Only one entry today; I had a very busy morning, after all. Besides
having my picture taken (which honestly didn't take all that
long), I also decided to move into Millie's house, since there was a
space open. There's never too much to move when anyone wants
to change houses here, since of course all the furniture stays with
the house. However, when we'd agreed I could move and I came to
retrieve my notebooks, I found that the desktop I've been writing
these entires on had been spontaneously replaced by a laptop.
And..other than being portable now, it's the exact same comupter:
Same programs as far as I can tell, same files including all of my
own documents.
While this isn't any more ridiculous and impossible than all
of the other things I've experienced and heard about on this island,
it just seems so oddly specific. It's like someone read my comment
about only a few girls getting laptops on this island and thought it
was a complaint. It wasn't; if anything, I can just tell
I'll wind up doing something dumb and needing Nikki's help again more
often than I ever would with an immobile desktop. But I can't argue
that it isn't convenient; I was able to just pull the computer from
my old house and take it to the new one intact instead of having to
somehow gather all the files and transfer them over to a different
computer. And, I'll admit, it is nice to have the option of
doing my work sitting on a comfy couch or chair rather than always
leaning over a desk in a bedroom.
Anyway, since I'm living here now, I thought it'd be best to
interview my other housemate first thing. We were introduced before,
but hadn't had a chance to talk much before the interview, and I'm
finding that these interviews are a pretty great way to get to know
each other. Her name is Emera, and she more or less just helps out
with things most of the time. Like, she'll fill in for Millie at the
library now and then, or help with the cooking, or go work in the
salon if it's getting a little too busy. If someone needs an extra
hand with something, Emera is one of the girls to come to. I don't
know of any complaints about her work in all these different areas,
so even if she isn't an expert in anything, she must still be
quite multi-talented, and a pretty hard worker.
Plenty of the girls here had lives before they arrived that they were
unsatisfied (or at least neutral) about. Emmett was nothing like
that; he was a young, wealthy, hotshot lawyer of about middling rank
and set to be promoted soon in a huge law firm. He wound up here
because his personal yacht sank out at sea. Emera wouldn't tell me
exactly how his yacht sank, which leads me to guess that it
was some act of stupidity on his own part.
Also unlike many of us, he woke up on the beach somewhere in the
middle of the night, with the moon high up in the sky. That meant
there was initially nobody around to greet him; for reference, he
arrived around a month after Kate, when the population here was
fairly low. People do stay up late some nights, but this just
wasn't one of them, or at least nobody who did happened upon
him.
He walked inland and found the houses, knocking on the door of the
first one he came to. No answer, so he tried the second, and then the
third. He called out, but nobody happened to hear him in that area at
that time of night. So he came to the conclusion that he'd stumbled
upon some sort of abandoned housing project out in the tropics or
something, especially since he found all of the front doors unlocked.
He went into the fourth house he came to, calling out to see if
anyone was inside, and once he was sure it was unoccupied, he just
went to lie on the couch to sleep.
The end result of all of this was that Emmett had no contact with
anyone and no particular warning about what was going to happen to
him at first. So he was very confused when he woke up the following
morning with shoulder-length hair. But he decided it was more
important to focus on survival. He explored around the bizarrely
pristine home to double-check that nobody was inside, and when he
found food in the kitchen and had convinced himself that it was
edible, he ate until he was full before going outside.
Then—finally—Emmett encountered one of the girls already present
on the island.
The girl in question was a little over-eager, and instead of saying
anything meaningful, she just ran off to get Najira. Emmett tried to
chase after the first human contact he had on what he'd thought was a
strangely deserted island, but she had enough of a head start before
he processed what had happened for him to keep up, and turned a
corner where he couldn't see. After stopping and catching his breath,
he called out a few times, each time hearing his voice come out a
little bit different. His voice had already begun to change at this
point, its pitch slowly rising; he thought it was just him being
hoarse or tired. This time, he was next to Kate's house, so she and
her housemates came out to see what all the noise was about—and so
he encountered a girl with the "impossible" traits of
foxlike ears and a fluffy tail.
There was a lot of confusion at this point, on both sides of the
conversation. On Emmett's side, there was understandable stress and
frustration that boiled out into some angry shouting about how very
important he was. Fortunately, Najira finally arrived after a minute
or two of both parties failing to make any sense to the other and
yelled at everyone to be quiet. She apologized to the newcomer for
the overall bizarre welcome and calmly explained the situation:
Everyone stuck on the island, and the island seemingly transforming
each new arrival into a woman over the course of the next few days.
Emmett huffed, saying that this was ridiculous—just as his voice
lilted up past a masculine tenor tone and began to sound like a
girl's. So Kate just flatly asked him "what do you
think's up with your voice, then?" prompting him to try to make
it sound the way he thought it was supposed to, five or six times,
all without success.
Emera remembers some of her exact words at this point, although she
warned me beforehand that it was "not my proudest moment".
He said, "This is absurd! I-I must have just come down with some
laryngitis or something! You honestly expect me to believe any
of your ridiculous story!?" Then he demanded to use a
phone...there aren't any phones here. Najira offered to let him use
her computer, noting that we do have Internet.
He stormed along behind her still fuming. He thought it all had to be
some kind of trick at this point, maybe an elaborate kidnapping
scheme that the perpetrators somehow thought would be easier than
just locking him in a room or something. Around halfway there, he
began to second-guess himself about Najira's height. Sure, he
thought, she was a tall woman, but was she really this tall?
Each time he tried to get a read on her, he measured her to be
taller. This came to a head when he nearly tripped over the leggings
of his pants, stumbling forward, and she quickly turned around and
caught him, helping him get upright.
At this point, Emmett was still wearing the clothes he'd washed
ashore in. They consisted of a fancy suit and tie, but not in the
best of condition: torn up in places and previously soaked in ocean
water. He'd lost his socks and shoes to the ocean, so he was
barefoot. It was all very expensive, custom-made, tailored to his
exact body shape—but as Najira calmly said something like "Oh,
it looks as if you've started shrinking already," he realized
that his coat was hanging awkwardly down past his shoulders, his
sleeves and leggings were both markedly too long, and the woman in
front of him looked even taller still. He was in complete denial,
angrily shouting (in what was now a high, cute, girly soprano) that
this had to be some kind of trick, even while our leader knelt
down to carefully roll his leggings up nearly to his knees so he
wouldn't trip over them.
As she'd anticipated, Emmett kept getting smaller as they continued
on to her house and inside, to a bedrrom which was at the time
unoccupied—and its resident computer. By this point, Emmett's eye
level had sunk from over Najira's head all the way down to her
impressive chest, and his continued display of anger was to mask a
steadily growing fear that he wasn't dreaming or hallucinating and
every bit of this was real. Najira stood off to one side in case he
had any difficulty with the computer, which he insisted he wouldn't.
This is where Emera's story gets especially strange, for me at least.
The law firm Emmett worked for, like I said, was huge. They
had a website; they had ads on TV and radio all over the place: They
should not have been hard to find. But, searching around,
Emmett could not find a single trace of them. He'd been hoping to log
into their website and use his company email to contact somebody for
help, but the URL took him to the website of some town's local plant
nursery instead. Not even his personal email address seemed to work;
the mail service insisted that no such username existed. Emmett could
feel tears coming down his eyes as he searched around desperately to
try to figure out what was happening, and then finally started
"loudly bawling" (Emera told me) and pounding on the
keyboard with his fist.
At the end of this tantrum, Emmett crossed his arms over the keyboard
and buried his face in them, still sobbing. He felt a hand gently
touch his shoulder and sat up, sniffing loudly and trying to
formulate some kind of angry response, when Najira just picked him up
into a bear hug with his head over her shoulder, silently letting him
cry it out. Once or twice she ran a hand through his hair, which he
found much more comforting than he would've expected. Finally, she
set him down in front of her and took a polite step back.
"I'm sorry you couldn't find them," she said. "This place is strange in many ways, and we still don't know what all of the rules are. It isn't the first time someone's looked for something on the net and it simply didn't exist."
Emmett was silent for a long moment after that, just feeling the reality of it all sink in, and then quietly apologized and thanked her. Emera told me that Najira said something "really cool and encouraging" after that, but she can't for the life of her remember what exactly it was.
"I'm sorry you couldn't find them," she said. "This place is strange in many ways, and we still don't know what all of the rules are. It isn't the first time someone's looked for something on the net and it simply didn't exist."
Emmett was silent for a long moment after that, just feeling the reality of it all sink in, and then quietly apologized and thanked her. Emera told me that Najira said something "really cool and encouraging" after that, but she can't for the life of her remember what exactly it was.
The main realization that Emmett came to as his mind worked to truly
understand what he was stuck with, was that Najira and all of the
other girls he'd met were stuck in the very same sort of situation:
stranded here, with no apparent way home. And so he decided then and
there that he'd do his best to be at peace with living here, getting
along with everyone and doing whatever he could to contribute and
help make everyone happy.
That's when Emmett felt a weird push from his ears, and the base of
his spine. He got out a confused "Wha—?" before he had
fully grown a pair of small furry ears (well, smaller than Kate's
anyway) and a long, slim, fuzzy tail. I wanted to save this detail
until reaching it in Emera's account, but yes: She was the second
girl with unusual, animal-like traits, and the first of what you
might call "catgirls" here. Najira couldn't offer much of
an explanation for this, just noting that something similar had
happened to Kate before and it probably didn't signal anything
too terrible.
Since he understood the situation now, Najira let Emmett know that
the bedroom they were in was unoccupied, and he could stay there if
he wanted—or go live in one of the empty houses if he preferred.
With the realization he'd had and resulting decision he'd made, he
concluded right away that he'd rather live close by other people,
especially Najira—since he'd been very rude and maybe even hurtful
to a lot of the other girls. She assured him that they wouldn't be
too upset and she'd smooth it over if they were, but his decision
stood nonetheless.
After she left him alone, Emmett decided that he wanted to take a
better look at just what had happened to his body, so he went to the
bathroom, peeling off the irritatingly loose and long,
totally-ruined-anyway clothes as he went. What he saw in the mirror
was a very short, quite effeminate man: Long hair, slender waist,
short arms and legs ending in tiny, delicate hands and feet. There
were, of course, the cat ears and tail he'd just gained, plus some
small fangs in his mouth. Besides all of this, his skin had already
shifted too, leaving it all soft and smooth, and even his face
was already quite different, looking soft, round, and girlish. Najira
would go on to tell her later that the face change had happened
sometime during the hug, but she hadn't wanted to upset him by
bringing it up.
He sighed, mourning the loss of his previous appearance for just a
moment, and then turned around to try and find some clothes that
would actually fit him. He was startled enough to jump briefly when
he found his discarded clothes completely replaced by a white vest, a
light-colored long-sleeved jacket with a zipper, and a pair of very
short jean shorts. In all of the fuss, Najira had forgotten to
mention the way this island likes to replace things like clothes
whenever you aren't looking, but Emmett worked it out on his own that
this had to be part of the same bizarreness that had him transforming
into a woman in the first place. He shrugged and put on the clothes,
reasoning that at least they fit him properly and weren't damaged
beyond all reasonable use anymore.
After that rapid onslaught of changes, Emmett and everyone else was
fairly surprised to find his body remaining unaltered for the entire
rest of the day. Emera admitted it was a little embarrassing being
such a short, feminine-looking man around all of those beautiful
women, but he started in on his earlier commitment all the same. The
first thing he went to do was apologize to the girls he'd met before
for the shouting match, all of which said they didn't mind or made it
clear they'd outright forgotten it had even happened.
After that, he went looking for things to help out with, and found a
few tasks here and there until lunchtime. Then Kate called for
volunteers to help her cook, and he was first in line. Emera told me
at this point that he was "totally incomptent" at the time
and Kate had to show him how to not cut or burn himself some five or
six times, but—despite her apparent disposition—she was extremely
patient with the newcomer the entire time.
The rest of the day went similarly. Emmett was slowly getting used to
the idea that he'd be changing sexes soon, and even began to look
forward to it as the girls remarked how cute they thought he'd look
"once it was all over". Emera's own words are that he "went
to bed that night happier than I remembered being in a really-really
long time." He'd been spending years upon years working
extremely hard nonstop, chasing fame and luxury, and it was already
beginning to feel like all of that had been ultimately hollow and
worthless. Not even doing all he could to enjoy all that
wealth seems to have really brought him much joy back then.
He woke up to a feeling of tugging and slipping between his legs, and
I'm sure you know what that means by now. Emera blushed and told me
that this was the first time she ever made "kitty noises",
just as the change came between Emmett's legs and the catboy fully
became a catgirl for the first time. She got up and took a shower,
and found her hips gently spreading themselves out, her chest slowly
puffing up into some breasts, over the half-hour or so that she was
in there; by the time she exited and toweled off, the transformation
was already complete, leaving her a petite, adorable catgirl.
She's maybe half a head taller than Kate, but that still leaves her
as one of the shorter girls on the island; she remarked to me that
she actually really likes having "tiny boobs" that don't
"get in the way all the time". I guess I'll find out
eventually just how "in the way" mine are. Anyway, she went
out of her way to find an outfit just like what her suit and tie
turned into on her very first day for Saya's photo shoot—although
there's a bikini top and bottom instead of the vest and male
underwear from back then, which have long since vanished.
I decided, as a final question, to ask her just what it's like to be
"part animal" the way she is. Emera giggled and told me
that she doesn't mind at all having better hearing and balance, that
her keener sense of smell is a "blurse" (which I think
means it's good in some ways and bad in others?), and finally that
it's still a little surreal to her to enjoy people petting her ears,
but it's a form of enjoyment she wouldn't trade for anything.
On that note, Kate showed up a little bit after sunset today,
announced that she was "here to see Em", and went to
Emera's room. I've occasionally heard faint purring and barking
noises from that direction since then. Well, I suppose this is what
Millie meant when she told me one of the perks of living in this
house was "the occasional big breakfast".
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