Laura“Sis, you need to take a look.”

  I repress yet another inflected exhation, as an overabundance of such expression might disrupt the mood I am carefully calibrating within my rival-cum-wrestling-partner—though she’s doing an adequate job of destabilizing those parameters all by herself, overachiever that she is. Fortunately, I am sufficiently locked-in on my current task and am able to add the finishing touches to the facial cosmetic enhancements I’ve been carefully crafting for well over twenty minutes. A quick confirmational scan in my handheld reflective surface and I’m happy to finally gnce up at my perennially persistent partner-in-crime—and crime alone—batting my freshly gold-flecked eyelids in response to her sustained sesquipedalian squawking.

  “Look at what, sis?” I drawl, pcing the emphasis on the correct sylble—Emmy’s so engrossed in her mystery-marauding mania that she’s forgotten why we even call each other that, and with such pointed intonations.

  Disappointingly, she barely registers the identitarian barb. “The NTBV. I’m closing in on a hypothesis.”

  My expertly-decorated eyeballs roll in their freshly-gilded receptacles. “I thought we settled at the st ‘practice session’ that your strategem of tweaking the mathematical coefficients would not, in fact, count as an honorable victory.”

  “You did, certainly,” Emmy snaps, regaining some of that competitive verve I found so very stimuting in a woman (which she most certainly was). “Regardless, I am not trying to calibrate the equation—at least, not quite yet. I’m trying to divine it.”

  “To what end?”

  “Have you no curiosity as to why these utterly arbitrary variables are included in what should be a straightforward volumetric computation?”

  I flick a lock of glossy, straightened hair over my shoulder, assuming my characteristic smirk that at once conveys all the relevant smugness I am notorious for, and also catches Emmy’s attention in that particur way. “I see no reason to tamper with a formu that has so accurately selected for the supreme candidate, sis.”

  The goading is quotidian, emblematic of our routine verbal sparring, that scintilting back-and-forth animating our competitive spirits—but seriously, has she like, still not noticed? My facepaint is so on-point as to make a confgrative nun weep, and my choice of costuming, while easy enough to mistake for everyday garb, remains recognizable enough that I had expected Emmy to pick up on the provided cues. Perhaps I had, indeed, overestimated her faculties, I consider with a pang of disappointment, and she has been defeated by my mastery of the subtle.

  “Yes, I am incentivized to investigate, we both know it, moving on,” Emmy snorts.

  She roughly flops down next to me in a manner most undylike—a strat I’d have to coach her on further, loath as I am to enhance my rival-cum-compatriot’s conversance with the meta, but our advanced two-pyer approach to the optimization of verdure-proximal subterfuge required such sacrifices. I make a mental note to correct her posture as well, before peering down into the proffered screen.

  “So you’ve listed every factor,” I note, bored, scrolling down the list with a glossy, manicured nail—that she still hadn’t noticed. “What about it?”

  “They’re in order of relevance to the mammarian dimensional analysis,” Emmy expins with a revolution of her own orbitals, making my ire at her dismissal of my capacity fre up. “A mind with a healthy, adequate degree of curiosity, such as mine, would seek to gauge what simirities characterize the least-relevant criteria.”

  My mind was adequately curious—curious about why Emmy cared more about her stupid fucking list than the outfit I had so meticulously organized, practiced, perfected, and then fwlessly implemented before her dense, unperceptive gaze. Gritting my teeth behind pursed lips, I let her aggravating attitude crinkle my otherwise immacute, glittering facade, and cock an eyebrow at her.

  “Yes, the formu is perhaps not as straightforward as it could be,” I allow, finally dropping the ironic term of endearment. “So what pattern connects the confounding factors?”

  Emmy gives off an exasperated sigh, just enough that I know she’s overdoing it on purpose, to try and tilt me. “The pattern could be literally anything, is the issue. Look.”

  She pulls up a huge fucking mess of a plot with, as I believe seasoned researchers in statistical analysis would say, a “bunch of graphs and shit”. She’s got the whole thing going on here. Scatter plots. Histograms—nice try, Emmy, those are herstograms, you’re not getting me to break cover that easy. She’s got a matrix in there, a sure sign of serious data analysis, a subject I’m both familiar and proficient in.

  “Obviously, the PCA tells us what we already know. Most of the NTBV variance is predicted by this one big principal component,” she begins, pointing at the leftmost edge of a pretty uninspired graph rightly stuck in the bottom left corner, the lowest-tier corner for subplots.

  “Boobage can’t be adequately described by just one variable,” I assert. She thinks she can just say “linear dependence” to counterpy my immacutely thorough measurement skills.

  “I concur,” she admits defeat. “It only describes about seventy percent. The rest…” she slides her finger to the right, “it’s a fucking mess.”

  Weird way to describe an almost ft line, but okay.

  “Whatever retionship everything outside the eigenmilker has to scoring in the competition, I can’t get statistical significance for a single one.”

  She turns to me and pushes on her gsses, light reflecting off them and missing me completely, her eyes perfectly visible in a complete failure to be even a little anime. “We’ve got data on about two hundred people here. The sample size is too small to identify any linear retionships present, and without something to go off, finding the right nonlinear one is going to be a grind.”

  “So your conclusion is … no conclusion,” I surmise, permitting the irritation to fully suffuse my body, to the point that I am almost shaken out of “the mood” myself.

  “It’s a start,” Emmy cries, no doubt attempting to convince herself more than me—for I am immovable on what an utter waste of time this has been, time we could have spent rehearsing our “covert maneuvers”.

  “It’s an end,” I state firmly, in a tone that Emmy has by now learned brooks no argument. “Look at me.”

  She obeys, as she usually does when I adopt this tone.

  “No, really look at me.”

  She does. After a too-long contemptive interlude, her eyes widen.

  “W-wait …”

  “Yes,” I confirm, before she can stutter out her sentence. “The resembnce is uncanny, is it not? I suppose hailing from the culture of the property’s origin helps … sis.”

  At that, Emmy only grows more tongue-tied. My grin increases in both length and wickedness, as I lean over and make apparent just how tight-fitting my white dress now is. Behind the resulting gssy look and sckened jaw, I see her brain running calcutions anew, becoming aware of the pin I have adroitly pressed her into. For you see, dear reader-who-is-myself-in-my-own-head-as-I-recount-this-narration-of-my-own-gamewinning-move, I have deviously trapped Emmy in an unenviable binary choice: either admit that she is in fact a sapphic woman who can unproblematically enjoy my simution of an evil character who is a favorite amongst the lesbians of the fandom—whose tastes I keep abreast of purely to be as convincing as can be in my own deceptions, of course—or otherwise, accept being tarred as a fetishizing heterosexual male who problematically desires a canonically woman-loving-woman—and a white man engaging in orientalist fantasies to boot!

  The sudden pressure I have put her under is clearly unraveling her composure, causing her to perspire and swallow and fidget with increasing vigor. She looks helpless, cornered, her discomfort mounting, withering under my piercing gaze as I loom over her with bared fangs, her own skirt proving to be treacherously revealing of the physiological state I have successfully induced in her. Yes, my pn has gone off without a hitch, and surely …

  Surely …

  It’s quite hard to think when her neck looks so biteable, I must admit.

  “You look amazing,” she chirps.

  I can bear it no longer. Roaring victoriously, I pounce.

  NicholeKatherine’s taste in women’s fashion scares me.

  The rapid, manic process of selecting clothing happened with such an intensity, I barely got a word in before my budget for the month had been blown three times over. My savings account is crying. I would be crying, if I did that at all.

  Katherine’s spending habits could easily be described as “thoroughly irresponsible.” In hindsight, I realize that it wasn’t just a lucrative future career in IT she was gesturing at when saying not to worry, as she’s going to have a lot more money on her hands not too far in the future.

  The spectre of the economy looms over us. Is it really that simple? Is she going all-in on transitioning, right down to having us both use her new name and pronouns even privately, because she genuinely believes she’ll be the winner of the 2024 prize?

  In terms of rankings, she’s decidedly average. (I checked.) The server’s respect for competitors’ privacy is a gring issue, with timelines of everyone’s measurements, even disqualified ones, just there. And at an NTBV score of 49, corresponding to a European 70A bra size, it seems like the only thing notable about her is server activity.

  And holy shit, she’s so fucking active. When does she have time to write all these messages? The word count in just the st week is something over ten thousand, with at-length rambles about the competition that go on absurdly verbose tangents not just commonpce, but expected of her.

  You really would think nobody had this much to say about ranked competitive breast growth.

  Anyway, the clothes. She ordered some fast shipping, and we already have the package just a few days ter. I managed to get a few words in and insist on a few clothes that I’ve actually seen people wear outside. The rest…

  Sure, the skirts and thigh-highs are, in her words, “the precise cliché that is needed to sell the notion of a man doing all his research on transfeminine culture with memes.” The same can’t be said for her eclectic taste in frankly ridiculous dresses.

  Admittedly, the ridiculous thing she’s wearing right now is working for her, somehow. It’s like a truck full of alt fashion collided with a truck full of thrift store donations and she’s wearing the wreckage, bits of the unfortunate vehicles included, but the way she carries herself looks … good.

  Like. Really good.

  Which makes my present situation feel all the more fucked, sitting in my chair wearing the outfit she suggested. A skirt, thigh-high socks and a crop top, all together conspiring to make me look like I’ve been attacked by some creature that forces you into ill-considered outfits, straight out of the book of well-considered and helpfully illustrative metaphors.

  I’m entirely nerves over here, feeling like I’ll die instantly if someone perceives me, and she’s over there. Lounging on my bed, scrunched-up comforter for support. Like the very idea of her, in that, is completely unquestionable.

  It’s the hormones, right? They’re why she’s able to slide so effortlessly into womanhood, while my desperate efforts to make it happen are currently getting me jack shit.

  At least I get to start soon. Kickoff is today, in less than an hour.

  Katherine lets out something in between a snort and a squeak. “Nichole, you have to see this, it’s incredible!”

  She links me to the meme channel of the Accord server. I dread clicking, as everything about the server culture feels like it’s going to give me radiation poisoning, but I can’t exactly refuse now, can I?

  It would be suspicious if I was uncomfortable with the meme culture at py here.

  The post in question reads:

  AVERAGE CASUAL BREAST GROWTH FAN

  literally a womanonly into getting tits for her genderdoesn’t even know her NTBV score“ahhh, I’m not sure if I want bottom surgery, it’s such a big deal”gets less dysphoria from hormonesscared of ftpecsAVERAGE RANKED COMPETITIVE BREAST GROWTH ENJOYER

  genuine phi male, so powerfully male he can live as a woman full time without losing his manhoodunshakable commitment, fights the dysphoria to pursue his goalsuqs want him, ftpecs respect his humongous honkerscasuals wish they were him, but they cannot be him, and need to quit trying to be him, and should toss in the towel for the real champion alreadyschedules groin respecc confidently, knows a dick is extraneous to his manhoodI’m getting the impression that ‘Mike’, ‘Master’ of Mammaries is processing some … stuff.

  Katherine, meanwhile, is giggling. “It’s so true, you know?”

  Her breezy assertion reminds me that yeah, her incredibly convincing trans woman act is, in fact, the second part of that accursed meme.

  “The discourse surrounding it is quite enlightening, if you look here.”

  She sends me another link, this time to #Strat-General.

  “Do I have to be enlightened on this?” I object, trying to come up with a convincingly male reason to excuse myself from the proceedings. “I don’t want to think about guys chopping their dicks off, bro.”

  KatherineShe is wavering.

  “Not ‘bro’, Nichole. This will not do.”

  I cannot allow her to lose her way, ruminating in her mind and away from our cover at the first discomfort. If I accommodate her wavering, then I will not be able to induce the sufficient amount of dysphoria in her before she is too far down the road of bodily modification and roiling in actual embodied torment. At the same time, I have to ensure that my own simucrum of her attempt at gynemimesis remains note-perfect, as it has to this point.

  “We have to be as one here, regardless of our shared discomfort with our …”

  Ack, how precisely am I to describe our phalli, adequately projecting the absurd attachment of a man to his hamsword, as well as this imagined man’s maintenance of a performance of memetic transfemininity?

  “ … nether regions’ …”

  Wait, wrong discomfort.

  “... vulnerability … to … medical excision.”

  Nailed it.

  I press on. “My advice? Do not be afraid, my uh, breastacur apprentice. The way to strength and enlightenment here is to face the discomfort head on, confront it with your arms and other other relevant appendages spread, taking it in fully, to the hilt! Thus conquering it by realizing that it cannot, no matter how deeply it touches your innermost recesses, harm you.”

  My words appear to be so convincing that Nichole is left speechless. I must rule this as another success at harboring the deep secret that I have no ability to rete to her outright discomfort with the procedure. Uncertainty, certainly, but discomfort would be pushing it.

  “... Fine, I’ll look.” Nichole relents.

  Bench Press Meta 2025Look mate. I am not judging you if you want to chop your dick off, but saying it’s a strat to get gains is unhinged. Saying you’re already having gains just from pnning the snip is even more unhinged.

  Mike, Master of Mammariesdickboys stay coping, theres a reason im winning this and youre falling behind

  Bench Press Meta 2025

  And that reason is I’m a genetic te bloomer, not my intent of having a dick at the end of this shit. Year three gains are where I’ll beat you and your weirdo boyfriend. If this went on for four, you’d be left in the dust, with nothing to show for it except your creepy anime girl cospy.

  Mike, Master of Mammaries

  oh lmao your coping so bad. cmon. do the whole dialogue tree. tell me how long puberty is. gimme the whole talk about how we should run the comp for a full decade. PAD me, geneseether. regale me with divinations of how your heirs will be getting the prize once were all rotting in the ground and the final NTBVs have been recorded. meanwhile ill be rewarded for my commitment with a huge rack, a million dolrs and a hot former rival i can fetishize lesbians with alllllll day

  Bench Press Meta 2025Bro you two are so obviously gay, holy shit.

  Mike, Master of MammariesLiking girls as a man is straight, dude. @isaacahedron is obviously a woman, shes just lying to herself.

  Bench Press Meta 2025If Isaac’s a woman then so are you. Idgaf about the tribunals or anything I’m just saying there’s no fucking way for this to be straight.

  Mike, Master of Mammariesur mom was pretty straight when i fucked her st night

  Bench Press Meta 2025And how do you pn to fuck anyone without a dick, Mike? What’s your pn there exactly?

  Mike, Master of Mammarieswow

  Bench Press Meta 2025Oh, is this the first time you’re thinking about that?

  Mike, Master of Mammariesno im amazed at how weak youre manhood is. you think i need a dick to fuck your mom? you think a mere meat shaft is what makes me a penetrator, rather than a penetratee? im doing manhood on levels you cant even comprehend. i could take en entire cock allllllll the way up my ass right now and it would still be the other guy walking out of it sore and, to be clear, penetrated, with my heterosexuality fully intact.

  Bench Press Meta 2025…

  Mike, Master of Mammarieswhich is xactly how i got my girlfriend to squeal my name ten minutes ago and how im gonna make her do it again now, virgcel

  Incredible. The Master of Mammaries’ run through this game is truly bzing trails for all men, not only his peers in this competition. And yet, Nichole does not seem to appreciate his absurd genius.

  “This is … complete fucking nonsense, Katherine. You can tell this is nonsense, right?”

  NicholeWhile the utterly deranged woman-shaped man reclining in my bed natters on about how insecure I am in my masculinity, I continue to stare at the single most surreal conversation I have ever had the misfortune to bear witness to in my entire current life, and frankly all possible previous ones. Somehow, the level of dissociation I feel—oh, that’s what this is, isn’t it—exceeds literally my most debilitating dysphoric attacks, a feeling that is only intensifying as the heated exchange of text refuses to abate:

  Bench Press Meta 2025Well pardon me, dollface, but I guess I just don’t see what REMOVING YOUR FUCKING COCK achieves if your only goal is “eliminatin wasteful t-gen from my perfect masculine champions form”. THERE IS ALREADY A PROCEDURE FOR THAT, WHICH DOESN’T INVOLVE DOING ORIGAMI TO YOUR PORKSTAFF

  Mike, Master of Mammarieslol cope harder dongpologist

  Bench Press Meta 2025No fuck you, you are absolutely not blowing this off, answer the damn question or be proved forever anatomically illiterate

  Bench Press Meta 2025Like for fuck’s sake, I am getting the ball-weights excised myself, NEXT FUCKING WEEK. Leaving T-levels for a fucking imperfect biofeedback loop to regute is just gross negligence. BUT DICKS DON’T PRODUCE TESTOSTERONE, NUMBNUTS

  Mike, Master of Mammariesur mom didn’t think my nuts were that numb st night

  Bench Press Meta 2025That’s you conceding the point, ‘champion’.

  Mike, Master of MammariesI concede nothing. I waste my breath on what should be obvious to even the sub-zeta males like you, but for your ck of even the barest spark of a worthy intellect capable of grasping how deeply embedded the Phallus is in our culture, history, bloodlines, psyches, OUR VERY ESSENCES. You need your pustulent, tumescent, blood-filled skin sack of rancid goo to serve as a paltry, tangible, mean fetish for your manhood, while I do not. I, Master of Mammaries that I am, have transcended, have gone even further beyond. You utter reprobates, you unthinking simpleton fools, I have BECOME THE PHALLUS ITSELF, IN BODY, IN SPIRIT, IN MIND AND BE-ING. I AM NO MORE IN NEED OF EXTRANEOUS APPENDAGES THAT TAKE UP PRECIOUS BODILY RESOURCES THAT COULD GO TOWARDS NTBV OPTIMIZATION THAN I AM IN NEED OF YOUR APPROVAL.

  Mike, Master of MammariesSis.

  I make a mental note to check whether this server covers therapy, too. Before I can tab away to look, Mike’s boyf—girlfriend? Partner. Wait, no, pretend partner?

  I really hope it covers therapy.

  IsaacahedronMy dy, I really don’t think you understood that essay quite as well as you think you did.

  Mike, Master of Mammariesdid I fucking say you could use ur hands yet

  Mike, Master of Mammaries

  ya. much better.

  My fingers almost moved by themselves to type my own “I fucking quit” message, but just then every channel was simultaneously locked.

  “Oh, my.” Katherine sat up straight. “It’s starting. Get to your rig.”

  Somehow, I find myself in my chair, in front of my monitor with the webcam turned on, Katherine hovering anxiously at my side, injector gun quivering in my dominant hand, staring at a colge of what I have to assume are equally-thunderstruck … “intakes”. We have been shunted into a conference call channel to record our first ever E-injections, taken in perfect synchronicity, in front of every other participant, serving as a …

  They say evidence, but it feels much more like a covenant.

  Like … I’m clicking on a link to a “listen party” that takes me to a custom webpage with an embedded audio loop that I must py. The haunting notes echo through the speakers of call attendees who haven’t yet muted themselves and so are forcefully muted by admin—there’s an account called ‘Admin’ present, now, that I only just notice, conspicuous though it is for being the only one with their camera off. Instead, the admin account is streaming a countdown to us. I watch the numbers tick off, paralyzed, staring as my new life approaches second by agonizing second.

  This is really happening.

  Oh, fuck, this is really happening.

  Someone unmutes. “Wait, we’re supposed to do it together? I already took my—”

  Whoever spoke up is banned before that sentence is even finished. Those of us remaining instinctively freeze, not even moving a muscle. You’d think all our cams were gging.

  Moments ter, another attendee joins, their cam screen flickering on. ‘Mike’—it was Laura, now, as her “RLC”, I recall, sitting next to … Emmy? They are attending as the reigning champs, inducting the new blood into the games.

  Katherine sucks in a breath, sharply. “That’s the Master of Mammaries herself?!”

  Almost as if in response to her, the call’s voice chat erupts in simir expressions of disbelief.

  Heir of Breastwait who’s the cis woman

  BigTittyFemboyare you seriously telling me the master of mammeries is a living waifu

  Only In This For The Money TbhGirl who did your wings

  MelvinYeah the picture in my head was… very, very different…

  askmeaboutmymaiddresswhy does bro look like my body pillow…

  Seconds after posting, askmeaboutmymaiddress is whited out.

  “Huh?” Katherine checks the mod channel on her phone. “‘Banned for using male forms of address during official proceedings’? I’ve never seen that before …”

  “I mean,” someone says, using my voice—I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t even risk talking with my mic off, but my mouth moves nonetheless. “You know this server is like. Really arbitrary, to say the least, right?”

  My feeble attempts to highlight the utter insanity of this online space barely have any conviction behind them, though. I’m much more focused on the injector approaching my thigh, as the sands of time continue to trickle by me.

  “Let me adjust the camera for you, then …” Katherine bites her lip. “You know, if you’re sure.”

  Am I sure? Am I, in this moment, actually sure that I want this?

  The countdown hits zero and I sm the needle into my skin too hard, pain blossoming as I pull the trigger and the sweet, miraculous tincture courses into my veins. It doesn’t work instantaneously—it’s not going to show any results for weeks, if not months, but in that moment I don’t care, I don’t care what my rational thinking mind knows. I’m telling you right now, I felt it. I felt that hormone coursing through my eager, hungry, starving body like lighting animating a corpse.

  Does a woman crawling through the desert want to colpse in the first oasis she stumbles across, no matter how muddy?

  Droplets of blood emerge from the injection site. Katherine wipes them away with a muttered “Be careful!”, but I’m just struggling to hold back ughter, almost rocking in my chair, awash with novel emotions and sensations, pain bleeding into giddiness that washes away my rapidly-dissolving disbelief.

  I am renewed, revitalized, revivified, REBORN.

  I am Nichole. I am, in this moment …

  I am.

  “Welcome to the race, future losers,” Laura sneers, her face adorned with what I can only imagine is a very well-practiced smirk. “Enjoy getting your hopes up, only for the champ to dash them to pieces.”

  The call ends. My monitor is bnk. My reflection smiles back at me for the first time in years, with tears in her eyes.