“They’re pretty responsible, for children,” Laurelai remarked.
“Maybe it comes with their royalty,” Squid said. “They know how to treat people.”
“They have treated us just like other children.”
“Yes. We’re people too.”
“Now let’s select a dance,” she said. “What one will be easy for us to do with reversed gender roles, and interesting for adults as well as children?”
Squid pondered, and it came to him. “False Step!”
She clapped her hands. “Oh, yes! Perfect.” Then she reconsidered. “But we’re a little young for it. We don’t want it to be a joke, the way it is when children do it.”
“Yes. So maybe you can age to teen. I’ll try to fake maturity.”
“I wonder.”
“What are you thinking of?”
“Our talents have been getting quietly upgraded. Maybe my age changing has too.”
“You mean you can age farther than before?”
“Maybe. But I’m thinking maybe now I could take you with me.”
Squid didn’t follow that. “Do you know something I don’t know?”
“Yes.”
Fornax was with her, and they communicated privately with each other. So there was something, but they should not advertise it. “Take me with you,” Squid said.
Laurelai put her arms around him, holding him close to her, face to face, but she was not being affectionate. “Now relax your mind, and let my will be yours. Let me carry you.”
Obviously not physically. Squid relaxed as far as he was able.
There was a kind of magical envelopment. Then he did feel as if he were being carried along with her. Not physically, but temporally.
Something strange was happening. He felt his body changing, and felt her body changing against him. In fact her chest was pushing oddly at his.
Then it stopped. She let him go and stepped back. “Our mass does not change, just our age. We reconfigure for the new age.”
He looked at her. She had indeed changed. Now her loose shirt was pushing out in front, forming a bosom, and her hips had spread while her waist narrowed. She had done this before, but this time it was more pronounced. She had evidently traveled farther into maturity. She was a full woman. A fascinating one.
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “Look at you.”
Squid discovered that his shirt had become tight across the shoulders and his pants tight in the crotch. He had grown in those areas, while turning lean in others.
But more alarming was his reaction to the sight of her. “I want to grab you and, I don’t know what, but I want to.”
“You are suffering the complications that prevented me from getting too old, when my body was male. Now you know how it is.”
“The Adult Conspiracy! My body wants to do something, but my mind remains too young to know what.”
“Exactly. It can be awkward as bleep.”
“But I’m really a cuttlefish,” he protested. “I don’t have human body parts, just emulations. I don’t want to, to signal the stork with you, regardless of my age. We’re two quite different species.”
“I don’t think so. Look at your hand.”
“My hand? It’s just the end of my limbs twined together and colored to look like fingers. It can’t pass a close examination.”
“Can’t it?” She took his hand and lifted it up between them. “This looks like five fingers to me.”
“Yes, but the moment I stop the emulation it will look like the tips to two octopus arms with suckers on the sides.”
“Well, stop the emulation.”
What was she after? Squid let his apparent human hand dissolve into the arms.
Nothing happened. The five fingers remained.
He stared at his own hand. “That can’t be.”
“Yes it can be,” she said. “That’s a fully human hand.”
He tried again, but again the hand did not change. He seemed to be stuck in the emulation.
“Here is the way I see it,” she said. “You’re used to emulating other forms, so that you look like something else while still being a cuttlefish doing contortions. You’re so good at it that you can fool most folk who don’t know you. But now you have taken one additional step: changing the rest of the way to human. You did it before, without realizing. Only when I took you with me five years, and you reacted to my grown body, are you discovering the truth. You have become a teen age human male, with hardly more than one thing on your mind.”
He opened his mouth to protest, but Laurelai took Squid’s hand, which she still held, and touched his fingers to her newly-grown bosom. He freaked out.
“Wake, Squid,” she said, snapping her fingers. “It was only an example so you would know it’s true. You’re a young man now.”
“But how—?”
“Your talent has strengthened. Now you can not only look the part better than before, you are the part. You’re a full shape changer.”
He had not run out of buts. “But—”
“And if you emulated a bird, you’d become a real bird, so you could fly. It’s not a full Magician talent, like that of Prince Dolph, because you have to work at it and you can’t change your mass. Still, it’s a really strong ability. But you see, those changes include the feelings that drive those other creatures. Because of the hormones in the bodies. So when I aged us, you started feeling like a grown human male in the near presence of a shapely human female.”
He grabbed on to one bit he might belatedly understand. “You aged us both?”
“Yes. My aging talent has been enhanced so that now I can take someone with me, if I’m close enough and concentrate hard enough. I took you with me. You will remain sixteen and I will remain seventeen until I take us back to our natural ages. We won’t do it often, or advertise it, but we now have potent additional talents.”
So now he was a real human being, sixteen years old. “I think I need to get back to my original self.”
She shook her head. “Not yet, Squid. I changed our ages, but it was quite an effort, and probably for you too. We need to save our strength until we have done what we have to do, which is to dance for the villagers. Then we can revert.”
“But I’m not used to this! Just looking at you puts me into a tizzy. I need to get away from those hormones.”
“Squid, I understand perfectly, I really do. As you know, I’ve been there myself and felt those uncomfortable feelings. But today you’ll just have to bear with it. I’ll try to help you, but mainly you’ll need strong self-discipline.”
He knew that she was right on the whole business. “I’ll try.”
“Good. Now let’s practice that dance.”
“But it ends with a kiss! Laurelai, if I kiss you—”
“You’ll what?” she asked, not challengingly. She knew the answer.
He struggled to speak the unspeakable. “I’ll fall in love with you.” There; it was out.
“Would that be so bad?”
“Yes! Because you won’t love me.”
She shook her head. “I am not sure of that. You brought me into this adventure, you steered me to the course that granted me my fondest wish. I could do worse than commit to you.”
“But I’m really an alien female cuttlefish.”
She smiled. “We all have our foibles. At the moment you are a young human man. Maybe when you return to your natural species and gender you will be free of such a problematic emotion.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“No, Squid. I’m trying to be realistic. You’re a good person. That’s what really counts.”
“You’re a good person too. But now you have your real form you’ll be able to attract any man you want. You won’t have to bother with me.”
“Squid, you’re forgetti
ng something. To complete our mission, we will have to return to report to the others. That means we’ll have to pass back through the portal. We will return to our original genders. Who else will even understand what we have been through here? They’ll think it’s funny. I think I would rather not try to explain. I would prefer to be with one who truly understands.”
“Yes, I appreciate that, though I don’t think my siblings would laugh. Still, we’re just children, in our real lives.”
“There is one more thing. This mission is dangerous; we know that. We may not survive it.”
“We may not,” he agreed reluctantly.
“If we are to die before we return, I would like to have experienced love first. There may not be another chance.”
She had a point. He felt much the same. “So then how do we handle the, the emotion?”
“I think we may be best off to invoke it now, and learn to handle it, if we can. So we don’t get torpedoed by surprise later, in public, not knowing its ramifications. That could be dangerous.”
“You mean—?”
“Yes.” She stepped into him and kissed him.
Squid’s world exploded into soft joy. There was no question: he loved her.
A moment or an eon later he found himself staring at a floating heart. Rather, it was half a heart. “What’s that?”
She smiled sadly. “Half a heart. I think it’s yours. I believe that means that you love me but I don’t love you. I’m sorry.”
“That’s exactly what I feared.”
“But Squid, I’m not trying to torment you. I do like you. I just don’t love you yet. Women are more complicated than men about such things. Just give me time and it may happen. Meanwhile, we can perfect the dance.”
“Kiss and all,” he agreed.
They worked on the dance. They were both thoroughly familiar with it, but needed to practice the changed genders. Laurelai had to take the female role, doing the twirls and leg lifts, and Squid the male role, holding her steady. They kept lapsing, but soon they were getting it right. They could present the dance.
The twins returned. “I knitted a bunch of dresses,” Hilda said. “Ion cleansed three wells. We have earned our keep. Have you gotten the dance straight?”
“We think so,” Laurelai said. “Here, we’ll show you.”
This time they opened one of the cans, and the music sounded. They did the dance, which really didn’t take long. They finished with the kiss, and Squid felt the explosion again. But this time he also felt some response from Laurelai. She was starting to share the feeling!
“That’s really cute,” Hilda said. “But now I need to make your costumes.”
Squid and Laurelai had forgotten about that. Their present clothing was ill fitting because of the age change, and it was getting on toward show time. Could Hilda make that deadline?
“Wow,” Hilda said as she conjured material and sewed it. “I’m twice as fast and sure as I was.”
Squid’s eye met Laurelai’s eye; their glances almost collided. Talent upgrading was still occurring. The girl was already a Sorceress; now she was even more so.
Soon the outfits were ready, a nice shirt and trouser for Squid, complete with a colorful sash. A lovely dress for Laurelai, complete with a plaid panty like the one Myst now wore. Dancing slippers for them both.
“But won’t that panty freak out the audience when she high kicks?” Squid asked.
“Fear not,” Laurelai said. “The flashes will be too brief for that. Just enough to cruelly tease them. This dance was always geared for that. They’ll love it.”
“We will need a caller,” Squid said. “I think you can do that, Hilda.”
“Sure. Long as I know what to say.”
Squid went over it with him. Hilda was delighted to have the role.
Then it was dance time. Inn & Outt came to the door to collect them, and he led them to the village square, where the whole village was gathered.
There was no applause at their appearance. The cynical villagers first wanted to see whether they really were good enough.
Squid smiled to himself. This audience would not be disappointed.
Now the two of them took the stage. “This dance is called ‘False Step,’” he announced. “It is really a story told in dance form. After we demonstrate it, we will teach it to any of you who want to learn it. But be warned: the steps are tricky, as you will see.” He saw the dismissal in their faces; they knew how to do tricky steps.
Hilda and Ion came to join them on the stage, Ion floating on her mini carpet. This caused no reaction: they knew and respected her. It was the two new travelers who were on trial.
The four of them took their places. Ion opened a can, and the canned music poured out.
“Laurelai has a problem,” Hilda announced, following the script. “She is a winsome girl, but she can’t find any boy to match her step.”
Laurelai danced forward, age seventeen, pretty as one-and-a-half pictures in her special dress, smiling hopefully. Squid, not yet active, saw all the village men of any age gazing longingly at her, along with some of the girls. Her feet made an intricate pattern so that it was difficult to see exactly when they touched the floor. That was the thing about this dance; it had the trickiest stepping of them all. Now Squid observed the audience in greater detail, and saw the men watching Laurie’s legs closely, and the women too, amazed by respectively bare perfection and a step they had not seen before. Already an impact was being made.
“She tries one boy after another,” Hilda continued. “But it just doesn’t work.”
Laurelai danced toward Hilda, and Hilda tried to match the step, but their feet got tangled and both fell to the floor. Ion put his hand over the can, stopping the music. There was laughter in the audience, as there was supposed to be.
“Finally she tries the last boy in the village,” Hilda continued as Ion removed his hand and the canned music resumed. “She is beautiful and he is ordinary, so she never noticed him before. And lo! He knows the step!”
Squid started dancing, his intricate steps matching Laurelai’s. They came together and swung, and her skirt flared out, almost showing her panty. It was amazing that their legs did not tangle as they danced together. Then she did a high kick, as he held her in place, flashing the audience too briefly to fully register. They loved it.
It was a beautiful dance, because of the perfection of their meshing; any couple performing it would look great, but they were a class above the ordinary. Finally came the finale as they kissed, and a heart flew out. Laurie had found her partner, and true love at last.
Applause broke out. The dance was a success!
But they were not done. Squid addressed the villagers again. “This is actually a fairly simple dance to do, once you learn the step. We will teach you the false step so that you can do it after we move on. We will start with two volunteers, one boy and one girl, and the rest of you can learn as they do.” He smiled. “I’ll take the girl.”
There was a hesitation, then a village elder indicated a girl. She came forward to stand before Squid, pretty and curvaceous. “Hi,” she said shyly. “I’m Renee. I’m thirteen and my talent is to make people younger briefly, or a part of a person younger for longer, like the heart or the mind. But I’d just love to learn this for myself so I can flash boys and make them drool.”
Squid considered, and decided not to mention Laurelai’s broader talent. For one thing, they didn’t want to make it obvious that they were younger than they looked. “That’s very good,” he said. “Now let me explain the key mechanism of the false step. Once you have that, the rest will be relatively easy.”
“Yes!” she agreed breathlessly. Girls like her were very good at being breathless.
He explained the step, had her practice it briefly, then took her in his arms and did it with her. It was far from perfect, but after
several false starts she began to get it. Then it came together, because she did know how to dance, and soon had the step. There was applause as they danced prettily, and Renee twirled and did a high kick. She had mastered it, or perhaps mistressed it.
She was of course thrilled, but Squid was quite pleased too. He had taught the step, as a boy to a girl. Did the villagers realize he was actually a girl? It was possible, because the people knew that anyone coming through the portal was gender changed.
Meanwhile, Laurelai was teaching a young man, Rick O’Shea, who tended to bounce around a lot before he got it straight. But soon he had it. Then they put Rick and Renee together, and they showed how they handled the False Step to more applause.
Others followed, until there were enough people trained in the new dance so that they could teach others.
The hosteler Inn & Outt came to them. “You have done marvelously well,” he said. “You will always be welcome here when you travel.”
“Thank you,” they said, almost together.
“I think Renee and Rick have crushes on the two of you.”
“Uh,” Squid said. “That isn’t advisable, because—”
“They know. Our village is not named Portal for nothing. Many of our residents are changed folk. It’s a compliment to your performance.”
They retired to their suite for the night. What a day it had been!
“Are you ready to revert?” Laurelai inquired.
“More than ready,” Squid agreed.
They clasped each other and slid back to their natural ages. Their new clothing no longer fit well, and they had to change, no longer concerned about seeing each other in the process.
“You know, you’re a fair semblance of a young man, as a teen,” she said. “I could see myself becoming earnestly attached to you.”
“Don’t tease me! You’re a devastating young woman.”
“I’m serious. I like you as a boy or a girl.”
“Oh, Laurelai! But you know we’re really not meant for each other.”
“Maybe not. But for now let’s enjoy our crushes.”
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