedhead sticking up in absurd directions.

Cameron went through his morning hygiene on automatic, barely opening his eyes for more than a second at a time. He had his own bathroom, small as it was. He and his dad and his younger sister lived in a small refurbished condo a mile or so south of Berkeley University, and Cameron got the entire ground floor to himself; since they were on a hill, the front door and garage were on the upper floor. He had his own front door with a wooden staircase leading up to the street, but he couldn't remember the last time he'd used it.

When he was finished in the bathroom and getting dressed - black khakis and t-shirt - he was starting to feel a little more alive. He ran a comb through his chaotic head of dark hair as he checked himself in his mirrored closet doors.

Cameron blinked. That was new. His eyes were a dark brown that was almost black, but that wasn't what he was seeing in the mirror. Cameron's reflection had very vibrant, very amber eyes.

Seriously, what?

That was about as far as Cameron's exhaustion-beleaguered mind got before his self-examination was interrupted by unnecessarily loud knocking.

"You out yet, bud?" Dad called. "It's seven-thirty."

Cameron shook himself, grabbed his backpack, and called back, "I'm out! I'm ready."

---

Cameron spent the short drive to school in the passenger seat of Dad's white pickup truck trying to force himself into a state that at least resembled wakefulness. It seemed to be working better than it usually did, today. He was already regaining some of the carefully cultivated situational awareness that was nearly mandatory for survival in high school if you were a shy geeky guy like Cameron was.

By the time Dad dropped him off, it was starting to get weird. He felt more awake and alert than he had since spending all easter break sleeping in. On his way to his first class he hurdled six attempts to trip him, dodged four attempts to body-block him, and he still had some inexplicable sense that there was more alertness to be had.

Cameron found his seat in first-period Biology and could barely sit still. He deliberately stopped trying to make himself more awake. That was weird too. He felt a little less wired now, but there was also a weirdly solid sense of making himself more awake that Cameron distinctly stopped doing.

Seriously, what?

---

Cameron breezed through Biology and Pre-Calculus and even managed to pay attention in History, even though he spent most of that time wondering just how he'd managed to simply will his exhaustion away.

As he sat down to eat his lunch - a greyish hamburger that tasted like cardboard and a tiny carton of unrefrigerated pulpy orange juice - his ears snatched a fragment of conversation out of the din.

"...how mutants are supposed to have, like, weird anime eye colors? Well..."

Forehead, meet formica. Duh! Double duh!

A few guys and girls sitting nearby looked over when Cameron's head hit the lunch table with a bang. Cameron ignored the snickering. It wasn't the first time Cameron had fallen asleep while eating and smacked the table with his head.

His eyes changed overnight, and then he found himself with an ability he didn't have before. That sure sounded like he was a mutant, even if super-staying-awake was like the lamest superpower ever.

It wasn't entirely useless, though. He hadn't felt this good in months. Cameron wondered what his limits were. Could he stay awake all night and not be sleepy the next day? Could he stay awake for a week? A month? There were a lot of inconveniences that went away when you didn't need to sleep, now that he thought about it.

The sounds of moving clothes, footsteps, and the tone of the snickering, warned Cameron of someone lurking up behind him. Cameron concentrated on the sounds and senses. It was easier than it usually was, since he wasn't battling sleep deprivation. He made sure his muscles were relaxed and nothing in his body language gave him away, but his heart was accelerating and he was poised on a hair trigger.

Rustling sleeve, shadow in the corner of his eye, a tingle at the top of his spine. Oh yeah. Some jerktard was trying to stick something down his shirt. Cameron's hand shot up and snapped closed around a bony wrist with an audible smack. Cameron felt something bounce off his shoulder and splat on the floor by his foot.

"Ooooh!" the jerk's friends hooted.

Cameron looked down at the open pudding cup that had fallen to the floor. The jerk tried to snatch his hand back but Cameron was holding on hard. Cameron slowly sat up and turned around to look at the guy. He recognized the grinning jerk, but couldn't remember his name.

"What?" the jerk chirped innocently.

Cameron wondered if this guy actually thought Cameron was gullible enough to doubt his guilt when Cameron had literally caught the jerkwad in the act. Cameron left his face blank and just squeezed harder as he stared in challenge.

"Dude is wack," some bystander commented.

The jerk continued to grin in what he probably thought was a disarming way, but it was just getting on Cameron's nerves. Cameron saw the shift when the guy moved. The jerk's off hand snapped out in a quick jab.

Cameron head-butted the fist.

"Yaeeh!" the jerk yelped, snatching his hand back.

Cameron surged off the bench as soon as the jerk's attention turned to his injured hand. He twisted the jerk's other arm in towards the jerk's chest and used the leverage to shove the guy off balance. The jerk went sprawling on the linoleum.

Cameron calmly used a paper napkin to wipe a small dollop of pudding off his shoulder, slung his backpack on, and took his tray to the trash.

His forehead really hurt.

Cameron saw one the teachers on lunch duty confronting the jerk. He regonized the middle-aged hispanic woman, but didn't know her name either. The jerk pointed across the cafeteria at Cameron.

"...psycho attacked me!" the jerk was saying.

The teacher looked at Cameron and then rolled her eyes at the jerk, and Cameron heard her exclaim, "Yeah right!"

Several of the jerk's friends looked like they were about to back him up, but thought better of it when they saw that the adult among them wasn't buying it. Huh. Maybe Cameron had more of a reputation than he thought, if a teacher was willing to dismiss accusations of Cameron starting a fight out of hand.

---

When he got home that afternoon, Cameron had his usual just-got-home-from-school meal and headed down to his room. He marked his calendar, made his bed, and committed himself to finding out just how long he could stay awake now. He was reluctant to say anything about his suspicions to his dad yet. Cameron wanted to be sure he was right about being a mutant before he brought it up.

Cameron dug his homework out of his backpack and got to work on it. It was still mostly boring and tedious, but being wide awake and rested-feeling made the work trivially easy.

Two hours later he'd finished all his assignments and was puttering around on the GEO Forums. Cameron liked to follow the community's fan art where he could. He clicked a relevant-looking thread and was presented with an image of a buxom battlemage barely clad in burnt tatters, escaping from a fiery cavern and facing a fork in the path. One way led through an ominous flesh-colored chamber of slime and squirming tentacles. The other portal led through a light crystalline chamber of sparkling beauty and unyielding razor-sharp edges.

While smirking in wry appreciation at the subtext in the choice the artist was depicting, Cameron also noticed something else. He was unspeakably horny. The sudden awareness of his need for release was like a punch to the gut. The scantily clad image on his screen certainly wasn't any more sexually provocative than a thousand other pieces of fan art he'd admired, but that was when he'd been suffering something like the symptoms of acute sleep deprivation.

Cameron hurriedly loosened his pants to make room for his swelling erection.

In retrospect, he probably should have anticipated this. It wasn't like his hormones were completely quiet even when he was a sleepwalking zombie. Now that he had a superpower that made him completely rested and alert, there was nothing suppressing those drives anymore.

Cameron reflected that it was a really good thing that he had as much privacy as he did. He clicked open a new tab and went browsing for porn.

---

The next day at school, Cameron made another startling discovery.

It was his usual habit to skip breakfast on school days, and last night he'd gotten wrapped up in GEO, which was a lot more fun when he was both alert and free of distractions. Gaming for seven hours actually did burn more calories than sleeping, so he was even hungrier that usual as he stared at the revolting offerings of the school cafeteria.

Why did he have to be so hungry when there was nothing available that actually resembled food? With a sigh, Cameron focused on his hunger and tried to push it away. And it worked.

Cameron was actually a bit startled. He wasn't hungry at all anymore. He stepped out of line and concentrated again, trying to figure out if he'd actually banished his hunger with his powers or if he'd just managed to put himself off by thinking about how gross the available food actually was.

While continuing to think about the school food's inedibility, Cameron concentrated on his absent feeling of hunger and kind of pulled.

Eaugh! Suddenly he was ravenous enough to eat anything. Oh holy hell he was even contemplating cannibalizing his schoolmates. Bad idea! Bad idea!

Cameron frantically tried to push his hunger away, and thanks to his momentary panic it took a few tries, but he was probably only standing there salivating like a beast for about twenty seconds. He decided to skip lunch and hide in the library.

As disturbing as it had been, he'd confirmed it. Cameron's powers worked on more than just sleepiness. This opened up all kinds of possibilities.

---

Friday, May 11th 2007
Berkeley, California
Endel Residence

Cameron once more got home from school, dropped his backpack in his room, and came back upstairs in search of lunch. The kitchen, dining room, and living room with his dad's entertainment center was basically just one large room. Dad worked at home most of the time. He was a programmer for AT&T. But since it was friday he was on the couch watching That 70's Show instead of in his office. Dreya, his spastic little sister, was cooking something at the stove.

Cameron searched the cupboards for something to snack on while deciding what to have. Dreya's pan sizzled loudly.

No had one noticed Cameron's sudden lift in demeanor or his new energy. Which was convenient, but also kind of disheartening. None of his classmates were his friends, he didn't know any of the neighbors, and he didn't actually spend that much time with his dad or his sister, but he was still a little bummed that not even his family had seemed to notice his sudden shift from stressed on the edge of suicidal to serenely upbeat.

It had been three weeks since his eyes changed, and Cameron hadn't slept so much as a minute. He'd learned that his power wasn't passive. If he stopped concentrating on his state of wakefulness for more than a few hours, he'd start getting sleepy at what felt like a normal rate, but it only took a few minutes of concentration to go from yawns and dizzy-spells to bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.

That idiom was kind of disturbingly literal when he thought about it. Brighter eyes were the first sign of mutation, and for some mutants bushy tails were a real possibility.

He had also experimented with the other aspects of his power that he'd discovered. Just to see what would happen, Cameron completely eliminated his hunger and thirst for three days. When he'd started showing signs of dehydration sickness, he'd stopped doing that real quick, though. At least he knew now that he couldn't stop eating the way he'd stopped sleeping.

Cameron's power seemed to work on any function of his body. He still blushed a little when he thought about how his power worked on sexual arousal. He'd discovered that he could go all the way to orgasm and then some without even touching himself, in under a minute, or hold himself in any intermediate state. That, he really had to be careful with, even if he figured having that kind of superhuman control would make him really good at sex. If a shy, acne-faced geek like him could ever get a girl to like him, that is. Cameron wasn't too optimistic about that.

That was the discovery that lead to the terminology he'd started using for what he could do. He could focus on a biological process and either make it stronger, which he called rousing, or make it abate, which he called numbing. The word 'rousing' primarily meant waking up, which was the very first thing he used his power for, and it was similar in both sound and meaning to 'arousing' which made for a rather appropriate pun, Cameron thought.

Munching on a Keebler cookie, Cameron went over and dropped onto their couch next to his dad. Cameron finished the cookie and reached over to hit the mute button on the remote.

"So," Cameron said. "I'm a mutant."

Dad blinked, hand freezing halfway to the remote. "You're a mutant?"

"I'm a mutant," Cameron repeated with a nod.

Dad gave him a baffled look. "When did this happen?"

"Oh my god," Dreya interrupted. "This explains so much. No wonder you're such a cold loner weirdo!"

Cameron gave his sister a flat look. "Being a mutant doesn't have anything to do with that, thank you. And what do you mean cold loner weirdo? I am not!"

"You know what I mean," Dreya said, rolling her eyes and leaning down over the back of the couch. "Wow, your eyes are all sparkly and gold."

"My eyes have been amber for three weeks," Cameron insisted, "which is how long I've been a mutant. Now go stir your vegetables."

Dreya rolled her eyes and gave him her number two Grunt of Teenage Exasperation.

"Are you sure, bud?" Dad asked. "It's said that the eye change is a nearly universal sign of meta-gene activation, but you ought to have developed some kind of paranormal ability by now, if it's really been three weeks."

Cameron nodded. "I'm sure I haven't slept at all since my eyes changed, and I've never felt more rested."

"Well, that does sound..." Dad frowned thoughtfully. "Huh."

"I can also make myself not hungry," Cameron added, "but it doesn't keep me from needing food. Speaking of which..." Cameron got up and headed for the fridge.

As Cameron grabbed the fixings for a sandwich, Dreya grabbed the pepper out of his hand and seasoned her stir-fry, and his dad came and sat down at the island. Cameron gave his sister a glare and proceeded to make his lunch.

"So, you haven't slept for three weeks," Dad repeated.

"Right," Cameron confirmed.

Dreya spun around. "Ohmygawd, you're turning into a vampire! Are you gonna get sparkly, too?"

Cameron rolled his eyes as his sister reached out and started poking him in the arm. "What are you doing?"

"Checking to see if you're hard like rock!" Dreya announced like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Cameron slapped her hands away. "I am not turning into a vampire! Cut that out."

"Pffft. Meanbutt," Dreya pouted.

Cameron turned resolutely away and focused on Dad. "Yes. I haven't slept in three weeks."

Dad leaned forward on his elbows. "Well, I only really know what's been written for Spectrum on pattern theory, but that seems like it could be a number of things. Is it passive? Can you sleep if you want to?"

"I haven't tried, but yeah I think so," Cameron said. "I have to concentrate on it every few hours to keep my wakefulness as... wakeful as possible, and if I wanted to I'm pretty sure I could kind of push in the opposite direction and knock myself out."

"Does, er, going in one direction take the same kind of effort as going in the other?" he asked.

Cameron nodded. "As far as I can tell, yeah."

"Hmm, at first I was thinking you might have an obscure Energizing trait or maybe an unusual Exemplar mental bonus, but that actually sounds more like a Psionic ability," Dad mused.

"So you're saying I've got, like, biokinesis?" Cameron asked.

"Don't hold me to it," Dad said. "I'm only guessing. But if I'm right, it's likely that you can affect bodies other than your own."

Cameron frowned. "I really should have thought to try that myself."

"You've always been good at... knowing yourself, regulating yourself," Dad said. "It follows that you'd naturally treat this biokinetic ability as an extension of that."

Cameron peered thoughtfully over the counter at his dad. He focused on rousing wakefulness, but this time he tried to exert his will across space in Dad's body, instead of in himself. There was definitely a sort of mild stretching strain that Cameron was mostly sure he wasn't imagining. Then, suddenly, with a psychic snap the strain vanished and Cameron's will smashed into his dad's biochemistry.

Dad blinked a few times, and said, "Whoa. I feel like I just had a pound of caffeine shot straight into my veins."

"So it worked?" Cameron asked, grinning.

"What worked?" Dreya interrupted again.

Dad nodded. "It definitely worked. But bud, please be careful with this. I can think of several dangerous ways you could use your powers just off the top of my head, that would be obviously unnatural. We don't get as much mutant-hate around here as in some cities, but it could still cause you a lot of trouble if you were found out. And the best way to stay hidden is to make sure they never start looking for the mutant in their midst in the first place."

"What worked?!" Dreya repeated vehemently, knocking a box of crackers and a couple paper plates to the tile.

"My sleep ray," Cameron replied flippantly, glancing significantly at the mess on the floor. "Smooth."

"You're so mean," Dreya whined.

Cameron knelt down to pick up the spilled plates and crackers. "Oh? Then why am I helping you pick this stuff up?"

Dreya gave Cameron her number three Exasperated Teenager Grunt including the flailing arms. The flailing arms that wacked the handle of her frying pan on the way down and flipped the whole thing off the stove.

Cameron had a split second where his heart jumped into his throat and he started to jerk out of the way like a startled cat, before a pan full of boiling oil and sizzling vegetables crashed down on his arm, shoulder and back.

Cameron froze in shock while Dad jumped up and grabbed the sprayer from the sink, and then the pain hit him like an avalanche. Cameron screeched as he leaped to his feet and collided with the corner of the island, falling on his good side against the cupboards. The burning agony grew and grew and then Cameron's whole body just sort of lurched away from the pain.

The pain was gone, and it was suddenly quiet. Cameron realized he'd been screaming, and had now stopped. His dad had been spraying him with cold water from the sink, and that had stopped too.

Cameron's first thought was that he'd somehow managed to create an anesthetic effect with his powers, but he could still feel the hard tile under him, the water dripping off him. His shirt felt weirdly tight on his chest as he tried to catch his breath and his underwear felt impossibly gravity-defyingly loose in the crotch. But the places where he'd been burned felt perfectly okay.

Dreya was looking at him, horrified, and Dad was looking at him, utterly baffled. Cameron looked down at... herself. Yep, those were boobs straining inside her shirt. The narrowing between her ribs and her hips was more pronounced and curved more smoothly. Her underwear felt loose because there was nothing dangling there between her thighs.

Cameron looked up, mouth hanging open. "Wha... I'm a girl! Dad! Dreya's stir-fry turned me into a girl! What the fuck!" Cameron sprang to her feet, barely noticing how effortless the movement was.

"It's not my fault!" Dreya insisted.

"It was your dinner!" Cameron squeaked. "Where did you get those vegetables? Moperville?"

"From the produce aisle just like always!" Dreya yelled. "I didn't do anything!"

"You knocked a pan off the stove and onto me! You did that!" Cameron shot back.

"ALRIGHT!" Dad barked loudly. "Dreya, clean up your spill, Cameron - "

"But!"

"Andreya Lauren Endel!" Dad roared. "Clean up after yourself. Now! And be glad you brother isn't on the way to the emergency room!"

"Fine!" And she got to it.

Cameron was staring down at herself again. Yep, still herself. "What. The. Fuck."

"Bud? Are you okay?" Dad checked as he put the sprayer back.

Cameron spread her hands helplessly. "Uh, I think so, but... Hello? Girl? Why am I a girl?"

"Don't look at me," Dad sighed. "I could make guesses, but... I could call my doctor and ask if he can refer us to someone with paranormal qualifications, who might be able to figure out what's going on."

Cameron grimaced. She hated hospitals and the modern medical culture of just throwing drugs at every little problem to see what stuck, while just kind of pretending the side effects weren't worse than the initial problem, as long as pills got sold. Still, that didn't exactly apply to her situation.

"Okay," Cameron grumbled. "But make sure they know I am emphatically refusing anything they might possibly call treatment. For anything."

Cameron went to finish making her sandwich.

---

Around the house, Cameron was in the habit of wearing loose cotton exercise shorts and plain t-shirts, so while they didn't fit quite the same on her new body, they were still just as wearable. Later, after reassuring her dad that she was still a sane healthy Cameron, and facepalming at her sister's contrived self-serving apology, Cameron retreated to her floor.

She locked the door with a sigh, and steeled herself to look in the mirror. Cameron faced her reflection in her closet doors, and was struck breathless.

"Holy crap," Cameron whispered, stepping forward to get a closer look.

Big, warm amber eyes, in a cute feminine face of perfect smooth peachy skin with wide cheekbones. Lips pouty, soft and moist and definately not chapped. Nearly black hair that waved and spiked in an artful splay, with a small lock of lusterous emerald green in her bangs. It was a gorgeous girl that Cameron saw in the mirror, and at the same time, absolutely herself. Idealized and female, but recognizably Cameron.

Suddenly needing to see the rest of what she looked like, Cameron yanked her shirt off and threw it aside, then shoved her shorts and briefs down and kicked them off. She stood there and stared at herself, hands hanging away from her body.

Peachy skin as far as the eye could see, without a pimple or blemish in sight. A fit figure on a frame that was a tad wide, but balanced well between sleek and curvy. No body hair. Yesterday his face and chest and back had been covered with pimples and coarse body hair that had been starting to grow in everywhere except the sides of his torso and his lower back. Now it was nothing but smooth skin, even down by the puffy lips and peeking folds of her very female crotch.

Cameron had only a vague sense of the scale for breast size, but the shapely globes on her chest protruded further than the width of her hand when she was standing straight, coming to a gentle point at the pink bud of her nipples.

"I look like a Final Fantasy fan artist Rule Sixty-Threed me," Cameron mused with a slightly manic giggle.

Cameron had no idea what she wanted to do about this. There was an almost giddy feeling that bubbled up in her chest at the perfect complexion and clean lines of her new shape. There was the sense-memory of the shape of her male body clinging to her, highlighting the differences and making her femaleness feel alien every time she moved. Despite that alienness it still felt good to be the shape she was now.

Cameron ran her hands over her new smooth skin and instantly became addicted to the feeling. She didn't avoid her breasts or her new vagina, but she didn't focus on them either as she explored her soft surface tactily.

Why wasn't she freaking out? Instant Girl: Just Add Burning Oil seemed like the sort of weirdness that ought to merit at least a little panic, so why did she feel like giggling in delight? Had some part of her wanted to be a girl? Cameron liked her new shape, that much was true and trying to deny it didn't even occur to her, but she didn't want to lose the old one forever.

"I've seen people talking about feeling like a woman trapped in a man's body," Cameron murmured to herself, but she couldn't remember ever feeling like a girl when she was a boy. "I don't think I ever really felt like a boy in a boy's body either, though. I just happened to look like a boy. And now... I really don't feel like a boy in a girl's body. I still just feel like me, who happens to be a girl at the moment. That's me in the mirror. It's a hot girl, but it's also me. I can't look at the hot girl and not see me."

Maybe it was as simple as that. "If I had suddenly become all," she gestured at the reflection of her perfect smooth skin and lean musculature, "but stayed a boy, would I be feeling the same way?"

"Yes...?" Cameron pondered. "I think I'd feel the same about suddenly being hot and sexy, but... imagining it... I don't want it. Okay, I would have wanted it, a lot, but now that I'm a hot girl, the idea of being a hot guy isn't better."

Cameron paused with her hands cupping her breasts, and took a moment to caress herself and enjoy how much more responsive her nipples were now. It sounded strange that the first breasts Cameron had ever touched were her own, but it would be stupid to feel weird about touching herself for that convoluted a reason. The flesh was softer than she'd expected, and the hardening of her nipples felt like a pair of tiny erections growing out of her chest, which was totally novel.

She dropped a hand and cupped her labia, questing between her folds with a finger. Cameron knew what to look for, but she had no idea what it ought to feel like. She trembled, more than a little flushed, when her pressing finger suddenly found a sensitive slippery heat and slipped through the opening. That was a new sensation, and not just in the didn't-have-those-nerves-before way.

"Oh damn, I didn't think it'd feel that warm and slippery," Cameron noted.

Trailing her wetted finger up through her folds, Cameron found her clit, and that sensation was familiar enough that the familiarity just made it stranger. Cameron stumbled, and realized she'd been standing on tiptoes with her hips thrust forward. She backed up and sat down on her bed.

"I know what I'm doing tonight," Cameron muttered. "This could be permanent, or I might turn back into a boy at any minute for all I know. I don't care how it... There's no way I'm not going to..."

Cameron decided not to rouse anything yet. She wanted to know what pleasuring herself as a girl was like without psionic aid, first. But the thought reminded her that she now knew her biokinesis worked on other people over distance, and that included her orgasm-at-will ability. She had an orgasm ray. No! Orgasm eye-beams!

Cameron rolled backwards on her bed and hugged her thighs as she cackled madly into her knees.

---

Saturday, May 12th 2007
Berkely, California
Bancroft Way

The morning sun shone down on the chilly patio tables outside a small coffee shop. At one of these tables, in a shaded corner against the brick of the building, a seemingly ordinary pair of pretty college girls sat and mulled over a pair of steaming white mugs. One was regal, with long shiny black hair and a calm confidence. The other was a petite curly blonde with her hands clasped nervously.

They were soon joined by a handsome young man in a maroon windbreaker. He sat down next to the regal one and kissed her in greeting. "It's ready," he said.

Patricia Kelly - occasionally known as Wandless, a Whateley graduate and self-styled battle mage and psionic adept - smiled wickedly at her lover and partner. Lars Verren - also known as Bloodwrought, a skilled enchanter with a knack for creative curses - pulled a heavy pendant from a pocket and set it on the table.

"It's range is about four feet," Lars explained, "and there's enough essence innate in the working for it to do maybe eight-hundred checks, just point the talisman and watch for the gem to glow. Green means you've got a virgin. Blue means you don't. Red means you're pointing it at a child."

"Excellent. Now we can be sure," Patricia purred. "There's no way the Grand Hall will keep ignoring us after we pull off this lost ritual. We'll show them that we have lore and power that they don't, and they'll have to allow us to open a chapter here, and allow us into the keeping of their secrets. A moment while I call our hired muscle."

"We're doing this now?" squeaked a wide-eyed Jill Hayes, a low-power coercive telepath who only recently chose the name Daydream. "Right now?"

Sharing a look, Lars and Patricia both leaned over the little round table and reached across, each caressing a side of Jill's face. The blonde girl blushed and looked between them like they were her whole world.

"If you're committed," Patricia said gently.

"We're depending on you for this, Jill," Lars murmured.

"Can we depend on you," Patricia asked, "to do your part?"

"Are you committed," Lars asked, "to us?"

Jill trembled and shut her eyes, then looked at them and nodded. Patricia smiled and pulled out her phone, whlie Lars sensuously brushed Jill's lips with a fingertip.

"Slamjam, it's Wandless," Patricia spoke into her phone. "It's the job we talked about. We're moving now. ... Yes, those terms are still valid. ... Good. I'm texting you an address and a passcode. Go there. In the alley you'll find a grey van with electronic doorlocks. Use the passcode. In the van's glovebox you'll find an envelope with instructions. Cut open the bottom of the envelop. Do not open the flap, that is very important. Got it? ... Good. Ta."

"Slamjam?" Jill wondered.

"A mercenary thug," Lars explained. "He's your basic Exemplar Five, but with no other powers. He's punctual and he follows orders well, and he doesn't get squeamish."

"Your part in the plan is simple, Jill," Patricia said. "While Lars and I head back to the house to finish preparing the ritual, you will take the talisman and walk around town. Slamjam will follow you at a distance in the van, while you collect our sacrifices. We need three virgin boys and four virgin girls, all at least fifteen years old."

"When you find one, just do your Imperio thing," Lars said, "and make them get in the van."

Jill grinned weakly. "Do you have to call it that?"

"Yes," Lars said. "Maybe I'll reconsider, when you come up with a name of your own for it."

Jill nodded sheepishly and stood up. Lars handed her the talisman.

Patricia watched her with a fond smile as she strode away. "So eager to obey. Come on, Lars. We have work to do."

---

Cameron was waiting when Dad came out of his room and shambled over to the coffee-maker. She was dressed in an old pair of dark grey cargo pants and a t-shirt. She plucked uncomfortably at the straining fabric around her chest and underarms, her empty backpack dangling from her other hand. "Hey, Dad?"

He blinked at her, looking confused for a moment. "Oh. Right. What is it, bud?"

"I need to go get some new clothes," Cameron said, focusing some wakefulness on him. "I can still wear most of my old clothes, but everything I'd normally wear in public fits all weird and uncomfortable now."

"Want me to drive you?" Dad asked.

Cameron shook her head. "It'll probably take me all day, figuring things out. Girl things."

"Okay. I do have calls to make," Dad said. "Maybe you should take Dreya with you. For the girl things."

"Yeah, that'll go so well," Cameron snarked.

"Cameron, she does try," Dad sighed.

"She won't be up for hours anyway," Cameron diverted, "and I want to get going while it's still early and not so crowded."

"Alright," Dad conceded. "Make sure you have your cellphone, and you can use the credit card for clothes."

"Oh, Kewl. Thanks," Cameron said.

"Clothes do count as a basic necessity up to a point," Dad pointed out. "I trust you not to go overboard."

Cameron nodded and waved as she headed out the door, swinging her backpack on. She walked with a spring in her step, feeling light on her feet. She hadn't bothered to explicitly check yet, but Cameron was pretty sure she was significantly stronger than she'd been before her sudden inexplicable girlification. She was definitely more limber.

Last night, after she spent a few hours exploring her new body, and learned how to pee sitting down, Cameron tried on most of her clothes and found that nothing fit right. Her underwear was way too loose except at the waistband, unless she pulled the briefs nearly up to her ribs, which looked ridiculous. Her smaller and darker-colored t-shirts looked okay, even if they showed off her boobs enough that she'd probably get stared at, but the real problem was they felt really awkward stretching tightly in some places and bunching up in others. Though a bit tighter, her pants still mostly fit, but the khakis and jeans chafed at her thighs when she moved in them. Surprisingly, her sneakers still fit just fine.

Figuring that new underwear was the first priority, Cameron had realized that trying to buy bras when she looked like she ought to already know all about her sizes and stuff would be beyond awkward. Either she would have to spend all day figuring it out herself, which would look weird, ask for help like a twelve-year-old which would be suspicious, or just buy everything that even looked like it might fit and end up throwing most of them away, which would be weird and wasteful.

So she had done some research.

First, she'd learned that she could check her cup size by measuring from rib to rib over her nipple. Ten inches put her at D, which was a surprise. She'd thought the D sizes were for like Sekirei-size boobs, not her generous but fairly normal-looking ones.

However, it turned out that the whole thing about 'proper support' was a complete myth. She'd gone on to read about breast anatomy mostly out of idle curiosity, and learned that the length and structure of the Cooper's Ligaments was determined genetically with separate encoded lengths for pre-lactation and post-lactation, and only began to fail when health decay or compressive atrophy interfered with elastin replenishment. Which meant that, depending on your genetics, 'proper support' would either have no effect at all, or actually accelerate sagging.

Cameron smiled wryly as she walked down the street. She still intended to get a few bras if only for forms sake, but...

She'd spent an embarrassingly long time admiring herself in the mirror last night. As a boy, Cameron had been more than a little self-conscious about his body, but the body she had now was, well, idealized. Pretty, symmetrical except for the emerald forelock, well proportioned with shapely muscles and sexy curves, and no unsightly features anywhere. There was nothing of her girl body to be modest about.

Cameron glanced down at her chest. Her nipples were clearly outlined through the black cotton. She didn't think it was too noticeable unless someone was already looking at her chest, but there wasn't a whole lot left to the imagination if anyone did look closely. And that was okay with her.

"Huh," Cameron said out loud. I wonder if I've had a few exhibitionist urges lurking around the back of my brain, that are coming out now that I've got a body that isn't a hairy, pimply, aesthetic nightmare.

Cameron ignored a crosswalk and cut across a side street onto Telegraph Avenue, heading towards the university. Her sense of modesty really was geared more towards sparing other people an unpleasant experience than it was towards shielding the sight of her body from those who'd want to see it. It had always been that way, now that she thought about it, but maybe that was just because boy Cameron had never actually met anyone who wanted to see more of his body. Cameron shrugged to herself.

It was still early and the air still had that brisk ocean chill to it, the sun coming in low and warm from over the hills. The streets weren't too busy. Cameron did nothing but simply walk around for a while, reminding herself where certain stores were that she had only noted in passing. That took over an hour all by itself, but it also confirmed something else. She'd been striding around for long enough that it was obvious that her body's fitness wasn't just for show.

Her memory was better too. Cameron had no trouble remembering every single store she'd noted and what she'd seen in the windows of each one.

Cameron started with underwear, heading into the first store on her mental list. She browsed uncertainly through some of the various options, but once she had a better idea of sizes she ended up sticking with simple. Unadorned black cotton panties in bulk. She could always come back for the less utilitarian options later, if she wanted.

It made her think about why she might want "adventurous" underwear, though.

She'd gone from exploring her girl body to thinking about equipping it. She hadn't really thought about living as a girl, yet. It wasn't like she could just go to school on monday as the same Cameron Endel that went last week. At the very least, half her teachers would notice a strange girl sitting in Cameron Endel's assigned seat. But she didn't have any friends or other obligations that would miss her boy self. She still wanted a girlfriend, and wouldn't hesitate to call herself a lesbian now, but that brought a different set of social challenges than what he'd been facing as a boy, the most daunting one to Cameron's mind being figuring out which girls were gynephiles and which were homophobes without making a fool of herself. Probably, the only time anyone would be seeing her underwear would be accidental glances in the locker room.

Strangely, Cameron wasn't too fussed one way or the other at the idea of changing for gym with the other girls. She didn't have a body she was self-conscious about anymore, and it wasn't like there was much titillation factor when she'd seen as much porn as she had.

Then there was the issue of her new body likely attracting boys' interest. Out of everything, Cameron was the least sure how she felt about that. She was fairly sure she didn't have any particular desires towards boys, but the idea of some of the people with desires towards her being boys wasn't actually off-putting. How did that work out?

Cameron shook herself out of her thoughts and moved over to the bras, but ran into a problem when she started looking at the labels. She'd figured out her cup size, but she'd completely forgotten to check her band size. "Well crud."

Fortunately, while Cameron stood there wondering how to figure out which bras would fit and debating the merits of just giving up and not getting any bras at all, a sales clerk spotted her and came to ask if she was finding everything alright. The clerk was a skinny girl who looked a few years older than Cameron.

"Um, I just realized I don't know my band size?" Cameron questioned.

"Oh," the girl said. "Well, we have a dressing room in the back. Why don't you take a few different sizes and try them until you find one that feels right?"

Cameron followed the suggestion. Once she knew her size she picked out three different bras in black to match the panties. Since, thanks to her research, she was planning to go braless whenever she could get away with it, she figured three would be enough.

At the next few stores, Cameron got a t-shirt and a tank-top or two at each while looking for pants she liked. One store had a nice selection of sports bras, which she bought five of. At another store she found some vests that appealed to her, which she thought would be handy if she wanted her lack of a bra to be less obvious when it was too warm to wear a jacket. She wound up buying several pairs of these black canvas pants that were marbled with grey to look like denim. Cameron had never favored jeans, but these only looked like jeans and she really liked the way they fit, so she bought five pairs, along with a couple of girl's khakis. She considered several colors, but somehow always ended up back in the nice neutrality of black. It just contrasted with her skin better, and avoided the issue of what went with what.

On her way to the register, Cameron spotted a mannequin wearing something she would never have imagined wanting to wear, but it was just kewl and she did want it. It was a short skirt, the black fabric pleated with a shiny emerald green geometric pattern sewn along the hem, and it actually hung a little below the waist from a pair of wide marbled green straps that made a shallow 'V' from the front and back of the loose waistband, riding above the hips. It was awesome and it matched that one bit of her hair that had turned green and there was a stack of them on a shelf under the mannequin.

It was mid-morning when Cameron headed back out onto the street, backpack weighed down with her purchases. She had one more stop to make, but this one wasn't for clothes. It was an entirely different kind of store she was heading for now, and she wasn't entirely sure she could make herself actually go in. Fortunately, she had a long walk to psyche herself up.

Cameron liked sex, and not just in the sense of wanting to have it. She found the whole subject of sexuality interesting, and worth geeking out about, not that she'd admit that casually. She was into a lot more than just porn when it came to that interest. Cameron had read about anatomy, sociosexual studies, sex life advice, you name it and a lot of erotic fiction.

Cameron thought that simple fear of the unknown went a long way to explain the foothold a lot of the cultural stigmas and urban myths about losing one's virginity had, especially for straight girls. Cameron had made a point of avoiding that, and it payed off in an unexpected way by keeping her from freaking out when she suddenly found herself female.

It also meant that Cameron had enjoyed seeing vaginas being penetrated by phalli countless times in a myriad variety of ways, and turning into a girl hadn't changed how she felt about that one bit. So, now that she was a girl, she wanted a dildo. That was just a given. She wanted to get the most out of her new anatomy, and her fingers were a poor substitute for something designed to penetrate her.

Ideally, she would have simply ordered something online, but unfortunately her dad had a habit of opening her packages for her. If he opened a box and found sex toys, well, it wouldn't be a disaster or anything, but it would be as embarrassing as all hell. So now she was making the long trek down to where she'd found an 'adult superstore' on Google Maps.

Cameron was maybe a third of the way there when she felt somebody tap her on the shoulder. She looked back to see who wanted what. It was a nervous blonde woman. Cameron met her eyes... and just zoned out completely.

It was like being lost in thought, except she wasn't thinking about anything in particular.

The next thing Cameron knew, she was leaning down between the front seats of a van while a disturbingly good-looking man in a baseball cap held a wet cloth to her face. Cameron lashed out on reflex, but the man was solid muscle and she was having trouble seeing straight. She didn't even manage to turn around and run before everything went black.

---

Cameron came to with a groan. This was the first time in three weeks that she'd been unconscious, so the first thing she did was a reflexive rousing of her wakefulness. She snapped to full alertness and found herself with her back to a cement wall with her arms chained over her head. She stood, taking her weight off her wrists, and checked herself over. Her backpack and clothes were gone. Someone had stripped her and dressed her in gown of diaphanous white layers.

She was in what looked like a cramped but well-lit basement, and she wasn't alone. There were three unconscious teenage boys in shiny white draw-string pants hanging from the adjacent wall to Cameron's left, and three unconscious teenage girls hanging from the wall next to her in white gowns like Cameron's. The adonic man from the van was directly in front of her, leaning against the side of a wooden staircase with his arms folded, watching them impassively.

Cameron realized she'd been kidnapped, and probably not by someone who wanted something as benign as ransom if the skimpy matching costumes were any clue. This was a direct, intentional threat to Cameron's person. A feeling of cold malevolence creeped through Cameron's veins like soothing ice, leaving behind an eerie calm.

First priority, information about the threat.

Cameron arranged her facial features into an expression of dawning horror, putting a fearful lilt into her voice as she looked around frantically and tugged on the manacles that held her arms over her head. "What's going on? Where is this? Who are you?"

Her frantic looking around wasn't just for effect. She used it to conceal the targeting of her fellow hostages in her biokinesis. A burst of numbing ensured they remained unconscious.

The man regarded her for a long moment while Cameron studied him through her act. Action-hero good looks and build, black boots and worn cargo pants in army green, heavy belt, hunting knife in a sheath at his hip, ring of keys opposite the knife, tactical vest over a bare torso, another knife. There was a considering expression on his face, but then it faded and he ignored her questions.

Cameron glanced fearfully between the other hostages, then hung forward as far as her restraints would allow with a pleading expression on her face. "Please. What do you want with me?"

His eyes dipped into Cameron's cleavage, but otherwise he ignored her. Cameron noticed, and decided to change tactics. She split her focus between the man's libido and her own adrenaline production, rousing both steadily. At the same time, she dropped the act completely, fear and pleading vanishing in an instant.

That got a reaction. The man jerked from his slouch and grabbed the hilt of his knife. Cameron ignored that, giving him a dead stare as she deliberately and obviously braced her back against the wall and pulled on the restraints as hard as she could. The metal bit painfully into her wrists but the bolts and chains actually creaked.

She let off on her own adrenaline and the man's libido to focus on the other hostages and rouse them just enough to wake up, then she resumed her rousing on the man.

"Let me go," Cameron said in an utterly calm tone, her face expressionless despite her growing flush from the strain.

"I do that, I don't get paid," the man responded, finally speaking.

"Let me go anyway," Cameron said in the same tone, sweat beading on her brow and body as her chest heaved in deep, measured breaths.

"Why should I?" he shot back.

The other hostages were stirring. There was a visible bulge in the man's pants as he watched Cameron strain. The man was starting to look at her with something like hunger. The ultimate goal of what Cameron was doing was to get information on her situation out of the man, but no one had ever looked at Cameron that way before. Underneath her cold rationality, Cameron liked it. She really liked it.

"Whu?" "Hey, where?" "What the fuck is this?" "What's going on?" "Ohgodohgod."

The others were awake. The blonde girl next to Cameron was already in tears as the rest made various demands. The man turned and drove his fist into the opposite wall. Concrete chips exploded across the room with a deafening crack. The man pulled his fist from a gaping hole in solid concrete to complete silence. Even Cameron paused in her steady strain against her restraints.

"I am Slamjam," the man announced. "You are now the property of the Grand Hall of Sinister Wisdom. I am going to guard you. You are going to behave. Are we clear?"

Magical supervillains. They'd been taken by magical supervillains. "Like shit. What do they want with us?"

Slamjam rounded on Cameron. "Am I gonna need to get rough with you?"

Cameron just gave Slamjam a challenging glare and intensified her rousing. He was already tenting his pants, but Cameron was aiming at a narrower target. She wasn't just trying to make him hard, and making him cream his pants would be counter-productive. Instead, she was concentrating specifically on the feeling of having gone way to long without getting off. Cameron didn't understand the exact biochemical processes she was manipulating, but as long as she had experienced it herself that didn't seem to matter.

It was getting to him. Slamjam lunged forward. Cameron forced herself to not flinch. If he was going to hit her there was no effective way to block so it would look better if she didn't try. The backhand blow crashed into her face, knocking her to the side.

"Hey! Leave her alone!" the middle boy shouted while the others gasped or whimpered.

Cameron blinked once, drinking in the pain as fuel for her cold malevolence. The whole side of her face throbbed as she calmly straightened herself up and gave him a dead stare.

"I am not impressed with your creativity," Cameron droned.

With a growl, Slamjam closed a hand around her neck, but he didn't strangle her. He leaned threateningly into her personal space and yanked down the front of her gown, exposing her breasts. The other hostages made noises of exclamation and dismay. Slamjam roughly groped Cameron's sizable handful of flesh and the girl next to her started sobbing again, whimpering something that sounded like a prayer.

"Get away from her you perv!" the boy on the left yelled.

Cameron didn't react at all. It hurt, but much less than her face, and at the same time it also felt good. That didn't matter, though. Only solving the threat mattered.

"Stop provoking him!" the hispanic-looking girl on Cameron's other side pleaded. "You don't want to do this, man. Think about the line you're about to cross."

The middle boy was making a racket tugging on his shackles and the blonde girl had her eyes shut as she whispered prayers. Slamjam and Cameron ignored them, locked in a battle of wills.

Slamjam released Cameron's neck and reached down for the hem of her gown. He slid his hand up her thigh. When his firm fingers prodded Cameron's labia and she still didn't visibly react, Slamjam suddenly pulled away with a growl.

"What? Worried you'll be interrupted?" Cameron challenged.

Slamjam glanced at the ceiling and grunted, as though dismissing that idea. Cameron took that to mean no, it would be a while until whoever was in charge came for them. Good to know. Slamjam's hand snapped out and gripped her neck again. He squeezed hard, cutting off her air as he leaned in and licked the bruise he'd given her.

"You're damn lucky the bosses need virgins," Slamjam growled, "because I am this close to just wrecking you, little girl."

He released her, and gasping for air covered her sudden disbelief. Virgin sacrifices. They were virgin sacrifices. Cameron was going to be a virgin sacrifice. She snapped. Her stoic calm and cold rationality were blown away by a simple overwhelming feeling of, Oh hell no.

Cameron looked up with death in her eyes. She narrowed her focus to Slamjam's heartbeat, and numbed with all her might. The adonic mercenary froze, clutching his chest with an expression of wide-eyed surprise and fear. A moment later he hit the floor, dead.

Cameron took a moment to marvel that that had actually worked. The other hostages were all watching, open-mouthed.

"What did you do?" the hispanic girl demanded.

"I killed him," Cameron replied as she reached for Slamjam's keyring with her foot.

"How?" the furthest girl, a petite curly brunette, boggled.

"Stopped his heart," Cameron explained, as her toes passed right through the keyring, dissolving it. "Oh fuck. The keys were fake."

"Mutant," the boy on the right breathed in realization. "You're a mutant."

"Yes," Cameron said, glancing up at her shackles and rousing her adrenaline.

The blonde girl squeaked and tried to edge away from Cameron. "Gene filth. My lord Jesus guard my soul from this taint on creation."

"Oh shut up," the boy on the left snapped at the blonde girl.

Cameron's heart was pounding as her adrenaline spiked. It is a little-known quirk of muscle composition that normally two thirds of the cells are dormant, only operating in times of immense stress. As Cameron's power forced her adrenaline to rise to critical levels, her body reached that threshold, momentarily tripling the force her muscles were capable of exerting. With strength three times that of an olympic athlete and a scream of effort, Cameron wrenched down on her shackles and tore them from their chains.

Falling to her knees in pain, Cameron clutched at her throbbing arms and gasped for breath. She crawled onto Slamjam's body and started searching for the real keys. Her breasts were still hanging out of her gown but that was so not important right now.

"Hey, mutant girl," the boy on the right said. "What's your name? Mine's Brian."

Cameron looked up at Brian, who was a scrawny but cute pale dark-haired boy. "Ca - " No, no real names where the Humanity First fangirl could hear. "Rouse. Call me Rouse."

Because, really, what else would she call herself?

"I'm Annabelle," the petite curly brunette announced. "What about the rest of you?"

"John," said the middle boy, who had the aryan look.

The hispanic girl was Katie, the gangly black boy on the left was Alan, and the blonde bigot finally admitted to being, "Marien."

"Ruuuah!" Cameron grunted in frustration. "He doesn't have the keys!"

Cameron stood and leaped lightly up the stairwell, but the door at the top was solid steel and there was no knob or anything on this side. Cameron sagged against the metal, wracking her brains for alternatives.

"So what the hell is the Grand Hall of Sinister Wisdom, anyway?" came Alan's voice from below. "That is what the dead dude said when we woke up, right?"

"You haven't heard of them?" Annabelle replied. "They're like a supervillain group for dark mages, from like New York."

"Oh my lord in heaven," Marien gasped, and started mumbling prayers again.

"Would you please stop that?" Annabelle complained.

"Did you guys hear what the dead guy said to Rouse?" Katie asked. "It was something about needing us to be virgins! Why would they care about that?"

Cameron's eye twitched.

"Oh fuck no," Brian groaned. "They're dark mages. Why do you think? We're human sacrifices!"

Cameron's whole body twitched. The others made various exclamations of dismay.

"Oh man! I don't want to die a virgin!" Alan whined.

"No shit!" Cameron yelled, spinning and leaping to the bottom of the stairwell. The others stared at her as she yanked her gown up and off, fighting with the layers of floaty fabric before she got it over her head and threw it to the side, leaving her gorgeous body bare. "I for one am not going to die a virgin, and I am damn well not about to die because I'm a virgin."

"Eeep!" Marien squeaked.

Cameron focused on all six of them and roused their arousal. The girls gasped and the guys suddenly all had a major tenting going on. Everyone but Marien shared looks and blushed, while the blonde girl trembled with a panicky wide-eyed expression.

"Damn, seriously?" Alan said, sounding impressed. "That's above and beyond."

"I don't want my virginity any more than you want yours," Cameron told him, "especially not now that it's why I'm in mortal danger."

"Oh man, you're really gonna...?" Katie trailed off.

"No! Don't listen to her!" Marien screeched. "She is an abomination with unholy powers sent to lead us astray! We must not allow her to defile out purity and virtue with her sinful lusts!"

"You have a better idea?" Brian snapped.

"No, Marien has a point even if she's not making it very well," John said. "I don't want to die, but I don't want to break my oath of celibacy while chained up in a hostage situation, to a mutant slu - mutant's sloppy seconds, either. I don't want to get out of this only to have to live with that."

Cameron twitched. She wasn't offended that he'd almost called her a slut. That was worth, at most, an eye-roll, considering why they were there in the first place. She was completely exasperated by his attitude, though. Marien's behavior could be excused by fear and a sheltered upbringing, but John actually sounded calm and thoughtful.

"Oh come on!" Annabelle exclaimed. "Saving yourself for whatever is so a moot point right now."

"Thank you," Cameron and Brian both said at the same time.

Cameron started towards Annabelle, then stopped to consider. This was most likely about ancient magical definitions of virginity, which might mean that only heterosexual intercourse would count. That sucked, because she still would have rather given her virginity to a girl, but this was about more than what she wanted.

If that was the case, she needed to get one of the boys free for the sake of the other girls, but she didn't know how long it would be before her arms would be recovered enough for another adrenaline spike. They still hurt a lot. So, maybe she needed to do all six of them anyway, just in case it counted. Cameron worried that she was rationalizing instead of being rational, then she worried that she might not have time to worry about rationalizing, then she shook it off and focused on Annabelle, intensifying her rousing.

"Alright, you first," Cameron said to the petite girl as Annabelle shivered and started breathing heavy. "You ever thought about sex with a girl?"

"No! Well, um, maybe once or twice," Annabelle mumbled as Cameron lifted the petite girl's gown, bunching it around her arms and behind her head. "God why am I so turned on right now?"

Cameron just smiled reassuringly, pressed her against the wall with her body, and kissed her. The warm skin and squishy flesh of their bare fronts pressed together felt shockingly good as their tongues met. Cameron hadn't ever actually experienced anything like that either, and it felt better than she'd imagined it would. It took her a few moments to get the hang of it, but when she did she lost herself for a while in raw sensation.

"Dayyam," Alan whispered.

There was a small part of Cameron that leaped with joy. It was her first kiss! This was a momentous occasion! The rest of her determined that part to be inappropriate and counter-productive, and stomped it down.

Shifting a bit to one side and slouching, Cameron pressed her slick vulva into Annabelle's thigh and reached down. Cameron's fingers slid through Annabelle's sweltering folds, exploring a tactile feast, as Annabelle lifted her thigh for Cameron to grind on.

"I vote John goes last," Brian said, "if he's gonna be all down on Rouse for being awesome."

Cameron's palm was flat against Annabelle's slippery labia as Cameron's two middle fingers thrust into her, encountering little resistance. Annabelle had probably broken her own hymen at some point. Cameron approved.

"Hey, I've got nothing against her," John said. "I'd just rather thwart our captors without sacrificing my virtue in the process. Telling my pastor about this is already going to be bad enough."

"Dude, they're probably going to kill us, or worse," Katie said. "You won't be around to brag about keeping your oath if we don't get out of this."

Annabelle moaned, jerking her hips forward onto Cameron's fingers. Cameron turned her gentle rousing on herself, which suddenly made the friction against Annabelle's thigh enough to catapult her to the edge of orgasm. Then, with all four fingers penetrating Annabelle, Cameron roused the other girl strongly, slamming a deep kiss down on her open mouth to muffle Annabelle's prolonged scream of pleasure. Annabelle's thrashing pushed Cameron that last little bit over the edge, just as she planned.

"I repeat, Dayyyyam," Alan said when Annabelle had been bucking and gasping for nearly a whole minute.

"And you're just okay with letting some mutant deviant do," John jerked his head at where Annabelle had sagged against Cameron, "that to you?"

"If it means not getting sacrificed to some evil magic thing, hell yes," Katie said. "Fuck, look at Annabelle. I'd want somma that even if my life didn't depend on it."

"Seriously, what is with you?" Brian asked. "You got a problem with mutants? Or are you just a homophobe?"

"The devout simply cannot condone sexual relations outside of marriage between a man and a woman," John said. "And a sinner with power is worse than the sinning itself."

Cameron looked over with a glare from where she had Annabelle's head on her shoulder. "There is no such thing as Sin. If that thing you worship can collect souls that defy His philosophy and inflict an eternity of torture on them out of petty spite, that doesn't make Him right. Or anything other than powerful."

"Of course not," John scoffed. "He is right and good because he is God, the source of morality. God is right and good by definition!"

"If that's how you define the word 'God' then the word certainly doesn't apply to that thing you worship," Cameron said evenly. "Goodness is a complex ranking algorithm that evolved in human-pattern minds, not some intrinsic property of existence. There are only values, consequences, and how the latter reflects over variations in the former among beings of unequal power."

"Guys, come on, this is so not the time," Katie said.

John was busy sputtering. "You arrogant heathen! You actually think you know better than God?"

"There is no 'knowing better' because there is no metric of morality written into the fabric of the universe that He can see and I can't. Values can only exist inside minds, and I think my values are incompatible with His," Cameron corrected over the sounds of Annabelle getting her breath back. "His values combined with His supposed power make him a threat and an enemy, not just to me but to every being my values are compatible with, including you. But you don't care about that. You're emotionally invested in the fictitious cosmic significance of your arbitrary morality. You'd rather we all die horribly than risk changing your mind."

John got even more indignant, but Cameron just hit him with a powerful rousing, sending him into orgasm before he got two words out. "Hey now...aauuuhhhh! Aauuh! Aauuh! Aauuh!"

"Dude," Alan said uncertainly as the wet spot spread across the front of John's shiny white pants.

"That has got be the most awesome superpower ever," Brian said, blushing.

"You're way too into this, you know that?" Katie said to Brian with a grimace.

Cameron stroked Annabelle's hair until the petite girl lifted her head. Cameron slid her hands to Annabelle's hips, thumbs moving in a gentle caress. Annabelle looked at her, more than a little boggled.

"Wow," Annabelle whispered.

"Do you still feel like a virgin?" Cameron asked seriously.

Annabelle shook her head. "No. Definitely no. I mean... wow."

"See?" John managed. "She enforces her blasphemy with her powers."

Cameron unbunched Annabelle's gown and pulled it over her curly head and down into place, ignoring John. She did smile a bit at Annabelle's compliment, but only for a moment. Yes, she had blown Annabelle's mind, but Cameron's biokinesis did kind of give her the mother of all unfair advantages when it came to sex.

Moving over to Marien, she found the blonde girl staring straight ahead like she'd gone catatonic. Cameron felt only exasperation and a vague sorrow for Marien, but was nursing a cold anger at whoever had raised her. Cameron reached for the hem of Marien's gown.

Marien shrieked when Cameron touched her, pressing herself back against the wall and bending to the side to avoid Cameron's hands.

"Don't touch her," John ordered, suddenly angry. "Marien is obviously an innocent and virtuous girl, even if she is hysterical right now. Are you going to force yourself on her? You've gone far enough. Do you really want to add rape to your sins?"

"No," Cameron said calmly, "but this isn't about what I want. It isn't even just about saving us." Cameron pointed at the ceiling. "It's about fucking up their plans."

Cameron turned back to Marien and roused her, hard. As Marien gasped and a deep flush spread down her neck, Cameron fondled Marien's breast through the wispy layers of white fabric. Marien's mouth opened in surprise, and Cameron quickly pulled Marien's gown up to her elbows above her head. Cameron brought her hands back to Marien's bare breasts, thumbing Marien's nipples as Cameron roused her over the edge.

"Ohhhhhhhh!" Marien whimpered as she trembled through an orgasm. Not a very strong one, but that was intentional since Cameron guessed Marien had never had one before.

Cameron dropped one hand and firmly cupped the blonde girl's vulva in her palm, slipping her middle two fingers to Marien's entrance. Cameron rubbed in slow circles as she relaxed her power, allowing Marien to come down from that first orgasm. Cameron's circling fingers slipped through Marien's folds and pushed in until they met her hymen. Then, Cameron roused at full power, almost immediately sending Marien careening into an overwhelming multi-orgasm at just the same moment Cameron shoved her fingers up through Marien's barrier.

Marien was far too stunned by the pleasure to notice the pain.

Cameron wiped her bloody fingers on the inside of Marien's gown as the moaning and shaking girl sagged in her restraints. Cameron brought Marien's gown back down into place. Once the blonde girl calmed down, she didn't say anything or even look at anyone. She just stood there looking stunned, or possibly grief-stricken, it was hard to tell.

John sighed angrily.

"Dayyyyam."

"You said that already," Brian snarked.

"So, me now?" Katie asked nervously.

Cameron swung her arms, then flexed, testing how they felt. "Maybe. I think my arms are rested enough that I could get one of the boys free, if you'd rather do it that way."

Katie looked over at the boys and blushed. "Um..."

Brian gulped, John glared at the floor, and Alan gave her a lecherous grin.

"I'm pretty sure I could use my power to make it good even if I'm not participating," Cameron informed her, thoughtfully.

Katie looked tempted, but, "I'm not on birth control."

Cameron nodded and lifted Katie's gown. Katie shyed away a little, reflexively clenching her legs together. Cameron put her hand flat on Katie's tense belly, gently stroking Katie's skin as Cameron focused a rousing on both of their arousals. Katie blushed heavily, but widened her stance and thrust her hips forward when Cameron moved in and pressed her thigh between Katie's. Katie looked up at Cameron's face and Cameron kissed her, squishing their breasts together. Cameron could almost feel the heavy thudding of Katie's heart in her skin.

Cameron finished with Katie much as she had with Annabelle. She turned to face the boys.

"Hey, are you just going in order?" Alan asked with an eager grin. "That mean you're gonna do me now?"

Cameron stared at him, and watched the grin slide off Alan's face as she kept staring at him. Yes, that was what she intended to do, but now that she was directly facing sex with a boy there were parts of her that leaped out of her subconscious and held her paralyzed.

Cameron closed her eyes and took a deep breath, mentally reviewing everything relevant about the situation, and about herself. Attraction was irrelevant, and her powers made it inconsequential. Her identity was unthreatened. She wanted to want to do this. The physical risks were minimal. She knew she hadn't been a girl long enough to be fertile yet.

The problem seemed to be embarrassment. She'd only been a girl for a day and she was about to have sex with boys. If anyone found out they'd call Cameron gay for sure! If the boys found out they'd be disgusted and freaked out that they'd been tricked into fucking a boy! That was the feeling that was stopping her.

But it wasn't valid. Cameron was attracted to whoever she was attracted to regardless of what she did or who called her what. Cameron wasn't a boy or a girl inside the girl's body, and it didn't matter what body she'd been born with or what body she'd had yesterday, she was herself and that person wasn't a boy or a girl beyond the body she was in, and right now she was in a girl body. It wasn't valid, and more importantly, it was making it more likely that they'd all be killed in some dark ritual. This feeling was a threat and must be excised from her mind like a cancerous tumor.

Cameron opened her eyes and looked at Alan, John, and Brian. Alan was affecting an aloof look despite the major tenting in his pants. John looked pissed off. Brian's expression was complicated, but the naked desire was easy enough to see. Cameron's heart stuttered. She'd enjoyed it when Slamjam had looked at her like that, and he'd been a hostile enemy. From a peer and ally, it was comparable to being smiled at for the first time in her life. It took her breath away.

As Cameron moved towards Brian, she caught Alan's sullen frown and realized that Alan had probably just been playing it cool while she collected herself. Oh well, she'd get to him.

Brian swallowed visibly as Cameron undid the drawstring on his shiny white pants and dropped them, revealing his erection. Cameron began a careful rousing on Brian's arousal, his hardness, with a slight numbing on his orgasm response. Focusing simultaneously on two different body functions that were so closely linked took a delicate touch, but Cameron had spent a few nights practicing the technique last week.

Cameron's first thought was to turn around and bend over. That would be the easiest way with Brian chained to the wall. But she wanted to see his face. She wanted to look into that hunger and exult. Despite their twinging soreness, Cameron thought her arms were still strong enough to support her weight.

Stepping forward, Cameron reached up and grasped Brian's chain where it met his cuffs, her naked from pressing against his as she tested her grip. With a firm rousing on herself, Cameron was wet enough that she felt like she could take a fist. Brian jumped slightly as droplets of Cameron's arousal fell on his erection.

Cameron reached between them and aimed him as she curled her hips forward. He slid into her, and she took a moment to experience how different it felt from her own fingers. Then she reached up for the chain and hung by her arms as she walked up the wall on either side of Brian's torso.

Brian gave her a few experimental thrusts as soon as she was in position and Cameron shuddered in pleasure. Under the effects of Cameron's rousing and his own desire, Brian couldn't help but start thrusting in earnest, Cameron bouncing a few inches away from his body as he picked up speed.

With the subtle numbing on Brian's orgasm response, he could thrust with abandon and not immediately go off like the virgin he was, and he did. Cameron felt an orgasm creeping up on her without any help from her power, and she let it happen. Her head fell back with a gasp and her muscles locked up as she forced herself not to pull away from the white-hot pleasure of Brian pounding into her through her climax.

Cameron lost control of her power as she rode it out, and by the time she realized she had, Brian was already ejaculating inside her.

Brian sagged under her and nuzzled her breasts. Cameron could have roused him back to readiness easily, but her hands and arms were aching and she was starting to worry about how much time they had left. She lifted off of him with a wet plop and dropped to her feet.

"Thank you," Brian breathed softly.

Cameron gave him a small smile and nodded as she pulled his pants up and retied them. John was hard again without any help from Cameron, but he looked even more pissed off than before, so Cameron went to Alan and started untying his pants.

Alan winced at the opaque runnels of fluid on Cameron's thighs. "Aw, man, I don't wanna get little white boy's jizz all over me. That is just gay."

Cameron raised an eyebrow at him as she let his pants fall from his half-erectness. "Do you see a bathroom? A sink? Towels?"

"Ah, no," Alan said.

"Seriously, this basement is crap," Katie muttered. "What, are they discount budget villains?"

Brian snerked.

Cameron met Alan's eyes as she roused him erect. "Your desires lay where they lay. Nothing I do will affect that. Now fuck me before we all die."

Alan laughed. "Right. Yeah."

Cameron turned around and bent over, curving her spine nearly ninety degrees to keep her balance as she leaned back into Alan. He was tall enough that his erection brushed her spine until he took up the slack in his chains and slouched. Once she got him inside her, she focused the same dual rousing and numbing on him and reached back to his hips to steady herself as he went at it with enthusiasm.

When she finished with Alan, he had a big goofy grin on his face and her legs were a little wobbly. Cameron had to rouse herself pretty strongly before she was ready for more.

John set his jaw and ignored her when she untied his pants. He didn't look at her when she roused him fully erect. When she turned to position herself as she had with Alan, John growled petulantly, "I do not consent to this. The sin of my tainting is yours."

Cameron sighed and impaled herself on him, her butt settling against his hips. He refused to move at first, even when Cameron wiggled her hips and felt him slide around inside her, so Cameron decided to test the limits of her fine control. She hit him with a much stronger dual rousing and numbing. Trembles quaked his rigid body. Concentrating carefully, Cameron slowly eased off the numbing of his orgasm response until she felt him spasm inside her, then held steady. She rocked her hips and slightly increased the numbing when she felt his penis jump again.

John shuddered as his hips gave a single involuntary thrust that would have pushed him over the edge if Cameron hadn't minutely increased the numbing effect in anticipation, letting through only a single orgasmic spasm. Cameron eased off again. Another involuntary thrust, another almost-orgasm. John let out a sound like a wounded animal and started thrusting on his own.

It took too much concentration to keep John in that state as he sped up to spare any for herself, but John was going at her with enough fervor that she felt another orgasm building in her anyway. When she climaxed it was almost painfully intense. She couldn't hold onto her power and didn't try as she choked off a scream. John exploded inside her as soon as her power stopped affecting him.

John's legs folded out from under him and Cameron fell off of him and onto her hands and knees. John was limp and panting as he hung from his arms, and Cameron was shaking. Slowly, she stood up and took a moment to let her heart-rate fall. She smiled to herself, feeling powerful as she pulled John's pants up and retied them. She'd played the urges of John's body until his will was overcome. That was no small accomplishment. That made her power dangerous.

Well, considering what she'd done to Slamjam, that was already true, but still. It was a far cry from her first impression of her own mutant power.

"So," Brian said, "what now?"

Cameron went over to Slamjam's body and started dragging it, until he was sitting up against the side of the staircase. Having a sudden thought, she scooped as much of the fluids from her thighs as she could and wiped it on the inside of his vest.

"I guess we wait for them to come get us?" Annabelle said.

"Then what?" Katie asked. "Make a break for it?"

"Like that would work," Brian said. "They'd just have that blonde lady put the whammy on us again. Duh."

"Right, right. I forgot about her, okay?" Katie defended.

"Man, the bad guys are gonna be pissed when they find their guard dead," Alan said.

Cameron went and picked up her own gown from where she'd discarded it and shook it out. "I can revive our guard and make it look like he just fell asleep. He's been down long enough that he'll have lost his short-term memories."

"Oh. And we just pretend nothing happened?" Alan asked.

"Wait! The fake key!" Brian pointed out. "It'll still be gone. They'll know something's not right."

"Maybe not," Cameron said. "If the fake keys were anything like an alarm, they would have checked on us long before now."

"That's true," Annabelle said. "So what were they then? Just false hope? Somebody's idea of a joke?"

"Possibly," Cameron said as she pulled her gown on, "but we shouldn't speculate. We should stick to what we know."

"That isn't much," Katie said.

Cameron swept the floor for broken chainlinks, kicking them under the staircase. "We know we were abducted by villainous mages. We know they have mutant muscle, and at least one woman with mind control. We know they need virgins. We don't all fit any one type, so we can infer that virginity was the only quality they were looking for. We know they dressed us in a specific way, so we can infer they're going to present us to something that wants virgins and doesn't care what else we are."

"So, human sacrifice," Katie said. "How does that help? We already figured that."

"Wait," Brian said. "She's right about them dressing us up. They wouldn't have done that if they were just going to stab us on an alter or something."

"Unless they're performing for an audience," Cameron said darkly.

"Right. Crap," Brian said.

Cameron went back to her space on the wall between Marien and Katie, and focused on Slamjam. It was hard. It felt kind of like her power was slipping off of him or through him, but she kept trying until she managed to rouse his heart into beating again and he began to stir. As soon as he moved, she numbed his wakefulness.

"I think you're right, though," Cameron said to Brian. "Our best chance is probably to bet on being unharmed when they start doing whatever they're going to do, and try to make our escape when it backfires on them. Anyone disagree?"

Cameron reached up for her broken chain and hooked the broken links through the intact ones. It wasn't perfect, but it would pass at a glance.

No one spoke up with a better plan. They settled in to wait.

---

They didn't have a clock, but it felt like about half an hour later when the heavy steel door clunked open.

A figure in a black hooded cloak glided down the staircase as though weightless. Under the cloak was a statuesque bronze-skinned woman in what looked like motorcycle leathers. Her midnight blue eyes scanned the hostages before landing on Slamjam and narrowing in anger. Cameron gave Slamjam's wakefulness a rousing nudge.

"Slamjam!" the woman barked, startling him awake. "I am near to disbelieving that I find you asleep at your post. Clearly, the rumors of your competence have been greatly exaggerated." She sniffed, and wrinkled her nose. "And you smell like dirty sheets."

Slamjam quickly struggled to his feet, scowling. "I've never fallen asleep on the job before. I assure you this was a fluke, Lady Wandless."

The knives on Slamjam's hip and chest suddenly spun themselves out of their sheaths and poised to scissor through his eyes. He recoiled, but two strands of what looked like barbed wire shot from under the woman's cloak like striking snakes and snared Slamjam around the neck and arms.

The woman, who was apparently called Wandless, smiled. "We are on a timetable, so you'll forgive me for dispensing with the haggling and cutting to the chase. Your agreed-upon fee is no longer acceptable. You will accept twenty percent, or I will throw you out and spend a few weeks completely destroying your reputation."

"Twen - hurk! Twenty percent will be fine, ma'am," Slamjam managed to get out.

The barbed wire vanished once more under the woman's cloak and Slamjam caught his knives as they fell out of the air. Wandless faced Cameron and the others, holding a hand up. She snapped her fingers and produced a glob of blazing black fire from her fingers.

"Did you know," she addressed the hostages, "it is really quite remarkable how badly one's skin can be burned without endangering survival. Internal organs are remarkably well protected from that sort of damage. I need you alive, but I don't need you unharmed. So please, feel free to flee. I could use the target practice. Otkljucati."

She's bluffing, Cameron thought as that last word warbled strangely in her mind and her cuffs opened themselves. Either we're wrong about why they dressed us up, or she's bluffing. How can I tell which?

"Now, you will follow me," Wandless ordered, gliding up the stairs.

Slamjam smacked Brian with the flat of his knife. "You heard her. Move."

John discreetly took Marien's hand and led her up the stairs first. Cameron followed Annabelle, emerging into a wide carpeted hallway with ordinary white walls. She looked around, and caught the gaze of the blonde woman from the street.

Cameron zoned out.

---

"ROUSE!"

The terrified scream of desperation snapped Cameron from her induced stupor. The first thing she noticed was the blonde woman spinning around, eyes wide with panic. This time Cameron didn't hesitate. She focused on the woman's heartbeat, and numbed with brutal force.

Cameron looked around wildly as the blonde woman crumpled. There was a rushing sound like wind and a bright pulsing green glow from a pattern of thick lines on the hardwood floor of what looked like an upscale suburban dining hall without furnature. Seven circles, connected by lines that formed a triangle inside a square, with an eighth circle that was twice the size of the rest in the center of the triangle. The boys made the points of the triangle, and the girls made the points of the square. They punched and kicked and slammed their shoulders against invisible barriers defined by the circles. The center circle contained a pool of bubbling darkness that hurt to look at.

"Fuck! Daydream's down!" Slamjam shouted from off to the side.

Something that hinted at grasping claws and squirming razor spines was creeping like living shadow along the lines of power that led to the boys' circles. It was dizzying and Cameron felt her sanity straining to track the thing. John had his eyes closed and was chanting a prayer, Alan was attacking the barrier that contained him like a madman, and Brian was shaking as he stared desperately at Cameron.

"No! How?" Wandless screeched from where she was levitating ten feet above the eldritch pool, black cloak flaring.

Cameron took the opportunity to hit Slamjam with another literal Death Glare. As the large man's heart stopped for the second time, Cameron felt an invisible force yank her head around, forcing her to look up at Wandless. Big mistake. Cameron focused another Death Glare on the woman, but before it could have much effect, the invisible force shoved her down. Cameron fought the woman's telekinetic grasp, and was surprised when it actually gave a bit, causing Wandless to wince in pain and sink a foot lower, but it was enough to make Cameron lose her own biokinetic hold.

Across the eldritch pool on the other side of the glowing pattern, a man stood haloed in green light in a hooded black cloak like the woman's. He pointed at Cameron. "It's her! The girl's got powers!"

"Yes dear, I noticed, thank y - "

A blood-curdling scream in triplicate cut through everything. Cameron watched in horror as the writhing shadow reached the boys' circles and dozens of deep cuts just appeared on their bodies. They collapsed in their circles, blood pouring from skin as they frantically tried to hold the wounds closed with their hands. Blood poured into the shadow, and shadow screamed in rage with a sound that made sparks go off in Cameron's visual field.

"Impossible! That's a rejection!" the man yelled. "Oh shit! We're sabotaged!"

"Lars! Forget the essence taps!" Wandless shouted. "Put everything into the containment!"

Cameron swore internally. Her great plan wasn't looking so great anymore. The boys would be dead in moments, and the razor shadow thing didn't look like it was going to just go away. If anything it was reaching towards Cameron and the other girls faster than it had gone for the boys.

Cameron slammed a shoulder into the barrier of her own circle in frustration. And fell right through without hitting anything. Her circle didn't have a barrier! Cameron leaped to her feet and ran around the outside of the pattern.

A flurry of knives sank into the floor in front of Cameron, making her flinch back. An invisible force tripped her and she fell flat on her back. Cameron looked in the direction the attack had come from, dazed, and saw strands of barbed wire shooting towards her from Wandless. Cameron yanked her feet up on sheer reflex and rolled backwards into a crouch, but the wire whipped sideways and caught her anyway.

"Eeaaagk!" Cameron screamed, as the razor sharp barbs bit into her shin and arms and neck, slicing into muscle and tendon as they yanked her back into the magic pattern. Lightning danced down the wires, adding to the damage with convulsions and burns. And, just as Cameron had when her sister had dumped a pan of boiling oil on her, she reacted.

The barbed wire was shredded as Cameron's flesh expelled it at lethal speeds. Shrapnel pelted the walls and impaled Marien through the chest where she was trapped in the nearest circle. Cameron flipped up to... his? Yes, his feet. He was a boy again, with the diaphanous white gown hanging off him awkwardly.

His distraction let Wandless land a telekinetically-driven knife in his shoulder, and again as the pain and awareness of the injury hit him, he reacted. The knife shot from Cameron's once more female shoulder like a bullet. It missed Wandless but it did put a big hole in the wall behind her.

"Yes!" Lars shouted. "We're okay! I'm breaking the pattern now."

Cameron noticed for the first time that the razor shadow thing had receded and the black pool had vanished. The man Lars did something and suddenly the pulsing green glow was gone, leaving the room lit only by ordinary sconces on the walls.

Not wasting time, Cameron focused a Death Glare on him. Wandless screamed in outrage as Lars toppled. Now free to move around the room, Wandless came down on Cameron with a fist full of dark fire. Cameron only barely managed to get out of the way, but as she scrambled to avoid the blow, Wandless used telekinesis to trip her again.

Other than Cameron, only Annabelle and Katie were still on their feet. In a display of remarkable bravery, they rushed Wandless, only to fall through her, scattering an illusion. The real Wandless appeared behind the two girls, her face a mask of fury. Katie was impaled on three strands of barbed wire and tossed aside to bleed out on the floor. Annabelle was hit with a glimmering shimmer that twisted through the air from Wandless' hand and ripped into her torso in an explosion of blood and gore that spattered Cameron and Wandless both. Annabelle was scattered in several bloody pieces around the room.

But their brutal executions gave Cameron enough time to focus a Death Glare. As Annabell's severed legs fell to the floor, so did Wandless.

Cameron stood in the suddenly silent room, covered in Annabelle's blood and guts. Her gown clung wetly to her front. With shaking hands, Cameron slowly pulled it off, using the clean parts to wipe down her face. For a minute or two, that was all she let herself think about. Wipe the blood off before it dries.

Dropping the soiled gown, she looked around at the carnage. For a moment she thought about letting herself just stand there naked and cry for a while, but then Katie gurgled.

Cameron ran to her side and knelt down, helpless anguish knotting in her chest as Katie looked at her. Wait. Cameron had healed herself from grievous injury three times now. She remembered what it felt like to do it, to sort of shift away from the injuries. It wasn't anything like her biokinesis, but it was there.

Cameron pulled the fabric of Katie's gown out of the way and pressed her hand to the ragged bloody holes in Katie's chest. Cameron focused on that feeling searching for it with her will... and felt her own body snap into form. Male form.

He looked down at himself, noting that it wasn't his old male body either. It was an idealized male version of himself. Cameron focused again, and this time he got it right away. He healed, and snapped into female form.

"Okay. Okay," Cameron breathed. "I've got this."

She mentally grasped and pushed and healed. Katie's body rippled, and her injuries were gone. Even the blood was mostly gone. Katie gasped, suddenly able to breath again.

"Holy crap that worked," Cameron said.

"I'm... okay?" Katie asked in wonder as she rubbed her perfectly healthy torso.

Cameron suddenly looked up. "Crap. The others!"

Rushing over to Marien, Cameron touched her and healed her. It was almost easy that time. Cameron quickly moved on to the boys and knelt down to heal Brian. She was kneeling in a pool of blood as she put her hands on Brian's chest and Healed.

Cameron got two surprises when Brian's body rippled into an intact form. First, a lot of the blood she was kneeling in was sucked back into Brian's body somehow. And second, Brian was now a girl.

"Oh fuck, oops," Cameron said, quickly shifting and healing Brain a second time. "Okay, note to self, be the same gender as whoever you're healing unless you want to gender bend them."

Cameron made sure Brian was breathing, then went to heal John and Alan, each with a quick touch as he rushed by them and towards where he'd spotted Annabelle's head. Cameron shifted and scooped up the head carefully, and was about to heal her when a yelp drew her attention.

"Oh my god," Katie whimpered from where she stood over Alan with the others.

Alan was still on the floor, looking uninjured but dangerously emaciated. His hands flopped feebly as he stared up at the others, and then he stopped moving entirely. Cameron felt a frisson of horror crawl down her spine. What did she do wrong? Mass. It was mass. Alan had the largest pool of blood and the worst injuries of the boys. There wasn't enough matter left to restore him.

"Damn it!" Cameron hissed, drawing the others' attention to her naked self. She held up Annabelle's head. "It gets worse."

Marien screamed and tried to hide in John's chest. Brian turned away and puked.

"Help me gather up as much of Annabelle's remains as you can find," Cameron ordered. "If there's enough left I think I can still save her, but if there isn't enough she'll end up like Alan."

They all stared at her.

"Now!" Cameron yelled. "Before her brain decays! Move!"

Amazingly, they moved. Even John. While they collected the bigger pieces, Cameron tried to gather up as much of the bits of guts and stuff that had scattered everywhere. It was difficult and extremely gross, but a life was at stake and Cameron had a very high squick threshold.

It wasn't enough. They gathered as many pieces of Annabelle's body as they could, and Cameron healed her. The pieces rippled into a whole, but it wasn't enough. Annabelle was even more emaciated than Alan, and didn't even wake up before her heart stopped again, despite Cameron rousing her heartbeat.

Cameron sagged in defeat.

"So, uh, what do we do now?" Brian asked.

Katie walked over to the thick curtains covering a window and threw them wide, letting in the dim orange glow of sunset. "It's that late?"

"Let's find our stuff, and call the police," John suggested.

"Or our parents," Brian said.

"You guys remember a van?" Cameron asked.

"I do," Katie said after a moment. "Yeah, and that guy Slamjam was driving."

Cameron nodded, standing up. "Let's look for it. They might have just left our stuff where we dropped it."

John blushed. "Would you cover yourself?"

Cameron just gave him a look. "Kinda have to find our clothes first."

John just grunted and headed off through the house, Marien trailing after him.

"Well, if they're going that way, let's go look this way," Katie said, heading down the other hallway.

Cameron and Brian followed her into what turned out to be the kitchen. They found the garage easily, and sure enough the van was inside, next to a pile of clothes and shoes.

"Score," Katie said, digging through the pile.

Brian opened the door to the house and called for John and Marien. Cameron opened the side of the van and found her backpack, so at least her day's shopping wasn't lost.

Not wanting to shift while the others were in any condition to notice, Cameron wrote off the clothes she'd been wearing and decided to break out her new girl clothes. The panties were weird, being all snug and form-fitting, but at the same time it was nice to not have things sticking out and flopping around down there. She grabbed a pair of the marbled black and grey faux-jeans and a black t-shirt and put those on.

"Hey, um," Brian began, leaning up against the van, dressed in bluejeans and a maroon t-shirt. "That was amazing back there. I mean, I was delirious from blood loss, but I still saw you totally save us."

Cameron glanced aside as she went to dig her shoes, wallet, and cellphone out of the pile of clothes. Katie was pulling on a pair of jeans.

"Most of us," Brian corrected with a wince. "And you damn near saved all of us. Thank you. You were awesome. Um, I don't mean to be presumptuous or anything like that, but I was wondering if I could, um, you know, know your real name?"

Cameron studied him for a moment, deciphering his expression, then smiled sheepishly. "It's Cameron."

Brian grinned brightly. "Cameron. Nice to meet you, Cameron."

"Can you stick to calling me Rouse, though?" Cameron asked as Katie finished tying her shoes.

"Ah, yeah, of course," Brian said quickly. "Sorry."

"Just being cautious," Cameron told him as she retrieved her wallet and phone from her old cargo pants.

"Right," Brian nodded, giving her a hopeful, vulnerable look. "So, um, do you think maybe we could, you know, stay in touch?"

Cameron sighed. That made it pretty obvious that Brian was having feelings towards her. The thing was, she didn't want to disappoint him. She kinda liked him. Cameron just didn't find boys attractive, and right now that seemed like a bad thing. A deficiency.

"You want to have sex again, right?" Cameron cut to the heart of the matter as gently as she could.

Brian still flinched and wrung his hands. "Ah, well, yeah, but it's not just that! I really do think it would be awesome to know you and stuff. But... you're probably, you know, out of my league."

Cameron took hold of his shoulders. "It's not that. It's just, I am a lesbian. But if it makes you feel better, I'm kinda wishing I was bi."

"Oh," Brian sighed.

That was when John and Marien came in and gathered up their clothes. There were tear tracks on Marien's face but she looked the calmest Cameron had seen her yet.

Cameron really didn't want to leave it like that with Brian, but what could she do? Actually, there were a lot of answers to that. She had her biokinesis, which let her bypass the necessity of attraction entirely. If she wanted, she could make herself horny enough to fuck just about anything, and she had genuinely enjoyed it when Brian had looked at her with lust. Her newly discovered shifting-slash-healing power would almost certainly make pregnancy impossible. Cameron grabbed Brian's arm and pulled him around the van, out of earshot.

"Tell you what," Cameron said, pulling out her phone and clearing the - several dozen, yikes - missed calls. "Give me your address, and if I can, I'll come visit you some night."

Brian's eyes went wide. "Really? I, uh, mean, some night, you said? To, like, have..."

"At least once," Cameron promised. "If you still want to, after we talk about some things."

Brian looked doubtful, probably thinking that there was no way he wouldn't want to have sex with her again, then he nodded and gave Cameron his address and number too while he was at it, but Cameron turned that down.

"I don't want any record of me on your phone," Cameron explained.

"Oh, right, okay," Brian agreed.

Cameron shrugged to resettle her backpack. "I'm going to duck out before the cops get here. I don't want anyone officialish seeing me either. Try to convince the others not to tell that they were saved by a mutant, if you can."

Brian nodded seriously, then got a hesitant look on his face as he stepped forward and hugged her. Cameron squeezed him to her with a smile. They were nearly the same height. Cameron pulled away and slipped out the side door into the house's back yard.

It was spacious, stone paths, grass, and tall brick walls. Cameron buckled the seldom-used waist strap on her backpack and did a few experimental bounces. The backpack was secure, but even with the tight shirt her boobs were bouncing all over the place. Cameron pulled the backpack off and opened it. She dug out one of the sports bras and quickly changed, stuffing the t-shirt back in with her other stuff.

With her backpack back on, including the waist strap, Cameron roused herself just a small dash of adrenaline. She sprinted across the yard and vaulted up the brick wall that bounded the yard. Standing atop it, it was easy to get her bearings. They were up in the hills. She could see the lights of the University campus through the trees to the south.

Cameron oriented herself, and ran like an olympic track star.

---

When Cameron made it home, she went in through the front door. Knowing Dad, he'd be pissed if she acted like she'd just forgotten to check in.

"Cam!" Dad exclaimed as Cameron kicked the door shut, flushed and sweaty. "Where were you? I've been trying to call you for hours!"

Cameron sighed. "Whatever you were imagining, what actually happened is probably worse. I'm okay, though."

"Worse?" Dad repeated, suddenly very concerned. "Cameron, what happened?"

"Well," Cameron said brightly, "I discovered a new power."

Dad gave her a flat stare.

"Um," Cameron hedged. "There may have been kidnapping. And supervillains. And black magic. And an attempted virgin sacrifice. I swear, I go my whole life without anything unexpected happening, and then I turn into a girl and suddenly my life's a comic book. What the hell, right?"

"Supervillains? Virgin sacrifice?" Dad repeated at a pitch she'd never heard him hit before. He shook it off. "You got away? You're okay?"

"Yeah," Cameron said, brushing passed her dad, dropping her backpack and collapsing on the couch. "It turns out I can do a literal Death Glare. My biokinesis works on heartrates, and I'm strong enough to numb one into stopping."

"You killed a bunch of - "

"They were trying to feed me to an eldritch abomination!" Cameron defended.

Dad was silent for a moment. "So, this Death Glare is the new power you discovered?"

Cameron shook her head. "No. I'll show you, but I need to change clothes first. Oh! That reminds me, did you make that appointment with your doctor or wherever, yet?"

"I called him," Dad said, perching on a barstool by the island counter. "I told him that you'd had a radical transformation, but he didn't wait for me to go into details. He gave me the number of a place called the Arkham Research Consortium in San Francisco. He said they're the people to go to to diagnose and understand mutant phenomena."

Cameron got to her feet. "Did you call them yet?"

"No, not yet."

"Good," Cameron said. "Not much point anymore, and it's not like I still need - one second, I'll be right back."

Cameron grabbed her backpack and ran down to her room. She quickly stripped out of her new clothes and put on an around-the-house t-shirt and pair of shorts. She skipped underwear, so she could shift both ways with a minimum of discomfort. Maybe she should invest in some boxers.

Cameron came back upstairs. Her dad was waiting expectantly.

"Like I said, I discovered a new power," Cameron said. "I figured out what happened when Dreya burned me. I can shapeshift by healing. Or heal by shapeshifting, but I think its the first one." Cameron shifted to demonstrate. "What do you think? Do I look enough like me to pass for the old Cameron?"

While his dad gaped, and then studied him, Cameron noticed that he felt conspicuously clean. Cameron had worked up a sweat running home, and was feeling a bit sticky when she changed, but that had gone away when he shifted. His healing power had actually reabsorbed his sweat. Come to think of it, he hadn't peed all day either, and he still didn't have to. Just how far did his healing go?

"You know, I think you could pass as your old self," Dad said. "But I think we should keep you out of school for a week, though, so your, uh 'growth spurt' doesn't alarm anyone with its suddenness."

Cameron nodded. "Well, I'm not going to complain about missing school. I just got an idea, though. I want to see something."

Cameron touched his dad's arm, and healed. Dad's body rippled. He didn't look much different, except he'd gone from mid-fifties to mid-twenties in age. Whoa.

"Whoa," Dad said, blinking. "What was that?"

Cameron just pointed towards the mirror in the front bathroom as the implications sank in. He could reverse old age. He could make anyone young and healthy with a simple touch.

"Holy shit!" Dad shouted from the bathroom.

"Yeah, that about sums it up," Cameron replied softly.

He thought he'd been at the low end of the power scale. He wasn't super strong or fast. He couldn't fly or shoot energy bolts or read minds. He could just make people's bodies do stuff that they might do anyway, only moreso. But this, this wasn't some minor power that he made useful with creativity. Healing on this scale was unarguably Great Power in the Comes With Great Responsibility sense.

Cameron plodded back to the couch. His boy parts felt weird flopping around in his shorts, so he shifted again as he sat down. So, she had mind-bogglingly powerful Healing. The question, then, was how she would use it, and on who.

---

Patricia awoke to grogginess and a splitting headache. Her hand fumbled habitually for the protection amulet under her jacket. It was a gift from Lars, the fruit of a year's labors, the ultimate backup plan. It crumbled to sand in Patricia's hand, which could only mean one thing. She had nearly died, and the amulet expended its power to resurrect her.

"Lars?" she called, trying to summon the strength to get up off her back.

It was silent. Patricia groaned in dismay as she remembered her last moments. The girl. The girl with the lock of startlingly green hair and suspicious attractiveness. A mutant. She should have seen it. She should have employed her meager skill in telepathy the second she suspected, instead of merely ordering Jill to manage the girl. The other sacrifices had been shouting for her. What was it? Rose? No, that wasn't right...

"Lars? Jill?" Patricia called out again as she managed to roll onto her side.

She was horribly weak. She had little energy and less essence. She was still in the working room, with the burnt-out magical pattern of connected circles in the hardwood. Patricia's head spun as she sat up. That girl, Rose... no, it was Rouse, and that sounded like a codename. Rouse had snapped out of Jill's control, and Jill's power had been the only thing holding the girl in her circle, since she hadn't stepped into it of her own free will. Not that it mattered in the end. The entity had rejected their offerings.

There were bodies. Two weirdly emaciated bodies, and that was Slamjam, also looking rather dead. And over the other way...

Jill, motionless and dead, and next to her, "Lars! Oh gods no."

Patricia lurched towards him, crawling over one of the bodies and collapsing over Lars' horribly still, cold chest. Patricia let the tears fall. She didn't have the strength to do anything else. What had that Rouse girl done? It seemed like some sort of subtle but lethal Psi effect, but Patricia couldn't be sure. The girl had just looked at them, and they'd fallen dead.

Patricia clutched at the empty place where her amulet had hung for the better part of her and Lars' partnership, and let the grief overtake her. Why couldn't he have kept it for himself?

"We promised, love," Patricia sobbed miserably. "We win together, and we lose together. You don't die to keep me alive! We go together! Always!"

The silence that answered her was tainted by the faint sound of approaching sirens. And she was too weak to fight. Too weak to destroy the evidence and cover her trail. She could only flee, and hope to hide until her strength returned and her essence replenished itself.

Patricia stroked Lars' cold cheek, tears falling from her cheeks. "I'm sorry, love. I can't follow you just yet. I know you'd want me to go out in a blaze of glory. I'm not going to care about glory, but I promise you this: There will be vengeance."

Chapter Text

 

It was the middle of the night, and Cameron stood naked in front of his dressing mirror. It was weird seeing himself like this. He looked almost the same as he had before he'd changed, but at the same time there was a whole world of difference.

He looked older by a year or two, he thought, his skin was peachy smoothness without blemish, body hair, or facial hair, just like his girl form. His hair was exactly the same splay of black with an emerald forelock. His muscles were more toned, his shoulders maybe just a little wider, his hips a little narrower. No more love handles. No more belly-bulge when he hunched over. His penis was thicker, and straighter. All his parts were symmetrical now.

Feel. Heal.

Cameron flexed her hands and wiggled her toes. Her stance felt different with the difference in the distance between her hip joints, as she naturally shifted her balance with the redistribution of weight. The pull of her breasts was noticeable in the moments after she switched forms, but her body was strong like an olympic athlete and the weight was nothing to that.

Feel. Heal.

Cameron flexed his hands and wiggled his toes. His extremities barely changed at all. His hands and feet were delicate for a guy's, but not overly so, while being large for girl, but again not overly so. There were subtle differences, but his hands felt mostly the same in both forms.

His face was his face, just slightly optimized and with the perfect complexion. Feel. Heal. Her face was evocative of her male face, but different enough that it wasn't obvious Cameron was the same person in both forms, though the relation was obvious. She was her own opposite sex twin.

Cameron sighed, idly fondling herself. She could switch sexes on a whim, whenever she wanted. It wouldn't have been the first thing she thought of if someone had asked her what kind of superpower she would like to have, but it was kind of... awesome. To say nothing of it being a bizarre side-effect of an even more awesome power.

A hand slid down to cup her folds. Now that she could turn back into a boy whenever she wanted, what doubts she'd had could no longer endure. Cameron liked being a girl. Not full time, but maybe half the time. At least half the time. After all, she'd had years of boy-time. She had a ways to go to catch up on her girl-time. Cameron giggled.

---

Sunday, May 13th 2007
Berkeley, California
Roof of Police Headquarters

Detective Shaun Gallagher of the SFPD Paranormal Crimes Division led his team down the boarding ramp of the SFPD's one operational dropship, and out into the blazing afternoon sun. Detective Gallagher recognized Detective Helena Aiden waiting for them on the Berkeley PD helipad and held his hand forward in greeting. They shook.

"Welcome back to Berkeley," Detective Aiden said. "I was pleased when the Chief decided to call you in on this one, Detective Gallagher. I look forward to working with you again."

Gallagher twitched a smile. "Likewise. Are you lead on this case?"

Detective Aiden nodded. "And I was first on the scene."

"Allow me to introduce my team," Gallagher said, gesturing to the four people behind him. "The distinguished gentleman on the left is Doctor Malcom Donland, our forensic specialist. The excitable young woman next to him is Scyelen Gail, our practicing mage and fan of all things creepy. She can stare into the face of a thing that would damage the sanity of you or I, and coo about it being adorable. I've seen her do it."

The girl in question beamed brightly. Detective Aiden gave her a strange look.

Gallagher gestured towards the tall, beautiful, asian-featured woman next to Scylen. "This is my second, Detective Deidra Tayler." He indicated the collected-looking black man with an air of dangerous grace. "And this is Special Agent Vaughn Dubaku, on loan from Karedonia."

"Karedonia?" Detective Aiden blurted in surprise.

Agent Dubaku inclined his head. "I am, so to speak, a diplomatic experiment. I have enjoyed lending my expertise to this team for the past two months. They are growing with me."

"'On me'," Deidra corrected out of the corner of her mouth.

"Tell me about the case," Gallagher said, stepping forward and gesturing for Detective Aiden to lead them inside.

Detective Aiden led them into the building. "Quintuple homicide in the upscale suburbs. A large geometric pattern burnt into the floor where the bodies were found. No apparent cause of death, though two of the victims appeared starved, superficially. We have two teenage witnesses in custody, a John Sampson and a Marien Bass, both claiming to have been abducted and ritually raped by a mutant calling herself 'Rouse'. We're running the codename through our DPA linkup. No hits yet."

"What were the results of the witnesses' physical examinations?" Donland asked as the six of them crowded into an elevator.

"No results," Detective Aiden groused. "Both their parents are refusing to allow them to be examined medically. Religious objections."

"Can I review their statements?" Scyelen asked. "Oh, I wanna see your photos of this pattern first, though."

"If the living witnesses cannot be examined, I would appreciate access to the deceased, if you would," Donland requested.

"Of course," Detective Aiden agreed. "I've been working on identifying the victims, fingerprint searches are still running, and we're also running a facial matching search based on a sketch of this 'Rouse' woman. We've set up a case board in the primary conference room."

The elevator dinged open, revealing a wide open room full of messy desks, ringed by glass offices. Detective Aiden led them to the largest of the glass offices. There was a small conference table with a laptop docked at each end, and a large electronic whiteboard on the long wall. Several series of photos were on display, showing the crime scene, the victims, and a detailed sketch of a lovely young woman with a messy splay of dark hair.

Deidra whistled when she saw the sketch. "This is the suspect? Yummy."

Gallagher whapped her on the back of the head.

"Changes the profile, boss. Attractive bisexual women are by far the rarest perpetrators of premeditated serial rapes. This makes it far more likely that her actions were purely a means to some other, apparently mystical, end," Deidra continued without missing a beat.

"I'd be happy to show you to the morgue now, Dr. Donland," Detective Aiden offered.

"Well then, lead on my dear," Donland said amiably.

As Detective Aiden and Donland headed out, Scyelen skipped up to the whiteboard and tapped the folder showing images of the crime scene, expanding it. She skimmed through the photos, making thoughtful noises. Agent Dubaku sat down in front of the laptop that wasn't running the whiteboard. He didn't appear to do anything, but a series of popup windows flickered across the screen, detailing a wireless access negotiation.

Gallagher and Deidra pulled up copies of the witness statements off to the side - the electronic whiteboard really was very large.

Time for the PCD to do their thing.

---

Cameron sat on the living room couch, watching his dad pace and rant. Dad was fine last night when Cameron had tested his newly discovered healing powers on him, but ever since Dad woke up this morning he was kind of freaking out. Cameron was starting to worry about him.

"...and the biomedial implications if it's an augmentation of the natural cellular repair processes as most mutant regeneration is thought to be, it would confirm so many theories about aging. But the speed! Chemical energy and delicate molecular replication processes simply can't move that fast. And raw material! The reaction produced no waste at all. Stars above, the metaphysical implications if it's not based on the natural tissue regeneration mechanisms are astounding. The implied computational cost alone ought to vindicate several highly controversial parts of Pattern Theory..."

Cameron sighed. Well, Dad was having a few good ideas while he was ranting maniacally about Cameron's ability to cure old age with a touch, at least.

---

"Fascinating," Dr. Malcom Donland intoned as Detective Shaun Gallagher and Scyelen Gail entered the morgue.

Scyelen bounced to Donland's side where he was examining the chest cavity of the emaciated female victim. "Whatcha got, Doc?"

"Ah, well Miss Gail, I believe I know how these unfortunate folks died even if I cannot imagine what caused it," Donland said, holding up a tissue sample. "Very strange, even by our standards, Shaun."

Gallagher raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"We have two unrelated causes of death among the five victims," Donland explained. "Despite appearances, our emaciated fellows here did not starve to death. Indeed, on a cellular level they're remarkably healthy."

"Annabelle and Alan, according to the witness statements," Gallagher said. "Unknown last names. No prints in the system."

Donland nodded. "Well, Annabelle and Alan here both died from massive internal hemorrhaging, caused by abnormal macroscopic thinness in their organ tissues. Note a complete lack of damage or deformity in the organ structures, other than the ruptures caused by their own weight or fluid pressures."

"Freaky. Lemme see," Scyelen said as she pulled on a pair of gloves.

"As for our more normal-looking fellows," Donland continued, moving to another slab, "at first glance they appear to have died of perfectly ordinary heart attacks. However if we take a closer look at their cardiovascular systems, we find no sign or heart disease or any other malady. I thought perhaps local electrocution, but there were no signs of electrical burns either. I can find no mundane reason for these three to have died."

"The cute guy's prints were in the system," Scyelen supplied. "His name was Lars Verren and he's a Tee-Aay in Yew-Cee Berkeley's Bonewitz Center for Magical Studies. Gallagher's gonna send me and Detective Aiden over to the campus to ask about him soon as we're done here."

"There is more," Donland told them. "I cannot be entirely certain, but I believe the large fellow here was a high-level mutant before he died. A warrant to perform an MID lookup may be in order."

Gallagher nodded. "Scye?"

"I'm reading a planar resonance on the skinnies," Scyelen reported, "but that could mean all kinds of things. We already know Mr. Verren there was possibly a practitioner, and I don't think I can tell you more than that. Sorry boss."

"Go meet up with Detective Aiden and head to the campus," Gallagher instructed. "I'm gonna get us that warrant."

"Sure thing, Gallagher!" Scyelen ran off excitedly.

---

Dad had wound down a bit, and while Cameron found his wild speculation and theorizing interesting, she was more immediately concerned with the moral implications of being a walking panacea. A shiver crawled down her spine and she felt her heart beat heavily in her chest.

Thudump. Thudump.

Out there, in the wide world, three living, thinking, feeling human beings died every time her heart beat. Lives, minds, annihilated with the decay of the brain, if not carried off by a soul to waste away in the abyss or to be enslaved by a god.

Thudump. Thudump.

Even with super speed, Cameron couldn't save more than a small fraction of those lives, and she wasn't any faster than an ordinary human. But her healing was instant, required little effort, and she didn't need to sleep. She could save hundreds, maybe thousands of lives. She could restore the entire population of a hospital to perfect health in one night.

No hospital staff would let her do that.

She would do it anyway. Cameron could knock a person unconscious with a look. Even if she was caught, her girl self didn't legally exist, and she could heal herself twice in a row quickly enough to conceal her male identity, unless someone was staring right at her face when she changed. She doubted she could break out of a jail cell, but no one who wasn't the Golden Gate Guardians would be able to get her into one in the first place, more or less.

I guess, technically, doing this would make me a supervillain, Cameron thought, shaking her head wryly.

Cameron went to look up online where the nearest hospitals were.

---

Later that day, Detective Gallagher's team gathered in the case room to compare leads. Gallagher tapped a set of files that had popped up, displaying them for the others to see. There were two MIDs and two UC Berkeley student IDs.

"Scye," Gallagher said.

Scyelen jumped up. "Two of our victims were students at the Bonewitz Center for Magical Studies. According to the attendance rosters I got a look at, Jill Hayes was in both of the classes Lars Verren Tee-Aayed for."

"They knew each other," Detective Aiden added. "Several students and their professor recalled seeing them together outside class."

"Oh, we stopped by the scene so I could do some scrying," Scyelen said, "but there were no clear traces I could detect. The ley lines in the area were kind of, um, wrinkled? I couldn't get a very good image without major prep time."

"So?" Gallagher prompted.

"Ah," Scyelen put a finger in the air, and then she slumped. "I dunno, boss. All I could tell was that major mojo went down there."

"Not very specific, Scye," Gallagher pointed out.

Scyelen pouted, and Gallagher patted her on the head.

"Agent Dubaku," Gallagher intoned.

Both of the MIDs enlarged. The first had a clear border and showed a figure in a black cloak with his face in shadow, blood-red fingerless gloves visible on his hands.

Codename: BLOODWROUGHT
Ratings: Wizard-3 / Esper-2
Techniques: Enchantment! Not enchantment.
Weak vs. Devises. Normal human weaknesses.
Affiliation: Black Swans

The second had a yellow border and showed a man that looked like GQ's version of Rambo.

Codename: SLAMJAM
Ratings: Exemplar-5 / Martial Arts - intermediate / Pistols - advanced / Assault Weapons - advanced / Sniper Weapons - intermediate
Techniques: Getting it done. Not asking questions.
Weak vs. Magic. Psi.
Affiliation: None listed.

"Lars Verren was also a mutant mage known among crafters of magical items as Bloodwrought," Agent Dubaku reported. "The name has a fair lot of notoriety for being an economic source for... creative cursed objects, among weekend dabblers. Jules Tate, codename Slamjam, was a registered mercenary. He also had a sizable reputation as reliable high-end muscle for hire. I was not able to find anything concrete on this so-called 'Black Swans' group, as our warrant did not cover secondary searches."

Detective Deidra Tayler whistled. "Think we may want to up the threat estimate on this one, boss."

"Deidra," Gallagher said.

"Our skinnies' full names are Alan F Jacces and Annabelle O Heath," Deidra reported. "They were both sixteen, and juniors at Maybeck High School. No records. Their parents have been notified."

Deidra tapped the whiteboard and brought up three Maybeck student IDs, and then enlarged one depicting a scrawny baby-faced boy with black hair. "Based on the statements from our two witnesses, and some cross-referencing with the Maybeck attendance roster, I also matched their description of 'Brian', one of the witnesses slash possible victims that fled the scene. This is Brian Farnell, seventeen, also a junior at Maybeck. Attempts to secure an interview got me nothing but angry accusations of making crank calls." She brought up a fourth student ID, this one for a Berkeley High student. "I also tracked down the last witness, the 'Katie' girl our witnesses described. This is Katie Guteriez, fifteen year old sophomore at Berkeley High. We should talk to her too."

Gallagher gave her a nod. "Speculation?"

"I'm starting to feel like there's something majorly hinky about the story our first two witnesses are selling," Scyelen opined. "I've been all over the photos of the crime scene, and I just can't figure how a ritual rape fits into whatever the perp was trying to work, and why there'd be three very different outcomes for the victims, though without knowing what they were trying to do, I can't say for sure."

"What has me confused is what a mutant mercenary and a low-rent supervillain have in common with a bunch of ordinary high school kids," Deidra said. "Scye's right. Something doesn't add up."

"My instructors were fond of saying, confusion is most often a symptom of reasoning from false assumptions," Agent Dubaku put in.

Gallagher nodded. "Deidra, Detective Aiden, pay miss Guteriez a visit. Scye, you and Agent Dubaku go talk to mister Farnell."

"What about you, boss?"

"I'm going to have a talk with miss Bass and mister Sampson," Gallagher said.

---

Cameron pulled a black cotton undershirt from her dresser and sat back down at her computer. She carefully followed the on-screen instructions for making a Shirt Ninja mask. Just because her girl self had no legal identity, didn't mean it was smart to flaunt her face for the hospital security cameras.

---

"I'm sorry, Detective," Jason Sampson said over the phone. "My son has made his statement. He's been through a harrowing ordeal, and we would appreciate it if we were left alone now." Click.

Gallagher ground his teeth, and went back into the case room. He'd been sitting and going over the files for about twenty minutes when a keyword alert popped up. He tapped it, and it expanded into a faux-live news feed.

Gallagher sat bolt upright. The image showed John Sampson with his arm around Marien Bass, standing in front of an upscale church, talking to a woman in a suitvest and skirt holding a microphone.

"...that's right Jenny, I'm here with two brave survivors of this shocking, unnatural crime," the reporter was saying, "and their caring parents, who've been gracious enough to let us speak."

"Those sons'a'bitches," Gallagher breathed.

"Mister Sampson," the reported said. "Could you tell the folks at home what happened to you?"

John Sampson nodded solemnly. "We were snatched off the street and rendered unconscious by what looked like a girl, but was revealed to be an unholy deviant from God's plan with unnatural powers. She identified herself as 'Rouse' when we woke up, stripped of our clothing and possessions and chained up in a cement room." John showed off the welts on his wrists. Welts that hadn't been there when he'd been interviewed by Detective Aiden.

Marien spoke up in a quavering voice. "Rouse held us prisoner... did unspeakable things to us... forced me to feel unspeakable things... defiled us... The others didn't survive. She is a godless deviant monster. We only made it out because the Lord is with us."

"I'm sure He is. You're very brave to do this, miss Bass," the reporter said. "Do you think you could describe this 'Rouse' for our viewers?"

"She was this tall," John answered, holding out a hand. "Skin tone just a little, um, richer than mine, but less tan. Messy black hair with a bit of bright green in the bangs. And a figure she probably sold her soul for. We've provided the police with our description, and they made a sketch."

"Thank you, mister Sampson," the reporter said, turning towards the camera. "If you see a woman matching this description, please do not confront her, but call the police immediately."

The clip ended, and Gallagher growled at the fools who were compromising his investigation. They were being played. He wasn't sure why, or by who, but he would damn well find out.

---

There was a knock at Cameron's door, and her dad's voice, sounding worried. "Cameron, you need to come watch this. There's something on the news about you,"

Cameron dropped her Shirt Ninja practice and opened up. "What kind of something?"

Dad blinked. "Back to being a girl?"

"Yeah...?" Cameron glanced down at herself. "Why?"

Dad just shook his head and waved her to follow. She came upstairs where he had a newsclip paused. He played it, and Cameron saw John and Marien together, giving an interview that blamed Cameron for the abductions, accused her of rape and murder, and implied they'd told the police the same thing. They made no mention of Wandless or the other real culprits at all.

Cameron's jaw worked soundlessly. "Those... those bigoted, lying, hypocritical, fundie faithtards!"

Dad gave Cameron a worried look. "I take it this is their idea of righteous anti-mutant action?"

Cameron sighed. "They pulled that story completely out of their ass and there's nothing to back it up but their word. The police have got to have the bodies. They've done as much damage as they can do, already. I've got better things to do than make martyrs of them."

"That's probably smart," Dad said.

"Dad?" Cameron began.

"Huh?"

"I need to go do something. It has nothing to do with them," Cameron said, pointing at the screen, "but it's probably big time illegal, and probably dangerous."

Dad look very worried. "Is it some sort of superhero clear-your-name thing? Because, Cameron..."

Cameron was shaking her head. "No, it's nothing like that. It's... are you sure you want to know? Plausible deniability, and all that," Cameron tempted.

"Oh no, you don't get away with that until you're eighteen," Dad said wryly. "I'm responsible for you, so, where are you going?"

"Hospitals," Cameron admitted. "Think about it. I may be useless in a superbattle," Cameron thought back to the fight with Wandless, "or only niche useful, but I've got a very real, very profound power to save lives. Directly. Easily. Costlessly."

"And you're worried about bureaucracy getting in the way if you go above board," Dad guessed.

"Among other things," Cameron said. "I also don't want my legal identity linked to - "

Cameron cut off as Dreya came out of her room with an armful of empty soda cans. Cameron shared a look with her dad, a silent agreement that they wouldn't mention this to the flaky one. Cameron shifted, and went back down to his room to prepare.

He'd travel as his male self. It was early evening, and there was nothing suspicious about him riding the BART. Cameron got out a pair of scissors and went into his bathroom. He carefully sheared off the lock of emerald green hair and tossed it in the trash. He was going to need to get in the habit of doing that anyway, when he went back to school.

Cameron went to his dresser and stripped off his shorts and t-shirt. He put on his heaviest cargo pants, the ones with actual pockets that he hardly ever wore, but were as nondescript as cargo pants came. He wore nothing under them. It was just easier to go without underwear when he knew he'd be shifting in his clothes, and it wasn't like he had to worry about chafing anymore. He kicked his normal t-shirt into the laundry basket and grabbed two of his plain black cotton undershirts, putting both on one under the other.

Cameron stuffed a third undershirt into the largest thigh-pocket of his pants and put the scissors in another pocket. He left his normal Nike' running shoes and dug out a pair of soft boots he'd gotten when Dad had taken the family skiing. His normal shoes had a distinctive tread. From that same trip, Cameron also had a reversible windbreaker that was green one way and blue the other. He turned it so the blue was on the outside and put it on.

Heading out through the front door down in his room that he normally never used, Cameron stomped up the creaky wooden steps, adjusting to the slightly-too-small boots, and let himself into the garage. His dad was fairly organized, so it didn't take more than a minute or two to find a crowbar and a pair of bungee cords to conceal it on his back under his jacket.

Cameron mentally reviewed his routes and targets, marveling at how good his memory had become. He left the garage and started walking.

---

Brian sat in his room, stewing. He was grounded with no internet for the rest of the week. He'd tried to explain to his mom why he'd been out so late, but she refused to believe that he was being serious. It wasn't like he'd had plans or anything, but it was still monumentally unfair.

And cutting off his internet access as a punishment for staying out late? What kind of insane troll logic was that?

Brian sighed. The one bright spot was Rouse, and her promise. He wished he had some idea when she would show up, or even just some sign to reassure him that she actually would. In spite of his best efforts, there was a fierce hope burning inside him.

Sex! Actual sex! With a girl! A totally awesome amazingly gorgeous girl with sexy superpowers that already took his virginity. Brian was beyond anxious. The thing they did down in that basement barely counted, it felt like. He wanted to lay down in bed with her and run his hands all over her skin and kiss her everywhere and savor every moment he was inside her, then cuddle with her and stare into her eyes and learn all about her hopes and dreams and fears. And more ands.

Brian let his forehead fall onto his desk with a loud thunk. "Getting way, way ahead of yourself there, Bri-bri."

The faint sound of the doorbell came from elsewhere in the house. Brian shot upright, his heart pounding. Could that be her? She wouldn't ring the doorbell would she? Firmly reminding himself to maintain some fucking dignity, Brian calmed down and cracked his door open to see if he could hear.

There were muffled voices. Was that a girl's voice? Fortunately he wasn't left guessing long.

"Brian!" his mom hollered. "Get your butt out here!"

Wincing, Brian hurried down the hall and out into the den. It definitely wasn't Rouse. His mom was standing with her arms folded across from an animated girl in a white labcoat and straight black hair in cliff-bangs. Looming behind her was a crisply-dressed black man that made Brian think, mister Murray.

"Brian Farnell?" the man that really reminded Brian of Christopher Judge in Stargate asked.

Brian slowly nodded. "Yeah...?"

"We're with the Pee-Cee-Dee," labcoat girl announced brightly, presenting an official-looking badge. "You can call me Scyelen, and that's Vaughn. We're investigating an incident that occurred on Saturday. I know it's probably hard for you, but we'd really appreciate it if you told us what happened to you last night."

Brian's mother gasped. "You mean you weren't just being a smartass about that?"

"I told you I was being serious. You didn't want to hear it," Brian complained, then after a brief pause. "Does this mean I'm not grounded anymore?"

"We'll see, and watch your tone."

"Ahem," Scyelen said, giving Brian an expectant look.

"Ah, right," Brian began. "Well, I was out on my way to Gamestop, when this blonde woman tapped me on the shoulder. Um, the bad guys called her 'Daydream' I think. Anyway, as soon as I looked at her I just kinda zoned out, and the next thing I knew I was knocked out, and waking up in some basement chained to a wall along with two other guys and four girls. Um, there was a guard. A big older guy called, um, 'Slamjam' was guarding us. I think the others said something about seeing him driving the van..."

Brian trailed off as Scyelen and Vaughn shared a very meaningful look. Scyelen pulled a folder out of her labcoat and showed Brian two morgue mugshots.

"Are these the people you saw?" Scyelen asked.

"Yeah, that's Slamjam and Daydream," Brian confirmed. "Hey, um, how'd you even know I was there? We all agreed we wouldn't... um..." Brian flushed, realizing he'd just fucked up royally.

"Mr. Farnell," Vaughn intoned, "are you aware that fleeing the scene of a crime is legally a punishable offense?"

"Ah, no?" Brian squeaked.

Scyelen rolled her eyes. "In your case we can probably let it slide, no worries. So what happened next?"

"Um, well, the guy, Slamjam, let us alone for a bit, and the seven of us, um, talked trying to figure out what was going on, other than being kidnapped, I mean," Brian said.

"Seven?" Scyelen asked intently. "You and six other teenage victims?"

"Uh, yeah...?" Brian confirmed, realizing a second too late that he might have just given Rouse away.

Scyelen leaned forward. "We know about you, Katie Gutierez, Aron Jaces, Annabelle Heath, John Sampson, and Marien Bass. Who was the seventh?"

Brian gulped. He didn't want to break his promise, but he didn't want to lie either. Scyelen pulled a sketch out of her labcoat and Brian sagged when he saw Rouse's face.

"It was her," Brian admitted. "She calls herself Rouse. She... she saved us."

Scyelen's eyes went wide. "She was one of the victims? She didn't rape you?"

Brian choked. "Whoa, hold on, what? Nobody got raped! Rouse just, um," Brian glanced aside, "um, I'm not comfortable talking about this in front of my mom," Brian diverted.

"Brian!" his mom snapped indignantly.

"Mrs. Farnell, this could be very important to our investigation," Vaughn said levelly. "I hope that you would wish to avoid obstructing us in bringing a dangerous criminal to justice."

Brian's mom scowled. "My son is still a minor. I have rights. You can't talk to him without my permission."

"Mom, please," Brian groaned.

"Why?" she demanded. "What are you trying to hide from me?"

"It's none of your business!" Brian insisted.

"I'm your mother!"

"You're a selfish untrusting troll! First you drove Dad away and now you're driving me crazy!"

"Don't you dare repeat your father's lies in my house!"

Scyelen put two fingers in her mouth and made a whistling noise they probably heard in Canada. Brian winced and his mom clapped her hands over her ears.

"Mrs. Farnell, leave the room now or we'll come back with a warrant to arrest you for obstruction," Scyelen bluffed, suddenly all kinds of menacing and creepy.

Brian's mom tried to stare her down, but in only a few moments she walked, pale and stiff, into her bedroom and shut the door. In a moment, Scyelen was all smiles and sweetness again. Brian sighed, and steeled himself.

He told them the whole story, everything he could remember, except Rouse's real name. Scyelen's eyes lit up with a frightening intensity when he described the thing that sliced him open and would have eaten him if not for Rouse. Vaughn pulled out a tablet computer and took furious notes when Brian described Wandless, and made a sketch right there. Scyelen gasped as though she'd just gotten the answer to a big puzzle when Brian confessed their failure to save Annabelle. They made him try to remember exactly where the door to the basement was, since they hadn't found that yet.

Finally he was done, and the PCD team left in a hurry.

---

Cameron carefully scanned the street outside the diner for cameras. The hospital he'd chosen loomed across the street, and he'd finally found a place to shift. Cameron went into the diner and slipped towards the back and snuck into the woman's restroom. As soon as he was inside he shifted.

Pulling her jacket off, Cameron turned it inside out and slipped it back on, the green side outward. She pulled the extra undershirt from her pants pocket and tied it around her head. Adjusting her pants on her now-female hips, Cameron checked herself in the mirror and took a deep breath.

Cameron let herself out of the bathroom, immediately focusing on anyone she could see and numbing wakefulness. A half-dozen diner patrons slumped over their meals, and a waitress fell and cracked her head on the edge of a chair. Cameron ducked down to brush her fingers over the waitress and Heal her as she strode passed.

Breaking into a sprint, Cameron quickly crossed the street and headed for the ambulance dock. It was wonderful to be able to to run like that without getting flushed and out of breath. She sprinted across the tarmac with enough speed that the cadence of her stride smoothed out and barely set her breasts wobbling.

There were a pair of EMTs stocking an ambulance in an open garage to the side. Cameron numbed them into unconsciousness without slowing. A security guard at a desk just inside looked up in alarm when Cameron crashed into the swinging doors, flinging them open. Another pair of EMTs appeared from the side just in time to fall with the guard to Cameron's numbing.

Cameron waited to see if anyone else would come to see what the noise was about while she helped herself to the security guard's keycards.

Cameron went room by room, numbing anyone she happened across unconscious and healing every patient she found, briefly shifting for the male ones and then shifting back. For some it was simple, a touch and she moved on. For others there was collateral damage. A number of formerly-elderly men and women had things like pacemakers or steel hips that exploded out of their bodies like bomb shrapnel when Cameron healed them. There was more than a little damage to the walls and one room's window was just gone, but it only took Cameron an hour to get through the whole building.

There were police cars surrounding the exits by then. It seemed an ambulance had driven up while Cameron was busy and the drivers found everyone knocked out. It barely slowed Cameron down. She turned the corner to the exit and numbed, causing the uniformed men and women to topple like dominoes. A couple got shots off, but by then Cameron was sprinting out the doors, focusing numbings on the source of the gunshot sounds.

Several police cars with flashing lights and sirens screeched around from the other sides of the buildings, but Cameron numbed the drivers, sending the cars crashing into the parked cars in the parking lot in a very satisfying way. Cameron used her crowbar, which hadn't gotten any use yet, to smash in the side windows of the police cars so she could give them all a healing touch. She moved fast, darting from car to car.

Done with that, Cameron scanned the area one last time for pursuit and ran. The girl with the green jacket and ninja mask vanished down an alley. A few moments later, a black-haired boy in a blue windbreaker emerged from the other end of the alley, slipping a pair of scissors and wisp of something green into his pocket.

---

Monday, May 14th 2007
Berkeley, California
PCD Temporary Case Room, Berkeley Police Department

"Alright, let's review the facts, people," Detective Shaun Gallagher ordered, sipping his morning coffee.

"We have two conflicting stories, between four witnesses," Agent Vaughn Dubaku stated. "Two witnesses claim our suspect, Rouse, was a fellow abductee that acted to protect them and defeat a team of four previously-unknown agents of the Grand Hall of Sinister Wisdom, three of whom are in our morgue right now. Two witnesses claim that Rouse was the abductor, and the lone perpetrator. Both sides agree that Rouse had sexual contact with them, while conflicting on the presence of consent. One side claimed the presence of a supervillain called Wandless, while the other implied her absence."

Agent Dubaku gestured, and an MID displayed on the electronic whiteboard. It had a clear border and showed a tall bronze-skinned woman in motorcycle leathers under a billowing black hooded cloak that shadowed her face.

Codename: WANDLESS
Ratings: Exemplar-1 / Wizard-2 / Psi-2 / Martial Arts - intermediate
Techniques: Telekinetic melee weapons. Force bolt. Shatterbolt. Hypnotic voice. Tazer touch. Spell eater. Ghost step.
Weak vs. Normal human weakness.
Affiliation: Black Swans

"Well," Detective Deidra Tayler said, "even if Farnell and Guteriez are telling the truth, Rouse is still guilty of at least statutory rape, extenuating circumstances not withstanding."

"Not necessarily," Detective Helena Aiden disagreed. "Rouse is not in the Dee-Pee-Aay database. Since she doesn't have an Em-Ey-Dee, maybe she's younger than your profile suggests. Maybe she's a recently-manifested minor."

Dr. Malcom Donland stepped in. "Forensic analysis identified seven individuals from Dee-En-Aay recovered from seminal and vaginal fluids found in the house's basement. Interestingly, six of those samples match our four living witnesses as well as mister Jaces and miss Heath, and the seventh does not match any of our samples."

Donland taps a file waiting on the edge of the whiteboard, displaying a nanoprint.

"If Rouse is our seventh victim, she is indeed an oddity," Donland continued. "What you are looking at, is the distinct Ex-Ex-Wye chromosome of Klinefelter syndrome. Now, for a Klinefelter to present as female, let alone functionally female, is incredibly rare, but given that Rouse is an admitted mutant, perhaps it is still more likely that this sample belongs to her than to anyone else."

"The fluid samples were all found in the basement," Deirdra pointed out, "while the magical workings appeared to take place entirely in the dining room. Can we assume those were separate events?"

"The layout of the casting diagram fits with the virgin sacrifice story moreso than the ritual rape story," Scyelen opined. "Maybe. I think. But I knew there was something hinky about those two."

"Vaughn. Deidra. Scyelen. I want you to conclusively determine the involvement, or lack thereof, of the Grand Hall," Gallagher ordered.

Just then, all of their phones made noises that announced a text message, ordering them to report for a briefing. Gallagher shared looks with his team, before shrugging wordlessly and leading the way to see what was going on.

---

Tuesday, May 15th 2007
Berkeley, California
Endel Residence

Cameron stared at the house on Google Street View. It was a long blue one-story, overgrown with trees, and it was only a few blocks away. Cameron could jog there in five minutes without crossing any major streets.

He was deliberately male as he let his thoughts dwell on Brian. Cameron wanted to test himself, to make sure agreeing to sex with a boy hadn't been some confused reaction to Cameron's inexperience being female, some psychosomatic gender identity shift.

But that wasn't the case. Being male while he thought about it didn't change what he thought about it. Would it be different if Brian wanted the male Cameron instead of the female Cameron? A little, yes, but Cameron didn't think it should be. That was just pop culture stigma that had rubbed off on Cameron growing up, not something he should let influence his decisions.

Cameron shifted. Technically, what she actually did was apply her healing power to herself, causing her form to reset to the opposite sex for some unknown reason, but Cameron had been simply calling it shifting for brevity's sake.

Dressed in a sports bra and sweatpants, Cameron put his shoes on and headed upstairs.

"Hey, Cam," Dad called from his home office, sounding amused. "Come check it out. You made the news again."

Cameron obliged, watching the clip over her dad's shoulder, titled Supervillian Attack on Hospital! It showed a tough-looking grey-haired man ducking under the police line, followed by a tall asian woman, a gothy girl in a lab coat, an older man, and an imposing black guy. The reporter was talking about the Paranormal Crimes Division from San Francisco coming in to investigate the incident, and cut to various bystanders talking about how glad they were that their dying relative is suddenly young and healthy, or how the whole thing was wack and the people who got healed ought to be quarantined, and variations between those opinions.

Cameron sighed. "I suppose I should wait to make sure all the people I healed aren't going to be quietly 'disappeared' before I do this again. Now that I've... played my hand, things are going to get nucking futz, I bet."

"I don't think it'll be that bad," Dad said, examining his own rejuvenated hands. "Aren't I supposed to be the cynical one?"

"The student has surpassed the teacher. Be proud," Cameron snarked.

Dad snorted and closed the tab. Cameron left him to his work and went out to the living room. Dreya was in the kitchen, making herself dinner. She saw Cameron and laughed, rolling her eyes. Dreya did that every time she saw girl-Cameron, ever since she found out Cameron could shift at will. Cameron flipped her off and stepped out the back into the yard.

It was a small yard, a grass-covered plateau on the side of the house, opposite Cameron's room. The sky was dim blue in the direction of the ocean, and the stars were just coming out.

Cameron turned away from the street and broke into a run. She vaulted up the fence and dropped twenty feet into the back yard of another house. She leaped and pulled herself to the top of that yard's fence, and then followed it like a balance beam. Sticking to fences and backyards as much as she could, Cameron eventually made her way to the blue house she'd looked up. Brian's house.

Cameron perched on the fence, legs dangling. She was nervous. Her impulse to blunt honesty was warring with her sense of self-preservation. She'd planned on showing Brian that she wasn't always a girl, but that was before her female identity became a person of interest, and she needed her male identity to stay separate. Now she didn't know what to do.

Maybe she could just be vague. Tell him that she's a shapeshifter and sometimes becomes male, and ask if that bothers him, and then go from there.

Cameron hopped down into the yard and went to each of the windows, peeking in through the blinds. On the far side of the house furthest from the street, Cameron saw a pair of hands holding a Nintendo DS, playing a Pokemon game. She leaned until she saw the face attached to those arms. It was Brian, reclined on top of his bed.

Cameron was surprised to find herself smiling, almost eager for what she was about to do. Was she attracted to boys after all? That would be great, but it still didn't seem like that was the case. Cameron remembered having a crush on a girl in middle school, and this didn't feel anything like that.

Brian didn't stir any base desire in her, unfortunately, but the idea of giving him the sex he wanted with her did provoke a... a vicarious thrill. It wasn't pity. It was empathy. Grinning with the relief of having solved an introspective mystery, Cameron knocked on the glass.

The blinds were yanked up, and Brian gaped as his face flushed. He broke out in a crazy grin and fiddled with the window for a moment before he got it open. Luckily, there was no screen.

"Rouse! You're actually here," Brian enthused in a loud whisper.

"Yeah," Cameron agreed. "Who's in there besides you?"

Brian glanced over his shoulder at the closed door set in a wood-panel wall, between shelves full of manga, paperback novels, and DVDs. "Uh, my mom. Last I saw she was in the den. It's just us that lives here, though."

Cameron nodded, and extended a hand. "Give me a hand up?"

With Brian to brace against, Cameron climbed catlike through the window and stood up in Brian's room. Brian was looking at her and around at his room nervously. The bed was under the window, which Cameron closed. One end of the room had a desk with a laptop next to a dresser, and the other end had an old TV and a Playstation 2.

"Kewl room," Cameron reassured him. "Wanna show me around the rest of the place?"

"Ah, it would probably be really bad if my mom knew you were here," Brian hedged, fidgeting with his hands.

"I figured," Cameron said. "That's the point. I want to use my power to put her to sleep so she won't interrupt us, but I don't want her to see my face and I don't know where she sleeps."

"Oh," Brian said, then his eyes went wide. "Oh! Some police people came by asking about what happened. They thought you were the bad guy! They know what you look like. They have a drawing of your face. My mom was there. She saw it."

Cameron sighed. "That figures. John and Marien were on the news calling me a sexual deviant and an unholy abomination. I ask you, why couldn't they just go fuck each other instead of fucking with me?"

Brian's jaw dropped. "They really did that? Those... those..."

"Hypocritical faithtards?" Cameron offered with a smirk.

Brian stopped and then burst into boyish giggles. "Yeah. What you said."

There was a knock on the door and an annoyed woman's voice. "Brian? What are you doing in there?"

Cameron spun, focusing a numbing on the source of the voice just as the knob started turning. A moment later there was a muffled thump. Cameron brushed by Brian and opened the door to reveal a thin middle-aged brunette unconscious on the floor. Cameron crouched down and scooped the woman up into her arms.

"Can you show me where her room is?" Cameron asked.

"Uh, yeah," Brian said, pointing down the hallway. "It's through the... damn you're strong."

Cameron smiled and shrugged as she followed Brian's direction. "You're mom's not all that heavy. It's not like I can pick up a car or anything like that. There are probably baseline humans stronger than me."

"What's it like?" Brian asked. "To be able to do things like just make people fall asleep with your mind?"

"It's like it gives me options," Cameron said as she went into the room Brian pointed towards. "If there's something I want to make happen, there's so many more ways I can do it now than before I got my powers."

Brian pulled the covers back and Cameron set his mom down in the bed. They got her reasonably undressed and Cameron gave her another burst of numbing as they headed out and closed the door behind them.

"So..." Brian said, shuffling nervously, his expression a mix of hesitancy and need.

"So, um, there're some things we should talk about," Cameron said, taking Brian's hand and leading him back to his room.

"Ah, okay," Brian said. "What kinda things?"

Cameron sat down on Brian's bed and kicked her shoes off. "Well, the main thing I'm worried about is, I can shapeshift. Some of the time, I'm, well, a boy. And I can see how that might bother a straight guy like you."

Brian flinched, pulling his hand away, and Cameron watched him visibly force himself to relax. "Ah, um, but you're not really a boy, right?"

Well, that at least, Cameron could answer honestly. "No. I'm not part boy, or think of myself as a boy, or anything like that" I don't really think of myself as a girl, either, but I don't think I could explain that so you'd understand.

"And, um, you're not going to ever, like, turn into a guy while you're with me, are you?" Brian asked.

Cameron chuckled. "I wouldn't do that."

Brian smiled weakly. "Oh, um, I guess I don't really mind, then. Was that, um, the only thing?"

"It was the most important thing," Cameron said. "The other thing is, I can't promise to be exclusive to you. Now, you saw my healing powers, and I'm pretty sure they work on everything, so you don't have to worry about, like, catching anything. I'll probably always be the cleanest girl you know."

"But," Brian began, then sagged. "Okay. I can live with that, too."

Cameron smiled and nudged him. "Come on, what would you do if you found yourself with a superpower that eliminates all the health risks of promiscuity?"

Brian grinned. "Yeah, I can kinda see your point."

"And look on the bright side," Cameron said. "I'm a lesbian, remember? Guys can come on to me, but I won't be coming on to any guys. If I come on to anyone it'll be girls."

Brian gave her a smile, then turned hesitant. "So, can we, um, are you gonna..."

Cameron figured he was talking about sex but was trying not to be rude by asking outright. Cameron bent down and stripped her socks off, then stood up and stripped off her sports bra and sweatpants. Brian's eyes were huge, nervous and hungry, as Cameron sat back down on the bed next to him, completely naked.

"Brian?"

He looked up and swallowed, meeting her eyes.

"If we're going to be friends, I want you to forget everything you've ever been told about how to respect a girl's physical boundaries," Cameron said intently, her voice trembling a little with the need to say this properly. "I'm here because you desire me. I will never think less of you for acting on that desire, and I will never get upset at you for touching me."

"Um, really?" Brian asked hopefully.

"Really," Cameron said warmly. "I wouldn't be here, otherwise. Now, are you going to get naked, or what?"

Brian grinned sheepishly, quickly shucking his jeans and t-shirt, leaving him in a pair of boxers tenting around his erection. Cameron pulled the blankets back on his bed and laid down on the sheets on her back, letting her limbs spread, relaxed and open. She focused a rousing on herself, and in seconds she was wet and aching to be filled. Brian hesitated for a moment, before dropping his boxers and climbing onto the bed.

"Wow, um," Brian said, blushing. "This is going to sound weird, but I think I was too busy being attracted to you to notice how attractive you are. Your body is so... it's a little intimidating."

"You don't need to be intimidated," Cameron said gently. "You're better looking than I was before I got my healing powers."

"Oh. Really? That's hard to imagine."

Brian rested a hand flat on her belly. His hands slid over her skin, exploring the contours of her waist, ribs, and hips. Cameron sighed happily. She wasn't used to being touched at all, and it really did feel good. Brian moved over her so he was straddling her torso as his hands slid onto her breasts and played with her squeezablely soft flesh. Cameron stroked her thumbs along his surprisingly-hairless thighs.

In fact, he had almost no body hair. A light sprinkling on his forearms and shins, and above his pubes, and that was all. Cameron was sure he'd had more hair than that when she'd seen him down in that basement. Was it a side effect of the healing? That would be interesting.

Brian's hands went to the sides of her breasts, squeezing them up and together as he dove in with his face, kissing and licking and suckling. He sucked one of her nipples into his mouth.

"Ohh... fuck," Cameron breathed, reaching down to her slit.

Cameron's fingers dipped into her moist heat as Brian switched nipples. It was like there was a string that ran from her nipples down her abdomen and into her clit, every suck sending a jolt of pleasure. It was a wonderful sensation and so utterly new. Cameron trailed a wet finger up and over her clit, and that set her off.

She let the moans, trembles, and twitches take her without resistance. Brian pulled back to look at her, his expression slack and unreadable.

"Did you just, you know, get off?" Brian asked.

"A little bit," Cameron told him. "And I didn't even use my powers once you started touching me."

Brian grinned bashfully

"I didn't know what having my breasts suckled would feel like. No one's ever done that to me before," Cameron said. "Let me tell you, it was awesome."

"Kewl," Brian said, glancing down at his aching erection. "So, um..."

"Whatever it is, you can say it, no matter how you think it sounds," Cameron assured him.

Brian looked around at nothing in particular. "Oh, okay, I was just wondering if we could have, you know, actual sex now, and if you'd be on top?"

Cameron smiled understandingly and nodded, scooching over. "Here, lay down."

Brian twisted down into the space next to Cameron, laying on his back. His erection bobbing slightly where it jutted up over his waist. Cameron felt a perfectly natural thrill of heat shoot through her as she put a leg over his body and slid on top of him, and his hardness poked her buttcheek and his hips rocked under her. She wanted to feel them chest to chest, so she laid flat on top of him instead of sitting up on her knees.

Brian sighed in pleasure and wrapped his arms around her. His hands went everywhere, sweeping up and down her back, following the contours of her spine, and groping her butt. The look of blissful awe on his face tugged at Cameron's affections, and when he lifted his head to kiss her, she closed her eyes and opened her lips, mentally stomping on the part of herself that whined about him not being a girl.

Cameron wriggled, trying to seat the head of Brian's shaft in the cleft of her opening while she re-readied herself with a gentle rousing. She finally reached back and grabbed him. Brian broke their kiss with a sharp intake of air. Cameron pulled her legs up, knees dragging over the sheets, and sat up just enough that her nipples were tickling the bottom of Brian's ribs. His hardness filled her, slipping through her inner labia and squeezing between her walls.

Brian groaned, his eyes rolling up as Cameron sat up the rest rest of the way, sinking down until nothing of his erection was visible. She sat on him like that for a while, eyes shut, etching every detail of the filling sensation into her deepest mind.

Cameron felt fingers stroke around her breasts and fondle her. She looked down into Brian's flushed face, alight with nervous joy, and her hips twitched forward all on their own, sending a spike of pleasure through her. Brian's hardness twitched inside her, tugging on some instinct that exulted not merely in being penetrated, but in being penetrated by a living partner.

"Um, are you gonna use your powers on me to make sure I don't go off too soon?" Brian asked hopefully.

Cameron nodded and took his left hand in her right. "Squeeze my hand harder the closer you are. When you want to cum, let go of my hand entirely. That work for you?"

Brian nodded eagerly, and Cameron started riding him. It was slow at first, as she focused a feather-light rousing on his erection and numbing on his orgasm response. She kept the biokinetic touch faint as she sped up and Brian started bucking his hips in time with her. His hand clamped down hard on hers, and she put a little more strength into her numbing.

The sight of Brian panting and writhing in pleasure was actually turning her on all on its own. Cameron applied a slight numbing to her own orgasm response and settled in to ride Brian until she just got bored.

That turned out to be for a lot longer than she'd have guessed.

It was nearly three hours later. They were both drenched in sweat. Brian was a thrashing insensate mess with a death grip on her hand, and Cameron was in a blissful zen of continuous motion and pleasure.

Brian suddenly threw her hand away as hard as he could and grabbed her hips in a grip that would have been painful if she wasn't so worked up. Cameron reacted as she'd been ready to do, barely even thinking about it, and roused both of their orgasms.

A bomb of ecstasy went off in Cameron's gut, lighting up her whole body. She screamed. Brian screamed. White out.

When Cameron came back to her senses, she was sprawled limply on top of Brian with her nose in his neck and her thighs out at a right angle from her body. She kissed the sweaty skin under her lips just 'cause it was handy, and felt Brian shudder. He'd gone flaccid and was only barely inside her, and she could feel their gooey fluids trickling down.

"Water," Brian croaked.

Cameron giggled weakly. "Yeah. Soon's we can get up."

Slowly lifting herself off the exhausted boy, Cameron went to her knees and then backed up off the bed, standing on wobbly legs. Her whole body ached and thrummed, but it was a very satisfied feeling even if she was uncomfortably tender between her legs. She offered Brian a hand and pulled him to a sitting position. Brian swung his legs off the bed and winced, hissing in pain.

"Damn I'm gonna be sore," Brian moaned, staring at his lap. "Putting clothes back on is going to be agony."

"Ah. I suppose this is why sex is only supposed to last about seven minutes, on average," Cameron offered, moving gingerly. "Want me to heal you?"

"Yeah," Brian said. "Definitely."

Cameron nodded. "Close your eyes."

Brian complied without comment. Cameron shifted and then brushed Brian's forehead with his fingertips. Brian's body rippled subtly. The sweaty sheen on his skin vanished. His genitals were suddenly dry and no longer raw. His slightly cracking lips were suddenly soft and moist again. Cameron quickly shifted back.

"Okay," she said.

Brian looked up at her. "Huh. That's strange. My body suddenly feels like what we just did happened weeks ago."

"Aw, man, you're right," Cameron said, feeling the same thing. "My healing cures sexual satisfaction? What a rip!" Cameron sighed. "Okay, that's hardly fair. It would be unreasonable for my powers not to have some drawbacks."

Brian stood up and reached hesitantly to touch her. Cameron rolled her eyes and grabbed his hand, planting it firmly on her left breast. Grinning sheepishly, Brian stepped close and slid his arms around her waist. His erection swelled against her thighs as her breasts squished against his chest. Cameron smacked herself with a quick rousing, and the sudden flush of arousal helped her melt into him and return his kiss eagerly.

Stupid brain with its defective androphilia. Maybe she could train herself to use her biokinesis automatically whenever anyone touched her, but that could get awkward when Cameron was male. Meh. Maybe autonomic arousal was overrated.

Brian pulled back and grinned. "So, I guess we're going again after we get some water?"

"Sure," Cameron said warmly. "You're still thirsty?"

"Not as much as I was before the healing thing," Brian said, "but... yeah."

Cameron nodded and followed him out into the hallway. She peaked in on Brian's mom while he went into the kitchen. The woman was still fast asleep, but Cameron numbed her some more just to be safe. Cameron heard the refrigerator open and close. Brian came back, gulping down water from a frosty plastic bottle. She finished off the rest of it when he offered it to her.

A thought occurred to her. "Hey, close your eyes again."

"Huh? Okay."

Cameron did a quick shift-heal-shift, then asked, "How does your thirst feel?"

Brian blinked. "Huh. I'm not thirsty, but I also don't feel like I just drank a bunch of water. Hey, that's kewl."

Cameron grinned. "That's what I thought. I haven't had to use the bathroom since I discovered my healing, and I've eaten, like, once."

"No way," Brian said.

"Way," Cameron said, heading back to Brian's room.

Brian followed her. "Damn. I don't even know what to say to that."

Giving in to an exhibitionist whim, Cameron crawled straight onto the bed, letting her butt stick up and give Brian a clear view. "Hey, watch this."

Cameron focused a rousing on herself, taking herself from almost nothing to soaking wet in about ten seconds. She kept the rousing up and her whole sex throbbed with a swelling pleasure until she spasmed into orgasm, letting herself tremble and moan. She folded her arms, letting her upper body down to the sheets as she looked back at Brian.

His eyes were locked on her apex and he was hard like steel. "Holy fuck, that was hot. I think you just gave me a new fetish."

Cameron grinned. "Oops?"

"Can you really do that to anybody?" Brian asked.

"Yeah, if I want," Cameron admitted.

Brian's eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment, then he blinked and looked at her, gaze sliding between her smiling face and her upturned rear. Gulping, he reached for her hips. Cameron closed her eyes and enjoyed it when his fingers massaged her folds and then were buried inside her. Brian withdrew his fingers after only a few moments, and Cameron felt his greater thickness prodding at her and then slowly sinking all the way into her.

Cameron let this one go without biokinetic influence. After all, it wasn't even midnight yet. They had all night and it wasn't like they would need to sleep, or conserve their stamina. She could scarcely believe how utterly wrong her first impression of her powers had been. She wouldn't trade her powers for Champion's.

---

Cameron went to visit Brian every night for the rest of the week. During the day, she kept an eye on the news, official and unofficial, to make sure there weren't any hints that things had turned nasty for the people she'd healed, and looked up hospitals, clinics, and travel routes to decide on her next target.

Once it was late enough that Brian's mother wouldn't get suspicious about her missing evenings, Cameron jogged over there and snuck in. She numbed his mother to sleep, and spent the rest of the night naked.

She always gave Brian a last really strong wakefulness rousing right before she left in the morning, and that seem to be enough to prevent any problems for him. Having sex was always the first thing they did, but between their bouts, sometimes they'd talk about GEO and other games, or their favorite books, or watch anime together on Brian's TV.

On friday, Brian joked that Cameron was his Magical Girlfriend. Cameron cracked up at that, but it also got her ranting about how the guys in those stories who stubbornly rejected a girl's sexual advances 'for her own good ' were always portrayed as the chivalrous hero, even though that thinking was just as guilty of degrading the girl's personhood as it was to treat the love interest's vagina like the hero's property. And just as bad for boys, was how the male characters who didn't do this were instead beaten to a bloody pulp by the female characters every time they expressed any interest at all.

Fortunately, by then Brian was comfortable enough with Cameron to distract her by tackling her flat onto the bed, mounting her from behind, and fucking her silly. Cameron approved.

---

Saturday, May 19th 2007
Berkeley, California
Roof of Police Headquarters

Detective Helena Aiden shook Detective Shaun Gallagher's hand. The case was in danger of going cold and the PCD had responsibilities in their own city, but they'd given her a solid foundation to work from. Still, she liked them, and liked working with them. She was sorry to see them go.

"My team's reports are on file, and updated profiles for Rouse and Wandless are archived on your server with the Eff-Be-Ey's files on the Grand Hall," Gallagher told her. "Good hunting, Helena."

She smiled as he released her hand and turned to board the SFPD dropship.

"I was so useless on this case," Scyelen sighed as she headed up the ramp with Detective Tayler. "Even with the hospital break-in, the security cameras were worth more than me. At least Doc had fun examining the quote-unquote victims..."

The boarding ramp sealed shut with a hiss. Helena backed away as the dropships engines spun to life. She looked away from the wind, and saw something strange. A figure was silhouetted against the setting sun on a distant rooftop. Helena hurried around the helipad to get a better look, but the figure was gone.

---

Later...
Oakland, California

Having decided that hitting two hospitals in Berkeley in a row would be too obvious, Cameron had taken the BART down to Oakland. He'd pulled the same stunt as last time with a nearby bathroom to cover his change, and now she was racing across the street at a sprint, clad in green jacket and shirt-ninja mask.

This place had more security than her last target, but she was methodical as she moved into the building. No one was left awake to raise an alarm.

Like last time, she went room to room, healing everyone she found. However, one of the patients she came across was a recent amputee, and she was worried that healing him might be fatal. Cameron paused to consider. The man was somewhat overweight, but Cameron could only guess if the man had enough excess mass to make a new leg.

There was an intake of breath behind her. Crap! Situational awareness much?

Cameron spun around, already focusing a numbing on the thickset woman in a security uniform, but the woman threw her hands up and yelped, "Wait!"

The woman was already swaying into unconsciousness by the time Cameron realized that she wasn't acting hostile. Cameron darted forward and caught the woman, easing her gently to the floor and Healing her for her trouble. The effect was interesting. The woman's mass redistributed, shrinking her somewhat bulbous belly to fill out her curves and harden her muscles. Cameron helped herself to the woman's keys.

Cameron left the maimed man. He probably would have survived, but that wasn't a risk that was Cameron's to take. She hurried through the rest of the building. This time, when she left, she didn't even have to flee a fleet of police cars.

As Cameron headed home on the BART, he realized that he owed that security woman. She had to have known Cameron was in the building, from a security monitor or something, and she'd chosen to confront Cameron in person instead of raising the alarm. Why had she done that?

---

Sunday, May 20th 2007
Berkeley , California
Farnell Residence

Cameron lay on her back, with Brian sprawled and spent on top of her. He didn't bother to support himself or roll off of her. He knew by now that she could take his full weight comfortably.

"Rouse?" Brian asked idly. "Don't take this the wrong way, but how were you a virgin when we met? I mean, I'm not so full of myself that I'd think there's something special about me, especially 'cause you keep saying you're a lesbian, and even with me you're so... wanton."

"It's always the quiet ones," Cameron deadpanned.

Brian snickered, dropping a kiss on her breast. "I don't get it, though. I can't be the first one that wanted you."

"Um, actually, you were," Cameron admitted. "I told you my healing power fixed me up to look this good, but that wasn't even two days before the, um, Incident. So it is just that you got to me first."

"Oh," Brian said thoughtfully. "What about who you wanted? Was there anybody?"

Cameron looked away. "There was a girl. My big crush. I admired her for ages, ignoring everyone else, but when she found out about me liking her, she just started avoiding me like the plague."

"Aw, sorry," Brian murmured. "I know how that goes."

Cameron shook her head. "So yeah, that's how I was a virgin when we met."

And she still felt like she hadn't really been with a girl. She'd told herself that she'd lost her virginity to Annabelle, and that would be enough to satisfy her self-image as a gynephile. But with Annabelle and the others it had been abrupt and one-sided. It barely counted. Being with Brian was nice, but every time her hands went roaming over his chest and hips or he spoke in his boyishly masculine voice, she had to fight down feelings of disappointment.

It really sucked that she couldn't risk being seen in public while she was a girl. Stupid self-righteous faithtards. Cameron grumbled.

Brian lifted his head from her shoulder. "Huh?"

Cameron gave him a little smile. "Nothing. Just wishing I wasn't a wanted fugitive, so I could maybe meet a girl. There are, like, lesbian hang-outs, clubs and such, aren't there? With my powers I could actually seduce somebody."

"Isn't using your powers like that a little, I don't know, sketchy?" Brian wondered.

"I really don't think so," Cameron said. "The only things I can control are involuntary anyway."

Brian shrugged. "If you say so."

"Not like I can actually go somewhere like that, though," Cameron sighed.

Cameron suddenly recalled an image. Brian, laying in a pool of blood, and her healing him. Only, the first attempt went wrong. It went female. If only... Wait. Why not?

"Brian?" Cameron started slowly.

Brian propped himself up on his elbows. "Yeah?"

"Would you, um," Cameron glanced aside, "would you maybe let me turn you into a girl? Just for a little while?"

Brian stared. "Wait, what? Turn me - you can do that?"

"It's part of my healing power," Cameron explained. "So... would you?"

Brian crawled off her and sat up, folding his legs. "Ah, I don't know."

Cameron sat up next to him. "You are into Yuri, aren't you? Haven't you ever thought about it?"

"Well, maybe in an abstract way," Brian hedged, "but actually being turned into a girl? That's not the same thing at all."

Cameron leaned over and kissed him, feeling encouraged when he returned it. "How about a trade? If you let me turn you into a girl for an hour or two and make sweet lesbian love to you," Cameron grinned teasingly, "I'll do something weird for you that you want to do."

Brian was silent for a long moment. "Well, I guess it could be okay, and there is... it's not something weird exactly, but it is, um..."

"What?" Cameron asked curiously.

"Um, rough? I've always wondered what the big deal is about, um, deep-throating," Brian admitted. "It'd be kewl to know first-hand."

Cameron considered. Brian's request certainly wasn't something she was eager to do, but it would be good to know if she could, and if it got him to agree... "I'm willing to give it a try."

Brian grinned bashfully. "You're really great, you know that? Do you have any hang-ups at all?"

Cameron gave him a quirky smile. "Oh I have plenty. Just not about sex."

At Cameron's prompting, Brian stood up off the bed and Cameron roused him to hardness as she settled on the edge of the bed in front of him. Cameron made two discoveries. First, that her biokinesis worked on her gag reflex, and second, that even without a gag reflex having a penis jammed down her throat was more than a little unpleasant. She was trying to enjoy it, she really was, but even with a rousing pushing her to orgasm, she just couldn't convince those parts of herself that her throat was an erogenous zone or that having her face in a boy's crotch was any fun.

Breathing wasn't very doable either, but Cameron held on as long as she could, trying to swallow Brian's glans. She roused him to orgasm before it got unbearable. He clutched her head to him as his erection spasmed violently. The orgasmic pulses were a lot more noticeable and, oh pun, in-your-face like this. She could imagine the appeal if one was an androphile. She didn't taste anything, since she was swallowing half his length already, but she felt the warm fluid slide down into her stomach. Ick.

She roused her own climax to distract herself, but that made her slip on her control of her gag reflex. Cameron pulled off, coughing badly.

Brian knelt down. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Cameron managed. "That was just the kinda fun that's not."

Brian snerked at her reference. "Sorry."

"Don't apologize. Feminize."

"Okay, that was awful," Brian chuckled.

Cameron winced playfully. "Yeah. Way funnier in my head."

"So..." Brian trailed off.

Cameron tapped her chin thoughtfully. "Do you have a mirror?"

"Yeah. Why?" Brian wondered.

"Where?"

Brian got up and went to his closet. He pulled the door open, revealing a full length dressing mirror on the inside of the door. Cameron stood and followed him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He leaned back into her breasts as she settled her chin on his shoulder. It was a cute image of an attractive young couple that stood in the mirror.

"Do it," Brian murmured.

Feeling a thrill of excitement, Cameron loosened her embrace so Brian's shifting flesh wouldn't bruise her. She healed him, and his flesh rippled. In an eyeblink, Brian was a slender and sexy girl, maybe two inches shorter as mass redistributed to hips and breasts. Cameron stared, grinning.

"Oh damn," Cameron exclaimed, hugging Brian to her. "You are really cute."

Cameron had started getting used to not feeling any natural attraction when she was with Brian, but now that he was girlified, she was getting turned on just looking at them in the mirror. Her hands roamed up to Brian's breasts and down to Brian's new slit.

"Oh, this is just too weird," Brian breathed in a cute feminine moan, rocking her hips against Cameron's fingers.

Cameron trailed kisses up and down Brian's neck as her fingers worked. "Go with it. You're hot. I want you so bad right now."

It took a while, but Cameron kept going until Brian climaxed without any biokinetic help. The new girl trembled against Cameron's body. Cameron turned Brian around and kissed her eagerly.

Somehow, they got back to the bed. Brian laid flat on top of Cameron as they made out passionately. Cameron ran her hands and lips over every bit of the new girl's skin she could reach. Their hips curled forward, squishing their clits together, and Cameron roused them both continuously, blurring their making out into one long pseudo-orgasm, a slow spasm wracking them every couple seconds.

At some point, Cameron found herself kissing down around Brian's breasts, and Brian twisted around until they were sixty-nining with Cameron on top. Fingers joined tongues, growing more and more forceful until Cameron felt Brian's entire hand slide through her labia.

Cameron wasn't sure how long it was before they simply collapsed from exhaustion, but it could easily have been several hours. They lay in a wet tangle, buried to the wrist in each other's vagina, panting breath tickling each other's mons.

Eventually, Cameron found the strength to drag her body around and snuggled into girl-Brian, kissing her softly and sweetly. Cameron had a satisfied smile on her face that wouldn't go away.

"That was... different," Brian breathed. sHe blinked. "I mean, obviously it was different, but I mean you were different. That was... different. You were..."

"I was...?" Cameron prompted gently, with an amused smile.

Brian grinned tiredly. "I guess there's no doubt you really are a lesbian. That raw lust... you've never been like that before. I think it was worth turning into a girl just to have you like that."

Cameron giggled and kissed the smaller girl. "It was a nice treat. But I still like you as a boy, even if my hormones don't. I still like sex, even if my base lust is snoozing on the job."

"You know, I've never heard anyone talk about sex the way you do," Brian said in a wondering tone. "Even... even in porn stuff, there's usually this juvenile it's-great-because-it's-nasty attitude, which always baffled me. But you don't act like that at all. You don't act like sex is something you only do because your body drives you to it."

Cameron gave Brian a smile. "Yeah. Everyone I've ever met or heard talking about it was always all twisted up about sex in one way or another. I think that it's mostly 'cause there's a lot of myth and incoherent misinformation about sex floating around, and most people never even notice how confused they are. Even you were, a little, even though you knew better, intellectually."

"Huh? I was?" Brian questioned.

"Don't you remember the first time I came over?" Cameron asked. "Even though you knew we weren't doing anything wrong and I had already agreed to have sex with you, you still kinda acted like your desire was something you needed to protect me from, at first."

"I was just... well..." Brian protested, trailing off. "Oh. Good point."

"I like it when you look at me like a starving man after a steak," Cameron said gently. "I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't. I think sexuality is a valuable thing, in itself. Look at the animal kingdom and the human's place in it, physically. Every creature has its niche, some thing that its body is better suited for than any other animal. Think about what the human body is better suited for than any other animal on earth. Why shouldn't everybody get to enjoy the thing their bodies are best at? Maybe I don't think there's enough sex in the world, and I wanna do my part to correct that."

"Even if you're not participating?" Brian teased.

"Especially if I'm not participating," Cameron laughed. "I'm only one person. I can't fuck everyone." Cameron sobered. "Just like I can't heal everyone."

Brian didn't say anything to that. sHe just snuggled into Cameron's arms, and held her close.

---

Monday, May 21st 2007
Berkeley, California
Maybeck High School

School. It was hard to believe that it had only been ten days since he'd last been here. Cameron felt like everything that happened had been only a long dream, at times.

Cameron had cut off his emerald forelock, put on his old clothes, and skipped washing his face. He was still two and a half inches taller and there was no way to really hide his now-perfect complexion, but he was counting on nobody looking closely enough to notice.

His improved memory continued to make things easier for him. It wasn't like he ever bothered to take notes before, but he could remember the minutia well enough now that notes would have been completely redundant. He used to routinely doze off in class and skipped doing homework whenever he could get away with it, and still maintained a C average. Now he'd probably drift up to a low A without even trying.

Cameron got a surprise at lunch. He was walking towards a table when he saw none other than Brian sitting at a seat in the corner of the cafeteria. All this time they'd gone to the same school, and Cameron had never realized. He thought about going over and sitting with him, but the idea of being male around Brian was... uncomfortable. And hadn't Cameron promised Brian?

Sighing wistfully, Cameron went to eat at the opposite end of the cafeteria.

PhysEd, or Gym if you prefer, was a revelation. Cameron knew he was stronger and faster. He'd thought about being able to match an olympic athlete. But he hadn't really internalized just how far above his classmates that put him. Class started with four laps on the quarter-mile path around the grounds, and Cameron was so far ahead by the time he realized how many people he was passing that he had to sneak in an extra lap to avoid drawing attention to himself. Even with the extra lap, he cut his best time in half.

---

After school, Cameron went after his next target. This was the first time he'd done this in daylight, so he'd chosen somewhere lower-profile than a major hospital. It was a retirement and nursing home. He found a place to shift, put on her disguise, and walked right in. As always, she was numbing wakefulness in anybody she ran into.

Cameron healed a dozen residents in the common area, then took keys from the nurses and let herself into the rooms one by one, restoring decrepit and ailing men and woman to the prime of health.

She was feeling good about her choice of target when she walked out the back door without fanfare. She headed for home, looking forward to visiting Brian that night.

---

That was the pattern that Cameron repeated over the next several days. She looked up every retirement home that she could get to and get home from in a single afternoon, and picked one at random each day.

When she went to visit Brian each night, Cameron maintained her custom of having sex with him first thing, but later in the night Brian usually let her turn him into a girl again for a while. Cameron was becoming worried about how attached she was getting to Brian. It was obvious that he wasn't comfortable being a girl outside intimacy with Cameron, but otherwise... he was quickly becoming her one and only friend.

Cameron continued to avoid Brian in school, for two reasons. First, it was dangerous for there to be any link between Cameron Endel, highschool boy, and Rouse, female supervillain. Second, she didn't want Brian to get the wrong idea about her. If Brian knew she'd spent most of her life as a boy, how could he not jump to the conclusion that Cameron was more boy than girl. So Cameron avoided him, but she wished she didn't need to.

The news was continuing to follow her hit-and-run healings, and being predictably sensational about it without actually saying anything of substance. Cameron wasn't sure how, but they seemed sure that the ninja healer and Rouse from the kidnapping incident were the same woman, and they were still calling her a supervillain, much to her and her dad's cynical amusement. The reports were frustratingly vague on what was being done to catch Rouse. She was hoping that meant she wasn't a high priority for any agency or superheroes, she was very much waiting for the other shoe to drop.

---

Saturday, May 26th 2007
Berkeley, California
Police Headquarters

Patricia had lost count of the days. So much time slowly recovering from her near-death, and to build up her strength. Then a blur of days as she searched and researched and laboriously prepared the big spells she was going to need. She knew she wasn't in the most stable state of mind, but she had a plan.

Stepping through the roof access, Patricia released essence in a spell she habitually kept ready. Her image, her perceptible presence in the world, was snared by the magics and delayed, slowed and left behind as Patricia stepped out of it. The spell drew more and more essence the further she separated from her image, but she was back to her full strength and had essence to spare.

There was nothing to stand between her and the information she needed.

---

Breaking News LIVE from Berkeley...

A two-story suburban house was blazing aflame as firefighters blasted it with water under a setting sun. The large oak tree in the yard had been twisted into a sickly mockery, its branches warped to spell out, THE SCALES WILL BE BALANCED.

Impaled on jagged wooden spines under these words were the still-burning bodies of John Sampson and Marien Bass.

"Firefighters have been battling this inferno for over half an hour. Unfortunately, the heroic efforts of these brave men have been met with little success. The fires appear to be unhampered. Police teams and paramedics are going door-to-door, evacuating as much of the surrounding neighborhood as possible. It is strongly suspected that the fire is supernatural. Experts agree that whoever or whatever did this could not have left their warped message in the manner they did through any known natural or artificial means. There is some speculation that these murders by paranormal arson are retribution for a statement made by the victims two weeks ago, from the controversial supervillain, Rouse."

An explosion shook the camera. Firefighters scrambled to keep up.

---

Sunday, May 27th 2007
Berkeley, California
Endel Residence

"Caaaam! Cameron! C'mere!"

Cameron looked up from GEO at her dad's bellow. She took a moment to log out, and headed up to see what was going on. She found him standing in front of the TV, showing the local news channel. Cameron saw the burning message, and the names scrolling by at the bottom of the screen, and a frisson crawled down her spine.

"They're saying those were two of the kidnapping victims from back when, with you," Dad said when a shot of the two burned bodies came up. "The ones who were blaming you for the whole thing, right after. They were targeted. The parents say they were tazered but left alive."

Cameron was sweating. "Shit. What are the chances this was about them pissing off someone who had nothing to do with the supervillains I killed?"

"This just in, we're getting reports of another fire, apparently bearing the same ominous message..."

Cameron and her dad watched for several tense minutes, until the news crews got a camera to the second fire. It was a fellow abductee to mister Sampson and miss Bass, they reported. It was Katie.

"I guess that would be zero," Dad said weakly.

Cameron was paralyzed. She had no good guesses about who was hunting down the escapees, or why, and she knew better than to wildly speculate. She didn't know what to do. She didn't know if she should even do anything. She didn't know anything!

Cameron took a deep breath, and then froze again. There was one thing. Five survivors, three now killed dramatically. Oh fuck, if they found Katie, they could find...

"Brian."

"Huh?"

Spinning around, Cameron tore out the backdoor without elaborating. Fortunately, she was already dressed for her nightly jog over to Brian's house. She didn't jog this time. She sprinted for all she was worth.

Fences and backyards flew by as she moved like she'd never moved before. She fell a few times, but a quick shift then shift back and she barely slowed down. She arrived at Brian's house and didn't even slow down, crashing through the sliding patio doors in an explosion of jagged glass.

There was a scream as Brian's mom fell off the sofa. Cameron numbed her to sleep as she raced down the hall and kicked Brian's door open. She found him sitting in his desk chair, playing Final Fantasy X with headphones on. He jumped in surprise and pulled the set off his head.

"Whoa! Rouse? You scared the - hey my door!" Brian greeted her.

Cameron grabbed his shoulders. "The others are dead. Murdered. Publicly. We have to go, now."

"Hey whoa what?" Brian sputtered as Cameron pulled him to his feet. "Who's dead?"

"John, Marien, and Katie," Cameron stated. "Burned to death in their front yards, only hours ago. Now come on!"

Brian paled. "Oh Madoka, I'm next is what you're saying."

Cameron nodded. "Put on something you can run in, and pack an overnight bag. Please hurry."

"What about my mom?" Brian asked as he put on his shoes, grabbed his backpack, and started stuffing clothes into it.

"The other parents were all left alive," Cameron said. "I think it'll be safer if we just leave her."

Brian zipped up his backpack. "Okay."

---

The interesting thing about flying the way Patricia did it, was that neither of her powers alone were enough to get her anywhere. She could lift herself telekinetically, but it was exhausting to carry her full bodyweight for any length of time. Likewise, she could magically weaken her gravitic links, but moving around up in the air drained her essence very inefficiently. Put together, though...

When she found the house, Patricia spotted something suspicious. The patio doors were smashed inwards. She was about to float down and investigate, when two figures emerged into the backyard. Patricia pulled up into the darkening sky.

With a startled gasp, Patricia recognized the young couple. Not only had she found the boy, but she'd lucked into finding Rouse as well. The dark fates smiled on her. Patricia followed them from above, and saw them scramble across several dozen properties until they entered the sublevel of another house.

Circling the house, Patricia noted the address and retreated. She'd thought long and hard about how to destroy a powerful regenerator who can kill with a look. She had spells to prepare. And then, Rouse was going to pay!

---

Shutting the door, Cameron touched Brian and healed. He rippled, becoming female. Brian gave her a questioning look, then heard movement coming down from upstairs.

"Disguise," Cameron said as she pulled her inside door open.

Dad was reaching for the emergency key above the doorframe. His hand dropped back to his side.

"Hey, Dad," Cameron said. "This is... Bree. She's gonna be staying over."

Dad stared for a long moment. "Is she...?"

"Let's just pretend she's a neighborhood friend having a sleepover?" Cameron suggested.

"Cameron," Dad warned. "I'm going to trust you on this, but I need to know you've thought this through. We can't go to the police for the same reason we didn't need to. No one knows you're Rouse. However, I'm guessing Bree here isn't a wanted supervillain, so why exactly is she here and not under police protection?"

Brian - or Bree, for the time being - winced.

"Um, there are pretty much two possibilities here," Cameron said. "Either the method that the killer used to find the others is something that will lead to me, or it's something that won't. In the first case, Bree probably would be safer in police custody, but only marginally safer. In the second case, she's in the same amount of danger in police custody, and almost no danger hiding here."

Dad nodded slowly. He introduced himself to Bree, and told her to let them know if she needed anything. He gave Cameron a last worried look before seemingly resigning himself and heading back upstairs. Cameron shut the door and turned to her guest.

"So," Cameron said. "Welcome to my evil lair, Bree."

She snerked. "Your dad knows about you? And he's that kewl with it? Man you're lucky. But, why 'Bree'?"

"It was the closest feminine name to Brian that I could think of off the top of my head," Cameron explained as she idly slipped her sports bra off.

"Ah, yeah, I suppose it'll do for a cover. I mean, I really wouldn't want to be called Brian in front of anyone but you when I'm like this, anyway." sHe waved a hand down her body.

Cameron nodded, sitting on the edge of her bed to pull her socks off. "And it's another level of misdirection. If you're a girl named Bree, and you call me Cameron, we don't have to worry so much about anyone seeing you or overhearing us. Like my flaky little sister."

"You just want me to stay a girl," Bree teased.

Stripping off her sweatpants, Cameron grinned impishly. "Well duh. But that doesn't make the other stuff any less true."

"It's okay," Bree said. "I can deal. For a while."

Naked now, Cameron pulled back the covers of her bed and lay back, her legs sprawled wide. She ran a hand down between her legs and stroked her vulva, giving Bree a grateful smile. Bree glanced back at the door as she suddenly hurried to catch up with Cameron's state of nudity. Bree crawled over Cameron and sank down on top of her, kissing Cameron tenderly.

"You know, your bed kicks my bed's butt," Bree noted, pressing on the sheets a few times.

Cameron giggled and threw the covers over them. "You know, I haven't used it in weeks?"

Bree ducked her head into Cameron's shoulder, yawning hugely. Cameron gave Bree's wakefulness a rousing out of pure habit and wriggled around under her, getting comfortable. It was really comfortable. She'd forgotten how much better her bed was than Brian's.

Cameron and Bree snuggled and kissed and made gentle love, as the hours of the night slipped by.

---

It was just after dawn when the power went out. Cameron's computer setup clunked and went silent, as the floor lamp and ceiling bulb flickered out. Cameron raised her head from Bree's breasts and glanced around in the near-darkness.

"Power outage?" Bree wondered.

"Looks like," Cameron commented.

Cameron took Bree's nipple back into her mouth... and the world exploded.

"AAAHGH!" Bree screamed as the deafening blast of heat and force flipped the bed and smashed them into the wall.

They crumpled to the ground in a heap of bruised limbs and scorched skin. Cameron scrambled up painfully, and saw the dissipating ball of black fire in the center of the room. She recognized that fire.

"No! She's dead!" Cameron breathed. "She was dead."

Cameron double-shifted to heal herself, then hauled Bree to her feet, healing her on the way up. The ceiling was already on fire and smoke was filling the room from the top down. Cameron ran to the door, but hit an invisible force field that flared into eriee black fractal patterns where she touched it. She pounded on the barrier but it showed no sign of yielding.

"Who?" Bree demanded.

"Wandless! That fire was the same stuff she threatened us with, remember?" Cameron dashed to her front door but smacked into the same force field when she tried to open it. "Fuck!"

Bree yelped as she dodged falling bits of burning drywall. Cameron hurried over and healed her again. It was already getting hard to breathe, and that was as much due to heat as it was to smoke. Cameron tried taking shelter in the less-flammable bathroom, only to hit the force field again. Cameron picked up her end-table and tried to break the windows, but the force field covered that too and the table smashed into kindling.

Bree started coughing. Cameron grabbed her and healed her again, then dragged them both down to the floor where the air was still clear. A massive chunk of burning drywall and wood crashed over Cameron's back, smashing her head into Bree's shoulder. Cameron shook it off before it burned her too badly.

"Where are our clothes?" Bree exclaimed.

Cameron pointed to the scorchmark on the floor were the magical explosion had gone off, then went for her dresser. Her dresser that was very on fire. Cameron pulled a drawer out and dumped it to the floor, but that just spread the flames.

There was a loud groaning creak and crack, and Bree shouted, "Look out!"

Bree shoved her out of the way as most of the ceiling came down in a raging inferno between them. Bree's scream of pain was cut short as she was buried. Cameron shifted desperately, flickering from male to female, trying to stay intact with the burning mass of debris pinning her down.

"Bria - Bree! Bree!" Cameron called between shifts.

There was no answer. Cameron swore. Pushing them apart like that. Cameron appreciated the intention, but it was probably the worst thing Bree could have done, because now Cameron couldn't reach her to heal her.

More debris fell, and the flames got hotter. Cameron could tell he was losing mass even though she was healing as fast as he could, shifting twice a second. Each shift loosened the burning matter on top of her, but not enough for him to wriggle free.

Cameron started getting light headed. Every gasp of pain or grunt of effort cost him oxygen. Constantly healing, reordering her body at what must be the molecular level, let him hold his breath under the flames and thickening smoke for what felt like hours and days, but she still ever so slowly asphyxiated.

He couldn't shift. His flesh was burning, and there was agony, but it was so far away. He couldn't...

---

Friday, June 2nd 2007
Berkeley, California
Burn Ward Lobby

Detective Shaun Gallagher and his team met Helena at the doors, and exchanged greetings.

"I'm sorry it was necessary, but I'm glad to have the Pee-Cee-Dee involved again," Helena told them. "Where are Miss Gail and Agent Dubaku?"

"At the scene. Scye's all excited 'cause she feels like she's making up for a failure on the abduction case," Detective Tayler told her.

"What's the status of your witness?" Gallagher asked.

"His name is Cameron Endel, fifteen, no record," Helena said. "The good news for us, is that with no next of kin, I was able to get a warrant for the hospital to give us the details of his condition..."

---

"We don't know how he survived," the doctor told them. "I'm told the fire department pulled bones out of the ruin that were barely recognizable as human. The fact that Cameron Endel survived with only 2nd and 3rd degree burns is... miraculous."

"Can we talk to him?" Deidra asked.

"I'm afraid not," the doctor said. "With unhealed burns this severe it would be inhumane to allow mister Endel to regain consciousness for even a few minutes."

---

"We've identified Richard Endel and Andreya Endel, but the third set of bones is a Jane Doe," Helena summarized. "I think our Jane Doe was Rouse. Cameron Endel survived because our killer wasn't concerned with him. The families were all left alive in the previous attacks. The father and sister could have merely been collateral damage."

"What about Farnell?" Gallagher asked.

"His residence wasn't hit," Helena said. "We've got an undercover SWAT team on stake-out, but according to the mother, mister Farnell went missing after a break-in only hours before the Endels were hit."

"Why would our killer change their Em-Oh like that?" Deidra wondered.

"Let's find out, shall we?" Gallagher said.

---

Elsewhen...

It wasn't quite a dream, and there were stirrings that weren't quite thoughts. Just a pervasive sense of wrongness. A weight crushing down, smothering. Resist. Push back.

---

Thursday, June 28th 2007
Berkeley, California
Burn Ward

"It's too soon! He can't wake up!"

"Increase his sedative dosage by fifteen percent!"

Smothering...

"We're already over the maximum safe dosage!"

"Why is he suddenly developing a resistance now?"

"We have to risk a higher dosage. If he wakes up now, the pain could send him into shock and kill him."

"It's not affecting him!"

Pain. Burning aching agony. A desperate whimper. Pain. Big pain. Very big pain! Cameron's eyes snapped open on a scene of men and woman in scrubs and white uniforms or coats looming over him. He was in pain like nothing he'd ever felt before. There was no way to resist the impulse.

Cameron shifted. The doctors and nurses yelped and recoiled as needles and tubes and stuff ripped out of her body, shredding cloth and bandages. She lurched up, gasping, and took a slow breath in relief. Then she realized that she looked like Rouse and the doctors were getting up.

Crap. She shifted again, but figured that was probably a futile gesture. The doctors were all staring wide-eyed. Yeah, definitely futile.

What the fuck was going on? The last thing he remembered... Oh. Fuck. Brian! His house! Wandless was alive! How long had he been out?

One of the nurses hit the panic button. Yeah, that was his cue. Cameron knocked everyone around him out with a numbing and started tearing bandages off. He found some basic hospital-issue scrubs in a cabinet and put them on. He still needed shoes, so he checked his feet against the shoes of the unconscious doctors and nurses until he found a pair he could run in.

Cameron emerged into the hall. He recognized the place. It was one of the hospitals he'd hit. Ironic. He fled, numbing anyone who got in his way.

---

The woman in a leather jacket with a badge and gun on her hip found Cameron sitting listlessly on the curb across the street from the burned out ruin of his house, elbows on his knees and chin on his hands. Cameron couldn't find it in himself to care. The secret was out, and he didn't have anything left to protect anyway. The woman didn't say anything. She just sat down next to him, mimicking his posture.

She watched him for a long time. "Life really spits on ya sometimes, huh kid?"

"I don't suppose anyone else survived," Cameron replied.

"I'm sorry, no," the woman said. "But the supervillain responsible won't be hurting anyone ever again. She was called Wandless, and she was killed in a superbattle only days after this happened."

"Are you sure?" Cameron asked dully. "She was dead the last time I saw her, too."

"Oh yeah," she said wryly. "I'm sure."

Cameron sagged. That news was a huge relief, but it just left him empty. The worst part was that he wasn't even mourning, exactly. He was lost. He had no idea where to go from here, so he didn't go anywhere. He just sat there. It made him feel despicably selfish.

"My name's Detective Helena Aiden," the woman said, "but you can call me Helena. Can I call you Cameron?"

Cameron shrugged.

"So..." Helena hedged. "Would you answer a question for me?"

"What's the question?"

Helena turned towards him. "There was a girl with you, when the fire happened. We couldn't identify her. Can you tell me who she was?"

It occurred to Cameron that they still didn't know that he could gender bend other people. That might be a secret worth keeping. "I know who she was, but telling you... that's more complicated."

Helena studied him for a long moment. "Until today, we thought she was Rouse. But your escape from your hospital room was caught on camera. As soon as you healed, it was obvious you were Rouse, and that Rouse was a shapeshifter pretending to be a girl."

"I wasn't pretending," Cameron growled.

Helena was silent for another stretch of moments. "Off the record, who was she?"

Cameron finally tore his eyes from the burned ruin to look at her. "I thought that was a reporter thing."

"I'm flexible," Helena told him.

"Off the record," Cameron said. "Brian Farnell."

The detective frowned at him. "Brian Farnell was male."

Cameron reached over and poked Helena's hand. "Yes, he was."

"Holy Fuck!" Helena leaped to her feet, patting down her suddenly male body.

Cameron shifted, and reached for man-Helena's hand. Another healing and the detective was back to normal. She stared down at her body, then looked up at Cameron with a shocked expression. Helena's eyes narrowed.

"I'm sorry if you had any scars you were fond of," Cameron said. "They'll be gone now."

"Okay." Helena swallowed. "That does explain everything rather neatly."

Cameron stood up and dusted off her butt. "It doesn't explain how Wandless found me in the first place, or how she survived the first time we met, you know, when she tried to feed me to an eldritch abomination, and a pair of religious nuts I rescued tried to blame the whole thing on me."

"We do know. Wandless ranted about the whole story before she died. I don't believe you're a bad kid, Cameron," Helena said. "Maybe you haven't been very smart about it, but you've got major league power, and you've been using it to do good."

Cameron quirked an eyebrow. "It's interesting how you say 'smart' when you mean 'legal'."

Helena snorted. "I'm a cop. We have to pretend they mean the same thing, around civilians."

"Is that what I am, still?" Cameron wondered.

"Well, you're not under arrest," Helena told her. "Rouse was wanted on several charges of vandalism and Bee-En-Ee, but... statute of limitations."

Cameron blinked. "How long was I...?"

"It's June the twenty-eighth," Helena informed her.

"Crap," Cameron summed up.

Helena put a hand on Cameron's shoulder. "Come on, I'll give you a ride."

---

Monday, July 2nd 2007
San Francisco, California
Bay Area ARC Outpost

After that, some things happened, but the only parts worth noting were when Cameron met a case worker from the Arkham Research Consortium. Her name was Jeanette Greyson, and she told Cameron that she was there to help him with the paperwork and such of inheriting his dad's bank accounts and stuff.

Jeanette was a thirtyish auburn-haired woman, pretty, but just a little overweight. Cameron thought she looked very huggable. Apparently she was also a mutant, but, "just a Gadgeteer Two," which in her case just meant she was really good at modding consumer electronics.

She offered Cameron a place to stay in the ARC facility in San Francisco while they got everything worked out. Cameron was wary, but she really didn't have anywhere else to go. The room they gave her was small, but comfortable, like a miniature hotel room.

"We have a budget to provide this kind of aid to mutants in need. You won't need to repay us for merely staying at the facility for a few weeks," Jeanette had explained. "The thinking is, mutants who need this kind of help, and don't get it, become distressingly likely to use their powers in immoral and illegal ways to survive, and many powers can be extremely destructive."

So Cameron had gone with Jeanette to San Francisco, and now she was looking around the accommodations. The hospital had let her keep the scrubs she'd borrowed, since she had literally nothing of her own.

"Check the closet," Jeanette advised. "There should be a few sets of generic exercise shorts and tops, male and female, that you can wear until you can get something of your own."

Cameron went and looked. There were full outfits, including underwear, socks and shoes. The similarity to Cameron's high school gym clothes could be forgiven. Cameron glanced at Jeanette, then shrugged and stripped off her scrubs.

Jeanette politely averted her eyes. "Ah, would you like some privacy?"

"If that would make you more comfortable," Cameron diverted.

"But I'm... that's not... but you're... I'm not... but I meant..." Jeanette didn't literally go cross eyed, but the effect was similar.

Cameron had to giggle as she went into the small adjoining bathroom and fiddled with the shower controls. Shifting alleviated most of her hygiene needs, but she figured she was still due for a wash. She went back out to wait while the water got hot, feeling kind of inclined to try flirting with Jeanette, just to see if she could figure out which way Jeanette swung, but the older woman was gone and the door was closed. Oh well.

---

Tuesday, July 3rd 2007
San Francisco, California
Westfield Shopping Center

Jeanette took Cameron to the downtown mall. They went through twice, with Cameron in two different disguises. On the first run, Cameron was a blonde girl with glasses, and on the second run, Cameron was a brunette boy in glasses and a baseball cap.

"I see we're going with the Clark Kent school of disguise today," Cameron deadpanned when Jeanette told her the plan.

A massive dent was put in Cameron's savings, but they managed to completely replace Cameron's wardrobe, and equip her with a moderately powerful laptop. Cameron spent most of the night downloading and installing the open-source versions of as much of her lost software as she could find, just to have it there.

---

Wednesday, July 4th 2007
San Francisco, California
Bay Area ARC Outpost

"So, what's on your mind, Cameron?"

The man asking had been introduced to Cameron as Doctor Issac Parr. He was jolly-looking guy, and according to Jeanette, a telepath. That was proven accurate. Doctor Parr winced as soon as the question was out of his mouth, as he obviously picked up on Cameron's annoyance with open ended questions like that.

"Okay, well why don't we start with something easy? How are you getting along with Jeanette?"

Cameron figured she didn't need to talk out loud. The big advantage of a telepathic shrink was that she didn't have to struggle to construct english phrases that matched up accurately to her mental and emotional experiences. And she liked Jeanette. The woman had a personality that fit with her huggable looks. Cameron had hugged her a few times, in greeting or farewell, as both a boy and a girl, and she still wasn't sure about Jeanette's orientation. The woman was being kindly, yet professional. Cameron missed Brian. She missed sex. Cameron was pretty sure that she was just latching on to Jeanette as the only friendly figure in her life after losing everyone she knew, but that didn't seem like a bad thing.

"It's, ah, perfectly natural, Cameron. You have suffered a huge loss recently. It is natural that you would develop feelings, but I'm noticing that you are framing your interactions with Jeanette in a sexual way. Are you aware that your ages, and the fact that she's your case worker, make that highly inappropriate?"

One would think a professional telepathic counselor would have a broader view of sexuality than that. And she didn't see how the way she thought about Jeanette was 'framing their interactions' whatever that meant. Cameron turned her head and looked the man over. Doctor Parr was pudgy, his gut straining against his belt and bulging over - though a healing would mostly fix his figure. There was nothing about him that was sexually appealing in the slightest, to Cameron, but that didn't mean she didn't see him in a sexual light. If he came over to her, dropped his pants, pulled down her shorts, and spread her legs, she wouldn't object. She found sexuality fascinating. Why wouldn't she consider and encourage that aspect of the people she interacted with?

Doctor Parr was looking a little red in the face. "Sweet mother mary, you're actually sincere about that. Ahem. Um, I think I'm going to recommend a series of followup sessions. Clearly you have some issues to work through. Perhaps you're using this unhealthy fixation on sex as a coping mechanism..."

Cameron snorted. These were hardly new revelations. She'd known this stuff about herself since the first time she really thought about the Perversion Potential of her Powers, and to a lesser extent long before that. So to speak. Cameron really didn't see it as perverting her powers. Sex was what the human body was for, after all.

"Eh... perhaps not, then. That does make me wonder. If you do relate to everyone through sexuality, how did you feel about your immediate family?"

They were her family. They were just there, but she didn't interact with them much at all. Huh, maybe that was why she never went out of her way to interact with her family. Interesting insight.

"Do you think this attitude is interfering with your ability to mourn your father and your sister?"

That wasn't it at all. It was just that people died every second, and every single one of those lives was a precious thing, lost. Cameron's family was just a tiny drop in that river. Yes, the deaths of the people close to her affected her more than the deaths of strangers on the other side of the planet, but that didn't make them any more tragic, because any death was already an infinite tragedy.

"That's... a rather bleak outlook. I take it you don't believe in an afterlife?"

"I don't believe in an ontologically fundamental afterlife as even a coherent idea," Cameron said aloud. "If a human consciousness continues as a soul after their body dies - and we live in a world with plenty of evidence that this does in fact happen to at least a handful of people - that's not afterlife, that's still just life, albeit of diminished quality."

"Ah, then is that how you justified killing in self-defense?"

Killing in self-defense was its own justification.

"Hmmph." There was a long pause. "Let's move on. I'd like to talk about your gender identity. I'm told you can physically shift between the sexes at will. Is it possible that your habit of spending most of your time female is a way of distancing yourself from your loss?"

Cameron rolled her eyes and sighed.

---

Friday, July 6th 2007
San Francisco, California
Bay Area ARC Outpost

They wanted to test her powers, so Jeanette took her down to the cavernous underground gymnasium they had under the building. It was well lit, and mostly grey concrete, with fiberglass partitions around various sets of equipment.

A pair of research techs met them outside the elevator. Their names were Julia and Jules, and they were apparently twin siblings, and both mutants. Specifically, low-level Exemplars with a high-fidelity empathic link that let them each feel everything the other did. Cameron immediately wondered how that affected their love lives. Maybe she'd ask if she saw an opening.

The first thing they did was study Cameron's shifting. They had her shift a bunch of times while they took various measurements. The results mostly confirmed what Cameron already knew. She could switch between two set forms, and only her whole body at once. Her internal organs and body chemistry changed in addition to her outer shape, but her mass couldn't change. It was entirely under conscious control. But the DNA test was a surprise. It seemed that Cameron's DNA didn't change when she shifted, and that she wasn't XX or XY, but XXY.

"These results put you squarely at Shifter Three," Julia told her.

Jeanette and Doctor Parr both volunteered to be test subjects for Cameron's healing. Julia and Jules were excited to start with, but after the test where they stuck a bunch of pins made of various materials into Cameron's arm and her healing absorbed some up to where they emerged from her skin, and flung others out of her like bullets, they both looked like they were majorly geeking out. They were practically squeeing about Cameron being a, "Healer Six," but then a DNA test showed that Jeanette and Doctor Parr's chromosomes changed along with their bodies when Cameron gender bent them.

Julia and Jules then had Cameron gender bend them, or at least, they had Cameron try. Cameron was shocked to discover that she couldn't. She could heal them both just fine, but unlike with everyone else, it didn't matter which form Cameron was in when she did. Julia and Jules studied the effect on themselves, and on Jeanette again.

"Healer Seven," the twins exclaimed at each other. "She's a frakking Healer Seven!"

After the twins calmed down, they moved on to testing Cameron's biokinesis. They had Doctor Parr, who was looking much fitter after Cameron's healings, put up his strongest psychic shielding, and then told Cameron to try to influence him.

Once she was done with that, Jules and Julia had an intense technical debate, and then had Cameron try to affect a bunch of chemicals in vials and beakers. That turned out to be mostly a bust.

"A Telekinetic One with chemical dexterity, obviously, but you don't seem to control it directly," Jules mused. "There's a level of abstraction between the effect and the control wiring in your brain, which makes you a specialized sub-variant of telekinetic. Your nickname for it, 'biokinesis', is accurate enough for casual conversation, I suppose."

---

Sunday, July 8th 2007
San Francisco, California
Bay Area ARC Outpost

Cameron stared at the brochure Jeanette had handed him off the top of a thick packet of forms that now sat on the little desk in Cameron's room next to his laptop. "Whateley? You mean that's actually real?"

"Very much so," Jeanette assured him. "I was too old, by the time I figured out I was a mutant, so I've never been there, but a lot of personnel at ARC went to school at Whateley."

"Kewl," Cameron said, looking through the brochure. "But, uh, this seems like it would be expensive. How am I going to pay for this?"

"Just being a displaced mutant is enough to get you in on scholarship," Jeanette told him. "As far as I know, all you'd need to do is sign up for a part-time job with their work-study program, and you'll be set for a full four years."

Cameron leaned his chair back on two legs, and glanced up from the brochure to catch Jeanette's eyes lingering on his shirtless torso. That was a point in favor of her being an androphile. Cameron had asked her outright at one point, but she'd figured out that Cameron was trying to determine which form Jeanette found more attractive, so she'd firmly diverted the subject.

Cameron dropped the brochure and picked up the admission forms. Name, age, sex... "Heh, 'complicated', well I don't think my gender is complicated, but everybody else seems to think so."

"Huh?" Jeanetted leaned over his shoulder to see what he was talking about.

She put her hand down on the back of his chair. Cameron moved subtly so his bare shoulder brushed Jeanette's hand. He was actually kind of enjoying the subtle flirting. It wasn't something he'd ever had the opportunity to learn before. He was expecting the novelty to wear off fast, though.

The thing was, he didn't really want to seduce Jeanette. He wanted to crawl into her arms to be comforted. So nudging her with his biokinesis until she lost control and gave in to passion wasn't as appealing as it might have been if he was just horny, because he didn't want her to lose control.

Cameron grabbed a pen and started filling out the form. "That makes me think, though. Legally, I'm still Male with a capital Em, right?"

"Er, yes," Jeanette said. "Your legal identity hasn't changed, as far as I know."

"It can be, though, right?" Cameron asked, flipping a page. "Like look at this, 'my mutation has caused me to become more...' And I would check feminine, but the fact that the question is even there makes me think that not everybody who answers it can go back and forth at will like I can."

"Well, I can look into it for you, if you like," Jeanette said. "Why would you need that, though? You keep saying that you're equally boy and girl."

"Well, I'm thinking like this. Do I want to be known as the perverted nerdboy fag that turns himself into a girl?" Cameron shifted. "Or as the eccentric bisexual girl that can turn herself into a boy sometimes? The double standard exists, and I can't just ignore it, so given that, I think the choice is obvious. If I'm officially a girl, it'll be much less often that I'll have to... defend myself in cruel and unusual ways."

Jeanette winced. "I don't think that's... well, maybe you're a little right. I'll see what I can do."

Cameron smiled at her. "Thanks."

---

Monday, July 16th, 2007
San Francisco, California
Bay Area ARC Outpost

It was Cameron's sixteenth birthday. Cameron didn't want to make a big deal about it, but Jeanette still went out of her way to find out what kind of cake Cameron liked. They were sitting in the large lounge slash breakroom, cutting into a chocolate cake with vanilla frosting and bits of white chocolate sticking out of it.

It was a good cake.

---

Saturday, August 4th 2007
Upper Atmosphere over the Central United States
ARC Suborbital Shuttle

The view was a lot more impressive than from a normal airliner.

It turned out the primary ARC facility with all the best personnel and equipment was in New Hampshire. They had wanted to study Cameron's healing further. Cameron was going to be getting a modest salary in exchange for playing lab rat until fall term began at Whateley.

Cameron had shifted to boy-form and kissed Jeanette goodbye. Cameron had made sure it was one hell of a kiss, with roaming hands, plenty of tongue, and all the biokinetic skill he had. There had been frowns of disapproval all around, but Cameron was unapologetic.

Cameron had made them promise to bring in people who actually needed healing to study her healing on. She never thought for a second that they would have let her continue her breaking-and-entering habits, but that was a compromise she could agree to in the short term.

---

Poe Cottage Freshmen Arrival Day
Dunwich, New Hampshire
Dunwich Train Depot

The Grand Miskatonic Shuttle would be delivering fellow incoming students over the course of the day. Cameron had been dropped off with her luggage to wait with the other students. She was directed through a wooden door with a pane of frosted glass in it, to find the designated Whateley arrival waiting room.

Inside, Cameron found an arrangement of old plastic covered couches and chairs, an assortment of vending machines on one wall, and an ancient-looking pinball machine next to a payphone.

It was still early, so there were only three other kids already there. One girl was an eerily ethereal beauty in a flowy midnight blue dress, with big aqua eyes, pale skin, and stringy raven hair. The girl caught Cameron's eyes as soon as Cameron walked in, and stood, moving with an effortless fluid grace. She was maybe an inch taller than Cameron, and a hair more slender. The girl walked right up to her and gently wrapped her arms around Cameron.

"Um, hi," Cameron said, wondering what was going on. "Are you sure you're hugging the right girl? I don't think I know you."

"You don't know me, Cameron Endel," the girl said in reassuring tones, her breath tickling Cameron's neck. "I am Purgatory. So many people. So many thoughts. They all blur together, echoing each other. Do you know how much your echo stands out from the din?"

"Oh. You're a telepath?" Cameron interpreted, taking that last comment to mean that there was something about her own mind that Purgatory had been drawn to from afar.

"I am the sum," Purgatory said, stroking Cameron's back. "Of my parts. Of your parts. Of everyone's parts."

Cameron blinked as she thought that over. It sounded like she was reading everyone's thoughts all the time. She didn't sound boastful, just matter-of-fact. Did that mean she had no choice in it? Damn. But she couldn't possibly mean literally everyone in existence at once. A range limit was implied.

"Eighty miles," Purgatory whispered. "No choice."

Cameron's mind blew. Holy fuck, how was she sane? Maybe she was lying, and the whole thing was just a bizarre come-on, or a trick.

"Like minds blur together, overlap. I don't lie to you. You overlap less." Purgatory pulled back to look her in the eye. "But this is a come-on. I want to be your friend. There is a void in your heart that I would fit into. I know this. I knew everything about you that you do as soon as you entered my awareness, and you know more about yourself than many."

"That sounds... incredibly dangerous to admit, actually. Why are you telling me this? What if I freaked out because you knew all my secrets?"

Purgatory smiled coyly. "I knew you wouldn't. You do not conflict with yourself. You do not flinch from your own thoughts. You explore your thoughts without shame, wherever they may go."

Cameron blinked. Okay, that was pretty convincing. And she was right, Cameron doubted there were very many people who wouldn't be bothered by having a friend that would know their every errant thought. Also, she'd just done a better job analyzing Cameron than Doctor Parr had after weeks of so-called therapy. Cameron suddenly wondered just how many people knew what Purgatory had just told her.

"Too many," Purgatory whispered. "I come to Whateley, not for knowledge, but for shelter."

That made sense to Cameron. And she did kind of want to be Purgatory's friend now. If it was true that she already knew everything about Cameron that Cameron did and came to her anyway, Cameron could be completely unrestrained with her.

"You understand," Purgatory said with a gentle beatific smile. "And you can call me Tory, if you want."

"Okay."

It was too bad they were in a public place. Cameron still hadn't ever had sex as a boy, and while that wasn't really a big deal to her, it wasn't something she wanted to pass up either. Purgatory would be willing, or she wouldn't have wanted to befriend Cameron in the first place.

"I am," Purgatory said softly. "We will."

An uneasy tension settled over Cameron, but it was tempered by Purgatory's promise and her arms which still enfolded Cameron. She really hoped Purgatory wasn't misleading her. Confronted with it, she did want someone to be close to. She wanted it desperately. She also wanted to have sex with Purgatory as soon as possible, to the point that it was making her edgy, even though she wasn't particularly horny. Cameron didn't actually think Purgatory was being insincere...

Purgatory interrupted Cameron's thoughts by turning them until Cameron's body blocked the view of the rest of the room, and worming her hand down the front of Cameron's pants. Her fingers settled in Cameron's folds, and she smiled like she'd just figured out something important. Cameron blinked and realized she was smiling back, and not at all in a lustful way. Her uneasiness was gone.

That was.. odd, right?

Purgatory extracted her hand and resumed their embrace. "What you were feeling a moment ago, it was remarkably similar to the discomfort many people feel at the idea of getting involved sexually without emotional intimacy. You're inverted. You aren't comfortable getting emotionally involved without sexual intimacy."

"Oh," Cameron breathed. "That's... it's not supposed to work like that, is it?"

"I think, for you, an emotional connection is a more special thing than sex," Purgatory said. "Imagine a social butterfly, makes friends easily, but fickle, every friendship dissolved by circumstance or bordom, yet sexually is utterly exclusive and loyal."

Cameron did so, and it wasn't pleasant. That kind of person always made a sickly knot form in her gut for some reason.

"Now imagine a dedicated porn model," Purgatory said. "Uninhibited, glad to have sex for the money, for the art, or just because someone asks, unhesitating with sexual partners she may never meet again, yet unreservedly open and trusting about her thoughts and feelings with a select few who return that trust and loyalty."

Cameron... liked the thought. That was the kind of person she admired and... wanted to be. Huh. She didn't know if that was a surprise or just obvious in retrospect, but that was exactly the person Cameron wanted to be.

Purgatory smiled into Cameron's neck. "Confirmed. An inversion. You see?"

"Yeah, I guess I do," Cameron murmured. "Sex and friendship. One is interesting and fun, the other is sacred. It's just a matter of which is which."

Purgatory pulled away and gave Cameron a gentle push towards the nearest sofa.

---

It was very strange, getting to know a telepath, but in a good way. The two girls snuggled up on the old sofa to wait, and Cameron just let her mind wander. Purgatory would comment almost at random, and the result was something that almost resembled an enjoyable conversation.

As the time passed, the waiting room filled up as a series of trains arrived. Cameron started paying more attention to the other possible Whateley students.

At exactly four o'clock, a tall asian woman came in.

"Okay, listen up!" she called out. "I am Misses Shugendo; I'm the Dean of Students at Whateley Academy. There are two shuttles here to take you to the school. I'm going to call off your names alphabetically. When I call out your name, let me know who you are, and then make your way out to the vans. Now, I know that you have a lot of questions, but, unless it's an emergency, save it for when we get to the school..."

---

ROUSE
Shifter-3 / Healer-7 / Telekinetic-1f

PURGATORY
Exemplar-4 / Esper-6

 

Chapter Text

Rouse and Jade Sinclair

"So if you're a girl, anyone you heal gets turned into a girl too?" the diminutive Japanese girl asked eagerly.

"Unless they have a Body Image Template of their own," Rouse explained. "Then my power uses that instead."

Jade suddenly grabbed her hands and turned on the Ultimate Puppy Dog Eyes Technique. "Heal me! Please?"

"Grk," Rouse said as the weaponized cuteness burned through her. "But, you're not hurt."

"No, my body's just wrong," Jade protested, waving her arms at the older girl next to her. "I'm supposed to look like that! My sister is using my Body Image Template."

"Really? Weird," Rouse opined. "Okay."

Rouse reached out and touched Jade's hand, and healed.

For a split second, nothing happened, and then there was a deafening crack and a magical pressure wave that knocked Jade onto her butt and blew Rouse through the reinforced brick wall of Poe Cottage.

Jinn helped Jade up. Jade, still in the same body as ever, scampered to the hole in the wall as she charged up two of her 'devises'.

"I'm okay!" Rouse called from the lawn below.

---

Rouse and Aleya

Aleya. Owen Larken. Avatar-3 / Psi-1. Spirit of the Will-o-Wisp. Resident of Twain Cottage, hopeless romantic, and an endless fount of misplaced chivalry.

According to Purgatory, he'd been nursing a crush on Rouse. Unfortunately, he was rather mistaken in his beliefs about the object of his affection. Naturally, with his misguided attempts to defend her honor and reputation, hilarity inevitably ensued.

Some guy Aleya didn't know came up and grabbed Rouse's shoulder. "Hey. Rouse, right? Is it true you banged my friend over there, yesterday in the elevator? He says you're really that easy, but I didn't bel - "

Aleya burst into harmless flames. "Of course she didn't! Rouse is a nice girl! Stop spreading nasty stories about her! She wouldn't do something like that!"

Rouse looked askance at Aleya. "It's true. I caught him staring at my boobs, so I asked if he wanted to touch them. Once he stopped stuttering, he did, and I didn't want to leave him hard and dry after that warmed him up."

"Yeah, she - wait what?" Aleya whipped around, bright greenish yellow hair flying around his head. "You're joking, right?"

Rouse shook her head. "I don't play coy."

Aleya spluttered. "But you... you don't act like a... you don't care that he called you easy?"

"I'll just... come back later," the guy said.

"I've been called worse," Rouse said. "Yes, I'm easy. That's kind of my thing. If everyone knows I'm easy, the idiots who are just looking for a conquest don't bother me, because I'm not a challenge."

"Status signaling accounts for the majority of disinterest," Purgatory spoke up. "A reputation for experience and lack of inhibition intimidates the desperate and virginal."

"I'm not intimidated, I'm - wait! I didn't mean... I'm not desp... I'm..." Aleya slumped.

Rouse patted him on the back, trying not to laugh.

---

Rouse and Carmilla

"Tentacles!" Rouse moaned. "She has tentacles! I can't compete with tentacles!"

---

Rouse and Lady Astarte

Rouse shifted nervously as she sat before the Big Desk in the principle's office.

"Miss Endel, I'm only going to say this once," Mrs. Carson told her. "While it is unofficial policy to overlook any sufficiently discreet intimate encounters between students, posting flyers offering your body for money in public spaces is not acceptable!"

Rouse winced. "I was making a statement."

"You are still a minor," Mrs. Carson ground out. "Whateley cannot afford this kind of scandal."

"I know," Rouse muttered. "That's why I turned down Peeper and Greasy's offer to film me. Well, and because even I don't want to encourage those two."

"Small mercies." Mrs. Carson was rubbing her forehead. "I'm assigning you detention at Hawthorne every day next week."

Rouse sighed. "Okay."

"I'm also docking your pay from your student job at Doyle," Mrs. Carson ordained.

"Um," Rouse spoke up. "Isn't that kinda counterproductive?"

Mrs. Carson glared.

"Eeep."

---

The Team

Rouse, Aleya, and Purgatory shared a smile as their training team was registered. The three of them together would be officially known as Panacea.