Day 39?If there’s one feeling Amy has always hated, it’s being unable to respond. She didn’t like it in css, in the rare cases when she didn’t know the answer to the questions given to her, and she never liked it during debates, when the implication of being unable to answer changed from mere stupidity to being incapable of continuing the activity itself. She feels humiliated every single time she’s left silent and forced to consider what she needs to say next.

  Usually, she avoids these scenarios by trying to think ahead, anticipate points of discussion and having an extensive corpus of possible answers ready to be slotted in. But it’s been harder recently as the surprises keep hitting, exacerbated by her own inability to imagine what the sponsors might do next. Part of that is that she doesn’t particurly want to think about the depths they’ll go to — another part is that the scripts she does have come from a certain literary genre, and Amy very much doesn’t want to py the role assigned to her if they do follow those stories.

  The st few minutes have been one gut-punch after another. Her situation has shifted from something she doesn’t want to consider to something she was unable to. Each revetion is filled with more emotion than she’s used to handling, wearing her down to the point she is now— silent, stiff, staring into the distance like a deer in headlights.

  The sponsors took Ray. Her best friend. Her partner in crime. Someone she had always been able to trust implicitly, and vice versa. Her friend who would send her the stupidest greentexts and the weirdest little freaks he could find, trawling through endless threads just so he’d find something amusing. Her friend who would always hold her to account when she was struggling too heavily with her mental illnesses, which was more often than Amy would like to admit.

  And that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  Faith — a girl she’s grown to like a little bit over the past week or so — is not just one of her two best friends who ended up being kidnapped. She was someone in mourning, someone who had lost a friend she looked up to and constantly queried for advice. She was lost at sea without anyone to help her, abandoned in a shitty small town without a future to dream of, left with just Ray — funny, yes, and someone who cares about her as well, but a friend who was unable to give her the permission she sometimes needed when she needed to indulge in certain activities.

  They forced this sweet, gentle girl to think one of her only friends in the world had died.

  Amy is forced to steady herself by sitting on the edge of her bed. She closes her eyes and starts focusing on her breathing, giving herself a moment to gather her thoughts. Pathetically and rather uncharacteristically she had to withhold a few tears as well. She’s never been this emotional before, and it would concern her if the cause wasn’t so eminently obvious — she’s overwhelmed.

  She tries to take as much time as she needs, but her friends don’t have a few hours for her to get her shit together again.

  “What’s going on here?” Ray asks, trying to sound less anxious and confused than he is. “How did you— What?”

  “She called you Jenny. I remember you sometimes pying around with that name. Eira also called me by the name I sometimes — rather too often — used for myself.” Amy speaks slowly, her words coming to her as she speaks. It feels very unnatural “And I’ve already spent a lot of time around Dar, though she was known to me as Faith. Yes, I know that was the name Dar liked to use in her video games, but… nevermind. I was trying to avoid thinking they’d kidnapped my friends, okay? Even though some of the details of her background were very familiar, even if her—”

  “Her?” Ray narrows his eyes at the way Amy gendered her friend. “His.”

  Faith is lucky she’s standing behind Ray, because Amy doesn’t want to know where the discussion would shift if he caught the girl’s flinch upon hearing the pronoun. It must be a gut punch after almost two weeks of being called a woman — something all three of them have always wanted, deep down.

  “Look— I’ve known Dar by a feminine name for a week now.” Amy expins. “And it’s hard to keep pronouns straight when a name that is objectively unmasculine is applied to someone in a maid dress. It’s the only name I had for Dar, because I wasn’t going to ask for her legal name, was I?” Amy looks away from Ray. “Maybe I should have. I don’t know. I’ve been having some pretty terrible migraines tely and have tried to avoid thinking too much.”

  “You should have asked Dar for his name, yes. A little headache isn’t an excuse to be stupid about these things— fucking hell, RM, you could have really fried his brain with that stuff! It can’t start feeling natural! That’s what they want.”

  Ray has always insisted that legal names are their ‘real’ names — often when Amy insisted the opposite was true — though he never revealed his own, preferring to use nicknames. It’s a little hypocritical of him.

  “Don’t be too hard on her. Amy hasn’t been well.” Faith whispers and pauses for a second when Ray gres at her, catching both the name and the pronoun. “RM looked so ill when I saw them the first time, and they haven’t been able to walk without help until a day or two ago.”

  “I’m not sure RM being unable to walk follows from being stuck in a cell, unless they were hitting them in the knees with those bloody tasers.”

  “D-Did they do that to you?” Faith asks anxiously, fidgeting with her fingers.

  “Five times in the torso. Once in the hips.” He expins, pointing at the rough locations on his uniform. “Surprisingly, they didn’t miss even once. Gotta hand it to the maids, they’re pretty good shots. Did RM get tased? He must have been, right?”

  “No.” Amy looks away, a little embarrassed. “They never felt the need to, I guess. They just told me that I should wear the dress if I wanted any food. And to hell with that— I wasn’t going to wear that bloody rubbish. So I didn’t eat for twenty six days, give or take. Not my brightest idea, given my body just stopped functioning after a few days. I might have gone a little insane too.”

  “You’re not wearing the dress, though.” Ray notes. “You’re wearing a little girl’s pajamas. When I was thinking of the great, intellectual RM, I wasn’t thinking of pink bunnies.”

  “I never expected disciple-of-bnchard to be in a maid dress. Maybe I should have, though, with a name like that.” Amy puts on a little confidence, if only to hide just how bad her blush had gotten at Ray pointing out her clothes.

  “At least the uniform is a colour other than pink.”

  “The pajamas are comfy, though.” She expins. “I’ve spent the past two weeks in bed, mostly. Have you ever tried wearing a dress in bed? It's not as easy as you'd like.”

  Ray stares at Amy for a second, then ughs heartily. “Yeah. Yeah I have. Of course I fucking have, you know how much of a degenerate freak I am.”

  She’s forced to ugh too, remembering discussions of Ray being busy, and the odd time they insisted it really was ‘just a fetish’.

  “And that’s why I wear these things. It’s not that deep. You two have cute little jammies too. Faith has those knock-off Paddington bears on them. The bears are wearing pajamas too.” Amy adds.

  “Dar.” Ray corrects. “You know much better than to call him by the wrong name. Especially now that you’re so sure about our identities.”

  “Yeah.” Amy shrugs. “I do. I’m sorry, okay? I’ll do better. I might not be perfect immediately, but know that I’m doing my best.”

  “It doesn’t seem like you are, really.” Her friend leans against a chair, sighing deeply. “What do you think it’s like to walk into this room and see your two best friends calling each other by their little degen names—”

  Amy isn’t going to take this rant, not now. “What do you think it’s like figuring out your best friends have been kidnapped and thought you were fucking dead?”

  Ray stops talking for a moment, internalising the shift of tone and realising he’d overstepped some boundaries. “I can imagine what figuring out your friends are being forcibly feminised feels like. It fucking sucks.”

  “I know. What about the second part of the cumutive despair I described? I know you’re pissed off, but please get off your high horse for a second before they turn you into a bloody horse girl.”

  Ray goes silent for a moment. “God, you really are RM, aren’t you?”

  Amy raises an eyebrow.

  “Only RM would say something like ‘cumutive despair’ and then immediately follow it up with a pun about horse girls.” Ray chuckles.

  She sighs. “I suppose I’ve a rather distinct personality.”

  “It was a little hard to believe, I’ll be honest.” Ray sits down on the chair and starts tapping the floor with his shoes. “Everything in this pce is trying to fuck with your brain. So when your mate acts a bit too differently from what you come to expect, you—”

  “—struggle to believe it isn’t a trick.” Amy finishes for Ray.

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  It’s not entirely unsurprising Ray reacted the way he did — he’s always been a little quick to judge. It’s not something that would matter in 99% of cases, indeed, it’s generally been rather funny. He has a knack for humorous psychoanalysis, which he applied to various lolcows, tripfags and Twitter personalities alongside providing some screenshots.

  It’s a little less fun when Amy is the victim of his tendencies, though.

  Maybe they can be mates again if she starts making a better impression.

  “Ray, mate, would you like something for breakfast?” Amy offers with a grin.

  Day 40?She’d always wanted to meet her friends in real life, though it’d always been difficult, each of them living in entirely different parts of the country — Amy in the suburbs of Bristol, Dar in the North East and Ray in Harlow, one of London’s outer suburbs in County Almsworth. It’s a shame that they’d have to meet like this, all three of them being kidnapped and brought to the same location, but that didn’t stop any of them from gorging themselves on the opportunity to talk face-to-face rather than through the inherently inferior option of talking through a chat box.

  The others seemed to agree too — Ray enthusiastically, Dar more reservedly, her shyness getting the better of her at times — and they’ve spent the past day and a half in many discussions. They’ve mostly done so at the kitchen table. The loss of a duvet covering her body has revealed just how nippy it is in the room — so Amy decided to start wearing the maid uniform alongside some leggings. Ray gave her an odd look when she went beyond the explicit requirements of the uniform, which Amy countered by simply pointing at the sea of white visible from their window. It’s winter: she’s cold.

  Not that Amy is sitting at the kitchen table today, rather deciding to sit on her bed with her legs resting on the chair nearest to her. She’s wearing some pastel-pink and white sneakers, crossing her feet at the ankles and bancing her back by leaning against one of her two pillows. It was rather surprising to her that they didn’t have to wear heels — the sponsors are failing to follow the script she’d come to expect.

  While Ray might compin about Amy’s failure to live up to his very high expectations of masculinity, he still seems to respect her enough to let her be and allow her to make her own decisions within the very limited options she’s been given. It was fine as long as they were discussing their options for getting out of the manor.

  What he didn’t respect was her choice to abstain from violent options in creating an escape pn. There are a few reasons she had for that, though she avoided expining Ray quite why she did that, as some of the reasons are quite embarrassing.

  For one, Dar wouldn’t be able to help out much with that. Secondly, Amy isn’t going to participate in some masculine fantasy of hurting women — though some obnoxious women would insist she does hurt them in different ways, which would be true. Thirdly, they won’t have to do that because she’ll work out a much better pn. It’s a massive building with many potential exits, they don’t need to hurt anyone in the process. Ray probably thinks she is insane.

  Luckily, he’s started to talk about topics that wouldn’t ruin the cutesy sleepover vibe that Amy has been trying to maintain and started to grumble about his studies instead. He had been reading History at Saints before his sudden and involuntary career change. Being kidnapped doesn’t seem to stop him from being annoyed by his former major, though. What he had hoped could be his profession was ruined by the postmodern tendency to look for new lenses through which to view its subject, and he had to inform the others about how bad it had gotten.

  “It was such bullshit!” He compins. “They were talking about how the retive normalisation of homosexuality and transgenderism in North Africa fed the attempts to colonise the region, and I was just sitting there having to listen to all this woke nonsense about Ismic trannies or whatever. Because history has to be diverse now, or something. You know what they do to gay people in the Ismic world? They get stoned to death. These people cim it’s a result of colonialism, but they’ll cim anything is— on the one hand, they preach ‘agency’ in history and on the other it’s white people who are to bme for everything. It’s one or the other.”

  “That’d be your gender history course, right? Using the book which had Marx on the cover?” Amy asks, vaguely remembering an earlier comment made just as the semester had started. She remembered ughing a little once she saw an image of the book.

  “Yes.” Ray rolls his eyes. “I knew the communists had captured academia before I got accepted into Saints, but seeing it first-hand is something else entirely. Everything is about race and gender nowadays.”

  Perhaps she isn’t as based as she could be, but she struggles to particurly care about the racial aspect of things; it’s always been a venus flytrap for the less intelligent of the online right, who are busier worrying about haplogroups rather than the actual degenerates infecting society.

  Besides, the most based conservative she’d met at her private school was a South Asian boy, Avi. Shame he was male, really, considering they ended up really close — he’d have made a pretty girl. Makes it more ironic they fell out over his belief that Amy was a gay man. She’s neither homosexual nor male, she’s simply an autogynephile who likes girls.

  “They’re just funting it too.” Dar joins in, speaking even more softly than usual. “They had a course on gender and sexuality at my university,” She studied psychology, Amy remembers, before dropping out st year. “and it was all this stuff about affirming gender identities and how gender dysphoria can only be treated through transition, and they expelled me from the course when I suggested that they shouldn’t just be giving any girl suffering from ROGD top surgery, in, um—”

  More explicit terms than that, Amy mentally finishes the sentence for the girl. Faith is clearly a little embarrassed by it, probably because it led to her eventually dropping out of Durham and moving back to Hartlepool. The event had led to a long discussion in which Amy had to comfort the girl and tell her things would be fine, that her life isn’t over, and that it isn’t her fault the university wasn’t more accepting of both her views and her inability to read social cues. She then drilled into Dar’s mind that she needs to be careful to not show her ideas around others who might be unsympathetic again, slowly finding the limits of the topic they can touch upon without getting hurt.

  It’s easier now that Dar has people in her life who will not judge her for her ideas, but rather for who she is— a rather sweet girl, in Amy’s estimation.

  “They’ll give anyone estrogen.” Ray agrees. “Don’t even have to be a real tranny. No temptations, no fantasies, nothing. If someone has convinced you that you should be a girl, you can show up at the NHS and just get the pills.”

  Amy isn’t sure that’s necessarily true, but it’s not something she’s going to challenge Ray on. She’s heard plenty of hons compin about how the NHS is impossible to deal with at times. A net good, really: transition should be a st resort.

  The three seem to have been too distracted with their conversation to notice the door opening.

  “They’ll give anyone estrogen?” Ray’s sponsor, Rose, says as she enters the room, grinning a little. “What’s the issue with that, exactly?”

  “That someone like you got any.” He crosses his arms, looking to Amy for support, though Amy is happy to wait for a moment to get a proper comment in ter rather than rushing into an argument to help someone who should be able to hold his own.

  Rose holds the door open for the other two sponsors, one of whom is carrying a bag. “Because there wouldn’t be enough left over for you? Don’t worry, Jen, we’ve got plenty for you too—”

  “Don’t call me that.” Ray stands up from his seat to be more able to protect himself from whatever his sponsor has pnned. “That’s not my name.”

  Dar senses the conflict that is brewing and starts to panic a little, her eyes darting between Ray, Rose and Vivienne. Unsurprisingly, she flinches a little when Amy takes her hand and helps her sit down next to her, continuing to hold her close as if she were a protective cocoon.

  “I don’t hear any compints about the concept of estrogen.” Rose twirls the taser in her hand, keeping her distance for now.

  “You bloody know my opinion about that.” Ray rolls his eyes.

  “Your opinion isn’t going to stop us from injecting you, exactly.”

  “I thought you would support informed consent as used in the United States.” Amy adds, giving Ray a little support, though she already knows what the response will be — some variant of ‘what consent is needed?’.

  “Some people are quite informed, know what they need, and still reject that treatment.” Rose doesn’t take her eyes off Ray, clearly more anxious about the confrontation than she lets on from other body nguage. “Jenny here is fully aware of the effects of estradiol on a body, definitely more than any genuinely male bystander would be.”

  Vivienne finishes unpacking a set of injection needles — there are four in total; three smaller ones, one significantly rger than the rest — and grabs her own taser as well. Amy pulls Dar even closer.

  “Bloody hell. You lot are really going to inject us with that poison?” Ray can’t keep his eyes off the needles, which Rose uses as a chance to close the distance between them. Perhaps she’s more professional than Amy guessed.

  “Poison? It really can’t be that bad for you if half the world manages to live with the levels we intend to give you in their bodies.” Rose aims the taser at Ray. “Sit.”

  “No, I won’t, you fucking tran—” Ray says. Before Amy can even think to react, her friend is mercilessly brought down to the floor, spasming at the shocks running through his body.

  She’s holding Faith closely enough by now that she can feel her heart racing, any instinct that would make her want to be brought down alongside Ray overwhelmed by the need to protect someone so unable to deal with what is to come.

  It takes ten seconds or so, but Ray manages to regain both full control over his body and the same level of righteous fury Amy saw before he fell down to the floor.

  “What the hell was that for?” He demands.

  “Attitude. Now sit down. I will not ask a third time.” Rose continues to take slow calcuted steps towards the boy on the floor. “I’m going to count to three.”

  Ray looks at Amy, and whilst the look couldn’t have been long at all, it still felt like an eternity. He seemed to be begging her for help. Amy really wishes she could help Ray, but she chooses to continue giving Dar the protection she needs, and communicates this by taking the girl’s hand and making sure her other friend sees it.

  Outnumbered and outgunned as he is, Ray is forced to take his loss for now. He scurries over to the nearest chair, his ire equally divided between the girl who wants to inject him and the girl who betrayed him.

  Amy kind of deserves it.

  Part of her wishes she had stopped grasping Faith as closely as she did. Not the rational part — given horrible options, she’s taken the least horrible one — nor the emotional, feminine part of her brain. No, she is instead struggling with the nagging desire in the back of her mind to be forced to accept the injections at the threat of ever greater violence. A self-destructive urge to fight back with every resource avaible to her at all times rather than saving them for wiser engagements. She isn’t sure whether it is violent and masculine or dramatic and feminine, but it certainly isn’t a good instinct to have. Not around Dar, at least — seeing both of her friends get hurt would just scare her even more.

  Amy closes her eyes, pressing her legs together as she feels other thoughts bubbling up to the front of her consciousness. She feels heat pooling in her cheeks, a significant amount of it, and a quick look at Kelynen forces her to divert her eyes to the floor.

  Perhaps the worst reaction she could have to the whole situation. She and her friends are being injected with estrogen, and all she can think of is that. All she can do is bite her lip watching the needle enter Ray’s body.

  All she should do is pull her friend close and give her moral support as her body is filled with something she never wanted.

  She wants to reassure Faith that simple estrogen doesn’t make a woman and that femininity is a package deal. Remind her that they’ll escape soon enough, as the three of them have been discussing, and their hormonal bance will be restored to normal. It’s fine. She can take one or two more stupid injections before they are freed.

  But she doesn’t have the time to offer the girl as much as a whisper.

  Kelynen looks down at her, the equipment ready in her right hand. It’s the rger of the four needles. “Will you be cooperating for your goserelin impnt?”

  It’s at this point that Amy remembers the other thing they’d been doing to her body — suppressing her testosterone.

  “Only if you let me hold Dar.” She whispers, hoping they don’t interpret this as her needing the girl’s support, but rather the protective urge it is. She knows that resisting will only lead to her getting hurt and result in Faith not having anyone who will protect and comfort her through something as painful as this. The injection is inevitable, it’ll be done regardless of how much she resists, so making it easier for her friend is her main priority.

  Kelynen exchanges a look with Vivienne, standing on the other side of the bundles of girls, and both of them nod.

  “Thank you.” Amy says

  She pulls her skirt up and takes her leggings off. It leads to her showing an excessive amount of skin for the task, but it’s not like it matters — they’ve seen it all anyway. It’s not like she enjoys allowing the two needles to enter her body and continuing her forced feminisation for another week, but it’s important she does so.

  For Faith’s sake.

  “Please be gentle with her, okay?” Amy whispers.