“We’re gonna be working together! This is gonna be kind of awesome. I mean, it’s menial service industry work, so that kind of sucks, but it’s about as good as waiting and busing tables ever gets, from what I hear. Mr. Paget’s a fair boss, unlike that asshole at my old job, and you get to work in all kinds of cool bodies.”

I apologize for the lateness of the chapter. I just forgot to post it manually after it went up automatically on Scribblehub. So here it is on Sunday instead of the usual Wednesday evening or Thursday. If I forget it again, you can always find the new chapter on Scribblehub -- all chapters through the end are already pre-scheduled there for Wednesday at 8pm EST.

Both of me were on pins and needles for the next couple of days, waiting for Mr. Paget to call back. My doll self overheard half of his conversation with Mr. Ramsey when he called to talk to him about me on Friday morning — I’d given him as a reference based on helping out with their home business a little. Just a few hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey left for their anniversary vacation; they wouldn’t be back until late Monday evening.

Then Friday afternoon, my human self rode the bus home because both Sophia and Meredith had to work after school. She was looking kind of bedraggled when she got in, and my doll self made her a cup of tea. She was sipping at it and telling me about her day at school when our phone rang. We both stared at it for a moment.

She picked it up. “Hello?... Oh, wow, that’s great... Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow at eight-thirty. Thank you so much, I won’t let you down... Okay, bye.”

My human self hung up and looked at my doll self, her eyes shining. “That was Mr. Paget; he wants us to start tomorrow. I mean one of us. And he wants a dragon-girl.”

“Do you want to merge back and then get someone to venn us into a dragon-girl for work?” my doll self asked. “Or stay split until Sunday night, and let me keep studying while you venn into a dragon-girl for work?”

“It would be nice to have one of us get another couple of days of studying in before finals while the other one goes to work. And if Mr. Paget wants us to work on Sunday morning, maybe you could go to church with the Ramseys while I work.”

“I don’t think they’ll blame us for working during church hours when our brand new job wants us to work Sunday morning.”

“Yeah. But we’re already split. It’s not like we’re asking our friends to do extra venning for us — besides venning one of us into a dragon-girl. Oh, and Mr. Paget said to keep track of how long we spent waiting in line and venning into the form we’re about to go to work in, and he’ll pay us for that time, and that if we need him or one of our co-workers to meet us at the machine and venn us, that can be arranged.”

“I think we should ask Sophia when she gets home from work.”

So we did. Sophia was excited, having heard from Mr. Paget that he’d given us the job.

“We’re gonna be working together! This is gonna be kind of awesome. I mean, it’s menial service industry work, so that kind of sucks, but it’s about as good as waiting and busing tables ever gets, from what I hear. Mr. Paget’s a fair boss, unlike that asshole at my old job, and you get to work in all kinds of cool bodies.”

When we described our plan to stay split until the night before our first final exam, she suggested that our human self ride to work with her the next morning and she would venn her into a dragon-girl. We agreed that made sense.

We talked with Jada on the phone that night, telling her the good news and making kissy noises. Sophia, who wasn’t as out of earshot as we’d thought, made fake gagging noises.

* * *

I said goodbye to myself the next morning and rode with Sophia to the library. At that time of morning, everyone who was waiting to use the machine worked at Metamorphoses. Sophia knew all of them, and I’d met one of them, Jill the mouse-girl; she was wearing a pretty mid-twenties human body at the moment. Sophia introduced me to everybody as we waited. A couple of people asked Sophia to venn them, so she went through the machine three times, with them and with me. After her second time through, she had a tall, svelte plastic body with green hair in a ponytail, wearing a skin-tight navy blue body suit with a lot of pouches and pockets. Everybody was pretty experienced using the machines, and in most cases were just venning into a recent form from their history, so the line moved quickly.

When Sophia and I got inside, she said, “History,” picked the dragon-girl body I’d worn on a date with Jada recently, and started tweaking it. When she pressed her green button, I was a purple-scaled dragon girl with slightly larger wings than usual and significantly larger pseudo-breasts. (I checked in the restroom later and found I still didn’t have nipples.)

I ribbed Sophia about my bust size on the way over to Metamorphoses.

“Wait and see the tips you make,” she said unrepentantly.

Before I started working, I had to read and sign a big stack of employment paperwork in Mr. Paget’s office. He was still male, if I had to guess, but much more slender and androgynous than when I’d seen him on Tuesday, with sky-blue skin and six arms, four of them slender and delicate. Most of the paperwork was familiar from when I’d started at Subway, but there were also a couple of forms saying that I understood I’d be expected to always come to work in a visibly-venned body, that I understood I’d be paid for my time spent at the Venn machine, and that I understood that Metamorphoses might, given reasonable advance notice, require me to come to work venned in a particular way on particular occasions.

“Is there something where we can put an exception for forms I’m not comfortable with?” I said. “I can’t do anything male.”

“Yeah, there’s a blank space on page three where we can fill that in. It’s no problem.”

I found the reservations and exceptions section he’d mentioned, and carefully wrote “No male forms,” then initialed the first two pages and signed the third. Mr. Paget signed it, and then we discussed my schedule, sketching in my hours for the next couple of weeks. I’d be working on Saturdays and Sundays as well as Tuesday and Wednesday evenings after school, up until graduation, when I’d start working about forty hours a week. Then I was ready to start training.

Jill, who Sophia had venned into a somewhat different mouse-girl body that morning, showed me the ropes; I learned how the different sections and tables were designated and how they were divided up among the waitstaff at busier and less-busy times, the shorthand abbreviations they used for various dishes on the menu, and so forth. Then I shadowed Jill for a while as she waited tables during the breakfast rush. Toward the end of breakfast hours, she turned me loose to wait tables by myself, which was a bit scary at first, but I managed okay, only occasionally having to ask someone for help about how to code it when a customer asked for something extra or for a standard topping to be left off.

During the breakfast and lunch rushes, I was kept on my feet the whole time, but during the lull between them, I spent some time studying the menu and chatting with some of the other staff. A lot of the kitchen staff were visibly venned, too, even though they weren’t required to be so like the public-facing staff. There weren’t any furries, such as predominated among the waitstaff, but several people had hairless forms, including one scaly like me, a couple of people with extra arms, unusually muscular forms, and so on.

I got to know Jill better, and realized (which shouldn’t have surprised me, but did) that the cute little mouse-girl had to be at least in her fifties, given the number and age of her grandchildren. (She showed me pictures; one of them looked as old as eight or ten, and there were several babies and toddlers.) I also got to know a couple of other waitresses and Ryan, one of the cooks, a lizard-guy.

“That’s a great dragon venn,” he said. “Who did it?”

“Sophia; she tweaked a form from my history that my girlfriend designed.” I mentioned Jada as a subtle hint that I was taken (and not interested), since he’d been kind of flirtatious in a friendly way.

“My compliments to both of them. Sophia’s brilliant; I always get her to venn me when she’s available.”

“Yeah, she’s about the smartest person I know. And my girlfriend’s pretty sharp, too.”

Sophia got off work around the same time I did, and showed me how to clock out, including logging the time we’d spent at the Venn machine.

“Do you want to venn back into your everyday human girl body now?” she asked.

“If I do, I’ll need to get someone to venn me back into the dragon-girl tomorrow morning,” I said. “And you won’t be available since you’ll be getting ready for church.” She wouldn’t go to work Sunday until shortly before I got off.

“One of us needs to give you a ride before church anyway, so we might as well —”

I shook my head. “Y’all have been great about giving me rides, but the weather’s fine, the neighborhood is as safe as it gets, and nobody’s going to mess with a dragon-girl. I’ll walk.”

“Okay with me. Don’t be surprised if Mom or Dad insists on giving you a ride anyway.”

We went home with the same forms we’d venned into for work. My doll self had been working with Mr. Ramsey on fixing supper. Meredith got home from work not long after Sophia and I did, and we ate. Then my doll self and I talked with Jada on the phone for a while before getting back to studying for finals.

That night was the first time I’d slept in a dragon-girl form. Back when I had a male body, I would sometimes sleep on my belly, but I couldn’t do that as a girl; I would sleep on my back or sometimes on my side. As a dragon-girl, I couldn’t sleep on my back because of my wings, but I found that sleeping on my belly didn’t make my pseudo-breasts uncomfortable the way it did my real breasts when I was human. After I figured that out, I got a decent night’s sleep.

* * *

Sunday morning, my phone alarm woke me up earlier than Meredith or Caleb. I wasn’t sure if I needed a shower this soon; I didn’t sweat in dragon form, but I decided to play it safe. As I dried off afterward, I realized I had another problem: the Venn machine had made a blouse with a gap for my wings, but none of my usual clothes would fit, and I didn’t want to wear yesterday’s blouse again. I’d have to get someone to go to the Venn machine with me before work.

Or — no, I didn’t necessarily need one of the Ramseys to do that. I could just meet up with the other Metamorphoses employees who were venning before work and have them venn me with a few of my blouses so they’d fit. For now, I’d put on the dirty blouse from the day before along with a clean skirt.

When I went to the kitchen, I found that my doll-self had fixed me a bowl of grits and scrambled an egg. The Ramseys usually didn’t eat breakfast until around nine on Sunday, and I would need to already be at work by then. While I was eating, Meredith came in and sat down with me, still in her nightgown.

“Are you really gonna walk to work?” she asked. “You know I can give you a ride.”

“You don’t look wide awake enough to drive safely yet,” I teased.

“Okay,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Then let Sophia drive you. She’s got to be well-rested.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s a safe neighborhood in a safe town and if you hadn’t noticed, I’m a dragon today. I don’t think anybody’s going to mess with me.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “You’ll be as safe as any pedestrian in this county.”

“Anyway,” I said, finishing off my last bite of grits and scrambled egg, and saying the next bit with my mouth full, “I need to get going.” I stood up from the table.

“If you got me or Sophia to drive you, you’d still be early,” she pointed out.

“Bye.” I hugged her, grabbed my purse and the bag of tops I’d set aside to v-tailor, and got going. It was a pleasant walk, the weather being sunny but not hot yet, with a mild breeze. I got to the library with twenty minutes to spare before I had to be at work, and found several of my co-workers waiting for the Venn machine, including Jill.

“Hey,” I said. “Could one of y’all just push the green button while I’m holding this bag of clothes? I forgot I’d need some changes of clothes for this body when I venned into it.”

“Sure,” Jill said. “Just as soon as me and Terri venn each other.”

A few minutes later, I had several tops with space for my wings, Jill was a mouse-girl again, and Terri was an androgynous cyborg with light-up implants in her scalp and forearms. Jill gave me a ride to work from there, which I had fewer qualms about accepting since she was heading that way anyway, unlike Meredith or Sophia.

“Do you ever stay in your mouse-girl form overnight,” I asked, “or do you always re-venn before and after every shift?”

“It depends,” she said. “My husband’s a long-haul trucker and when he’s home, I like to be human. Other nights I’ll go home with the same body I work in, unless it’s a silly holiday body like the turkey-girl Mr. Paget asked me to be around Thanksgiving.” She hadn’t said a lot about her husband when she’d been showing me pictures of her grandchildren during a break the day before, though she’d mentioned him once or twice.

We didn’t have time for any more conversation than that in the four blocks she had to drive. We clocked in and got to work.

The breakfast rush was lighter on Sunday, but the lunch rush was bigger. I figured of all the people from Crossroads who were going out to eat after church, only a tiny fraction would ever eat at a place like Metamorphoses; and if they did, they wouldn’t recognize me anyway. And that particular Sunday, nobody I knew from Crossroads ate there during my shift, though later on I did occasionally see Crystal Hallock and her new husband Mark, who I’d met a couple of times when he was dating her, and a couple of other people I knew from church. But I got a pleasant surprise that Sunday: Jada, her sister Tamily, and their grandma came in to eat wearing glorious Sunday dresses.

“Hi, welcome to Metamorphoses —” I stumbled for a moment as I recognized Jada, and a moment later, her sister and grandma, but then recovered. “I’m Lauren and I’ll be your server this afternoon. What can I get you to drink?”

“Sweet tea,” Jada’s grandma said. Jada and her sister ordered Coke. Jada’s eyes were twinkling, but she didn’t let on that she knew me, and after a few moments of confusion, I went along with her on that. After four dates, she still hadn’t taken me to her house to meet her grandma and sister, though she’d shown me some more pictures of them. She’d told me that her grandma didn’t know she was into girls, or that she was dating me, though she’d told her about making friends with me and hanging out with me both at school and on weekends.

I went to get their drinks, as well as those for another table, and when I brought them back, I got their lunch orders. Jada ordered the fish tacos, which made me extremely glad that my scales wouldn’t show a blush, and when I stopped by their table later on to see if they needed anything, she teased me by savoring a bite of taco in a way so suggestive I couldn’t believe her grandma didn’t spot it. We still hadn’t had sex yet, though we’d had gotten as far as touching each other’s breasts on our last date, and I was afraid my cloaca would be damp enough to stain my dress. Fortunately, I was too busy rushing from table to table to stay aroused or flustered for long.

When I brought them the check, Mrs. Plinkett took her debit card out of her purse and handed it to me, and as I was about to go off to the register with it, I heard Jada say, “I’ll cover the tip, Grandma.” She threw a lascivious glance at me over her shoulder as they left, and when I cleaned up their table afterward, I found her tip with a hastily scrawled note folded between the bills:

“Let’s get tacos again after finals.”

I had to go to the restroom after that to cool down a bit.

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