The night passed without incident in the dorm. Charlie awoke the next morning at 5:30 AM promptly in order to get an early start to the day. All "initiates"-the technical term for their current status in society-were expected to be awake, groomed, dressed and down for breakfast by 7:15 AM sharp. Lateness was not tolerated, and would leave a blackmark on your record. Shaking his head as he headed for the communal shower that his dormgroup and two others shared, Charlie reminded himself that every action could be judged and used against him, especially frightening given the circumstances they were in. As he headed for the shower, he noticed that Daniel had already awoken and apparently dressed and showered himself, as he was in the common room engaged in some kind of meditation or something. Charlie didn't allow himself to worry about it, simply carrying on with his own business.
After showering, Charlie dressed and headed straight down for breakfast, finding Timothy waiting for him there. The two friends caught up more with what they thought the day's trials would entail and what jobs they might be assigned upon their graduation. Charlie figured they would both head into construction work in their town...after all they were still building a new set of apartments for the rebounding population of their state, but Timothy had higher hopes of education or even the military police. Quickly their conversation was drowned out by the other boys arriving for breakfast, Lance arriving first closely followed by the twins. Daniel was the last to arrive, only eating a small portion before mumbling that he was full. After breakfast, the commandant of the center addressed the gathered crowd, saying that the first official trial, a 10 mile hike through the woods to test physical endurance, would be postponed to the next day, as they had something else in store for them today. Curious, Charlie and company followed along with the other initiates, only pausing momentarily when he realized that they were headed for the Girls Showers. They were led to a room just outside the main entryway to one of the dreaded transformation chambers where a one-way window was showing them the inside.
"Today you boys are going to see first hand what awaits you if you fail. I don't need to tell you the consequences, but sometimes a visual aid can be helpful," he barked out. He then continued saying that the boy to be transformed was a holdover from the last set of initiations a few months earlier. He had washed out before the end of the trials for committing a cardinal violation. "He was caught in a homosexual act," the commandant explained. "As you all are aware, homosexuality is an intolerable offence given the difficulties that have plagued our society since the Great Calamity. While it might be tolerated in less civilized places in the world, we will not stand for it in this country. His "lover" has already been sentenced and sold to another state. This one though...we wanted to save for an example." Charlie leaned closer into the window as he saw the young man dragged in by guards wearing riot gear. He was stark naked save for the cuffs on his hands and feet, and while he still fought to get free, he almost seemed resigned to his fate by the end. Charlie didn't really want to watch, didn't want to know how this worked. On the other hand, he was also morbidly curious. He did notice that Lance was shying away from the window, while Daniel appeared to be watching with much more intent than even Charlie.
The subject was left in the center of the room and the cuffs were removed as the two guards left, sealing the room shut. The young man tried in vain to run against the door, but found it would not open. The commandant flipped a switch on the wall next to the one-way window, and a powerful but muted hissing sound could be heard coming from the inside of the chamber. The man slowly back into the center, a colorless and odorless gas filling the room. In vain the boy held his breath, trying to keep from breathing the transformative agent, but he could only hold out for so long. About 30 seconds after the gas had began, the young man cried out in pain and collapsed onto the ground. He attempted to curl up in a fetal position but his spasming muscles forced him to stretch out as sweat poured out over his body. Charlie could only watch in amazement as the boy slowly shrank in size, his bones loudly cracking at intervals as they shrunk to match his new frame. A sickeningly loud snap was heard twice in quick succession as his hips reset themselves into exaggerated, child rearing position. As the gas continued to fill the room, all the hair on the boy's body, what little there was to begin with, fell off quickly. The hair on his head though grew out to shoulder length, a side effect of the feminizing gas.
The boy's face rearranged to become smaller, rounder, with a thinner nose and higher cheek bones. His screaming and yelling rose up in octaves as his voice changed to a feminine register, while what little muscle tone he possessed reshaped itself into something more fitting his new gender. Charlie then watched as fat began to build up first on the boy's ass, giving it a nice heart shape, and then on his thighs, accentuating his curves even more. The boy's screams began to turn to moans as hormones flooded his body and his chest began to grow larger, two bulbous breasts forming to forever define his new lot in life. Finally, after what seemed like forever but in reality was only a couple of minutes, the boy's dick receded back into his body, his balls long before having been transformed into their feminine counterparts, leaving only a non-descript slit behind in its place. The boy let out a near orgasmic yell as his transformation completed itself, morphing from abject terror and pain into something resembling pleasure. Charlie noticed that he was getting slightly turned on from the experience of watching it, and hoped that wouldn't be held against him. As giant fans blew inside the chamber, sucking out what remained of the feminizing gas so it could be neutralized, a guard wearing a hazmat suit came into the chamber and injected the newly transformed woman with the second half of the transformation, the first part of the drug cocktail that would turn him into the docile creature that would become an obedient slave in this society.
The one-way window closed and Charlie slowly backed away and the Commandant warned them that could be them if they fail, before dismissing them back to their dorms for some "reflections" on what they had just witnessed, with instructions to be ready for the trials to begin that afternoon. Mechanically, Charlie and his group went back to the dorm and awaited their first trial, going through lunch and the rest of the morning without so much as a word exchanged between them. As they arrived at their first trial, they learned it would be a basic aptitude test instead of the ten-mile hike, though Charlie felt he couldn't focus on anything except the transformation he had just witnessed. Knuckling down, he tried to finish the test and make it through the rest of the day.