Chapter 2: The Training Montage
The dawn light was the color of a bruise, seeping into the abandoned rooftop garage. Leo hugged himself, shivering in his boxers on the cracked asphalt. The wind bit with a serrated edge, carrying the stink of old oil and pigeon droppings. He felt profoundly stupid.
“This is necessary, Leo,” Crimson Femme said, her voice echoing in the empty space. She leaned against a rusted beam, looking utterly comfortable in her sleek suit. “The transformation is a psychic muscle. It needs repetition. Unrestricted form allows for a cleaner shift. Clothes… confuse the process.”
“They confuse me,” Leo muttered, his teeth chattering. “It’s freezing. And what if someone sees?”
“Who? The ghosts of commuters past? Focus.” She held up a sleek digital stopwatch. “We’re doing intervals. Shift to Astra. Hold for thirty seconds. Shift back. We’re tracking your latency.”
“My what?”
“The lag between your decision and the change. Right now, I’d guess it’s a sluggish, panicked two-point-five seconds. We need to get it under one.” She gave him a thin smile. “Think of it as a design problem. Streamlining the user interface.”
Leo groaned. He’d been trying not to think about the logo he’d half-finished, the deadline now blown. This was his life now: supernatural boot camp on a rooftop at dawn. He closed his eyes, trying to summon the feeling. The terrifying, electrifying feeling of becoming her.
It wasn’t hard. The memory was etched into his nerves. He willed it.
The change came faster this time, a violent rush that was becoming familiar. The stretch, the burn, the dizzying reconfiguration. It was over in a gasp. The cold on his skin vanished, replaced by the suit’s ambient warmth. He—she—stood taller, the wind now catching in long platinum hair.
“Three-point-one seconds,” Crimson Femme announced, clicking the stopwatch. “Dreadful. Hold.”
Astra wrapped her arms around herself, a gesture that felt instinctively Leo. The strength in these limbs was a dormant hum, like a live wire wrapped in silk. She felt exposed, powerful, and absurd.
“Thirty. Shift back.”
Astra focused on the feeling of his own smaller body, the ache in his lower back from bad posture, the familiar hangnail on his thumb. The reversal was a suction, a feeling of being poured back into a cramped container. He stumbled, back in his boxers, the cold slamming into him like a truck.
“Four seconds.” Crimson Femme tsked. “You’re thinking too much. Don’t narrate it. Just be it. Again.”
They did it again. And again. Each shift was a psychological tremor. He’d become Astra, stand there feeling her alien grace, then collapse back into Leo’s shuddering form. Crimson Femme’s commentary was a dry, relentless drip.
“Two-point-eight. Better.”
“Hold the form, don’t fidget.”
“Three-point-oh. You’re regressing.”
“Good.”
On the seventh shift, as Astra solidified from the dissipating pain, Crimson Femme spoke before the timer.
“Good girl.”
The words, so casual, so utterly wrong, lodged in Astra’s mind like a splinter. She wasn’t a girl. She was Leo in a costume. A really convincing, biologically accurate costume. The praise felt infantilizing and corrosive. She shifted back, the recoil sharper than before.
“Two-point-five. See? Positive reinforcement works.” Crimson Femme smirked. “Again.”
Leo lost count. The sky lightened from bruise to a sickly pale gray. His body was a raw nerve, humming with phantom sensations—the memory of a different weight distribution, the echo of that strange, perfumed scent in his own nostrils. His real nails, he noticed during a breath, were still that immutable glossy pink.
“What am I training for, exactly?” Leo asked, his voice raspy from the cold and the effort. He was Astra again, holding the form, trying to ignore the ‘good girl’ ringing in her ears. “You said there’s a threat. Is it here? Is it now?”
Crimson Femme waved a dismissive hand, her eyes on the stopwatch. “It’s a destabilized energy signature. Very amorphous. It could manifest as a kinetic surge, a structural weakness in civic architecture, a localized gravity spike. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“That’s not a threat, that’s a… a broken thermostat! How do I fight a gravity spike?”
“With instinct. With power. Which you won’t have if you can’t shift faster than a sloth. Now, again. But this time, when you shift back, I want you to try and hold a piece of the suit. Just a glove. An anchor point.”
It sounded insane. But he was too cold and too tired to argue. He focused, became Astra, counted the thirty seconds in her head, then willed the reversion.
The pain flashed. The world compressed. But something stuck.
He was Leo, standing in his boxers, shivering violently. But his right hand and forearm were still sheathed in the crimson material of Astra’s glove and vambrace. It felt warm, flexible, utterly alien against his bare skin. He stared at it, breath caught in his throat.
“Interesting,” Crimson Femme murmured, stepping closer to examine it. “The connection is strengthening.”
“Get it off,” Leo whispered, panic clawing up his throat. He tried to will it away, to push the foreign feeling out of his skin.
For ten agonizing seconds, it remained. Then it dissolved like mist, leaving his own goosebumped flesh behind. The ghost of its warmth lingered.
“See? Progress.” Crimson Femme finally looked up from the stopwatch. “Your latency is down to two-point-one on the shift-to. The back-shift needs work. The blending phenomenon is… promising. It means you’re not just putting on a costume, Leo. You’re integrating.”
“I don’t want to integrate!” The shout echoed off the concrete pillars. “I want to know what I’m supposed to do! I want to not be standing in my underwear on a roof! I want my nails back to normal!”
She looked at him, a flicker of something unreadable in her flame-blue eyes. Not sympathy. Calculation.
“The nails are trivial. A side effect of channeled cosmic energy. Think of them as a… cosmetic residue.” She glanced at the lightening sky. “We’re done for today. You’re fatigued, and frustration hinders the process.”
“Hinders the—?” Leo began, but she cut him off.
“Go home. Shower. Try to sleep. The energy signature is still fluctuating. I’ll alert you when it crystallizes into something you can actually punch.” She turned and walked toward the rooftop’s edge. “And Leo? Good work today. Really.”
She stepped off the edge. Leo’s heart lurched, but he didn’t hear an impact. He ran over, peering down. The alley below was empty. She was just gone.
He stood there for a long minute, the full absurdity of his situation settling into his bones deeper than the cold. He pulled on his jeans and sweatshirt with numb fingers. The shower sounded like a religious experience. As he trudged down the graffiti-streaked stairwell, he caught a whiff of jasmine and ozone on the cuff of his sweatshirt. He stopped, sniffing it. It was definitely there. He hadn’t imagined it.
At home, under the hot water, he scrubbed until his skin was pink. The nail polish gleamed, defiant. He studied his face in the steamy mirror. The tired eyes were his. The stubble was his. But as he dragged a hand through his messy dark hair, a longer, softer strand fell across his forehead. It was out of place. It was silkier than the rest.
He pulled it straight, his breath fogging the glass.
It was nearly two inches longer than it should have been.
He stared, the wet strand pinched between his thumb and forefinger. A tremor started in his hand, a fine vibration that had nothing to do with the cold. He let go. It fell back against his forehead, a blatant, silken anomaly. He dug through the bathroom cabinet, scattering bottles, until he found a pair of scissors.
The sharp snip was profoundly satisfying. He held the severed piece of dark, too-soft hair over the trash. It looked innocent. It looked like evidence. He dropped it.
Sleep was a futile concept. His body buzzed with a residual, unfamiliar energy, a leftover current from the repeated shifts. He lay in the dark, the scent of jasmine faint on his pillowcase. The roof. The cold. The condescending praise that stuck like a burr. Good girl. His mind, exhausted, began to loop.
I want not to be standing in my underwear on a roof, he thought, the complaint a dull, thudding rhythm in his skull.
He rolled over, punching the pillow.
I want not to be standing in my underwear... The thought echoed, but the tail end of it—the specific location, the reason—seemed to dissolve into static. Just the core, humiliating image remained.
I want not to be standing in my underwear...
The loop tightened, grew louder, but the voice felt different. Not quite his own internal monotone. Smoother. Higher. A subtle, mocking lilt edged into the mental recitation. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block it out.
I want not to be standing in my underwear.
The finalized sentence rang in his head with a strange, declarative clarity. It was a command. A correction.
And his body obeyed.
It was not the full, wrenching transformation. There was no cascade of platinum hair, no restructuring of bone. This was a swift, localized violation. A whispering sensation flowed over his skin, from the shoulders down. The worn cotton of his boxers and t-shirt dissolved into a tingling nothingness, replaced in an instant by a new, unsettling touch.
He gasped, bolting upright in bed.
The streetlight from his window cut a blade of illumination across his torso. He was not naked. He was clad in delicate, intricate black lace. The material was scandalously brief, a sleek panty that clung with an athletic precision, paired with a matching bralette that felt both constricting and flimsy against his completely male chest. It was Astra’s. He knew it with a sick, immediate certainty. This was what she wore beneath the crimson suit.
He scrambled out of bed, his legs tangling in the unfamiliar, revealing fit. He stumbled to the light switch, flicking it on, and stared at his reflection in the darkened window.
The image was surreal, disjointed. His own lanky frame, his startled face, his shorter dark hair—all undermined by the lace. It was elegant. It was feminine. It was utterly, profoundly wrong on him. He clawed at the waistband, but there was no seam, no tag. It felt like a second skin, and it wouldn’t budge.
A low, shaky breath escaped him. This wasn’t residue. This wasn't a longer hair or a bit of polish. This was an active, deliberate change forced upon his private self. He stood there, exposed in the cold light, the thought he hadn't quite finished now a physical reality.
He was not standing on a roof. He was standing in the middle of his bedroom. And he was standing in Astra’s underwear.