Monica gave her new tail a cautious flip and felt it propel her through the warm waters of Venus. She was still overcome with the feeling of moving through a three-dimensional medium. what the older merfolk called the water high. Fish herding was tiring, but the constant mental engagement kept her, so to speak, grounded. And communications were better than she expected, as she wore a crystalline unit around her neck wired for global and personal (although, alas, not interplanetary) communication.
She felt the slight electrical tinge that went along with the device activating. "Hiya, cutie!" She recognized Lorraine, a more experienced mermaid on her fish-herding group that she had been flirting with. "You wanna come hang out with my pod tonight?"
Monica would have felt weak in the knees if she still had knees. She knew that "Hang out with my pod" meant in merfolk-speak "Engage in group sex with 4-5 other merfolk of both sexes." She had had trouble deciding whether the curvy, graceful bodies of mermaids or the muscular bodies of mermen were more attractive, until she discovered the most merfolk thought it was silly not to enjoy both.
"That sounds fun!" she sent back.
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Taprobana looked at the vial of youth hormone and sighed. She had never planned for her second teenagerhood to be permanent. Now that Ashley had shown it was possible to make a change, maybe it was time to grow up. She handed the vial back to the nurse practitioner, a lizard-man. "Take me off the program."
Carlotta gave her a hug. "I'm so proud of you" she whispered in her partner's ear.
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Robisa was "on shift"--enjoying a period of normal consciousness while most of the new colonists were in cryosleep--when word arrived of a personal message from earth. She nudged the male colonist beside her out of bed. "Message from home" she said. "Little privacy?"
Her bedfellow got up and shook his head. "OK" he gave her a kiss on the cheek. Robisa smiled. Before she became female, she had never truly appreciated the combination of ridiculousness and delight that was a man. She turned her attention to the screen. A message from Ashley.