71: Slow Acting Poison
I woke up in my room in Exodus City the next morning, reeling from a new nightmare. The dream I had was twisted, dark, and had me desperately trying to prove that I was a girl to everyone around me. The body I had for the dream was my normal one—my Keiko body—but nobody seemed to understand. They would point to my tiny, feminine form and label me ‘boy’. It seemed that the barbed words of my former friends hadn't entirely rolled off my back.
The nightmare lodged itself in the back of my mind and followed me as I wandered like a zombie into the kitchen. Mum was down in the living room having a bowl of fruit or something while she watched a news show, and didn't notice my shitty mood.
I wasn't in the mood to make breakfast from actual ingredients, so I just pulled a breakfast burrito from the warm food dispenser—an appliance that looked like a small microwave. I ate it there in the kitchen, trying to relish the taste of the perfectly rendered virtual burrito, but it didn't help. It was good, but it was too… geometric. Making the food from ingredients just tasted better—less uniform, less obviously built from code.
“Hey, mum?” I asked, looking down from the kitchen into the living room.
She glanced up at me absently, then focused in properly as she paused the news. “Yeah, little sprite?”
“I'm going to head straight back into Rellithesh,” I said. “I have to walk all my ore home and… you know…”
She watched me, searching my face for a second before she said, “Okay, sprite. I'll be at the inn by the time you get there, if you need anything.”
“Okay.”
The trip home from the copper node was relatively uneventful, besides another pack of greenboars. They died to a Larkspur Strike—I knew the lay of the land, now, and in the name of expediency I made use of my big ability.
When I was home, I still felt like shit because the annoying dream had marinated in my brain the whole way home. What if Aquila and Arca were right? Could I really call myself a woman if I'd never… been one when I was physical?
Getting to work on processing the copper was the only thing I could think to do while I fought to rid myself of the mental parasite, but it didn't work. Copper bars began to pile up while I descended into a pit of doubt.
Lunchtime passed without me going to eat, and then as the afternoon began to cool, my mum walked into the forge. She sat her large butt down on a nearby workbench and watched quietly.
Packing one of my many crucibles with ore, I set it into the forge and turned my attention to her. “Mum?”
“Hey, sprite,” she said gently. “Are you okay?”
I frowned and looked away, focusing on the large stack of copper ingots I had. “Yeah?”
“You don't look it,” she said. “Keiko… what's wrong?”
I shrugged, staying quiet. I didn't even know how to begin explaining the shit that was happening in my head.
“I'm fine, mum.”
She stood up and approached, opening her arms. I leant in, allowing myself to be engulfed in the hug. My shoulder muscles relaxed slightly, and I realised I'd been tensing them all day—same with my back. Her hand was running down it, completely unperturbed by the sweat that'd pooled between my shoulder blades.
A question dislodged itself from my darkened thoughts. “Mum, is it really okay that I call myself a woman if I never was one?”
Her hand fell still, and she pushed me out to arm's length so she could look at me. “Keiko… that's not how that works.”
Looking down at my shoes, I said, “I don't know if it is okay.”
“Of course it's okay,” she said, cupping my cheek in one large hand. “Sprite… what's wrong?”
“It feels… wrong, or disingenuous, or… whatever,” I mumbled. “I don't know. I grew up as a boy, I grew up being called a boy, and I never did anything about it. I never tried to… to change that, not until VR and like, a month later my physical body died. I never actually became a woman, I—”
“Keiko…” mum said with a tone that stopped me cold, despite how gentle it was.
Continuing to stare at my feet, I waited. In my mind, I remembered how I used to be—with thighs that cut straight down from my hips in an unerring straight line, and waist that was chunky and thick with testosterone fuelled strength. I remembered my shoulders and the way they flexed, or the hair that sprouted unwanted from my chin. The memories lanced through me like a spear, and my stomach dropped as raw, uncomfortable disgust wriggled down my nerves.
“Keiko…” mum said, shaking her head. “You've been told your whole life that you were a boy. Your body was given a little societal tag that said ‘boy’ on it. Your parents—myself and your father—we told you that you were a boy from before you can even remember. Despite all of that pressure to fit into the mould you were assigned, you still decided that it didn't feel right, and that being a woman suited you better. Doesn't that kind of speak for itself?”
Her words filtered into my brain like a deluge of clean, clear water spilling into a muddy puddle. I had decided that being a woman felt better. Guh, even thinking back on my life and the way I felt whenever someone said I was a boy—Half the time it felt like they were talking about some fictional version of me, while the other half of the time, it felt like the whole concept of boyhood just… itched.
“I guess…” I said finally. “It still feels wrong to claim it from people who… you know… were women from—”
She rolled her eyes. “Funnily enough, womanhood isn't a physical object you can steal, and it certainly isn't a finite resource. In fact, everyone already does womanhood in different ways. Your version just happens to be…” she broke out into a grin, “Fashionably late to the party.”
“Twenty something years late to the party,” I grumbled, but her pep talk had worked. Everything she said felt… right. It felt like it fit with my experiences—mostly, anyway.
She laughed and pulled me in for a nice, safe, warm hug. “You know, it's not entirely applicable, but throughout my whole life I experienced something similar. One of my first memories was of my mum's friend joking that her son and I would be cute as boyfriend and girlfriend. From then on, it was just boys, boys, boys. It was just a thing that I would like boys, and that boys were the only option. It wasn't until I was your age that a drunken kiss with my best friend made me realise I might not be as straight as I thought. In fact, I was only interested in a select few men—most of whom were fictional. Then I had to battle with the fact that apart from that one kiss, I'd never actually dated a woman and I was already with your father, so I had no way to know… Anyway, societal pressure is strong. Going against it takes a lot, sprite. I'm proud of you.”
“Mum…” I protested, feeling gooey warmth flow upwards from my heart and into my cheeks.
Suddenly, I was lifted bodily off the ground. I squealed, and mum laughed, “It's true, little sprite! I'm so proud of you! My gorgeous daughter, fighting the world to be who she wants to be. No wonder you can solo raid level bosses—You already beat the hardest one!”
“Mum, that's so cheesy!” I grumbled… okay, maybe it was a giggle, I'm not sure. She was squeezing me really tight.
Putting me down, my mum kissed the top of my head again. “Sorry, sorry sprite. With me being so tall and you being so small, it reminds me of when you were small.”
“Thankfully, I wasn't getting frisky with my friends when I was small,” I grouched, half under my breath.
Mum laughed and rolled her eyes. “I know, I know. It's a failing of parents everywhere—we struggle to accept that our kids have grown up.”
Despite all the embarrassing coddling, I still felt so warm and happy that my mum was being like this. In a way, it helped reinforce my new identity, but mostly it just felt good. I felt… loved.
That particular word caused my thoughts to jump the tracks, though, and my heart began to ache. We'd only been apart like five days and I was already missing Paisley so fucking much. How had the days suddenly started taking so long to pass by?
Mum let me continue with my copper smelting, which I finished as night began to fall. With her pep talk sitting as a shield in my mind, I didn't have any more problems from my stupid dream.
The next morning, after a night spent hanging with Ethan, Noah, and Elena in the main taproom, I got to work building moulds for copper pipes. I ended up using some sort of special clay that Vesuvia sent someone to fetch. With that clay, I was able to carefully sculpt a mould using various cylinder shaped objects as tools. I had to make a few different shapes of pipe too, so the whole process was… well, it was both simple and complicated at the same time.
That whole day was used up in crafting and testing those pipe moulds, until as I was going to bed, I had a product I was happy with. I even showed Vesuvia's plumber friend how to cast more pieces using the forge, so he could get started with getting us plumbing. In the end, my ‘easy project’ had turned into a whole event, with tons of help from the older inn folks. At least my part in the plumbing saga was over, and I could leave the rest up to other people.
I was still left with one burden that I couldn’t offload to everyone else, however, and that was just… had all of that really been worth it? What a fucking saga for simple plumbing.
