Netherworlds had a lot of different races, as well as the ability to decide on a dungeons-and-dragons type alignment, which determined what quests were available and who you could group with. Liara, Taur’othen, Gorokka, Brynhilda, and the rest of Dyslexics Untied (our guild) were Neutral Good, which as far as I can tell is basically obeying the law but only if people are watching, and trying to help people as much as possible. Chaotic evil guilds were so common that it tended to make world Player vs. Player combat really imbalanced, because Chaotic Evil is going around slaughtering stuff not paying attention to what people THINK, and because you’re chaotic you’re allowed to kill pretty much anyone that you don’t have loyalties to, and sometimes people that you do.

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Author's Note:I'm actually pretty happy with this one, I think the extra time payed off. Comments would be great, feel free to be harsh.

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I was lying on my face. Also on my boobs. They were squished.

I groaned and pushed myself up.

I was lying on a mat on the floor - with a blanket on me. No actual pillow, by the looks of it.

I looked around the stone-cold room and realised how cold I was. I was wearing… a…

I goggled.

Desperately looking away from myself, I noticed there were two other girls in the room. One of them was wearing a kind of dress with a long slit all the way up the side of the leg. She looked… maybe 16? 18? There was a long staff, very similar to the priest one in Netherworlds, lying next to her mat.

The other was an elf girl with really long, blonde hair - like, maybe a metre down her back? She had a bow and quiver next to her mat. I investigated the smallish sized quiver.

There were around 30,000 arrows in it.

Yup. This was Netherworlds, definitely. Netherworlds II.

That, at least, explained why I was covered in fur, my ears had slid up my head and morphed into cat ears, I’d gained whiskers and a cat nose, and I had retractable claws. They made no noise as they slid in and out, but… heh, it was cool.

There was a mirror in the room - my eyes had changed colour but not shape. They were basically human eyes that were coloured weirdly - like cat-green with pure black pupils.

The elf - really long ears, by the way, like 50 centimetres (about 1.6 feet?) - began to stir, while the human groaned and pushed herself up.

“Urgh…” she said, messaging her head.

“Hey, Brit,” I said.

“Hm?”

“Lara here. I think we’re in Netherworlds II.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Since when,” the elf said, presumably Lisa, her voice muffled by the mat, “was my hair this long?”

“Lis, your hair’s been this long since you changed.”

“Oh. Yeah. Then what’s with the ears?”

“You’re in Netherworlds.”

“Ah.”

Lisa pushed herself up, and opened her eyes. They were startlingly blue - like human eyes, but it all had a blue tint. They glowed blue.

“Okay. So I’m some kind of elf,” she said.

“A high elf hunter, I think… Brittany’s just a human priest, and I’m a…” I looked down.

There was a pair of twin daggers next to the mat I was on, as well as a pile of light leathers.

“Yup. Felis rogue,” I said.

“Um… right. So what do we do now?” Brittany asked.

“I… think we’re playing hero classes. Otherwise everyone else would be here… the people on the bus didn’t mention anything like this, so I think this is a first.”

“Dang right it is,” said a voice from outside.

“Leanne?” asked Lisa.

“Yeah, Tina n’ Allison’re here too, ‘swell as your boytoy,” she said. I heard Mike’s petulant voice object obscenely to that.

“ You guys dressed?”

“Um…” I looked down.

“I think the answer to that is a definite ‘no’,” said Brittany.

“Just… hold on.” I pulled the leathers on. It felt kinda wrong - like I said, I’m vegetarian. But this was starter gear. It didn’t come from anywhere. Or anyone.

“Yeah, okay. Come in.”

Leanne, Tina and Allison came in. I was… surprised, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been.

Leanne… was… a half-ogre. Which basically meant she looked the same, only bigger. And stronger. And more huge-hammer-holding-y. Allison didn’t look the same, except in the broader facial structure, and the hairstyle. She was an orc, and therefore green. With tusks. She had a pair of axes. Mike had stayed human and looked mostly the same, but he’d gained maybe 30 cm and a couple of kilos of muscle. Also a sword. Tina also looked mostly the same… only about a metre shorter.

“Oh… my… god… Tina! You’re adorable!” said Brittany, picking Tina up almost effortlessly and hugging her like a doll.

“Gerroff!” she said, and Brit put her back down.

The tiny gnome mage Tina had become was, like I said, really short, but her eyes had grown hugely as well and her face had been majorly chibified (look up chibi if you don’t already know what it means). She looked… just… well, cute. There, I said it. Not attractive, unlike the girl on the bus who I’d met earlier, though they were very similar. Cute in the same sense a puppy is.

Okay. She was… about… 50 cm high. Yes, she was shorter than Brit’s ears. Weird, but… yeah, that’s gnomes for you.

By the looks of it, Netherworlds II was basically the same as the first with a frikkin’ huge graphical upgrade.

“So, um… I’ve never played Netherworlds,” Leanne said, “but I heard there were faction type things in it.”

“Sorta… you ever heard of alignments? Like in dee n’ dee?”

“Er, not really…” she replied.

Netherworlds had a lot of different races, as well as the ability to decide on a dungeons-and-dragons type alignment, which determined what quests were available and who you could group with. Liara, Taur’othen, Gorokka, Brynhilda, and the rest of Dyslexics Untied (our guild) were Neutral Good, which as far as I can tell is basically obeying the law but only if people are watching, and trying to help people as much as possible. Chaotic evil guilds were so common that it tended to make world Player vs. Player combat really imbalanced, because Chaotic Evil is going around slaughtering stuff not paying attention to what people THINK, and because you’re chaotic you’re allowed to kill pretty much anyone that you don’t have loyalties to, and sometimes people that you do.

Usually in PvP it just goes good vs. evil, with neutral people randomly being assigned a side. This being an online game, there was the obligatory capture-the-flag type PvP with the tagging people being replaced with KILLING THEM. Taur’othen usually carried the flag, Liara kept her alive with her l33t healz.

This is basically what I said to them, only a little more paraphrased.

“Umm… right… so, uh, what are we?” Tina asked.

“I… don’t know. Um, usually you can tell because of the quests you get…”

“So do we look for giant floating exclamation points? Or should we try to find some kinda quest log?” Leanne asked.

“Hmm… well, I checked Lisa’s quiver, and there’s 30k arrows in there, so I think gameplay is kinda more important than realism… so maybe we should check our bags or something?”

“We have bags?”

I sighed. “Yes, Allison, we have bags. We’re not going to carry around all this stuff in our pockets. Look,” I said, “You guys should probably go back to your rooms and get your bags and stuff.”

“Oh, um… okay…” Leanne said. She headed towards the door again, Tina and Allison following closely behind.

Something… something snapped. In me.

“Uhh… Mike? Don’t you need your bag?”

“Oh, um. It’s in here…”

I was in an inexplicable virtual world, created by the people who stuck me like this.

“Wait, what?”

“Um, yeah, I kinda woke up here… so I left to see if I could find anyone else…”

I was stuck kilometres away from home, lying in some science-fiction reject ‘facility’.

“Oh, do you know which one’s your bag?”

“I think it’s the biggest one…”

And I had lost my… my… downstairs. How the hell had I coped up until now…

“Woh… that’s a big sword. You sure it’s not compensating for anything?”

… my body. My family.

My life. It had been stolen.

I sat down, and started crying. What could I do?

Who the hell was Lara? Why had I adapted? Why was I able to ignore this? And why wasn’t I able to now?

Because Aaron didn’t have anything Lara didn’t have, and Lara has more.

My manhood. Lara doesn’t have that.

So?

What do you mean, so? It’s my fucking PENIS.

… um, okay, so now you have a vagina. How’s that worse?

Because it’s a girl’s part?

So what? How is being a girl worse?

“Hey? Guys?” I asked.

“Yeah?”

“How… how do you cope with this?”

“Cope with what?” Mike asked.

“THIS!” I gestured at myself.

“Being a catgirl?”

“No! Just… being a girl!”

“Lisa’s got a traumatised memory as a boy. Brittany was a suppressed transsexual. I was, too…” Mike said.

“Huh?”

Mike sighed. “I hated being a girl, and I wanted to be a guy. I didn’t know what I was until Brittany told me. I tried my best to… girl up, I s’pose… but meh. This is kinda a dream come true. You never wondered why I said I should be the tank?”

“Well, you were playing a male character, so you had better stats.”

“Mhm. And why was I playing a male character?

“Because they had better stats for t-”

“Going in circles there, Lara,” Lisa said, smiling slightly.

“That’s not my name.”

“I used to think I was a lesbian,” Mike said, “but then I realised… I was just straight. Have you heard of Autogynephilia?”

“Um, no… is that something to do with pregnancy cars or something?”

“Nah, not really. Mostly it’s just a word conservative assholes use to describe transgirls like Brittany. What it’s supposed to mean is that you get turned on by imagining yourself as a girl - and usually that’s because of the sense of taboo that comes with it. Not always, though, sometimes there ARE people who are like that, but… well, the female-to-male version is autoandrophilia. I guess I used to have that, but my parents were cool with it, so I started being Mike at home. I dunno if there’s a word for what I did have, though.”

“Wait. What did you have?” I asked. I don’t even know if I wanted an answer.

“Extragynophilia, I guess would be the right word.”

I blinked. “You get turned on by the thought of other people as girls?”

“No. Just one other person. And now… everything’s right with us.”

“Wh… what?”

“It’s all good. Now, we’re both in the right bodies,” he said. He was kinda getting creepy.

“Mike… no, I’m…”

“You’re bi now. You can’t say you don’t find me att-”

“Wrong.”

“Huh?”

I took a deep breath. “Mike, I dunno why, but I’m still only attracted to girls. You’re a great friend and all, but I’m not interested in you in that way, okay?”

“But…”

“Seriously. ‘you can’t say you don’t find me attractive’? You know how much of an asshole you sound like that?”

“Lara, I-”

“That’s not my name,” I said, and I left the room. Which overall was a dumb choice, seeing as that assassin was right outside.

---

“Rise, Shadowstalker.”

“Don’ wanna.” I mumbled, blearily opening my eyes.

Something pieced through my chest, and I was held up to eye level of the monstrosity, like an unidentifiable piece of meat on a kebab. I looked blurrily around. Looked like I was in some kind of big, circle, stone-walled room with no obvious routes of escape.

“Norae delcuf dunim,” the voice intoned. I suddenly discovered what having a vacuum cleaner sucking your insides out from both ends felt like.

“Weak. She will learn true strength,” it said, and I was wiped off his sword. I heard deep footsteps echo away, slowly.

“… She, my ASS,” I muttered, pushing myself up. The stab wound from where… the guy… had impaled me had started oozing. Not bleeding, but oozing tarry black stuff. Eww.

I pushed myself up, noticing my skin had gone a purplish-grey tint. My ears came to a slight point, as I felt my face I realised it wasn‘t furry, and it seemed that I wasn’t a felis any more. Random race change? Woo?

The ooze clotted up pretty fast and my body seemed to heal really quickly. And then, I noticed I was naked.

I groaned.

“Okay… clothes…”

I looked around the large, circular room. There were a couple of crates nearby that I tried to open and failed at. There was a skeleton near the edge that had some armor that it turned out was way too big for me.

“Mike? Lisa?” I called. No response, can’t say that shocked me. Not that I would’ve been to happy to see him here, especially with me naked. Never thought he… she… would have turned out to be such a chauvinist… you wouldn’t think it was possible considering everything SHE’D been through. I don’t care what Melissa said. Or even what Allison said. I’m a boy. Just because I don’t look like one right now…

Right. More immediate problem. Stuck in netherworlds II. Want to buy logout button?