Chapter 329: Archangel Michael Appears in Public

Mid-March to Thursday, April 5, 2007

Mom and Julia had been far enough advanced in their decorating planning to be able to get the Army to paint the walls the likely final colors and lay the chosen carpets, and that's how the two houses were when the Army left. Getting the decorating designs to that stage in only two months was - I was clearly informed by the little person who did it for my new home - a miracle. It required having the house's major theme already decided, its overall look, the looks of individual rooms, etc.

I expressed my amazement that Julia was able to do such an amazingly difficult job in only a little longer than it took for the entire complex of tunnels and houses to be built from scratch. My underlying point was perfectly valid, so the hits I received must've been for being stupid enough to mention it.

Julia had made a big deal about having already made what she described as "all the major decisions", so if you're a guy you'll think that what was left could only be minor decisions. You'd be wrong of course (you'd be logical, if that's any consolation). I don't understand how, having made "all the major decisions", there could still be a million major decisions to go, all of which seemed to be even more major than any of the previous decisions, but that's apparently how females think. As far as I can tell, when decorating and furnishing a new home, there are about a million major decisions, all of which are worth more than my life would be worth if I poked fun at them. Given that I still haven't worked out what's the difference between "decorating" and "furnishing" - and I'm too smart to ask - I'd be foolish to criticize the process, wouldn't I?

I'd assumed that since we'd had the plans for our new houses for two months before the Army left it to us, and that we'd been able to inspect them during construction as much as we'd wanted, that the women would have most things pre-ordered and the delivery trucks would be arriving at the front gate as the Army was driving out of it. Why couldn't the dinner plates, and so much more, have been purchased a month ago? I'd bought three tractors, several quad-bikes, truckloads of tools and the truck we fetched them in, God knows how much topsoil, and a huge quantity of other miscellaneous stuff. Meanwhile Ava had bought everything necessary to make a 24-bedroom Staff Quarters and a 4-bedroom Senior Staff Quarters fully habitable, and they were happily inhabited. But Mom and Julia had apparently bought nothing.

If you detect a great degree of frustration in me, you'd be right. I'd had the original idea for my "Angel Plan" and it was time to start working on it seriously. It was a very high-risk plan with a huge amount of flexibility permitting it to include hundreds of small details, so it needed to be thought about and discussed a great deal over a few weeks. But too many of my advisors were so totally distracted that they'd barely give it any thought at all, presuming I could get their attention to discuss it in the first place.

My plan's timing wasn't critical, but there were timing issues. It'd be best to do it during winter or early spring. Maybe I could start it as late as mid-spring if I accelerated the execution of plan, but starting after mid-spring would definitely be too late. After that, I'd have to wait until the next fall, losing me half a year. At the rate the women were getting the furnishing and/or decorating done, they'll still be immersed in those tasks NEXT winter!

The seasonal timing was because I had to change my body substantially. My family could see my new body, but no one else could be allowed to. I would naturally be dressed enough in public during winter and spring that no one would think twice about my being fully covered, but come summer, my being overdressed would be noteworthy. Ron would be getting a great deal of attention at the end of the plan, and people noticing that Ron was overdressed would be so bad that it'd force me to delay the execution of my plan until the following year.

When the Army had left in late-February, I'd hoped that we might be living in the place within two or three weeks, so by mid-March. Obviously there'd be more furnishing to be done, and possibly even some decorating, but I'd expected the pressure to have dropped enough that we'd be able to have some good quality planning discussions about my idea, in our highly secure, guaranteed-bug-free home. (It was "guaranteed" enough for me. I'd checked the Faraday caged rooms VERY thoroughly. The sheets of metal wrapped around them were unbroken except where they were each supposed to be. There were no wires running out of the rooms in funny places, only via the single floor access point. I'd followed all those wires into the room, and there were definitely no microphones or lenses attached to them. That left the possibility of someone hiding some sort of tape recorder in the room, but the sensors that picked up electrical activity were amazingly sensitive, designed to detect such bugs. I was happy to have life-at-stake discussions in such rooms.)

It was now mid-March, and every indication was that moving into our new place wasn't going to be happening for several weeks - there was no indication of any movement at all - which wouldn't leave enough time for my plan to work before summer. So over dinner one evening, when everyone was present, I asked, "I need to know when we're moving into the new place?"

As expected, overstressed Julia and Mom took my question the wrong way. With tones of voices that overdid letting me know that they didn't appreciate my question, they told me they were going as quickly as possible, that these things take time to do properly, and other crap. Ava had done most of the purchasing necessary to get the 24-bedroom Staff Quarters ready to be habitable in just two days, so clearly "as quickly as possible" was NOT what Mom and Julia were doing. Painstakingly agonizing over every single decision was far too much fun for them not to drag it out as long as possible.

I said, "Let me repeat myself. I NEED to know when we're moving into the new place?"

"Why?" asked Julia.

"Because there is a VERY important issue in my life that's being held up by not being in that house yet."

"What is it?"

"I don't want to talk about it here. It's too large, complex and important to start discussing it here. I want to discuss it there."

"We can go there after dinner," suggested Prof.

"I meant to discuss it there AFTER we've moved in properly. My issue is large and complex so it's going to take several conversations and much thinking about. Our lives are distracted messes at the moment, so people won't be able to give it anywhere near their best attention. I need for us to be in the new place so we can talk freely, and I want the major decorating and furnishing over with so people can relax and take time to think about my issue rather than rushing around like stressed out chickens with their heads cut off all the time. Time is important to my issue, so as I said before, I NEED to know when you think we'll be living in the new place?"

Julia and Mom tried to answer me, but the only thing they said that was true was, "It's impossible to say." I got to listen to them repeat, "We're going as quickly as possible" another couple of times, which certainly wasn't true. That could be achieved by getting a moving company to move everything from this place to the new one, but it was pointless telling them that; it'd only make them angry with me.

So I did another pointless thing instead, I asked them, "Please go faster." I knew it wouldn't help at all. Women are unable to control themselves when they're in Mom and Julia's situation, especially with hundreds of millions of dollars available.

"We'll try," promised Julia, saying the words without her brain being in any way involved in the process, including not listening to herself.

There were a number of ways in which I was becoming increasingly unhappy with my life:

• Damned decorating! It was a severe pain WAY up the rectum. It was all the females could talk about, and it dominated EVERY family discussion. It quite often made me want to rip my hair out.

• I was getting near the end of the courses for the three degrees. When I got to the end, it'd mean absolutely nothing because I couldn't do anything with the knowledge.

• There were some interesting landscaping opportunities in our new place, but they were hardly keeping my thirty two minds busy. I'd been proud of the landscaping work I'd done at Peoria Road, but it was all for nothing as we'd be walking away from it eventually (although God knows when). That diminished my satisfaction in repeating the process elsewhere.

• I had absolutely no idea what my life was going to be like in the future. I couldn't think of a single ambition that Ron could risk getting involved in. He couldn't be intelligent or athletic, which didn't leave anything, let alone anything that appealed to me. Spending the rest of my life as a dissipate playboy didn't appeal either; I wanted to do that AS WELL, not to make it the sole focus of my life.

• And adding GREATLY to my dissatisfaction, was that I'd had an idea for how to get back to being Mark Anderson.

Most of my loved ones had their heads spinning over the insanity of choosing what plates to buy, and other overwhelming decisions, so I saved them the bother of worrying about my future by acting on my plan myself. Somewhere along the way Julia was going to realize that her insanity had hurt me, and I was going to enjoy teaching her that lesson.

Some months ago, I'd removed the excess fat from my body and given it some muscles, but hadn't taken either action far. I was still slightly bulkier than average and certainly not 'cut', to avoid reminding anyone of Mark. Now I ordered my body to rapidly become super-impressive in all the ways I wanted. Unfortunately excluding height. It would've been fantastic to make myself seven feet tall, but I had to pass as Ron during all of this so my height couldn't change.

I gave Donna her next monthly session that night, two and a half weeks early. She didn't care what the reason was.

The next day I called my casual lovers (Alexis, etc.), telling them, "I'm going to take a break from the strange, multi-girl sex that goes on around here so I can get in touch with my true feelings for Carol. I expect everything will return to normal in a few weeks, but I think it's important for me to do this."

They thought I sounded wonderful, which increased their desire for me, because that's how girls think.

Julia and Carol were quite surprised when some of those girls discussed my recent monogamy (that should really be "trigamy", but wasn't) with them at that terrible-waste-of-valuable-shopping-time called school. They made mental notes to ask me about my new attitude when they got home, but by then there were FAR too many distractions so it was quickly forgotten. School was the bane of Julia's existence these days. Without it she'd be able to fly to New York to check out the store that she heard sold fantastic pots and pans (or whatever), but school finished annoyingly late EVERY weekday. Her parents hadn't helped either, when they'd reacted the wrong way to Julia's suggesting that it'd be best if she skipped a few days of school.

[By the way, our Chip Ross Park address was closer to a different high school. The Board of Education sent my parents a politely worded letter saying that Carol and Donna should change schools at the start of the next school year (Julia would have graduated by then). Mom discussed it with the girls, who said they'd rather keep going to their existing school, so Mom wrote back to the Board saying in effect, "No thanks," and that was the last we heard of it. Considerably more important was that our relocation resulted in us being much closer to the nearest pizza delivery place. I considered that to more than compensate for the extra distance my sisters would have to travel to school.]

As part of the preparation for carrying out my plan, I'd researched "larynx" to learn more about how mine worked. I spent a fair while playing around with it and other parts of my vocal tract (oral cavity, nasal cavity, etc.), to find good ways of quickly changing my voice away from, and back to, the sound it produced now (as Ron, which was different from Mark). I learned how to make a significant difference in less than an hour.

Several days later, in bed one evening, Ava noticed what changes my body had already achieved; Julia and Carol being far too busy talking about the thread weight of cotton in something or other. Julia and Carol sleep on one side of me these days, with Ava on the other. I'd gotten tired of Julia and Carol blathering back and forth across me, so those positions have been fixed for some time.

Julia is the worst of the three and she's swept Carol up in the decorating frenzy. God knows why the weight of a thread of cotton is exciting, but apparently it is. Fortunately for me, Ava isn't insane. By now she'd completely finished the Staff Quarters - they'd stopped talking to her about small things that'd been forgotten - and was now working on the Visitors' Quarters. She was enjoying planning out the different decors of the ten units, but it hadn't consumed her the way it had Julia and Carol. There was no hurry for it, and Ava wasn't going to live in those rooms, so she was pacing herself sanely.

I was cuddling Ava in bed when she checked, "Is your body changing?"

I made light of it, just saying, "Yeah, it's getting somewhat stronger with all the work I'm doing." I didn't want to be more explicit than that, mostly for a lesson I was going to teach Julia and Carol, and partly because I wasn't 100% sure this bedroom was bug free. I almost hoped it was bugged, because the listeners would've been driven insane by all the decorating talk; unless they were female, in which case they were probably insane already, but they'd be driven even more insane with envy.

A few evenings later, Ava and I were alone in bed together while Carol and Julia were away doing something highly non-productive, when Ava exclaimed, "You're BIGGER!"

"Maybe you're smaller?"

"Not THERE I'm not! How can..."

I sealed Ava's lips with some NP and shook my head. I didn't really fear bugs that much; I just wanted to avoid the conversation. I got back to business.

Ava decided to enjoy herself rather than look a gift horse in the mouth. Wisely, because inside a horse's mouth would be the last place I'd put the subject of our conversation.

Over the next couple of weeks that part of me got larger and larger, until Ava whispered a very quiet complaint, "It's TOO big!"

I whispered back, "Okay. I'll stop it there."

"Can you make it smaller please?"

"Not for a few weeks."

"{Groan}."

I could've rushed my preparations a little, to be ready to carry out my plan on April 1 to make it an April Fools' Day start. I thought about that, and was tempted, but decided it had too many negative connotations. I was playing a mind-game on the world, so I wanted them confused, but I didn't want to be written off as a prank.

As it happened, one thing I did on April 1 was finish reading the online lectures for the three degrees. I understood all the lecture material, so I would be able to pass all their exams now. The fourth year Math and Physics courses weren't nearly as difficult as I'd been very fearful of. They'd definitely required extra mental effort, but hadn't been anything like the impenetrable brick walls I'd expected. The advanced Business courses weren't any harder than earlier in that degree; they just required a broader application of business knowledge. They were more detailed rather than more complex. I hadn't bothered with most of the BCC courses, so I'll read them over the next few nights rather than starting another degree or three. I want to see how my Angel Plan works out first.

I waited until my muscles were just about perfect before I did the last preparation. There were only three major ways I had to prepare:

1. Research religion and especially angels. That'd been completed during Majestic Countdown trips weeks ago.

2. Transform my body. That was nearly completed.

3. Make myself a costume.

I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted. The main requirement was that it had to cover me ENTIRELY because I didn't want any DNA escaping or to let anyone catch a look at, or photo of, any part of Ron. I also wanted it to be very sexy, a little freaky, and look 'good' (meaning "not evil") although I'm fully aware that many Christians think looking sexy IS evil.

I snooped some costume rental places in San Francisco to see how similar costumes were made and to get an idea of what they were made of. Then I snooped fabric warehouses until I found the right material. To my shame, I stole a roll of the fabric ("for the greater good," I told myself), using their computer system to record one roll as having been thrown away as faulty. It was a very large warehouse, so hopefully they'd never realize I was wearing their fabric when they saw me on TV. I needed scraps of some other colors and some velcro, but they were easy to find inside the waste bin of a clothing factory. I borrowed everything else I needed from home (scissors, needle, thread, glue, a tape measure and a few other miscellaneous items).

I flew it all to a remote location which had a large, flat rock, where I tried to make my costume. You probably won't be surprised to learn that I haven't made many clothes before, so it was a process very accurately called "trial and error," in that there was the exactly same number of "trials" as "errors".

In addition to being completely inexperienced, I was also forced to have extremely high standards, so I wasted several hours and a great deal of fabric - which was why I'd stolen a whole roll - before I discovered the right approach. A few more attempts, and I finally had what I wanted.

The fabric was silver-colored, very stretchy and thin. I'll be totally naked under it, so it'll show every impressive contour of my body, including the VERY impressive 'contour' between my legs. The costume covered my body ENTIRELY. It had three pieces:

1. Long pants, which started at my waist, looked utterly indecent around my groin (to think I'd considered my bright yellow Speedos embarrassing!), then had legs down to built-in booties, into which I'd glued the bases of a too-wide pair of flip-flops to disguise the shape of my feet in case someone tried to match Ron's footprints to the angel's. I'd try to remember to walk on NP-plates every step to further disguise my footprint and stop the thin fabric from ripping.

2. Long-sleeved shirt, which terminated in mittens rather than gloves. The bottom of the shirt attached to the top of the pants with velcro all the way around, so I could bend without exposing any skin.

3. Headpiece, which pulled completely over my head. It had a very long neck which went under the shirt (the headpiece went on first) to avoid any skin being seen. It had no eye holes, partly to be deliberately freaky, and partly for security reasons so no one could photograph my eyes and maybe use that to identify me later; they couldn't even see my eye or skin color. The fabric wasn't transparent, so I'd be using one or two sight blobs all the time. The headpiece had some pieces of firm rubber glued inside it to disguise the shape of parts of my head. My ears fitted inside two rubber rings which protruded farther than my ears did. Similarly for my lips, so I was effectively speaking into a very short, oval tube. I had a couple of rings around my forehead and an inch further up my skull, to lift the fabric away from skull so bumps on my head couldn't identify me. Under the two small triangles of rubber that my nose slotted between, was a small hole fitted with a piece of mesh to let air in.

On the front - where Superman had his "S" - I'd sewn "A-man" in letters made from blue fabric, with the top of the "A" poking up through a rakishly tilted yellow halo. On the back I'd done the same, except spelled "A-men". The logo had three meanings:

1. "Angelman", like "Superman" or "Spiderman".

2. "A man", as in the sentence, "I am a man."

3. "Amen", the end of a Christian prayer (or possibly even the ancient Egyptian god).

The ambiguity was a little mind-game, adding to the whole thing being a mind-game. The costume was obviously a costume, so a little joke would help make it seem reasonable.

I stood dressed in my outfit, using a sight blob to look at myself from all directions. The eyeless head looked weird, and the headpiece's rubber inserts resulted in very flat shapes where my ears and lips were, which looked strange, anonymous and perfect. My head looked artificial and non-human, like a cyborg's would, but the rest of my body looked excessively human, so it was a confusing image. I thought I looked pretty damned good, especially when I moved so the play of my muscles could be clearly seen. And my grossly enlarged cock stood out so prominently I wondered whether I should delay for a few days to give me time to shrink it.

#23: <Fuck it!>

#2: <Haha. It's going to fuck with their heads, that's for sure.>

#25: <That'll be a good trick; they're fucked in the head already.>

I tidied up my sewing mess, burning the scraps, wrapped the remaining roll of material in plastic and buried it.

I spent the rest of the night refining and practicing my two special visual effects: wings and a halo. With several hundred light blobs available, and with the much-increased control I had over their size and shape, I could produce some VERY impressive effects. The halo was easily done, made out of sixteen semicircular 'bars' of light joined to make a complete circle so I didn't need to rotate it. It looked like a continuous neon tube floating over my head, which was a wonderfully halo-looking image.

With thirty two minds controlling aspects of the wings, they and their complex movements looked fantastic; far better than I'd done in the CIA lab's computer room. My wings emerge from my shoulder blades. Literally "emerge from", as light could be seen radiating through the suit. They have a leading edge of bright, solid light bars joining together in an aesthetic, non-aggressive curve, the bars thinning slightly toward the wings' ends. Projecting backward from the leading edge of each wing are half a dozen ribs. They start thinner and dimmer than the leading edge, and get progressively thinner and dimmer so they eventually disappear entirely about four feet behind the leading edge. In flight, small, bright light blobs will emerge from the leading edge and from the ribs, to shoot down the inter-rib gaps, getting progressively smaller so they disappear about a foot behind where the ribs disappear.

Both the halo and the wings used yellow light blobs and looked awesome; literally, I hoped.

By the time I was ready to launch my plan, Julia and Carol STILL hadn't noticed that my body had changed. I must confess (not to them though) that I'd been deliberately hiding it from them and had asked Ava to keep quiet about it too, to maximize my wives' guilt when they did finally notice.

You'd think that our sleeping naked in the same bed every night would make keeping my body's changes hidden for three weeks difficult, but you'd be badly underestimating the attention-getting power of unlimited-budget, new-home decorating. Or furnishing, I wasn't sure which was the main culprit. In the mornings, Julia's mouth would open even before her eyes, so she could babble to Carol about something or other. In the nights, Julia's mouth would still be going after the lights were turned out, and - I was pretty sure - well after her brain had gone to sleep.

I'd been sleeping with my back to my wives, leaving them to talk with each other while I talked to Ava. I could easily get out of the bed on Ava's side while Julia and Carol were engrossed, slipping on a robe I kept handy. Or the reverse sequence to get into bed. I timed my showers and dressing for when Julia and Carol were busy or elsewhere; and I tried to be in bed before my wives, or I waited for the room to be very dark before I entered. They know I can see perfectly well in the dark so no one bothers to turn on a light for me.

The main reasons why it'd been so easy for me to hide my body from Julia and Carol were my proximity sense and sight blobs. I knew where the girls were and what they were intending to do. That made it impossible for them to catch me by surprise.

Lastly and most appallingly, in bed Julia or Carol could've rolled over toward me and started getting sexual, but they were never in the mood. That's right, I hadn't had sex with them for three weeks! Thank goodness for Ava. I could joke that, "Decorating and furnishing have a GREAT deal to answer for," but the truth is that it is Julia that has a great deal to answer for. I was looking forward to her getting her comeuppance.

^

All my preparations complete, I told my families and the gardeners that I'd be out of town tomorrow. That was routine enough not to excite much curiosity, as Ron sometimes went on trips to research some aspect of landscaping, although that was sometimes a cover for Majestic Countdown spending a day in a city to watch people arrive at work to learn their security procedures and passwords.

I also told Ava that there might be a weird thing on the news later today which might make the family want to talk about me, but she should keep them quiet because bugs were a danger. She should not mention anything about her knowing that my body had changed, and ESPECIALLY not that I had a big cock now. She couldn't understand what my cock had to do with the news, but she promised to be careful.

Wednesday night, April 4, I took a bike and rode east, going several miles before hiding it and flying toward Los Angeles with all my prepared gear. I was wearing my A-man suit but with dark clothes on top of it. I was also carrying several airtight plastic bags, each containing changes of clothes and cash; plus a roll of sticky tape and a few other items.

Halfway to LA, I descended to stash my wallet, watch and one of the changes of clothes. I missed not having my multi-function watch, but there were enough city lights in the distance and the coastline was obvious enough that I could easily navigate myself.

I flew around LA hiding my bags of changes of clothes and cash in places where they might be useful if I needed to escape in a hurry, particularly from helicopters and planes trying to follow me. In case I was being pressured, I placed them in several places around the city where I wouldn't expect people to find them for many months, if ever, such as:

• Inside a hidden crack in the concrete inside a very large, multi-level parking building. I could fly in, get dressed, and walk out.

• Securely taped under a long stretch of elevated freeway. I could fly under the freeway, along its length to pick up the clothes, get dressed, then descend somewhere safe, then stroll out.

• Hidden inside a tree in a remote corner of a park. I'm not sure why I'd need a set here, but there was no reason why not.

• On the seabed not far offshore from the marina at Marina Del Rey (that sounds clumsy, but Marina Del Rey is the name of the town. It's wholly within the city of Los Angeles, but for some reason is a legally distinct community. Don't ask me why). The marina was recessed into the land and surrounded by houses and various businesses. It'd be easy to escape helicopter pursuit by diving underwater to my clothes, getting changed into them, swimming underwater into the Marina, ascending somewhere unobserved by anyone, then walking away. (If that doesn't seem easy, it will when you've read a little more.)

Their placements meant I had changes of clothes in several compass directions around where I'd be appearing in LA, so there'd be something handy no matter what direction I end up fleeing in.

All the emergency escape stashes placed, I flew back to where the Santa Monica Mountains meet the coast northwest of LA, before Malibu. I found an exact location not far offshore of an unpopulated area, which I could easily locate again because of the way the onshore geography lined up to triangulate to this spot, especially a large road sign that I was directly offshore from, so all I could see was the thin sliver of its edge. I created an airtight box around myself and pushed it to the sea bottom. It wanted to float, but several tons of NP force easily won that argument.

I sent a sight blob straight up to check I was still lined up on my triangulation points. The current had pushed me during the descent, so I let my box rise slightly and pushed it until I was repositioned perfectly. Then I pressed down harder on the top of my box again, so it was firmly held against the bottom.

I stripped down to my A-man suit, put my dark clothes and everything else I had left into an empty bag, squeezed the air out of it then sealed it. I dropped it on the floor of my box, then created most of a second floor six inches above the lower one, stepping onto it, then finished it off. There were now two airtight containers in my NP-construction, the slightly smaller big box I was standing in, and the six-inch tall box underneath it.