Chapter 3

April 4th, 2024. Alison Dikscheide.

The reporter from the local news followed Alison leaving the assembly hall, with students milling about all around them. She held out her microphone.

“With the shutdown of the school newspaper, a lot of people are saying students feel intimidated by the way you’ve run the DEO, that it’s crushing school spirit and free speech. How would you respond to that?”

It was exactly the kind of question Alison longed for. She tried (and failed, hideously) to deliver her response in a conversational tone, as if it was simply obvious. “It’s still Trump’s America, even if he’s out of office. There’s a lot of bigots out there. I imagine bigots do feel intimidated by the DEO. That doesn’t particularly bother me.”

Behind her, a petite student with sharp pink ‘money piece’ highlights in her black bowl-cut was whispering with her leggy Asian friend. “Are you now or have you ever...”

The mike caught it. Alison was not amused.

April 5th, 2024. Bonnie Liu.

“Suspended? For snark?”

Chinese Bonnie nodded. She and Nora were alone, behind the equipment racks in the locker room. “Just three days. ‘Contributing to the disenfranchisement of fellow students by mocking the plights of oppressed peoples.’ At least, that’s what the Principal told her parents. I think the DEO’s on edge thanks to the AFHU situation.”

“Geez,” Nora said. “Is she in trouble?”

“Nah. PHB’s family knows the game. They don’t care. Apparently they even said Principal Hardin sounded sheepish and ironic when he gave them the reason. He just rubber-stamps whatever Dikscheide says to avoid her Twitter mob and keep his job. I’m going to take notes for her in Bio, and Julie said she would in History. Can you do Chem?”

“Yeah, sure. Absolutely.”

“I’m just ... I was right there. I’ve been having little anxiety attacks ever since it happened. If I got suspended, my parents wouldn’t get it. Sorry to be racist and all but Tiger Moms are a real thing. I would know; I was raised by one. My parents don’t really get the woke culture war stuff. They’d think it was something I actually did wrong. I can’t be, I mean...”

Chinese Bonnie was starting to tremble. Nora hugged her, but didn’t say anything. She already had an idea what was coming. CB just needed a minute to get it out. “Nori, I was the one who said it. PHB knows how my parents are. She took the blame because I shot my mouth off. Because I ... I just can’t listen to people spew bullshit like that. I talk up, all the time, because I can’t at home. She took the rap. I sold her out, but I can’t speak up. I can’t afford to. I don’t know how I’ll ever look her in the face again...”

Nora held Chinese Bonnie as she started crying. “She obviously gets it, babe. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t have taken the rap...”

April 9th, 2024. Julie Lambert.

“Oh, look. It’s Miss Entitlement.”

Julie frowned. It was Tana, the maladjust who made herself an outcast from the outcasts’ clique. Julie made every effort to avoid dealing with her. So did everyone else. They were alone in the girls’ washroom during morning recess; Julie had just been fixing her makeup. Damn it. “What do you mean?”

“You think you’re born better than us. You’re so desperate to prove it with the posters and the smarmy civil service and all your other endless bullshit.”

Julie was actually glad it was Tana that said that specific thing to her, because it was easier to refute with her. “We’re the same gender and ethnicity, and our parents are in the same income bracket. How could I possibly be born better than you?”

This was slightly duplicitous. Sure, Julie was upper middle class... now. She’d learned about that Robin Hood app from the Young Investors, though, and mapped out some hypothetical investments starting with a thousand dollars capital. Turns out when you mix transhuman intellect and stock markets, entertaining things happen. She’d be a millionaire right now if those investments were real. She wasn’t, though, because the 2020s had a mad hate-on for self-made millionaires and most of her classmates wouldn’t vote for a newly rich girl as prom queen. After graduation, though, she didn’t have to stay middle class if she decided it wasn’t beneficial to her. Still, staying out of the media’s notice had advantages to an Adept.

Tana, conversely, had ratty clothes because her parents cut off her finances after she beat up her twelve-year-old kid sister in a fit of rage. She was currently couch-surfing with various death-metal dorks and dopies after being kicked out of her house.

“Then you admit it! You’re just putting on airs.”

“Look. Decide if you support the class system or not. I don’t actually care what you decide, but it has to be one or the other. If you like it, you can’t accuse me of being born better. If you don’t like it, you can’t accuse me of trying to reach above my birth station. You can’t change the position you’re arguing from just to keep attacking me.”

Julie’s words confused Tana, so she didn’t bother to even try to parse their meaning. “Can’t I? Just watch me!”

“What is your beef with me, anyway?”

“Do you even have to ask? Everyone treats me like shit, and it’s because you and your in crowd have it out for me!”

“Look, Tana. You’re not an outcast because other people are elitist, and you’re not above cliques because you decided to join an especially antisocial one and then alienate even them. You’re an outcast because you bit off a fellow student’s ear, have a conviction for animal cruelty, ran around licking other students’ lockers during a pandemic, advocated for forced sterilization as your Social Studies class project and have a two inch barbell stuck through your nose. All of those things were your own choices, and they had consequences.”

“No they weren’t! I have Histrionic Personality Disorder, and I have a doctor’s note to prove it! If you don’t give me the leeway to be who I am, you’re stigmatizing mental illness! You’re nothing but a neurotypical bigot, and I’ll break your head open for it!”

“HPD isn’t neurological. Also, your doctor’s notes are kinda sus after the ‘medicinal cocaine’ one.”

Honestly, Julie believed her about the HPD — she’d have been expelled by now if she didn’t have a legit mental illness. Nobody with a psychiatric diagnosis got expelled in 2024. It would be like catnip for the Twitter mobs.

“Don’t contradict my lived experiences!”

“Maybe don’t parrot progressive jingoism when you don’t even understand what it means and everyone’s seen you try to cozy up to alt-right shitheads anyway.”

“Fuck you, ginger trashbot!”

Julie sighed. She felt a headache coming on. “Look, can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How many hours a day do you devote to becoming popular?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, you come after me like you deserve to have everything I have, so I ask you: have you worked as hard to earn it as I have?”

“You just don’t get it! The licking thing was for YouTube. It’s supposed to make you popular if it goes viral. A girl I know who once met Jake Paul said it would!”

Tana looked like she was going to cry, or rend someone in twain, or both at the same time. Don’t comfort her. It will just make her angrier.

“A ‘devious lick’ doesn’t mean literally licking things, Tana. It also only makes you popular in really weird edge cases. It’s like trading pink sheet stocks. It doesn’t work unless you know exactly what you’re doing, and even then it still makes you an asshole. If you want to be more popular, or at least accepted, just try just being nice to people — and stop dressing like a school shooter.”

“Oh, sure, suck up to fagbots not worthy of my time and dress up all Sheeple Barbie like you? Fuck that noise. You really worked on this, huh, with all the campaign posters? You think all this clique and popularity bullshit really matters? What a sad, deluded loser. You’re gonna become the very definition of peaked-in-high-school. Fuck you forever, you vanilla-scented cuntwaffle! Bleed and die!”

Tana fiddled with her switchblade. This would have scared Julie, but she had seen Tana try to pull it before. It took her about two minutes to get it open. Still, she was angry, and mercurial, and she had about two hundred pounds on Julie. There was danger here, physically — Julie sensed it. But it was better to goad it out now than have Tana try to sucker punch her at some other random time — or worse still, go after one of her friends who didn’t have danger sense, boosted stamina and agility. So Julie played it cavalier. “Laugh at the people in the popularity contests all you want. Just remember this: the popularity contests in May are just the tryouts. The really big ones happen in November, and they determine the fate of the world.”

Tana was confused again, and her anger got the better of her. She roared and lunged, but Julie saw it coming for multiple reasons and sidestepped. Slipping behind Tana, she pushed her into the corridor wall, both hands on her shoulder blades. “Listen to me. I know the school is letting you get away with shit because of the DEO, but the town won’t. If you ever get violent with me or my friends again, I’ll tell Mrs. Andercleft what you did to her prized Clydesdale, and why, and who you sent the pictures to.”

Tana turned white and went limp. Information supremacy is fun!

“Okay,” she finally said quietly. “I, uh ... I won’t hassle you anymore. Promise.”

“Great. And my friends?”

“Yeah, them too.”

“Awesome. Since I’m trying to get everyone to be my friend right now, maybe just don’t bully, punch or lacerate anyone, mmmkay?”

“That’s really pushing it, Basic Bitch Barbie.”

“Mrs. Andercleft will push harder.”

“Fine, fine, okay!”

“Wonderful. One other little thing, and then we can both forget any of this ever happened.”

“What?”

“I’d like to know what Bonnie Kellerman said to you to get you so riled up at me.”

Tana’s answer was long, convoluted and deeply surreal. By the time she finished, all Julie could do was shake her head in pity — marveling that even someone like Tana would actually believe it. Of course, that’s likely exactly why DB sought Tana out to begin with.

April 22nd, 2024. Julie Lambert.

Marvin wasn’t Julie’s first Dorn.

In reality, he was a short, plump, gawky little nerd with a serious acne problem. He’d taken to wearing an eyepatch, recently, to cover his black eye. He thought it made him look badass; it didn’t. He had been one of the more influential voices in the school’s nerd clique, especially after keeping a level head in the apocalyptic library brawl — he was the DM for their tabletop RPGs. After his central role in the big hamster controversy, though, everyone was shunning him like a leper.

His fantasy seemed to be tutoring her in Algebra; undoubtedly she would desperately need his fatherly explanations in order to pass her next exam — and he’d exploit that desperation. Well, maybe. Hopefully. Julie wasn’t sure if he’d actually go there — maybe all he wanted was for her to fawn and act all impressed with him. Boring. Julie’d take degrading and exploitative over boring any day of the week. Honestly, given everything he’d gone through recently, he desperately needed a self-esteem boost — and Julie would have been willing to put up with a bit of condescension to give it to him. There was a way to do it, though, that would be more fun for both of them.

She’d used a fairly blunt variation of her usual line to get dorky guys to re-visualize themselves as total snacks in their dreams. “Imagine yourself being a stud worthy of me,” she whispered breathlessly in his ear as he leaned over to help her with a problem, “and it will be so, and you may actually get what you really want as a result.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it, pudgy five-two Marvin Stockman the alleged math wiz melted away, being replaced with a tall, bald, brown-skinned barbarian avatar of masculinity bearing mighty thews and a mighty something else, too. He radiated a thick, almost tangible aura of erotic machismo and raw virility. The eyepatch actually looked badass on him. Yeah, it wasn’t surprising that film was the first thing to come to mind with a certain class of boys who had exposure to, and love for, retro-cinema. She actually knew the script at this point — she’d looked up the film after her second Dorn to see what it was all about. Pretty entertaining, honestly, and such gorgeous line art. She’d been big into sketching back in Junior High herself, so the artistry of it wasn’t lost on her.

The study buddy fantasy also melted away, and Julie wasn’t sad to see it go. She hated pretending not to understand Algebra just so Marvin could feel smart coaching her. It didn’t help that, nerd stereotypes aside, he wasn’t actually any good at Algebra. Nor could either of them read a textbook (or anything else) in a dream. What replaced it, though, took her breath away. A spectacularly vivid alien landscape — angled piping weaving like cobwebs across a desert wasteland, exotic walled cities with incredibly beautiful if far-fetched architectural wonders, ringed gas giants hanging behind thin, flowing clouds in a polychromatic, marbled alien sky. It wasn’t even all copied from the film — there were original elements, and transplants from sci-fi and fantasy franchises too obscure for Julie to recognize. The artistry of it clearly wasn’t lost on him, either!

Julie hugged Marvin, making him shiver with arousal, even as her eyes picked out all the ornate little details in the landscape and setting. She already knew he was going to be her best Dorn. It wasn’t just a hyper-macho fantasy for him — it was a completely different world, a chance to live and experience something wholly other to her daily high school life. She guessed that’s why guys like Marvin played D&D that way, but she could never have understood the appeal of it until she saw that landscape. He’s not just a sad-sack loser — he could be the next Boris Vallejo or Julie Bell! She took his hands in her own, looked him in the eye, and willed herself to change in turn.

She grew a good four inches taller. The red bled out of her hair, and even as it grew more lustrous and full-bodied it took on a steely grey pigment. Her features remained fundamentally her own, but her cheekbones grew sharper and more pronounced — giving her the look of a formidable, take-no-shit warrior. She had purple eyeshadow in neat, almost ritual stripes, and her lips were dyed a rich magenta to match the ornate sword-tattoo on her neck. She was clad in a strappy black leather bikini and ornate, thigh-high crimson bitch boots with matching arm-guard and sheathe. Deep scars formed on her belly and forearm, and subtler thin white whip-scars all along her body. She didn’t need to look down to know she’d picked up two cup sizes and the expansion had been quite visibly cinematic — the expression on Marvin’s face told the whole story.

She felt powerful. An indomitable protector, last of the Tovaarian defender-race who, fittingly enough, empowered other women in their dreams.

Tonaara was the strong, silent type, but fuck that. Julie knew she’d have to speak to be able to guide the dream and prevent it from going off the rails. Might as well start now. She fixed Marvin with a slight, coy smile. “If any part of me pleases your senses...”

Dorn’s face lit up with an almost comedic flash of gleeful, boyish delight. “Ohmigod! You saw it! We really are made for each other, just like Dorn and Tonaara!”

“Dorn and Tonaara never met,” Julie observed dryly, but it fell on deaf ears.

“So, uh, you ... you cosplay?”

At least it was Marvin’s voice (albeit deeper), and not John Candy. When that happened, it just felt weird.

She grinned. “Only in your dreams, kid!”

And everyone else’s, but there’s no need to get into that right now.

The cartoon aesthetic projected onto live-action bodies, combined with the look of uncynical, wide-eyed excitement on Dorn’s face brought an entirely different character to Julie’s mind. Am I really going to fuck Bull Shannon?! It was a very macho, ripped and rugged Bull, mind you — but the childlike sincerity made the unwanted connection in her mind, making Julie giggle. Yes, she decided. I am, and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it.

They were out behind the cantina, Julie realized. She looked around. No one was nearby, but people were milling about in the distance. So — public enough to be thrilling, but discreet enough they might actually get away with it. Cool night air flowed over her exposed flesh, exciting her — Julie had worn a lot of sexy things before, but she’d never been outdoors in anything as scandalously skimpy and overtly kinky as Tonaara’s getup. It excited her. She felt like a stripper — a brazen, naughty stripper that was allowed to casually decapitate overly boorish clientele. Fuck yeah — she wanted that life for longer than just one dream.

Her hand circled around the improvised loincloth Dorn wore, and tore it loose with an impish smile. “I have no problem with your dork hangin’ out, by the way...”

Dorn’s hand on her shoulder guided her down, and she got on her knees. Tonaara’s armored bitch boots gave her kneepads, which was great — the city was a monolithic morass of smoothly-hewn stonework, carven with ancient, mythic murals. She loved looking at it, but didn’t especially want to crawl on it. Dorn’s cock was huge, but in the way a real man’s cock could be — not blown up to grotesque proportions the way her other Dorns had been. Oddly, that made Julie respect Marvin a bit more. It was a cock made to be used and enjoyed, not to massage a wounded ego. It was also currently only semi-chub rather than constantly erect. She could fit it in her mouth, she realized, and that was more than enough reason to do so.

She leaned forward, engulfing it without hesitation, magenta lips locking around the shaft like a vacuum seal. She pulsed her cheeks in and out and stroked the semi-chub with her tongue vigorously. She could feel the veins pulse with Dorn’s excitement, feel the flesh grow firm and hard inside her mouth. It excited her, that she could feel the effect of her ministrations on his body on a tactile level. After half a minute, she might as well have been sucking on a dildo, so rigid, long and hard was Dorn’s shaft.

No, she thought. Not a dildo. You can’t feel the veins pulse as blood flows through a dildo. You can’t taste the tang of your partner’s sweat. You can’t feel the warmth of their flesh swell against the back of your throat. You can’t slide the tip of your tongue around in the little groove between the head and the foreskin, and feel your partner’s whole body shiver in response. Dildos don’t do any of that. Dorn’s hand slid into Julie’s voluminous grey hair, cupping the back of her head to guide her as she sucked him off. It was a dominant gesture, and that excited her. Marvin would never do that when awake, but in dreams he was Dorn, and Dorn would and did.

Julie’s head bobbed up and down on Dorn’s rod, slowly and gracefully. She was happy — profoundly so, and consciously focused on taking in all the details of the moment, savoring and experiencing it to the fullest. She remembered the jokey conversations the cheerleaders had in the locker room, about the heights a girl was expected to make a hot guy jump — in terms of gifts, attention, foot-rubs and general romance — before it was permissible to blow them. Julie was certainly not immune to the delightful pleasures of making boys work for their treats — but she couldn’t imagine a blowjob as a chore, unless it was for a guy she didn’t want to be dating to begin with. She wondered if those conversations were as performative for her friends as they were for her — did the other girls enjoy the act of fellatio as much as she did, or was she just a sexual freak? She was okay with either answer, honestly.