Karyu shook his head to the idea of mating with any dragon besides Oakmoss, deciding that he will stick to Luka if not daydreaming about the teal and gray drake he continued to pine for.
Bartamus stared for a moment at his brother-turned sister, and he rubbed his eyes. "Luke...Luka...I mean it just doesn't look like you have ever been different, except that I know that you used to be," he said, trying to process this. "When I talk to you, you are the same gung-ho but annoyingly idealistic person. If you had told me in a letter that you had become a woman, I would have been worried for you, and I would have expected to find that something bad had happened to you and broken something in you. You don't seem broken. You seem, if anything, repaired in some ways. Still you, just a little more confident and happy."
"Well, yes," Luka said wryly, "I have changed my sex, not my personality. I never thought that I really wanted to be a woman and felt like it was such a fleeting, stupid fantasy, but necessity pushed me over to making the decision. I am happy that I did. I realize now that I was not silly at all to daydream that I could be a beautiful princess, but instead, I could be so much more, not less."
Bartamus shrugged, and he blushed a little bit. "I just guess that I feel like being less of a man would be like being less of a person, but now that I meet you and talk to you, you don't seem like less of a person at all. You are like a warrior goddess. A Valkyrie. You are HOT, Luka."
"Are you really thinking about becoming a woman, yourself?" Luka asked, tilting her head to the side. She had really been half-kidding when she suggested that her brother, Bartamus, become a woman and consider having kilin offspring by his dragon, but now, his brother seemed to be seriously considering the idea. "I think you might be making a mistake if you are thinking about bearing kilin. Don't you spend most of your life out adventuring?"
At this, Bartamus paused, and he slowly shook his head. "I have been moderately successful, and I actually have a few homes that I legally own in places that are almost incredibly safe. I have a few investments lying around, most of them a little embarrassing but a handful I know are secure. If I wanted to, I could disappear to one of those places, and I could focus the rest of my life on motherhood."
Luka giggled. "You're serious, aren't you?" she asked, putting her hand over her mouth for a moment as she thought about what her brother was considering. Bartamus, the bigshot pirate that was never loyal to anybody, wanting to live like a stay-at-home mom, bearing offspring for his dragon, Teach."
"Well, it depends on what Teach thinks," Bartamus cautioned. "We've always been in this together." Luka had only learned recently in life to ask for her dragon's opinions on things, having had her mind opened up by her experiences with Karyu. Bartamus had always just done this easily and casually. Before, Luka had always thought that Bartamus was just being cheeky toward tradition, and she had felt it was a silly habit of a man that always was obsessed with flouting expectation. She saw now that Bartamus and Teach really had always loved each other, and this was just going to open up a new dimension to their relationship.
The golden dragon's eyes sparkled with amusement, and he pointed out, "Well, we already bicker," he suggested, "so I see no reason why having squalling brats in the background should make things any different, at heart." His eyes twinkled humorously as he turned to Karyu. "So human pussy is good, you say?"
Karyu blushed and ducked his head. "Well, I've always been a little...small. For a dragon, anyhow. And Luka is..." he broke off, and soon, he became so flustered that he was beyond recovery.
Bartamus thought about that, and his mouth twisted in a worried manner. "Well, just a moment, then. If Karyu is small for a dragon and gets a tight fit, then how...?"
Luka giggled. "Come ON, Bartamus. I gave birth through the same orifice. It stretches because it's MEANT to stretch. Yes, Bartamus would be about as big inside you as a baby would be, but on the other hand, doesn't that just make you more prepared?"
Bartamus sighed. "Okay, but I remember you saying something about this transformation involving a mixture of human magics and draconic ones."
That brought a nod from Luka. "And luckily, Anija has managed to teach Avelia enough witchcraft that I am pretty sure that Vrackie and Avelia together could manage such a simple transformation spell."
The matter was decided, then, that they would take a trip out to visit Vaestro, Anija, Avelia, and Vrackie.
It was Vrackie, though, that was the voice of skepticism. "Luka, you should know better!" sie fumed.
"What did I do wrong?" Luka said helplessly, gawking at the herm as sie raged and snorted a cloud of annoyed smoke. "I just said the truth about what I felt. It feels so good. I feel like a goddess. How was I wrong to make it sound as appealing as it actually is?"
"You idiot!" Vrackie raged bitterly, licks of flame trickling out of hir maw. "For you, an undeveloped remnant of your gender was always there. Yes, I know human mythology, which Anija taught me well enough. You heard a story about a princess when you were little, and you became fixated upon it as a fantasy. That was because you already had something inside you that needed some kind of an outlet. A role-model. A prototype. You didn't need it quite enough that you were sad anytime you didn't have that outlet, but you needed it just enough that playing the fantasy in your head helped you sleep at night. Well, now that you are actually a woman, you are full up enough of womanhood that you don't need that as your nighttime blanket to cling to as you fall to sleep, but you DO dress up in a boy's clothes and live a boy's life as an adventure-seeker BECAUSE YOU LOVE BOTH PARTS OF YOUR NATURE. If you humans were made by a sane deity, you would have a hermaphroditic sex, just like us dragons do."
"Well, I don't LOOK like a boy in my tunic!" Luka said hotly.
"But why do boys wear it?" Vrackie asked, crossing hir forelegs in a very human-like gesture. Vrackie was neither entirely human-like nor entirely dragon-like, being more fairy now than either.
"To be able to use all of their muscles at once," Luka said. "It doesn't constrain motion like a pant would. If you even tried to mount up on a dragon while wearing pants made out of the materials that are available to us, they would rip instantly, most likely in a highly embarrassing place. Someday, we might have a textile that is stretchable and strong enough to make a solid pair of pants out of, but for now, the best thing for an athlete to wear is something that liberates the legs."
And at that, Vrackie stomped hir foot. "There you go, thinking like a male," sie said, a triumphant gleam in hir eye. "Your gender, Luka, is the same as it was when you were a man. Magic can change many things, but it can't change that."
"Then why, again, would Bartamus be affected in this way but not me?" Luka asked skeptically.
Vrackie explained patiently, "Luka, you comforted yourself to sleep at night with a fantasy where you were a princess, so you had an anchor in the feminine identity. You had the ability to imagine yourself being a woman, even if that fantasy never meant anything to you during the day. If Bartamus doesn't have anything in him that identifies as a woman, then he will not have anything to anchor himself. He will go the rest of his life feeling like he is in a body that does not belong to him. He might even hurt himself."
Bartamus, a little flustered at this point over being talked about as if he were not present, finally got a word in edgewise. "Well, how can we figure out if I actually do have something in me that I could use as an anchor?"
Vrackie said firmly, "You need a heroine that you identify with. A female character from either a folk story, a children's tale, or a romance that you feel expresses something inside of you that you otherwise could not express."
"Like 'The Princess that Fell in Love with the Dragon,'" Bartamus said brightly, smiling.
"I have never heard of that one," Vrackie grumped.
Bartamus proceeded to tell the story from his childhood. As he told the story of the heroine, who was treated very badly by her kingdom and very well by the dragon she was thrown to as a sacrifice, Vrackie's eyes gleamed with humor.
"Well," the herm admitted, "surprisingly enough, you humans do have stories where dragons are something besides either devils or beaten animals to be driven by a riding crop or a whip. I wonder why I have never seen this put into practice, but then again, you must regard it as fantasy, rather than biography. Anyhow, surviving the change is going to require you to fix your mind on this identity, so when you find yourself in the body of a woman, you will be able to adopt a viable persona to go with that body. If you are ready, then, Bartamus, I will need you to remove all of your clothes at once."
Bartamus blushed. "Now, come on!" he protested. "In front of everybody? I mean going about without a stich is fine for you dragons, but..."
Anija leaned up against the door-frame and smiled wryly at Bartamus. She was an anthro dragoness, and her body was highly pregnant. Somehow, it seemed very natural for her to not be wearing anything at all, and her body looked both adorable and sexy clad in nothing but her natural feathers. "You will not be showing anything that we have never seen before, Bartamus," she said. "We promise we won't faint."
At that point, Vaestro appeared in the family room of the little cottage, appearing to have just woken up. He wore absolutely nothing, not being a sort of person that worries about who sees what parts of him. "What is this all about?" he asked.
"That's the spirit, Vaestro!" Anija said merrily. "All humans, CLOTHES OFF!" she cheered.
With that, all of the humans, including Avelia, were wearing no clothes at all. Avelia looked particularly odd without any clothes on, though. Avelia had grown up wearing a bodice at all times, whenever she was awake, and she had therefore never used her own core muscles very much to hold up her weight. As a consequence, she had an extremely narrow waist. Avelia lacked the girlish cuteness of Anija or the athletic vigorousness of Luka. Instead, she was a full-blooded WOMAN, and she really looked stunning revealed in her full feminine glory.
Vrackie looked over at Teach's sheath, and her breath caught in her throat a little bit. Where Karyu was actually slightly small for a dragon, his shaft being about normal for a miniature horse and being something that any woman that was determined to could fit into her, Teach bore between his legs a bit of a monster. "Bartamus," Vrackie said, "I am going to have to put a compatibility spell on you, just to make sure that you live through your first mating with Teach. Your hips will be very wide like Avelia's, but in your case, your vagina will be correspondingly large, making just enough room...and only just enough...for you to safely fit Teach inside you. There is just no alternative. It's going to be a tight fit, even this way."
Bartamus nodded in consent, standing nervously in the center of the room and waiting for the ritual to begin. With that, Avelia began walking in a circle around him and painting some sort of mixture onto Bartamus, chanting something in an ancient language. Vrackie summoned hir draconic magic, which was more intuitive, and conjured a sphere of magical energy between hir wings, which glowed brightly like ball lightning. As Vrackie's magic combined with that being used by Avelia, the symbols Avelia was painting on Bartamus began to glow, and the mixture began to fuse its way, painlessly, in to Bartamus' skin.
After a while, Bartamus began changing, slowly, into Battamaea, affectionately known as Tammy.