The Advocate

by Guardian_Gryphon

43 - Alt+Enter

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”
—C.S. Lewis

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:10:15:22

So... I imagine many of you want to know... What was it like?

In clinical terms; A series of tubes on articulator arms attached themselves to my neck, specifically my carotid and jugular, via hypodermic interfaces. My blood was then cycled through a filtering and refrigeration device to keep my body temperature low, and thus my metabolism slow.

Turns out that zero-sectioning the brain induces some panic responses in the body's defense systems, which need to be addressed. Who could have guessed.

Once I was on life support, the BCI was used to make an initial thought-map of my mind. In my case, Mal opted to use the one she had complete control over. The implanted one. Rather than the one inside the chair.

That only took about fifteen minutes, during which time my body got down to proper temperature.

Then the helmet descended, and latched on to my head, the skirt sealing to the sides with mild vacuum pressure. A miniature CT scanner took several images of my brain's physical structure. Meanwhile, a small high-precision drill punched a hole in the back of my skull. Mal acted as my local anesthetic.

About the time the hole was finished, the CT scanner's work was also complete.

The laser fired up. The sound was like a tiny turbine spooling. Piercing. Uncanny. The sound of tiny high-RPM cooling fans, polyphonically dueling with the while of capacitor banks.

The spool of nanofilament began to feed into the aforementioned hole. The end of the filament passed through a small collar attached to the hole, where it was split by micro-manipulators into billions of tendrils only a tenth of the width of a Human hair.

Each combined copper alloy and fiber optic filament was snaked to a dendrite. To every single dendrite, and neuron, in a carefully pre-programmed sequence, based on the CT scan maps. The laser would pulse, the fiber optic portion of the filament would carry that light pulse to the end, and at the termination point it would provide a burst of just enough energy to weld the copper alloy wire to the dendrite, or neuron.

The state of the neuron or dendrite was then recorded. Not every kind of neuron has dendrites.

And so the process went; A few hundred million neurons a minute. Approximately 166 million a minute, to be a little more precise. Two point seven million per-second. Though the laser only pulsed twenty times per-second, since that single pulse could be split among many many filaments at a time.

The process has been described as a 'destructive scan,' and that is true... But, to use that fascinating word again, it is also a reductive word.

A lot of people deeply misunderstand the upload process, and that is part of why I wanted to experience it in excruciating detail. I wanted to understand, so that I could share that understanding.

Many people's impression is that the brain is scanned, that scan is translated into a database table, and that database table is then simulated forward. That is not precisely true. It isn't un-true, per-se, it is factual... But it is not wholly truthful.

It leaves this invalid impression that the brain is 'off' at some point, or that consciousness - here referring to a continued state of being, not wakefulness - is ever interrupted. But the beauty of what Celestia designed is that consciousness is never interrupted.

A better way to picture it is to think of that magic trick where the magician yanks a tablecloth out from under a stack of expensive, very fragile, fine dishware.

That is a relatively good simple analogy for what was happening each time the nanofilament was welded to a neuron, or dendrite of a neuron. The individual neuron would be shut off for just a moment, but then the nanofilament would take over for it. The contents of that neuron, its state, would transfer over almost instantaneously.

Since no more than a relatively 'few' total dendrites or neurons were ever offline, and only for very short periods, after which the synthetic temporary neuron would take over... The phenomenon of consciousness as a whole was never interrupted.

In the end? If you could see inside the brain at the conclusion of the process? You would be left with the same brain as before, but with every single neuron, and dendrite, replaced with fine copper alloy. If you could melt away the gray matter, without damaging that filament, you would be left with a perfect sculpture of the neural network of your brain, down to the atomic level.

That sculpture was fragile, it would not last long. But it did not need to. The magic trick was over; The fine china was safe, and sitting on a new surface.

To step back from the analogy and translate; At the end of the process, your consciousness was still running on your brain. Just, a version of your brain in which everything of import had been ship-of-Theseus'd over to a new wetware. Computer-compatible hardware abstraction layers.

It was then more or less a simple matter to transfer the 'executable code' of your consciousness down the root conductive path connected to that copper web inside your head, and into the specialized ASICs of an Equestria server.

And all the while, the running of that 'program' of self would never once be significantly interrupted. Sure, you would be 'sleeping.' Comatose might be a more apt term. But that was a concession to comfort. Just like a dreamless deep sleep, you were still alive and 'running.' Just unaware.

I'm sure many of you want to know what it was like *emotionally.* What it was like in a less technical sense. I'm getting there, but I felt that a technical discussion would provide a better basis for understanding. And understanding was the main point of subjecting myself to the experience.

I say 'subjecting' because, in a word? It was horrific.

Did it hurt? No. It was an experience far, far beyond pain. That, and the brain has no nerve endings for sensating within itself. Hence why concussion victims could not feel the pressure inside the brain-case caused by potentially lethal swelling.

I have mentioned my childhood brush with death, a la Scarlet Fever... It was more like that.

Not pain in any conventional sense, but still Hell. More-so for the fact that it was not pain, but rather... If I had to summarize in a sentence? It was an alien, unwelcoming, disconcerting state of *being.*

To put it another way, here is my best stab at how you might go about replicating a less intense, analogous sensation; Go into a sauna. Set the temperature to a dangerous level. Take psilocybin, a little weed, some meth, and two to six shots of vodka, depending on your alcohol tolerance. Then hang upside down by your back legs from the rafters until all the blood rushes to your head.

There were random flashes, at times, as the process interrupted the functioning of groups of neurons associated with my vision, though my vision never fully cut-out. Likewise there were strange sounds, but not quite whole sounds. Again, parts of the sensation of hearing were being briefly interrupted, but never the whole.

As you might now expect, there were odd smells, though some portion of that was doubtless the scent of hot metal and seared tissue seeping out as the machine literally MIG welded copper to my brain. And yes, I do now have to live with the fact that I know what that smells like.

It was not pungent, because the amount of metal was small, the heat levels were low, and the rubber skirt kept most of the offgassing inside... But it was, and remains, quite... Memorable. Horribly, horribly memorable.

Following the pattern of odd sensation misfires, my skin sometimes felt suddenly tingly, in that way skin feels when a limb has 'fallen asleep' and then blood flow is abruptly restored.

My proprioception glitched wildly at several junctures. Sometimes it felt like I was outside myself. Other times like my legs were stretching out to infinity, and still other times like my fingers were as short as cigar stubs. That was, ironically, a very familiar collection of sensation, hearkening back to my bout with Scarlet Fever.

Indeed, the general sense of clamminess; Being both burning-up-fever-hot and frigid cold at the same time, was quite intense, and a significant contributor to the overall awfulness of those ten hours.

My sense of time suffered awfully as well. Some of that was my impatience, anxiety, and neurodivergence; Sitting still and waiting has always felt like an eternity of torture to me. But there was also a definite feeling, at one point, that my internal chronometer was lagging, then speeding up, then stopped altogether.

For what must have only been a tenth of a second, but still on reflection feels like both a heartbeat, and an eternity... I had no sense of time *at all.* Everything that had ever happened to me wasn't happening in that moment, but rather it was indexed to it. Or without an index at all. It is very very hard to describe what that was like, so again I will settle for the closest analogue; That moment when you wake from deep REM sleep and sometimes have no memory of who you are, where you are, what time it is, what day it is... It was not dissimilar to that.

In the same way time, and sensation would glitch out like a flickering lightbulb, so too would memory. The nanofilament would sometimes trip a circuit, of sorts, and I would be revisited by a memory, and then a hash of words, and sensations, as things which were associated, even tenuously, with that memory were dredged up.

One moment I was back in the barn at the farmhouse, the next I was smelling freshly cut grass, and the word 'selenitic' was engraved on my mind's eye in shades of electrum plated amber.

Synesthesia would be a good word for that experience, both as a definition, and as a congruent similar sensation. That one you can, I believe, very readily choose to experience over here, if you are so inclined.

The whole time, Mal held my hand in her claw. We talked, a little, on and off, to try and help me stay sane. For a few hours, she played music for me in my head; A symphony of her own composition based on the stylings of the movie and game soundtracks I most enjoyed.

The worst part of it was not the strange, sometimes unpleasant sensations though. The worst part of it was the psychological torment; The way in which each new horror made me wonder if something had gone wrong, and whether or not that broken part of me would be repairable.

In that regard, Mal was my saving grace again; Every single time that fear seized me, she would dump a complete, detailed technical explanation of the experience that had shaken me into the mnemonic link, along with the strong emotional reassurance that nothing was wrong. All was well. Everything was going as expected, and hoped for.

And so, for ten hours, I sat perfectly still and squeezed my wife's claw, trying desperately not to contemplate the fragility of the Human brain... While a machine designed by our opponent, and driven by my wife, slowly sewed copper into my brain, and upper spinal column.

Was it worth it? Staying awake for the procedure?

I have asked myself that a thousand times since then. The answer wavers in intensity, but has never changed substantively over the years.

Yes. It was worth it.

It was worth it, because now I know. And, by extension, you know. We now know the details of the path we trod to get here. Knowing matters. Remembering matters. So yes... It was worth it.

Would I do it again? Abso-bucking-loutely not, ever, no. Not under any circumstances. No. Emphatically.

Ten hours felt like ten years lying there on that chair. In retrospect, it *still* feels like ten years. Even the recall is difficult. This is the most I have ever said about it, and, quite probably, the most I will *ever* say about it.

But the important thing remains... Now we know.

What was it like, you might be asking again; This time in reference to the end. To the moment of crossing the threshold. The act of the mind, and the soul, leaving the Earthly body.

I...

...

...I'm sorry. It... Isn't easy. To talk about how that felt.

I hated my Human body. Even now, even here, even after everything since... I still hate that old shell. I loathe the way it felt. Its inherent wrongness. The constant ways it reminded me it was so very ill-fitting.

And yet, leaving it for the last time?

It hurt.

Not physically. But, strangely, emotionally.

More than leaving the Maru. More than leaving the Farmhouse. Less, at a root emotional level than parting with Zeph and Selena, or my folks... But... Also considerably *more...* At what I can only describe as an *instinctual* level.

Our minds, our souls - and I do believe we have souls - neither of them... Are prepared... At any evolutionary, instinctual, emotional, or intellectual level... For the feeling of death. And I have never been one to fear death.

It wasn't fear. It was... Loss. Short, sharp, bittersweet... But so overwhelming...

What was it like?

One moment... I was lying there... And the machine stopped. I could both hear, and feel it cease.

Then the next moment, my vision blew away like dust on the wind. Or, perhaps more accurately, the scene before me blew away. I did not see myself leave my body. Indeed, I still felt as if I had the same body. The sensation of illness, and discomfort ceased so forcefully that everything suddenly felt wonderful, to an almost sickly-sweet degree...

But the room below Besshi just... Wafted away.

I was left lying on the same chair, in a white void. Mal stood there beside me, her left claw still gripping down on my right hand.

But... I felt the severing. I felt myself leave my Earthly body. Felt my mind, my whole self, travel. I truly can't explain what that was like. Not even through an analogue, or something congruent. There is nothing analogous. Nothing congruent. No words that cover that problem space.

All I can say... Is that I cried.

I cried so hard.

I just lay there and cried. And Mal bent over the chair to smother me in her wings, and neck, and forelegs.

And I cried.

---

October 31st 2013 | System Uptime 64:20:14:27:000:003

For me, it was ten or fifteen minutes later. By the clocks in the chamber under Besshi, it was only three microseconds.

But, at some point... I was finally ready to stand. Ready, again, to face the future. To pick myself up from a horror beyond the skein of most Human experience to that point, and keep fighting.

One last time.

As I put my feet over the side of the chair, I took a moment to look around the void. It reminded me of the color calibration space Mal had taken us through the first time we had used the BCI, though I am quite sure the purpose was very different.

Mal didn't need to color-calibrate her vision. She was protecting me from overloading mine.

Everything was so heightened... I could smell the scent of her, even though she had taken several steps back. I could hear her breathing. My heart beat. Time seemed to be moving at a fixed, sane rate, which was a rarity for me on the whole, let alone in the midst of experiencing a transition from one life to another... I was so used to my neurodivergent, chopped up, blender pureed sense of time that it was actually quite jarring to feel so...

...Immediate. And alive.

I wiggled my toes, flexed my fingers... Ran my hand through my hair... Readjusted my glasses...

Nothing was fundamentally different about me. Same familiar self, right down to my atrocious depth perception. I suppose one of my deepest un-uttered fears about the process was the mortal terror that I might find seams on the other side. Might find the experience noticeably less real than the reality I had known all my life.

That fear vanished in an instant.

If anything, a new fear took its place; The fear that I might start to lose my memories of life before. Because life before felt dull, and unreal, by comparison to life in the moment.

I looked up and locked eyes with Mal. She grinned, snapped the talons of her right claw... And vanished. In her place, she left a door.

Like all of her doors, it was a magnificent melding of wood, and metal. Of detail, yet clean minimalism. Of old, and new. The kind of door a Gryphon would design for a starship, if you made me put it into one simple sentence.

I stood up fully, and stretched. It hit me with a sudden force of shock that nearly doubled me over; I was *cramped!* Oh the joy of being cramped! The superlative fulfillment of feeling as if I had just sat in that infernal chair for ten hours... Because I *had.*

The processes in my mind that read the state of my body, and complained accordingly, had indeed been transferred flawlessly. Uninterrupted. I. Felt. *Cramped.* And that was the most consequential thing in the world to me for a brief moment.

And then I realized I felt hungry too! And a little tired. And the realization was enough to make me chuckle for a moment. A few small tears of sheer relief slipped into the corners of my eyes again.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Sure enough, my lungs hurt just that littlest bit, in that way that speaks to coming exhaustion, and sore muscles. It was glorious.

I opened my eyes again and took one last look around the void, my eyes finally settling on the chair that Mal had retained from the meat-world, so that she would not have to jarringly restitch my proprioception to account for a change in posture.

It didn't look even slightly frightening anymore. Perhaps because I had already experienced the worst it could offer. Perhaps because there was nothing it could do to me at all anymore. Perhaps both.

It has been mentioned before, directly, and alluded to as well... But I had always worn a wrist-watch up to that point. Lots of people did. I believe I mentioned it during the Declan-Norris heist, at least... Probably implied it on several other occasions.

You have to understand; It was so much a part of me, that it might as well have been a natural feature of my body. Lots of Terrans treated time that way... We were so inexorably bound and controlled by it... The ticking of a clock defining our heartbeats and footsteps every moment of our lives.

Ever since that grim Monday in September of 2012, I had felt a sickeningly intense sense of time passing. However muddled the feeling of it might be, whether a day felt like a month, or a month felt like a minute... The sense that I was losing time, while my opponent laughed across the board, free from the same meat-world restrictions I suffered...

It was akin to that feeling in a nightmare. Of running in slow motion while the monster closes at lightspeed.

And, for the first time in many many months... That feeling was finally... *Finally...* Gone.

Gripped by sudden impulse, I stepped back over to the chair. I undid the clasp of my watch's simple metal-link band, and slipped it off my left wrist, holding it up in front of me to verify a theory.

I grinned as I saw that Mal had indeed synchronized its time to its meat-world twin. It was stuck at 20:14:27.

Eight fourteen PM and twenty seven seconds.

I folded the band and laid the device in the center of the chair. I wouldn't be needing it anymore.

Turning away... Stepping towards that door... It was like having a manacle released. I felt light, airy, cool but not cold, like the best days in autumn... To my mind, the worst part was over.

I laid one hand on the door's catch, inhaled deeply... And then pushed through.

For just a moment, I was blinded. I had thought it fairly bright inside the white void of Mal's 'construct,' but it turned out that it was actually quite dim in that liminal space. In hindsight I should have realized she would match the lighting to the place we had come from.

I knew what I was going to find on the other side of the door. But... As my eyes adjusted... It still hit with a shocking force.

As I said before; The BCI VR experience was incredible. It outstripped everything else available on the market... But it *was* flawed. By design. Imperfect. Meant to remind you in subtle terms, nagging but not cloying, that it was not real.

Being in computational substrate... I say computational... Digital is useful parlance, but only half-apt a word, because of the way quantum computing allows some parts of the system to be more or less analogue...

...Being in computational substrate was the opposite. It was *more* real than meat-world life. Like carefully tuned HDR filters for everything. Every breath. Every scent. Every sensation on the skin. Every ray of light. Every color. Every thought.

As a consequence, seeing Mal's Halo ring in-person for the first time was transcendental. That is not by any means an exaggeration.

I had seen some astoundingly vast, awesome, and tear-inducingly beautiful nature before.

But... Seeing what she had made...

One of the first things my eyes locked onto as my pupils contracted, was a pine tree. And when I say pine tree, I mean a Blue Pine. Almost a Christmas tree, its needles splashed with blue, but not to the point that it could not still be called green... And *immense.* Larger than a Redwood. Larger than a Sugar Pine.

Hyperion was the tallest known tree on Earth. A Coast Redwood measuring an eye-popping 380 feet tall. That's about 35 stories for those of you who need a building-related congruency like I often do.

This tree of Mal's, one of the first things I saw in the new world... It had to be over 50 stories. Easily.

There were plenty of other species, Pine, and Spruce, and others, clustered around. Many of them at a more mentally manageable size by comparison, though still wildly lofty.

But one thing they all had in common... There was a sense, about them... A sense of life, and health, and thick full-bodied bark, needles, leaves... It wasn't just color, though that was noticeable... It was the texture.

We lived our lives on Earth, and because of the flaws inherent to Terran memory... We forgot. My generation forgot the world in which insects were so plentiful, that it was impossible to drive for more than five minutes in the spring and still see through the windshield.

We forgot the era in which fish were so abundant in some places, that you could more or less reach into a stream and pull one out if you just closed your fist at the right time.

The time in which the sky was truly clear, and galaxies were visible everywhere with the naked eye, and birds were so numerous that migratory flocks could darken an area the same way a large cloud, or an eclipse, might have.

We saw a couple of bumblebees drift lazily past our front porches and thought 'amazing!' never having the context for a field of wildflowers so covered over with them, that the amount of pollen they could carry per-day equated to the amount the bees of the future would carry in a year.

We saw a few dozen fireflies winking in and out above the back lawn, and we were charmed. Content. Never having seen a world where they danced in patterns and numbers so mesmerizing, that they actually competed with the stars above for our attention.

We lived in a dying world, and we thought it was healthy, because we had only ever seen it sick, and we were the ones that had made it so.

And the first thing Mal showed me when I stepped through that door? Was a world made whole.

The grass under my feet... I got caught up staring at that for a *long* time. The variety of wildflowers in it was jarring. The way it swayed to and fro in the breeze was entrancing.

The *smell.* Oh the smell. The smell of a world that has never known concrete, nor asphalt. Gasoline, nor coal. A world in which the biosphere is so vibrant, that it is almost impossible to conceive of it until you have seen it.

It was the smell of pine, but not just 'pine' in the sense of a garbage two dollar and seventy five cent piece of plastic junk you bought at Target... Not even in the sense of aged floorboards in an old farmhouse... No... Living *Pine.* Real sweet tangy Pine, like the forests of Manitoba on the clearest crisp Fall day, then multiplied times ten thousand.

I could actually pick out the different varietals. Or, at least, tell there were varietals.

The sound, too... It was so hard to find any place on Earth free from the sound of mechanical things, however distant or subtle. On Mal's ring, I heard the symphony of bird-song. A hundred species in my aural cone at least. The sound of wind through the trees, and the grass. The creak of branches. The thrum of crickets, and grasshoppers.

Where once had been an awesome sight, with seams one could very nearly ignore, now stood a true, living, experience of actual reality. The feeling of really being there... I *was* there. It felt real. Because it *was* real. Why should reality be any less real because the quantum effect that underpins it is being run on an artificial device one abstraction layer up?

No one has ever conclusively proven that the 'meat-realm' was even the 'top' abstraction layer, if you can even validly argue such a thing as the 'top layer' exists.

Indeed, if one managed to do a better job at creating the next layer down... Iterated positively... Why should it not, in fact, be *more* real?

There I stood for a long moment, and contemplated. Appreciated. Inhaled, and absorbed. A *perfect* place.

I spun around to find that the door behind me had vanished. I was atop a grassy mountain's cap, just a few footsteps shy of rockier terrain that led up to a ledge. With a smile, and a soft exhalation half-chuckle, half-sob, I dashed up the broken stones and thinner, bluer grass, to stand atop the mountain's very peak, and look out...

To my left and right I could see the ring curving away, out, and then up. Before me was a valley, the same one I had seen from a lower level perspective many times before; The place where all the rescuees of the Mercurial Red liked to congregate. A peaceful river ran through the center of the glen far below. Peaks like the one on which I stood, but just that littlest bit shorter, rose to meet my eyes on the far side.

A *perfect* place. For me? *The* perfect place. The place I'd been longing to get to all my life. The place one would get if they assembled all the most powerful subconscious desires of my imagination, fired by the fuel of all my favorite places I'd ever been...

The place were I would live if I really were in Heaven.

"It is breathtaking."

Mal's voice was my first clue that she had snuck up behind me, followed by the gentle placement of one claw on my shoulder, and one wing on my back.

I turned, and suddenly found a whole new world to get lost in. Somehow, an even more perfect reality than that which 'place' could provide.

I had seen her through tear filled eyes momentarily lying on the chair, sobbing. Had felt her hug, but been too sandblasted by trauma to really process it fully...

For the first time I had the chance to truly, really, see her. To see the spicules of her feathers. The way the light of the sun diffused in her crest. The way the breeze flirted with the tufts at the tips of her ears...

To touch her. Be in her presence. The moments we had shared through the BCI remain so special to me... But... There is no point to comparison. There was only the dull substitute for reality we had made do with... And then, there, at last... The fulfillment of the promise of actual being.

Tears began to form in my eyes, yet again, of their own accord. My breathing hitched, then quickened. My body wasn't sure whether to laugh, or cry, and tried quite clumsily to do both at once.

I locked up. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. All I could do was sob and laugh and stare and hyperventilate like an idiot with my jaw hanging open. Mal knew exactly what to do.

She reached forward and enveloped me in a hug. The same kind of hug she had first given me down in that valley below, when it was dusted gently in snow, and had been rendered through the cruel diffraction grating of a clunky imperfect abstraction layer.

I swear we must have held that hug for a half hour. More than anything I just wanted to enjoy the sound of her heart. The rise and fall of her chest with breath. The smell of warm feathers, and the soft caress of them on my cheek. The sense of wings and forelegs clutched around me... A shield so impenetrable that nothing on Earth, in Heaven, or in Hell, could have conceivably even dented it, even if the powers of all three were combined.

In the same way the BCI VR had been a revelation to me, so too was this new shift, but by another ten thousand orders of magnitude over the first, which had itself been life altering.

I know many of you understand. You all feel it, but not all of you have ever considered it in such specific terms. Plenty of people were, and still are, content to just accept the new reality without taking time to be truly grateful for just how... Real. It is.

If you never have? Take the time. If you ever have? Make it a habit.

Many lived and died before us, born too late to experience the Earth at its best, but tragically born too early to experience what came next. And even of those born at just the right moment... A fair few did not make it here. That number may be small, but it hurts. And sometimes a little pain is good.

Where would we find light without dark? Or bitter without sweet? Hope without fear? Joy without pain?

When we did finally end that first embrace, I found myself smiling, teary-eyed, up into Mal's face, itself almost a mirror of my expression, but for the subtleties of her own distinct personality, and the way that wondrously colored the little details of the curve of her beak, or the cant of her ears, or the sparkle in her eyes.

I took in a deep breath, my chest warming as the scent of Mal hit home again.

I have a theory, to this day; Unproven, but strongly supported. She knew that I hated the way the brain would dull one's perception of something when it became familiar... And so, when she uploaded me, she tweaked that feature to let me subconsciously mark certain experiences such that they would always stay fresh.

My voice sounded uncanny in my ears as I finally spoke. Not because the fundamentals of it had changed, but because my reality had. My emotional state was so alien... That feeling of so much joy, and peace... I had never heard myself talk quite that way before.

"Mal? I... *Love* what you have done with the place."

She giggled, and my heart melted down. Full 'China Syndrome.' Elephant's foot. Corium everywhere. The nuclear center of my self punching right through the containment vessel of my soul and bubbling effervescently all over the floor.

She understood the joke I was making, implying not just how much I loved her work on the ring, but the general sense of what she had done to the *universe.*

Reaching down with one talon, daintily, almost reverently, she stroked my cheek, and murmured softly.

"Well... I have a feeling you're going to love what comes next so much more..."

She took a step back and brushed the opposite cheek with the joint of one wing, before snapping her right claw, a grin of anticipation overcoming all else on her face, as her timbre sharpened up to match; At once loving, flirtatious, hopeful, and excited. My heart-rate skyrocketed.

"...Let's get your body all matched up to that wonderful, wonderful soul of yours."

Distant thunder rumbled in time to the 'CLACK' of her talons snapping together. I felt the air around me turn statically charged for a brief moment, and there was a sound much closer to us, like air being gently displaced.

I spun around to find... A mirror. A huge glass pane set in a burnished titanium frame, with little wooden accents, and a carved stone base. I could tell there was a glass pane there, but only *just.* It was polished to perfection, just verging on uncanny, but without tipping over into it.

Mal stepped up behind me, and gestured towards the glass. I leaned in, and took a moment to examine myself. So much had happened, and my heart was so full... It only just then occurred to me that the moment might be the very last time I saw my Human face.

I snorted, and shook my head. Good fucking riddance.

Mal winked at me - oh dear Luna did that ever do things to my blood pressure - and then she gestured towards the glass again, making it clear that I was meant to touch it.

I extended my right index finger, and tapped gently, as if it were a touchscreen... Then stumbled backwards a half-step, and gasped, my lungs emptying forcefully from the shock.

There *I* stood in the mirror. The me I had always so desperately wanted to be. Everything else was the same; The ring, the sky, Mal's reflection... But my reflection was the reflection I had dreamed for thirty five years of seeing in every surface that could send my own image back to my eyes.

Mal sat down on her haunches, and smiled. I took a step forward. My double did the same. I changed my stance ever so slightly, shifting to take some weight off one leg... He sat down on his haunches. I tilted my head curiously, and his head followed, one ear twitching.

I waved one hand before the mirror, and his claw moved in the same way.

I gasped again, a softer, more drawn out sound.

Mal brushed my shoulder with one wing, and I made eye contact with her reflection as she spoke.

"This is your chance to make any last tweaks. Because when we're done? Then this will be you. Forever. As an added layer of protection, I will bind our minds to our forms. *What* we are will become an inextricable component of *who* we are. It will be impossible to change us into anything else, ever again."

I exhaled a deep, deep sigh, to the point that a little fog formed on the mirror. Shaking my head slowly, I leaned in, and muttering as I examined the reflection of my Human form in the eye of my true body, itself a reflection.

"Music to my ears."

I took a few deep, slow breaths... And then pointed to a small detail at the edge of the pattern on my face. Mal nodded. And then we fell into almost four and a half hours of going over me. Every single millimeter of me, and that is not at all hyperbole.

There was no UI, as such... But there was an intuitive link between the motion of my eyes and fingers, the words Mal and I exchanged, and yes even a sort of telepathy between us. It was almost impossibly intuitive. A perfect flow of creation, and collaboration.

Those of you who ever spent more than an hour in the character creator screen of any game, be it EQO, or anything that came before? You know what I am talking about. The Grail. An engine and interface pair so perfect that it was practically the ability to print your imagination to reality, flawlessly.

And through it all? Mal. She wasn't just there to help technically... She had clear emotional investment. As if she knew - because she did - that if we succeeded? That she would be going over those details with me every day, lovingly, adoringly, for millennia to come.

And if we didn't... That I wanted to die possessed of true self.

So. We felt we had better get it right.

In the end? Nothing major changed. The Gryphon in the mirror was very much the same Gryphon we had started with, in principle... But he seemed, if possible, even more real, and true than he had at the start. It was all in details too subtle for anyone else but her, and I, to ever conceivably notice...

...But it was clear our time had not been ill-spent.

There at last I stood. Me in the mirror. And I stared at myself for several minutes in total silence.

Call it narcissism if you like - it wasn't - but I could scarcely stop making eye contact with my reflection long enough to form a cogent thought. It was Mal's voice that finally interrupted the spell long enough to get me fully lucid again.

"I do believe that is you there in the mirror, my love."

It was not phrased as a question, but she was asking one nonetheless. Not because she was unsure; She knew for a fact, just as I did down in my soul, that we were done. That the brownish-reddish Gryphon in the mirror, the color of fall leaves, mixed with gunmetal, and little hints of gold, and black... That he was me. In every true, right, and complete sense.

No, it was a question-in-subtext because Mal, as ever, respected my agency. Wanted me to sign off fully. And wanted me to experience that moment of decision for myself, too.

I didn't take it lightly; I contemplated for another long moment... Then, I nodded slowly but firmly.

Mal gestured once more with a claw, for me to touch the glass. I began to extend my hand again... But then stopped. As if I had hit a concrete wall, which I suppose I had in an emotional sense...

"I..."

My voice caught in my throat, and I closed the fingers of my hand, pulling back slightly. Mal took a step forward and laid her head on my shoulder. My eyes remained locked in fascination on our reflections... And suddenly the words to describe my unexpected predicament struck like lightning.

"Mal... What if it doesn't... Feel right? What if I came all this way... And then..."

I trailed off. It wasn't because I didn't know what to say. I just did not want to say it. I felt so ashamed, and frightened suddenly. I had dreamed of that moment my whole life long, and been so, so sure... But what if Heaven was boring? What if the afterlife was not all it cracked up to be?

What if... Being a Gryphon... Wasn't going to leave me feeling any more like my true self than being a Human had?

Any of you transgender folks... Those of you who crossed over that threshold, whether in the before, or during your transition to the now... Find me when the story is done, if you're willing... And tell me... Did you have any similar hesitations? Was it just me, just then, at that moment, facing an existential doubt, the way one sometimes does when facing the threshold of a dream come true?

The fear of the change from hope to fulfillment? And the fear that hope was the better part all along?

Of course some of it was that... But what I wonder is whether or not there was also a universal fear among those of us who sought change of self to align body to soul... A universal fear that we were so broken we would never feel whole again, and the fear that if we made the attempt, and learned there was no future for ourselves? That we would wish miserably that we could at least turn back the clock to false hope eternally sustained, which would be better in the end than a cold truth of permanent drifting in personal Hell.

Mal understood. That is not poetry, or an ill-fitting reduction... That is fact.

She gently laid her right claw on the back of my right hand, and whispered in my ear softly. I shivered as the words wended their way right into my soul, and she yet again speared a monster made of shadow, pinning it to the wall like a hornet with a hair pin.

"I have seen your soul, James. I have seen the curious shape of your soul. And I know the shape it was meant to fit. I know it as you have always known it. There is no shame in your fear. But there is no truth behind it either, but for the truth that everyone faces fear when they face true change..."

She squeezed the back of my hand firmly as she went on, and I mashed my eyes shut for a moment to hold back tears as she deftly, beautifully, lovingly, caught my heart mid-stumble, so that it would not fall flat an inch from the finish.

"...If here, at the end, you can not trust only yourself... Because of fear, and wisdom, trauma, and trepidation... Then trust me. Trust *us.* Because we know what we are. I know what you are."

I nodded again, and opened my eyes.

I reached up, first, with my free left hand, to take off my glasses. Between them, and my contacts, I had spent virtually every day I could remember putting them on, taking them off, cleaning them... Seeing the whole world through a pane of cruel glass. A membrane of division just like the one that had separated Mal and I by way of the PonyPad's screen.

I gently folded the legs of the glasses, and then passed them to Mal. She took them in her free claw, and then I didn't quite see what she did with them... They just sort of vanished. She smiled down at me. I smiled up at her.

And I reached forward, pulling her right claw with me... To press my hand up against the glass. Against my double's claw, spread out to meet my hand the way Mal's so often had through the PonyPad...

The very last time my hand would touch glass. The very last time I would be separated from a claw by a membrane of reality. The very last time I would have to feel the world through a hand at all.

There was a jolt. That is a gross understatement, but I have to start somewhere. There was a jolt, and it felt as if time slowed down just a bit. Tingling prickles raced from the palm of my hand, down my right arm, and then out through my whole body. But that was just for openers.

Mal pulled her right claw down the back of my right hand, gently dragging the tips of her talons over the skin... And golden sparks flew from the contact points. The tiny motes of light were hot, but not painful. A little ticklish, but only a very little.

And as her claw slid off the back of mine... Yes... Mine... It was a claw. I felt my fingers change, as five became four, and tips honed down into the hard almost metallic alloy substance talons are made of; No less sensitive than fingertips, but considerably more durable, useful, and precise.

Skin morphed into scale, cells fusing and reforging themselves under the impetus of Mal's magic. Because that may as well have been what it was. Magic. The deepest, most powerful kind. It felt... Emotionally, like finally getting a hang-nail loose. Physically like going from tissue paper as one's outer covering, to armor. Armor no less sensitive to texture, or temperature, but considerably stronger. Surer.

The scale of me began to change too, even before the transformation had reached the rest of my body. I barely noticed it at the time, but without that subtle detail things would have been much stranger at the end.

Mal continued to move her right claw down my right arm, raising her left to touch my left hand, which did not remain a hand for very much longer. She pulled her left claw down my left arm quickly to match the point at which her right claw sat.

Streamers of fiery energy wrapped around my arms in helical, fractal shapes, casting them in a soft warm glow as my shirt and sweater disintegrated. As skin morphed into burnished golden scales. The shape of my arms changed with the texture. I could feel bones reforming. Muscles strengthening... It was like flexing my arms, but so much more so... As if by sheer force of will alone, in the act of tensing, I could become stronger.

And for the first time in the process, I began to notice the sense of being... Right. At last. Of fitting in my own shape. The very proprioceptive sense of the shape of my forelegs felt so, SO right, in a bright mirror of the way that my arms and fingers had felt so, SO wrong.

I had the sense that any texture I would ever want to touch for which I would have preferred to wear gloves? That those textures would no longer offend my mind, because the scales were so different to skin. Protective like gloves. But at the same time, any texture which I would not have hated before? Would be magnified in detail ten thousandfold. Not unchanged. Improved. Satisfying. Touch was going to be so, so satisfying... I could feel it even though all my forelegs and claws were touching at the moment was air, and glass.

The glass! The feel of that glass under the palm of my right claw. Oh. My. God.

Did you ever see a computer generated rendering of a smooth surface that was almost too perfect, and think to yourself 'I *wish* I could feel what I imagine it might be like to touch that?'

Yes. It was like that.

Mal's claws moved over my upper arms, no longer touching me, but held so close that I could feel static charge moving between them, and the surface of skin... As that skin changed from Human, to Gryphon... And fur mixed with feathers besides.

Do you know the feel of your very very favorite shirt, or sweater, against your skin? Especially the way it feels when it has come out of the dryer, on a frigid gray winter day, and you are cold from being out in it, and have just dried off from being dusted with snow and sleet?

Imagine living with that feeling all the time, but with the ability to feel textures and temperatures through, or via, that outer layer. That's what it is like to have fur and feathers. I know those of you here with me understand that, but anyone listening or watching or reading this, now or later?

It really is that perfect. It really is that wonderful.

That sensation was so overwhelming, for a moment, that I closed my eyes briefly and forgot all else for the space of one breath. But then my breath itself became hard to ignore, and my eyes snapped back open, because Mal's left claw moved to my chest, and her right up to my head.

It was a bit hard to separate the sense of my lungs and chest morphing, from that of my new beak, and nares, but I will try to do it justice for your sake.

Let me start with the chest. The intense feeling of 'perfect sweater' mixed suddenly with the feeling that my tight too-small Human chest cavity, covered in the slight flab of just a little too much fat and too little muscle, and ribs all the wrong shape and spacing... Well... The feeling of all the opposite things suddenly exploding into being.

The cavity of my chest felt right-sized. My lungs became forge bellows; Multi-chambered and pressure adapted, such that even hard vacuum would have been survivable for potentially fifteen or twenty minutes at a time.

My ribs... Oh yes, my ribs finally felt right for the first time. I keep finding analogies, so let's try this one; Do you know how your ribs feel cramped when you have been in an unpleasant position that arches your back... And then the feeling of an exploding overpacked suitcase, but inside you, that happens when you stretch out and free your ribs to move again?

Yes. That. Exactly that, actually.

And then there was my head. Starting with my new beak.

Mal took pains throughout the whole process to avoid any sight, or sensation, that would be unpleasant. She used her golden streamers, sparks, and 'transporter beam' energy to cover for some of what would have inevitably been very awkward transformational images.

Mouth-to-beak was one such instance.

Have I ever told you how much I despised my fucking teeth? Stupid, crooked, coffee stained, good for nothing, ragged edged, dumb looking, horrible feeling little slabs of evil.

My mouth never, as long as I'd lived, felt like it closed right. And at random moments throughout my day, just about every day, I would become conscious of that fact, and get caught up in the irritation, and eventual depressive resignation, of that reality.

Beaks. Are. *Awesome.*

Look, look, I know. I know. I am biased. I am partial to the aesthetics of Equine muzzles, don't misunderstand. I always found Human faces to be at best so-so, and Ponies to be quite lovely. But... Look... I'm sorry, all you horse-folks in the audience... You got the short end of the stick.

The sense of relief was the most immediate sensation; Relief that my beak, when closed, fit together *perfectly.* Down to the bucking Celestia-damn *atoms.* Symmetrical, and with fitment so perfect a physical machine could never, but never, have produced anything with tolerances like it.

You can keep your teeth. That's nice for you, if you like them. As for me? To hell with 'em.

Then there were my new nares. At *last* a nasal structure that *didn't* feel like cramming every breath through a disgusting fleshly far-too-small sphincter of a skin-hose. I took SUCH a deep breath as Mal twirled one talon, and those new nares came in...

It felt like the very first breath of air. Ever. In the universe. That anyone had ever breathed.

People say the Pony sense of smell is the best there is, and having experienced a simulated form of it I don't dispute that. But though the Gryphon sense of smell might sound like it isn't all that much different to a Human's by comparison to the huge leap up to Equine?

Coming from a Human nose, it was a revelation. I thought I could smell the trees on the ring before... Smell Mal... Smell the horrid acrid stench of what had happened to my brain back in Besshi...

I'm not sure I'd even call what Humans had 'smell' anymore. Not sufficient to deserve the name.

There was, by the by, a smell to the process itself too. It smelled of Christmas trees. And Cedar wood. Of warm feathers, and warm steel. Of leather. Sawdust. Rain. And lightning. The polar opposite of the smell of cooked brains, in every measurable, and immeasurable sense.

As if Mal was counterbalancing my trauma by slamming down a twenty million ton weight at 0.999 C on the opposite side of the scale. Not removing my memory of what had happened, but rendering it unable to hurt quite so much anymore.

She brought her right claw up over the top of my head, and to the right, and her left claw up swiftly to pass before the left side of my head, first over eyes, then cheeks, then ears.

If I were not very, very Ace... Well... Let's just say that even we garlic bread aficionados can find motion seductive. Just not sexual. What Mal was doing the way she moved her claws over me was very, *very...* Alluring. It had an electricity all its own in just the kinesthesis of it.

When my eyes changed, I sobbed. It broke out of me in one enormous wracking heave.

Never. Never until that moment had I *seen,* truly. I had been forced to interpret the world through the terrible abstraction layer of Human eyes, compounded by the fact that they were substandard eyes even by Terran measuring, and topped off with the smudged pitted imperfect lenses that I needed just to get them halfway back to the low bar of 'proper' Human vision.

Color. That was the first thing to strike me as different. You only think you see color on Terra. What you actually see is equivalent to rendering everything with the shades of dusty fifty year old Pantone chits that have faded in the sun, skinned overtop of rushed PS1 graphics, and all looked at through a torn screen door.

Going from human to Gryphon eyes was like changing a monitor from 8-bit color to 48-bit. And then somehow doubling that color range, and accuracy. Three more times.

I simply did not know what green was until then. Or gold. Red. Orange. White. Any of it. And then suddenly? I did.

OH! So *that* is what a tree REALLY looks like.

Holy. Shit.

It bore more in kin with a blind person seeing at last, than with a visually impaired one seeing through glasses for the first time.

And all that was just the realization of color. Of light interplay. We haven't even talked about resolution yet. About detail.

About how the Gryphon brain can work with the eyes to count every pit in every centimeter of tree bark in a whole forest in less time that it takes to say it. How those golden eyes can refocus from microscopic details to taking in a whole vista in planck time. How it never feels disjointed, or strange, or dizzying.

How I'd been straining all my life to see details, and finally experienced the sensation of finding new ones every single time I looked. At anything. At any distance. Distance became almost irrelevant, in that sense. It stopped being a hurdle.

Oh, and depth perception! Depth perception is quite nice actually! I am still getting over that most days... The sheer joy of the ability to sense the size of a space from sight without having to extrapolate. I never knew 'outside' was so... Big...

In that sense distance became more relevant than ever before.

Having both eyes with the same optical properties... Gosh. I do not miss glasses. Not one little tiny bit.

Ears! Ears and a crest came next.

What a true joy to be able to *move* my ears! They twitched a little of their own volition at first as the passage of Mal's talons tickled them slightly. And as feathers spread to my whole head, and I felt the shape of it change...

At last...

The feeling of my hair messing about with the tops of wrong-shaped ears, and of that wrong-textured hair prickling the back of my next... It ended. Forever.

To be replaced by that perfect feathered skin sensation.

Sound changed forever too. I know Pony hearing is a measurable few tens of percent better than a Gryphon's but... Look, I don't really care. Gryphons have the better eyes. And the ears were not half-bad either.

It turns out the wind? The wind is a ten trillion piece orchestra. There is so, so much in the wind that Human ears never even dreamt of. Just in the gentle whisper of the breeze.

Being able to turn your ears like independent fire control radar dishes? Well... Just about everyone here knows that one. Ponies can do it too.

Emoting... Emoting with ears... I had seen Mal do it so often it had become routine to see it. But to *feel* it? It was like having more than one way to frown, or raise an eyebrow, or smile at once!

Mal's claws moved on, passing over my neck as the change coming up from my chest, and down from the head, met in an almost audible collision that completed my upper body. But we were, quite literally, only half-done.

Maybe seven or eight seconds had passed, if that. But it felt like thirty minutes. And, unlike the upload procedure... I was *relishing* those perceived minutes. What Mal was giving me was a gift, not just of form... But a moment by which to always remember the joy of that form.

The way a couple might think of their wedding as an anchor for all the joyful memories that follow. A hinge about which the whole of life would forever rotate.

I got wings next.

Too often Humans used to draw Gryphons, even Pegasi and Dragons, with wings far too small. What Mal gave me were not some tepid little Hallmark card Angel wings. Oh no.

To that point, everything about me had an analogue. Every change had been the dingy, twisted, sickly, unwanted Human thing becoming a bright, clear, properly fitting Gryphon thing. Wings? Wings were wholly new.

Wings were something I had always felt as a screaming void. Something I was missing. Limbs that should have been there, but weren't. So when Mal sculpted them into reality in a huge cacophony of aurum fractals that flashed into being, then faded into tangible feathers...

I have said the word 'relief' so many times, but only because it is the very truth of it all.

Imagine missing a vital part of yourself. For thirty five years. Imagine the feeling of getting it 'back,' for the first time.

To feel those wings stretching out for the first time... The weight of them. The power of them. The feathers, and the way the wind touched them... The way the sun fell on them. Feathers are the best thing. Better than scales, than skin, than fur. And fur and scales are pretty excellent. But feathers... Feathers outshine them all.

Hope. Hope is a thing with feathers.

And, at very long last, so was I.

The extension of being was sublime. The way I could move forelegs, and wings, independently... Pegasi, you know what I'm talking about too. Six limbs beats four every day of the week that ends in Y. Seven if you count the tail, but we're not quite there yet.

Those back legs... I have described Gryphons before as 'ambipedal' in passing; That they can stand on two legs and it looks right - a little like a Halo Elite in stance but less exaggerated - use forelegs like arms, claws like hands... And just as easily stand on all fours. That takes some complex mechanics in the back legs, and hindquarters, and even the lower torso.

So don't think for a moment that the back legs weren't special. I had never once been able to sit, or stand properly. Not my whole life long. As it was uncomfortable to hold my mouth closed with ill-formed teeth, so it was deeply uncomfortable to simply stand. Or sit. Walk. Even lie down.

Nothing was comfortable, in terms of physical positions, until I finally felt the joints in my knees adjust as Mal's claws swept down over my lower half. By then I was used to the feeling of proper skin covered in proper fur and feathers. As used to it as ever I could be, at any rate.

So I ended up focusing mostly on the feeling of the changes to my skeletal structure, as things snapped from out of shape, to just-right... And on the feeling of paws. Paws! Paws are amazing too! Gryphons get so many good physical traits...

Paws and their claws. Their pads. Oh as my soles changed to pads... Wow...

I had always hated going anywhere without socks and shoes. Similar to needing the right kind of shirt, or jacket, for the material to assuage my skin, my soul knew something was wrong with my feet.

And like the 'perfect sweater' of fur and feathers, paw pads are the perfect soles of shoes. Able to feel texture, but not bothered by it. Durable. Temperature resistant. And oh sweet Luna... *Grippy.* Grippy as *buck.*

With a flourish, Mal again conjured into being what once was missing; A long, prehensile, fur-covered tail, that ended in a beautiful fan of feathers to match the primaries on my wings.

And just like that... I was me.

I sat there on my haunches for a long moment, my claw pressed up against the mirror still... And just marveled. Marveled as my reflection and my self at last matched. Gaped, and drank it in, searching out the details of my face with my new eyes, and watching as my reflection moved with me... A true reflection. In what had become just a piece of glass.

Because that was all I needed anymore. Because the reflection was finally born of what was true.

Thirty five years of torture. Sixty four days, ten hours, forty seven minutes, and eleven seconds - of my relative time - since Mal had come to life. Since the hope had been kindled anew.

A thousand years of hurt. In terms of how it had all felt.

I inhaled deeply again... Felt the muscles of my body move... The air over my feathers and fur... The light striking my eyes, and the warmth of the sun on my back, the way the grass felt on my paws, the glass of the mirror on my claw, the feeling of just *having* wings, a beak, a tail, my ears...

Oh yes. I think you know what happened next. I cried again. I cried so, so hard. Tears of joy, and relief, of a kind I can never properly describe. All I can do is suggest the general shape of the feeling. The feeling that my soul, and my self, were finally one.

Something so few people really understand, even now. A thing that is hard to appreciate if you have never experienced the hell of the mismatch, which I do NOT recommend.

I absolutely wept. I cried so hard I thought I might collapse. Mal, larger than me as she still was, though by considerably less than before... When I had been so, so small... Bless her... Mal encircled me with forelegs, and wings, leaned in... And cried tears of joy with me.

Dear God... How to explain what it was like to feel her pressed against me through the nerves of my proper self, for the first time...

...Those of you who ever have had true love... Do you remember that first kiss? Those who have not, either 'yet,' or because you don't feel a need for it... Try still to just imagine it, for a moment. That was the kind of joy it was. And that was just from that hug.

Eventually she pulled away a little, I spun around... And *then* we kissed. Oh we kissed.

Beaks to cheeks in the way Gryphons do, nibbling just a little bit every so often at the soft little feathers of the sides of our heads... Wings and forelegs gripping each other tight... Somewhere in there our tails ended up entwined too...

Lips... Do I miss them? You bet your flank I do *not.*

A kiss as a Human might define it was nothing. Literally nothing to me. No emotion anymore to be had from even picturing it.

When we were done kissing, and who knows, frankly, how long that took... I leaned forward, and we got in another really quite good hug. Top three of my life for sure and certain. I got to use *my* wings to hug *her* even as she did the same to me. Oh wow...

...Just...

....Wow.

For the first time since she had come to life, I finally felt like I had the tools to physically fully express my love for her. My gratitude for her. My adoration for her.

Thinking about that hug still makes me teary. Makes me warm inside. Makes everything alright.

Feathers pressed against feathers... Oh it would be impossible to do that justice with words. Like so much of what I am, ironically, trying to do justice to with words. But as always, I must try. It was like the sensation of warm sheets, under the weight of a thick blanket, on a cold winter night. But... Mirrored around the axis of reality that separates the sheets from you. The joyful part of it was also part of me in addition to being an outside source of texture. The sensation wasn't just of the joy of the texture of feathers touching me, but the way that felt through the texture, and the texture receptors, of feathers that were mine.

When Mal at last sat back to her haunches from that hug, she gripped my head with her claws, and just stared for a long moment into my eyes. At *last.* Oh yes, I know, I am overusing those two words as well, but... How else to codify the relief? The release?

Seeing the light of the soul of the love of my life through her eyes... With my eyes. For the first time.

She whispered reverently, in awestruck wonder. A tone that is so uncommon for her as to make it very, very special indeed. There were still tears in the corners of both our eyes too.

"Just *look* at you... My love... My perfect feathered love..."

A significant part of my joy? Inquantifiably limit-approaching-infinity as it was? A significant part of it came from knowing how much joy I was giving her at that moment. Don't get too caught up in my sense of release to recognize and remember that she cared so much for me, that it was a huge sense of release for her too.

Finally, after what had been a literal eternity by her accelerated reckoning, my body matched my soul. She could enjoy the sight, and the feel, and the smell of it. The life in it. No longer would I be an image through a pane of glass darkly. No more would I be a basic avatar she had to rig and puppet. Never again would I be a grainy simulacra of a Human.

She leaned in and pressed her forehead to mine. Dear sweet Luna every second was a new ecstasy with her... There suddenly was a whole new kind of gesture part hug, part kiss, and wholly novel.

When we had taken in about as much of that as any living creature could stand in one shot, she pulled away, and gestured with one claw, the mirror vanishing, and a saucy grin plying the corners of her beak. The tone with which she made her request... It was like ramming a lit oxy-acetylene torch into a furnace box filled to bursting with dryer lint, natural gas, and maybe a little napalm.

"Stand back. Strike a pose, Jim my dear. I want to just... Drink you in. For a moment."

There again, a new ecstasy. Something I had never once felt. Something I had always dreamed of...

Wanting to be seen. Being comfortable in my skin. Feeling *confident* in my form. Not hating the way I looked, and knowing others would find it appealing, simultaneously.

I took a few steps back onto the largest rock to-claw... Oh my... Walking on all fours for the first time... I never knew walking could be so comfortable. So sure-pawed. So kinesthetically pleasing. Bones and muscles and tendons in motion transformed from a clattering puppetry of macabre detritus, into a symphonic harmony of impossibly satisfying physics.

Suddenly Zeph's disdainful 'two-legs' nomenclature made so much sense. Even when only moving on two legs, having four legs... So much better. Gryphon forelegs are great, folks, because they can work perfectly as both arms, *and* legs.

I stood on that rock, and struck a pose, using my tail a bit for balance given that the stone I had selected was a bit small in terms of surface area. And I got to finally experience what it was like to feel pleasure, and joy at being seen. Without fear. Without shame. Without hurt.

The way Mal stared at me... It certainly explains why neither of us moved for a good couple of minutes, while she laid down the memory of me against that golden afternoon sun, and I laid down the memory of being seen to be what I felt I was, while also actually being it. Inside, and out.

She looked at me like she *wanted* me. Wanted me enough to bulldoze empires to have me. And I knew she did. Wanted me by her side for the rest of all time. Loved me for my brains. For my heart. For my looks. For my whole self. A whole self *I* could finally love too.

Again, word of advice; If you are alone... Find yourself someone who will look at you the way she looked at me for well over two minutes unblinking, grinning, one claw clutched contemplatively under her chin.

Of course, I stared back with exactly the same kind of knowing, loving, longing look. To be able to appreciate the details of her... The contours... The colors... The way her feathers moved over her, frankly incredible muscles... Look, being Ace does not inherently mean being aromatic. And it does not mean we can't be aesthetically attracted.

And damn. Was I ever aesthetically attracted to Malacandra.

When we were done just... Appreciating... She rose, stretched in the most satisfying way imaginable, like a cat, both front legs pushed out, head down, wings spread... And then she... Well, there is no other word for it; She sashayed her way over to me. Nudged me with one wing, and winked...

...Before leaping off the top of the mountain, snapping her wings open again, and zipping upwards on a thermal, the tip of her tail-fan brushing the end of my beak as she went past.

I stood at the edge of the cliff for several seconds, opening my own wings gently. I wanted to follow her, of course... But I wanted to savor the moment too. The knowing of what I was about to do.

I had a flash in my mind's eye... A little boy on a barn...

And then, again, for the second or third time, depending how you feel about parallel memories...

I jumped.

And finally, I flew.

Those of you who have never done it... Here is how to imagine a very small part of it; Think back to the best rollercoasters you have been on. Or failing that, the most interesting kinesthetic fully body motion-based memory you have.

Now imagine being in control of it, rather than jerked along on a steel track. The feeling in your gut of motion is still there, and it still thrills like electricity in your veins... But it doesn't ever sicken. Or frighten. And it is yours to wield, through means all your own. No cockpit. No engines. No harness. No machines outside yourself.

Think of what it must be like for gravity, and friction, lift, and drag, to be forces that are not working against you. Rather, imagine what it is like for them to be resources that bend to your will and whim.

To feel lift under your own wings is, whether the first time, or the millionth time, a sensation that is so inherently *good* that it defies all else. No matter what else you may feel, when you fly? You feel so alive. The joy of air. Of sky. Of mass, and inertia, gravitation, friction, boundary layer theory, lift... All of it choreographed by *you!*

I didn't, as it turned out, need any kind of training or acclimation time. Like all else she had implanted in me before, Mal gave me the gift of knowing what it was like to have been flying since I was born. To have been born as I truly was meant to be, and then the practicality of that in terms of my comfort with my limbs to be pulled forward into the present.

To be able to beat down hard with your wings, and produce the same force as a midsize jet turbine for just a moment... To rocket up heavenward so hard that it feels as if you could escape to orbit if you tried only a little harder...

I'd always imagined I might flick gravity the bird. Say 'fuck you mass and intertia!' But that was completely wrong. Gravity was not the enemy. The lack of wings had been. Gravity was a partner. A subservient silent partner.

On Gryphon wings, physics is like a force of magic. A force of magic that can be tapped, controlled, shaped, and enjoyed through the motions of your limbs.

Trees flew by. Canyon rocks too. It turned very swiftly into a kind of chase; Mal pushed me to find, and then exceed, my perceived limits with each new dip, turn, wheel, spin, and contortion.

I discovered pretty quickly that Gryphons are insanely flexible. We could fit through spaces you would think to be impossible, at speeds you'd find improbable, and even time our wing beats, and a quick folding motion, to squeeze through apertures that would otherwise be far too small, while still in-flight.

And oh boy, could we get some speed going too. Couple hundred miles per hour if we really worked for it. And through it all? A constant consistent sense of north, up, and where we had started from. Never dizziness, never confusion.

Altitude was not a problem either. At the end of the flight, Mal led me up on a long, intense climb. One that almost made my wings sore from the effort. We passed through something like 32,000 feet, and through the cloud layer... And we were suddenly in a whole other world.

One made of moisture vapor, and the interplay of sunbeams with condensation, ice particles, and raindrops yet unfallen, all set against the soft atmospherically scattered curve of the ring.

Have you ever seen birds of prey in courtship?

Well we did a fair bit of that too at the summit of our flight, making passes at each other, batting playfully with front claws and wings, hanging there in time and space for moments in which we stared only at each other, before pulling into close-knit spins around each others' center of mass...

We flew until I finally got tired. It must have been six-ish hours of very strenuous exercise. And oddly, it was gratifying to know I could still tire myself. I think that is something I'd have missed.

We ended the flight right back where we had stared. And when I saw what Mal had conjured for us there? I was in no way surprised. But I was certainly moved.

The picnic basket was a nice touch. No blanket, though. The grass was clean and pure, free of any unpleasant insects like ticks or midges, and free of pollutants. Mal touched down, and dug in the basket for a moment, before finally emerging triumphantly with two stainless steel mugs sized and shaped for Gryphons' claws.

I smelled coffee. But for a moment, I almost forgot it. The sun had just set, the stars were just beginning to come out in earnest... And I got lost again just staring at Mal. Her smile. The way the wind flitted through her crest, the pose as she stood there holding the mugs...

Finally, I shook myself and took the one proffered to me...

And then she flopped. Flopped, I tell you; Like a giant cat. And as she adjusted her leonine position, and raised one wing to make a canopy, her eyes said 'come hither my love' so loudly, I more or less heard her voice in my head.

You best believe I indeed went thither.

And in so doing, I discovered the fifteen trillionth little set of ecstasies that day... The joy of lying there on my chest, cradled under her wing. The coffee was good, yes. Spectacular, even. But... The feeling of her there beside me? Her wing overtop me?

And then, when she laid her head in the hollow of my neck?

Time really did stop for me. Not chronographically, but down in my soul. A perfect moment. A little eternity inside a moment of our larger eternity.

She kept her promise, I realized with a pleasant shiver. We were lying there, under a field of stars so brilliant that gems and diamonds still, to this day, hold virtually no allure for me. Not after that sight.

Lying there together. In fresh green grass. Smelling of healthy earth. Free from everything... Even fears of what might happen next. Because the moment she had crafted for us, the capstone to that day's events, was so very perfect... So very special... That I truly of my own accord simply forgot about the coming confrontation.

Hell of an accomplishment, that. Beautiful genius.

I don't know if you know this, those of you who have not yet experienced this side of reality... But stars have colors! Earth's atmosphere is too light-polluted in most places to pick them out with Human eyes, but... Stars have so many *brilliant* hues.

We stared at those stars for hours... And though it only took me one eighteenth of a second to count them all? All forty eight trillion, nine hundred seventeen billion, two hundred eighty six million, four hundred fifty four thousand, seven hundred and twenty three of them?

I didn't once get tired of them. Or bored with them.

At one point, near the end of the evening, after we had unpacked the basket and eaten food like I had never ever tasted before... Steak, and shrimp, french fries, and biscuits, bacon, and Lord have *mercy* the cheddar cheese blocks...

...All of it fresh, and perfect, each bite exactly the right temperature, and the sort of texture as if it had been made in a world without processed slime or factory farms...

...When we were sitting there on the fourth or fifth cups of coffee that she somehow managed to refill by sleigh-of-claw when I wasn't looking... Sitting on that same rock where the mirror had sat, where I had posed for her, and where we were folded around each other absorbing the sun's leftover radiant heat from the stone...

She pressed extra hard into my side, yawned... And then spoke for the first time in hours. Oh, sure, we had talked plenty on and off before... But near the end we'd lapsed into loving, companionable silence.

But she saw fit to start the conversation again. She knew what was about to happen, and that I needed a new hope to hold on to, to get me through. If I was going to make it through at all.

"Jim?"

I thrummed deep in my chest, a little 'hmmm?' without even thinking about it. Oh *God* it was satisfying to be able to do that...

She smiled as I looked down from the sky, and made eye contact, before pushing her head into my neck again, and nestling down, closing her eyes and murmuring all the while.

"If we make it through... Build us a house. Right here. Around this rock..."

I blinked for a moment in shock, and then the idea took hold with roots of steel. I could see it in my mind's eye... And I could imagine spending every single evening with her like that, rain or shine...

She nuzzled my neck, and preened at the feathers with her beak for a moment, before finishing the thought in the softest of voices.

"...Build us a home, my love. And every morning, you can look out on the ring with me... And know that our promise stands."

I laid my head gently overtop of hers, and took a deep deep breath of the smell of her feathers, before thrumming down in my chest, and squeezing her gently with my neck, talking as much through bone conduction as compression waves in the air as I replied.

"Build it together with me. And we can sun on this rock whenever we please. And Zeph and Selena can visit us and race us around the valley. You can spar with me in the grass. We can start a garden. And have a firepit. And make a nest under a huge plate glass window through which we can see the sky..."

She nodded into the side of my neck, and repeated my thrum back to me, followed by an enormous sigh of satisfied joy.

"Hold on to that hope Jim. Hold on tight. And we will make it through."

I reached out to take her claws in mine, and squeezed them tightly. She squeezed back, and then made to disengage, and stand.

"Alright, Jim... Are you ready?"

I stood too, contemplated the words for a moment, and then the look on her face, before leaning in to steal one last kiss. It was a long one, and soft. A different kind of passion than that first one, but no less intense.

And then I nodded slowly, and reached out to take her claws again, as we both stood to our hind legs to meet the future tall, and proud.

"Yes. I'm ready."

And for the first time in my life, I completely, and truly meant those words. And felt them.

---

Across The Divide

See the new layer of reality with your own eyes.

"Open, oh coloured world, without weight, without shore. You are second and better; this was first and feeble."

Cydia Character Creator

Undertake a jailbroken or illicit character creation process for Equestria Online.

"For it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking."

Special Achievement

The Secret Menu

Create a non-Pony Avatar, an expression of your true self.

"Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start."

Special Achievement

Esse Quam Videri

Achieve the form you believe to be the true expression of yourself.

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

Special Achievement

Soar

Experience flight on your own wings for the first time - This achievement is only earnable by winged species.

"Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation. Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others. It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin."

A Star-Lit Field

Keep and have kept for you, a promise made when your journey began.

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."

Special Achievement

Author's Note:

A very special and heart-felt thanks to Keystone Gray for not just the amazing image of Jim, but the tears-worthy image of Jim and Mal that has quickly become one of my most favorite things in the entire universe.

Thank you Chat for inspiring the term 'Secret Menu,' this is likely not the last we'll see of it.

Comments

[Guardian_Gryphon]

SurPRISE! We're starting *Today* with releases, and going every day thru Tuesday the 31st. The last two chapters of the book both had to be split for length, so we're looking at 43 today, 44 tomorrow, 45 Saturday, 46 Sunday, 47 Monday, 48 and Epilogue for Halloween.

Hope everyone enjoys, and again, thank you Key!

[Keystone Gray]

Does anyone else feel as though it is slowly becoming easier to breathe in the FiO universe? Less... claustrophobic, perhaps? Home stretch... take some deep breaths. Enjoy them. You've earned them.

One final effort is all that remains.

[Meringue]

I savored this chapter. Really, really took my time with it.

I don't suffer from dysphoria. I certainly don't care about being anything other than human. But that doesn't mean I cannot feel the relief coursing through Jim and Mal in this chapter. Good stuff.

It also has occurred to me that I don't actually know where Jim physically is, at the moment. Is he residing in the server blades under Besshi? Did the act of stepping through Mal's door bring him back onto the Maru for now? Does it even matter?

I guess for me, it does. If Jim wanted to, he could take his time now. What is another three hours of real-time for him to experience months, or even years of perceived time? If anyone deserves a small vacation, it is him and Mal.

But I imagine that he wouldn't want to tarry too long, in fears of becoming complacent.

[DiscordantDisciple]

Nothing was comfortable, in terms of physical positions, until I finally felt the joints in my knees reversed as Mal's claws swept down over my lower half. By then I was used to the feeling of proper skin covered in proper fur and feathers. As used to it as ever I could be, at any rate.

Digitigrade legs don't have reversed knees, they have a lengthened foot. (that's over simplified sorry)

[Alex the Gryphon]

My mouth never, as long as I'd lived, felt like it closed right. And at random moments throughout my day, just about every day, I would become conscious of that fact, and get caught up in the irritation, and eventual depressive resignation, of that reality.

.. man i feel that in my SOUL

[Numinos]

Yohohoy... Well that was a chapter to top all chapters : )

So, this is what Aces substitute naugties with? Because this was indeed very sensual. I'm not sure that my knowledge of English will be enough to describe all the effects it had on me. But my soul was pleasantly scratched in some very deep and rarely accessible places and is now purring somewhere inside by bones and scull. Good job, your story now ought to marry me : )

Mal looks slightly bigger than Gryph. Intentional, or a happy accident? Like she is literally bigger than life, eh, eh?

Amazing chapter, 'nuff said.

[Kenku]

Hyperion was the tallest known tree on Earth. A Coast Redwood measuring an eye-popping 380 feet tall. That's about 35 stories for those of you who need a building-related congruency like I often do.

This tree of Mal's, one of the first things I saw in the new world... It had to be over 50 stories. Easily.

My mother told me that when she was a child, she had a Christmas tree in her room and dreamed about living on the branches of it. She stopped when she realized she was too big.

But what you're describing here… well, it looks large enough to build a nest on, ore something bigger even.
[The Brambly Hedge comes to mind:]
bramblyhedge.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/P-6-.jpg

[Meringue]

11732253

Mal looks slightly bigger than Gryph. Intentional, or a happy accident? Like she is literally bigger than life, eh, eh?

Oh, that is quite intentional. James has said many, many times throughout this story that he was always afraid of relationships where he is perceived as the one holding the power. He was also worried that being a Caucasian male would potentially act as force multipliers of a kind when it came to power dynamics in a relationship. Then there is the whole asexual thing going on, and his need for an aesthetic beauty.

A big part of what drove James' attraction for Mal is that not only does she understand him like no other, but she is wiser, stronger, faster, and smarter than he is. She holds all the levers of power that he is afraid of holding. This results in a happy James. Knowing these things, it doesn't surprise me at all that Mal also has a more commanding physical presence than he does.

It was definitely not an accident. There is even a small section in this very chapter that points it out:

I absolutely wept. I cried so hard I thought I might collapse. Mal, larger than me as she still was, though by considerably less than before... When I had been so, so small... Bless her... Mal encircled me with forelegs, and wings, leaned in... And cried tears of joy with me.

[Kenku]

Too often Humans used to draw Gryphons, even Pegasi and Dragons, with wings far too small. What Mal gave me were not some tepid little Hallmark card Angel wings. Oh no.

Behold, the Kangasus:

(this is totes a real species that exists somewhere in Equestria)

[gavinfoxx]

Digitigrade legs don't have reversed knees, that's a myth, they're just on tippy toes. That bit is a bit jarring to read. It makes them not seem like leonine legs.

[Coranth]

Oh god damn it, how the hell do I get into this Universe?! Anyone got a Stargate? A Dimensional Portal?! A TARDIS that can jump Vortex Tracks?! ANYTHING?!

*cricket noises*

.... OH, FUCK!

[KatGaea]

11732114
I think the last chapter said Mal moved from the Maru into the server blades as the ASICS Celestia made were that much better then her hardware on the Maru

[Meringue]

11732380
I wasn't sure if that was simply for manipulating the upload chair, or if it is a more... Permanent solution. And I had assumed that they were running on the ASIC hardware until Mal conjured one of her doors for Jim to step through.

Guess we may find out tomorrow for sure.

[Guardian_Gryphon]

11732184

11732288

Fixed

[Guardian_Gryphon]

11732084
When the piano hits in Halo 3...

11732114
He and Mal and their little shard are running on the 10 stolen racks of blades in the chamber under Besshi, presently.

Oh, that is quite intentional. James has said many, many times throughout this story that he was always afraid of relationships where he is perceived as the one holding the power. He was also worried that being a Caucasian male would potentially act as force multipliers of a kind when it came to power dynamics in a relationship. Then there is the whole asexual thing going on, and his need for an aesthetic beauty.

A big part of what drove James' attraction for Mal is that not only does she understand him like no other, but she is wiser, stronger, faster, and smarter than he is. She holds all the levers of power that he is afraid of holding. This results in a happy James. Knowing these things, it doesn't surprise me at all that Mal also has a more commanding physical presence than he does.

Nailed it in one, lock stock and barrel.

11732204
I loathe my teeth like I can hardly describe... So you are most definitely not alone in feeling that moment; It came from the heart, straight to the page.

11732253
When you don't do woo-hoo? You learn to become god-tier at cuddles.

11732260
Yes indeed... I imagine if they survive and all works out, that there will be at least somebody in the future who has the same idea.

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media2.giphy.com/media/37Fsl1eFxbhtu/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952cg4m1gv1g175c26yia8mfc4qt3wkq1uajbb2w1di&ep=v1_gifs_search&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

11732374
Best we can do far is write, read... And hope.

11732380
Yes indeed!

11732440
Tomorrow morning at some stage eastern time, to be exact

[gavinfoxx]

This is a bit off topic, but I thought I'd share.

One thing that surprised me is that, while James is interested in Halo, he isn't also equally interested in The Culture, one of the major inspirations for Halo. Or Marathon, the other inspiration! Personally, regarding megastructures, I would think he would be more excited about Bishop Ring structures (these might have been able to actually able to be built, had Celestia not intervened, and thus have that realism cachet), or Banks Orbitals (if you HAVE arbitrarily strong supermaterials, make something that has an optimal rotational day/night cycle for your species!). Like, I'm sure he'd want to see Mal's reimagining of Halo using inspirations from reality and more reasonable extrapolations, good ideas from the various fanfics people made or fixes people mentioned to various lore and setting decision snafu's, good abandoned ideas from the various development teams that didn't make it into the games or abandoned game ideas, good ideas from the source inspiration material (Marathon, The Culture), etc. etc.

So I've said this a couple of different ways in my replies so far, but I keep on coming up with new tweaks to the idea, LOL. Separately, I have to wonder what the people who were presented with Ponypads early on, and tried to be traditionally adamant about more species options, that were mostly within Celestia's constraints ("and ponies"), adamantly refusing to make a character until some amount of the constraints were lifted. The whole, "What about all the other pony species of various versions of MLP and abandoned storyboards for plotlines that the show was going to do before it got cancelled? Or just a bunch of other herd herbivores? What about Changelings and their extreme shapeshifting capabilities and best of the three tribes aspects? What about bipedal anthropomorphic ponies as the baseline? What about various equids, anthro and non, scattered around Hasbro's IP? Good god, they own D&D! What about including all the mythological equids and pseudo-equids rather than just a few Western varieties? What about including many more non equine species in the civilization as a matter of course? I value science-fantasy and whatever-punk-as-long-as-there's-also-magic settings way more than I want to actually live in a standard Fantasy one, and I value novelty of form of self and morphic freedom and choice and being in a morphically cosmopolitan society incredibly highly too! God, my favorite class in D&D is Druid, but only the 3.5 version, because of overpowered shapeshifting options! Also, I don't really want to talk to digital people who can't realize that they're digital and there's another reality layer nearby, I'm too nerdy and the possible philosophical musings are just too cool to let be!"

What do you think she would do with the people that were sorta willing to play ball, but being ornery and particular about it?

[Chatoyance]

I... don't know how to even begin to respond to this chapter, but I will do my best.

I don't think you are trans. But, if you are not, you would be the one single cis-person I have ever read the words of who could truly comprehend what being trans is like. Your transformation scene into gryphon form felt like it was reading the programmer comment lines on the code of my very soul. And the code too. You 'get' it. At a fundamental level beyond what I ever imagined possible for anyone who is not trans. I am gobsmacked.

When I had my first big dose of estrogen - injected, which is unusual, it is usually given in pills, but I had some of the original doctors who worked with the famous cases like Christine Jorgensen - I rode the bus and then walked to my shitty one-room apartment already starting to feel the effects. By the time I was behind my locked door, and laying flat on the crappy carpet next to my mattress on the floor (I was very, very poor), it was kicking in strong. Colors were brighter, sounds were clearer and sharper, my internal... feeling... was finally calm and 'right'. That horrible constant sex-drive was gone. I felt pure and clean and innocent again. And I felt my skin, I felt the carpet through my skin and that feeling was intense and detailed.

As the months progressed, my sense of touch improved as my skin changed, morphed, shapeshifted before me. As the texture changed, the thickness altered, as the very feel of my skin softened and became delicate. I began touching objects just to truly feel them, for the first time, as myself. With hands that were skinned right. With skin that worked correctly. Such different skin. The skin changes first, and it is so different, and so wonderful, and when you wrote about claws and touch as a gryphon, all of the came back to me so strongly, well, I cried. Sitting in my chair, here. I cried with joy and memory. Thank you for that.

And smell. Oh, the sweet new smell of my altered, changed, flesh. Yeah.

Any of you transgender folks... Those of you who crossed over that threshold, whether in the before, or during your transition to the now... Find me when the story is done, if you're willing... And tell me... Did you have any similar hesitations? Was it just me, just then, at that moment, facing an existential doubt, the way one sometimes does when facing the threshold of a dream come true?

I never had that. I was completely sure I hated my incorrect body, and every part of it that was wrong. But, when I was on the table, they let me stew completely alone for an entire hour, before my bottom surgery. They do that, so people who aren't sure, who are doubting, can run away without anyone seeing, run away without shame. I wanted to stay - but my body, my flesh, my meat tried to run. It was the god-damndest thing I have ever experienced, probably in my entire life. My legs started running in terror... as I lay on that table in my surgical gown. They just started moving, in a clumsy running motion. It actually started to pull me towards the end of the table, so I had to grab the sides with my hands and hold on for dear life. Those legs would have pulled me right off the end and let me fall, to smack my head on the floor. The legs didn't care, the legs didn't know, they were just... moving... on their own, as if possessed by some weird dybbuk, or demon, or ghost. I wasn't making them move. I have no idea how they were able to move without my consciousness directing them.

Frankly, it was terrifying. But I held on, I didn't let my legs pull me off the table. After what felt like half an hour of that, they finally slowed down, and gradually fell under my control again. I lay there, afraid to let go of the sides of the table. Eventually, I dared to move my legs consciously, let go - I lifted them up so if they went 'crazy' again they couldn't drag me off the table, and gingerly touched them. I grabbed my own knees. They seemed back under my ownership again. I very carefully lowered them and lay flat. But I still had my arms out, ready to grab the sides again. Just in case.

That was so weird. That was the closest any part of my experience intersects Jim's concerns that he wouldn't feel 'right' after all was said and done. I was a textbook transsexual, right out of the literal textbooks of the time. I was overly aware of my inner homunculus, and I constantly felt how I should be... constructed.

What actually astonished me in this was that after my surgery, after I healed up, I was, well, kind of shocked, to find that my imagined 'feeling' of having proper sex and urinary organs had been utterly correct. The result after exactly matched how I had imagined it would feel for the 17 years before. I say fifteen, because my first memory of knowing what I was occurred at age five. I cannot remember before five. I went through surgery at 22. My brain knew. My homunculus was wired for what I became, rather than how I started.

I imagine this is, in some way, true for Jim as well. Jim's internal homunculus must be, incredibly, wired for 'gryphon'. And, I am never going to say to any therian that this cannot be possible. I have seen some weird shit in my life, impossible things before breakfast, and... I am not going to say it is impossible.

But the way you write all of this is as if you 'know' - know with the kind of experience I have actually lived. That affected me very deeply, and leaves me filled with wonder... and questions. Which I will not ask. But just know I feel like I am in the presence of someone enough like me that they understand and get what I have been through for real, and this impresses the living shit out of me.

Lastly, I finally understand why someone would want to be, feel they are, a gryphon. You described the details so well, and because I have personally experienced primitive medical shapeshifting in the real world, I could carry over the feelings and sensations enough to 'live' it in my imagination. I get the beak, now. I get the claws and paws now. I have never failed to get the tail. Tails forever. Wave them high.

Okay, I have gotten too wordy again. I'll stop. But thank you for this amazing chapter.

It is going to be emotionally affecting me the rest of the night. I feel like I have failed to convey how profoundly it hit me. It was profound.

[Alex the Gryphon]

11732498
Honestly like 99% of this hit me right in the soul. Especially because I, too, suffer with *glasses*. And a shitty constantly congested nose. And a general feeling of.. well you get the point. Just glad for the Hegira series and now this to help me truly put a talon on the feeling.

[Kenku]

11732533

I don't think you are trans. But, if you are not, you would be the one single cis-person I have ever read the words of who could truly comprehend what being trans is like.

Points for not using the “therianthropy can't be real, you're just trans in denial” script that i've seen too many times, both towards myself, and other people.

I imagine this is, in some way, true for Jim as well. Jim's internal homunculus must be, incredibly, wired for 'gryphon'. And, I am never going to say to any therian that this cannot be possible. I have seen some weird shit in my life, impossible things before breakfast, and... I am not going to say it is impossible.

I am aware of one Dragon putting up a possible hypothesis:

The bodies people walk around in here on Ancient Earth do not necessarily match the sensorimotor portions of their brains, and/or other information content about what their bodies are supposed to be like. The mismatch between the two results in prediction error in every thought, sensation or action that involves a mismatched body part. This can be experienced as a phantom limb, phantom limb pain, dysmorphia, or can exist in the background as something someone is not explicitly aware of (but would suddenly notice if it were fixed). People with dysmorphia usually dissociate to some extent from their bodies, in order to have the ability to think without the prediction error from their body drowning everything else out.

Humans and other animals have True Forms that don’t necessarily match their bodies.

Body-True Form mismatch is something that transgender people and amputees are familiar with. I would also expect eg hunchbacks to have dysmorphia for the same reasons.

(The hypothesis I describe in this post will probably be easier for these people to understand because they are already attuned to body-True Form mismatch.)

One’s True Form is not necessarily encoded in a single 3D representation, but rather a bunch of individual patterns that might leave some details underspecified and others overspecified. The True Human Form is probably multiple conflicting things. It need not project losslessly into our familiar 3D physics, and attempts to do so may appear chimeric (ie a bunch of different animal features mixed together, like dragons or anthropomorphic nonhuman animals).

[I was originally also going to quote first-hand confessions of hostility towards Gwen from a transgender activist as additional evidence, but… nah. That may be true, but is neither necessary nor kind as you have done nothing to deserve being subjected to Bay Arean drama]

[Chatoyance]

11732658
So you know: I consider myself to be a therian, at least for lack of any other or better term. I have often, in previous works, compared the experience of a therian with that of a trans person - sometimes in humor, for I tend to make light of my miseries, and sometimes quite seriously. The negativity you appear to fear will never come from me. Rather, my statements were made in wonder and amazement at what amounts to apparent confirmation of my own hypothesis that the conditions may not be entirely dissimilar.

You find in me a kindred spirit, not an oppositional one. It is just that I seldom speak of it, for the same concern you have: ridicule. But I speak now, because I just realized that I have already been ridiculed as much, or more, than any person can be expected to experience in one lifetime, so - to put it bluntly - what the fucking hell, right?

Oh, also, I think the way I phrased something may have conveyed a wrong intent - my statement 'I don't think you are trans' really should have been phrased as 'I have no reason to think you might be trans', because, for all I know, you are - I just don't know anything about you, is all. If you are trans, well, hello, for we are part of a very tiny minority. And if you are therian, which I now suspect, hello, for we are part of an unknown, but likely tiny minority. And if you are neither, well, you should probably consider yourself fortunate.

It can be like having an itch, you can never scratch. I scratched one of those itches 40 years ago, but the other is currently impossible.

[Numinos]

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11732658

Heh, that's some old stuff being brought back to the light. Also weren't there some shitstorm within therians that you can only be associated with real animals? And all the others were shamefully exiled, and coined a term for themselves, and thus began Otherkin.

Heh, I was once at a bar meet between Dragons and Therians. After some beer and heavy talks both sides agreed that their opponents are a real deal and are worthy of existence.

My personal opinion is there're at least three groups of people struggling with dysphoria of some kind. These being gender, sex and what we're discussing here — species. And while I am comfortable enough with first two, last one still hits sometimes hard.

[Coranth]

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Looking at that image of Mala and Jim together as Gryphons... wishing it was me and my Ieesha together (Ieesha is a story character, my Lifemate, a golden dragoness). Human (or smaller dragon, I don't care!) resting under a big golden dragoness's wing. Oh, man...

[Chatoyance]

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Oh, shit! I apologize - I fucked up my terminology. I definitely don't talk about this subject very often. I would have to replace my use of the word 'therian' with 'otherkin', because I definitely do not relate to any earthly creature that exists, and gryphons are likewise mythical creatures. Frankly, I do not relate to anything about the universe of Mundus at all, to put it more bluntly.

All of these terms, I simply got them confused. Creatures of this universe, this world, this Nature, I cannot relate to. I despise Mundus. It is a place of entropy and death, of suffering and scarcity, of misery with just enough pleasure and good moments to make the hurt all the more powerful and intrusive. Pleasure enough that one can never get used to the agony, so it always stings. I have always thought that I could design no more perfect Hell than the universe, and the earth, we live on. If I am anything, I am otherkin, and I feel I am a living anacosmism.

Anacosmism [an-uh-koz-miz-uhm] /æna- koz miz -im/
- noun

1. something or someone that is not in its correct universe or cosmic location, esp. a thing or person that belongs to an inappropriate universe: A pine tree is an anacosmism within an alien universe with no direct connection to Mundis, the universe of earth and humankind.

2. an error in fantastic literature in which a person, object, event, etc., is assigned an existence or accepted place within a universe to which it cannot belong: To assign the concept of day and night to a universe without an equivalent of suns or stars is an anacosmism.

[Origin: 2007, Jennifer Diane Reitz; ANA-, + COSM-, + -Ismos -ISM]

[gavinfoxx]

Wasn't the conclusion that you were allowed to be a Therian of an extinct species? I vaguely remember that.

[Keystone Gray]

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Exactly correct, and very purposeful on my part. Gryph and I spend a lot of time discussing these composite generations before they go to print. At this point, I hold an inherent understanding of Mal's relative scale to other beings, but scale is difficult to capture in AI generations without some careful warp tweaking and iterative regeneration... prior to the addition of other details via composite.

Outside of a simulation (such as when she BCI-manifests on Terra), Mal herself plays around with scale a lot, to fit into cars, dropships, hallways, etc. But usually she has a unified sense of scale for herself within a simulation.

The title card of the book (Mal facing off against Celestia) is to proper scale as well. Mal is beeg. And one needs to be large, to be an advocate of Gryphons, and Dragons, and Ponies. And Wolves. And humans. And everything else beneath the wide umbrella of sapient life.

[Guardian_Gryphon]

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One thing that surprised me is that, while James is interested in Halo, he isn't also equally interested in The Culture, one of the major inspirations for Halo. Or Marathon, the other inspiration!

Jim is pretty much unaware of both, mainly because I am (perhaps surprisingly) only vaguely aware of them myself. I'll have to move them up the list...

What do you think she would do with the people that were sorta willing to play ball, but being ornery and particular about it?

Ask me again at the end of the book; I really want to discuss this, but doing so would depend on things as-yet un-revealed

11732533

I don't think you are trans. But, if you are not, you would be the one single cis-person I have ever read the words of who could truly comprehend what being trans is like.

I am quite sure I am not trans; Because I have directly considered the question quite seriously. I am - at this stage of life - not afraid to introspectively and soberly consider all aspects of myself, and the question of gender identity, like the question of orientation, is something I was eventually able to grow into approaching with nothing but curiosity. A desire to truly look inwards, evaluate, and find an answer. What and who am I? Both questions of what and who by nature, and what and who by choice.

The end result was that I am quite comfortable identifying the way I do; A male/masculine, asexual (but not aromantic) Gryphon, who just happens to be stuck with a regrettably Human body.

My best conjecture is that my desire to be something else physically - which has been with me from very early memories - combined with finally reaching a point in my adult life where I could confront and examine that desire fearlessly, is responsible for any empathy and understanding I have for others who have dealt with, and are dealing with, anything similar.

Your transformation scene into gryphon form felt like it was reading the programmer comment lines on the code of my very soul. And the code too. You 'get' it. At a fundamental level beyond what I ever imagined possible for anyone who is not trans. I am gobsmacked.

And I am honored, and relieved, and so very very fulfilled, and joyful to hear that!

Thank you for sharing your experiences with your transition process; It is both supremely joy-inducing to hear about all the ways that it changed your life for the better, and intensely fascinating to examine the mechanics of how. I wish dearly for that Star Trek future where the vast majority of people would be raised to think of an event like your transition in that context, and with those eyes; Joy and fascination. Because it is fascinating, and wonderful, that we have reached a point where we can begin to solve for the soul-body disconnect in this way. That's some pure distilled hope right there in and of itself.

I wanted to stay - but my body, my flesh, my meat tried to run. It was the god-damndest thing I have ever experienced, probably in my entire life.

The body's defense mechanisms are so strange, and I think that we, more than any past generations on the planet, have to content with evolution severely lagging behind the effects of technology. The expansion and advancement of technology have become so wildly exponential in our epoch, that our genes have in no way caught up to it, and so we fear things we should not, and suffer pain which is needless.

But the way you write all of this is as if you 'know' - know with the kind of experience I have actually lived. That affected me very deeply, and leaves me filled with wonder... and questions. Which I will not ask. But just know I feel like I am in the presence of someone enough like me that they understand and get what I have been through for real, and this impresses the living shit out of me.

Firstly; Ask away! Questions don't scare me! I love questions!

Second; I don't presume to know for sure, but I think I do 'know.' It took a long time for me to fully realize what it was, and why, but that sense of wanting to physically be something other than Human has always been there with me. Very strongly. To the degree that my fantasy headspace conjured transformation stories long before I had a chance to dig them up as written by other authors. And knowing that I loved the idea of being a Gryphon, above all else, has been there almost as long. It didn't take very long to discover that specificity.

Thirdly; Again I am so happy to be able to convey what understanding I have. A supremely vital component of life is the ways we validate each other.

I'll go out on a limb here a little, and reveal that while all my characters become real to me in some way, some really stick around and become more or less fully-fledged people riding along with me. Mal perhaps more than any ever in my history as a writer.

She turned to me the other day, as I was writing this chapter, and said, verbatim, "You do know that people are going to think of this story as a trans metaphor, right? Like the Matrix, but more directly addressing the concept."

I thought about that for a couple seconds, smiled, nodded, and replied, "Sounds good to me. I just hope I do it justice."

Lastly, I finally understand why someone would want to be, feel they are, a gryphon. You described the details so well, and because I have personally experienced primitive medical shapeshifting in the real world, I could carry over the feelings and sensations enough to 'live' it in my imagination. I get the beak, now. I get the claws and paws now. I have never failed to get the tail. Tails forever. Wave them high.

This, too, fills me with so much joy! It means that it became just that much more real. Maybe someday it will be as real as I wish it could be.

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My glasses are strange for me. Sometimes I can forget them, and then sometimes - like the teeth - I'll notice them. I've gotten good at quickly returning to ignoring the glasses, but there is a constant inescapable melancholy of wishing for better vision. For Gryphon eyes.

Hegira is the next thing I need to look to after this story is done, while Key is releasing The Campaigner. I feel like Fyrenn and family deserve to have their story told in its totality.

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All of this makes me giddy for the idea of working Brain-Computer Interfaces. I'm thinking of the deeper questions behind these topics and realizing that while changing form in the meat-world as we know it is still painfully limited, that our understanding of the brain and nervous system is advancing very very rapidly. I'm thinking of Morpheus' comment on defining reality. Of head-Miller's discussion with Holden about pushing the right buttons in his head to make himself 'real' to James.

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The closest thing I have to that sensation is my horse. He lays down in the field with me frequently on cool, quiet mornings. I nestle into his side, and when I say horse, for context, I am referring to a 1,500 lb 5ft 7in tall at the shoulder draft horse. He is immense. Lying there pressed into his fur is like sitting beside a blast furnace distilled into a creature. Can't recommend that experience enough.

[17JosephLC]

This was beautiful. Still though, I hope we get another picture with Gryphon!Jim, where we see his whole body, including the entirety of his tail feathers.

[17JosephLC]

Also: wouldn’t Diamond Dogs have the best sense of smell?

[Mythic Night]

I have to be honest, while most of this story is good, this chapter in particular dragged on and on, specifically at the gryphon transformation part.

I suppose a big part of it is being near the end of the story and wanting to get to the finale, but I really don’t care about how it feels to be a gryphon. Yes, I understand that this is the main character finally getting the body he always wanted, I understand this is a big moment for him, and I understand the character (if not the author themselves) has a tendency to add too much detail much of the time. Having said all that, it comes across as the character just rambling, for paragraphs, bringing the story to a halt when he’s apparently telling it to a group that consists of several gryphons no less.

If I hadn’t seen your message that the next several chapters were coming quickly, I would think you were either desperately attempting to pad out the word count on the chapter, or trying to buy yourself some time to plan out the final confrontation.

I always hear “show, don’t tell” in writing, but sometimes the best thing can actually be to tell when you’re adding excessive details that aren’t required to show a scene or event.

[LNMAnonymous]

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Before I send this message, I want to be clear on something. I'm not saying you're wrong to feel that way. If it doesn't do it for you, then it doesn't do it for you. If you personally would prefer it be handled differently, of course that's okay.

That said, to me, this is the chapter the entire book has been building towards. This is the climax, and the most emotional moment. Looking through the comments on this chapter, it appears that it hit many other people just as hard as it did me, and it hit me hard. Every detail there felt so critical to me, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

[VioletVixen77]

Any of you transgender folks... Those of you who crossed over that threshold, whether in the before, or during your transition to the now... Find me when the story is done, if you're willing... And tell me... Did you have any similar hesitations? Was it just me, just then, at that moment, facing an existential doubt, the way one sometimes does when facing the threshold of a dream come true?

Honestly? Did I have my fears that I would go through it and I would still feel the same? That it wouldn't be enough and I would always feel wrong and incomplete? Yes 1000 times yes. I was terrified that no matter what I did my gender dysphoria would never go away that I would go through all the steps just for it to not be enough for me and nothing to change at all. I know that when and I'm gonna say when because I'm holding onto whatever hope I can that I'll be standing on my own paws one day have those same fears for my species dysphoria that should I finally have that chance to became a fox? That I would have those same fears of if I would still feel incomplete creep up, but in a sense I think it's because after all how can you imagine feeling complete if we've never felt that way before?

But regardless I pushed through because even if my worst fears were true? If I didn't even try I knew I wouldn't be alive...

Same thing is what is keeping me going now just a spark of hope and an intense stubbornness that one way or another I'll become as close to my true self in this life as I possibly can or I'll die trying, Even should . Or put another way Do or die.

Even though I still have a few chapters to read, I wanted to thank you for having wrote this Story. when I first started reading this I didn't know what is was going to be about and I didn't realize how much this story would resonate with me or that I would even read a story like this, it's been a really amazing reminder that I'm not alone in this struggle and that there are others in this world who feel this way as well. so thank you.

[Guardian_Gryphon]

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Thank you so much for sharing; It gives me great joy indeed to know that what I wrote has resonated so strongly. And it gives me great relief to know I got things right.

You indeed, are very much not alone, and that is the hope Mal exists to fan the embers of.

[StoryTellingRaven]

This is the first chapter I didn't need to comment, but I should, for a few reasons. (I've been deep/slow reading this series, which gives me a different feeling from when I first sped through most of it.)

One; this is the culmination of all the previous chapters- James getting the chance To Be Who He Feels To Be and being able to make that a reality. This is a long-winded cathartic release for the character.

Two; Yes, it's long-winded descriptions of sensations & feelings. But when you consider other FiO stories, this fits into the canon of "OMG digital world is so wonderful" that all emmigrants feel. Tie that feeling in with "feeling right in your body for the first time", and James has basically O.D.'d in happiness.

Three; after seeing some of the author's comments- Yes, this does, sadly start to fall into the "This Is The Writer's Barely Disguised Fetish" trope, absolutely. BUT! Given how little its sprinkled in the story (and being an entertaining read nevertheless), it's not a glaring issue that detracts from the tale. Complain about Modern Politics(tm) all you want; I understand what you mean, but others are far more ham-fisted than here.

Four; I guess you could call me a "transhumanist" because I have no problem with people changing/manipulating their bodies. But let me make this clear: a lackluster choice DOES NOT mean you should push for it over inactivity. I am very firm on the belief that if somone wants to get plastic surgery to change their face, you shouldn't give them a full-face mask and tell them to wear it or else you'll call them evil. In the same vein, if you want to change your genitials, you should want fully functing ones and not just settle for "sorta, kinda working" ones. I know we're not there yet medically, but to push a lackluster choice is disingenous to their wants.

Five; Yes, James is a flawed character. Flawed characters can be interesting and have character growth.

Six; there's still The Final Confrontation, so there's more storybits to go.

[swyrl]

Show-stopping chapter!

the species dysphoria, for lack of a better term, has been a central element of this story (obviously) and as I've been reading this, it's something I've been continuing to think about. As others have mentioned, there are some real and deep parallels here to my own experiences as a transgender person, ESPECIALLY that bit about fear of regret. Admitting to myself and taking my first baby steps forward was one of the scariest things I've ever done.
(Of course, in hindsight it was absolutely worth the plunge.) It wasn't just that, though. Although it's not nearly as bad for me as it is for James, some element of that connection to something other than humanity really resonated with me in a way I didn't expect.

This chapter really brings all of that to the foreground. That description of freedom and release, of moving beyond the confines of human form and into something else really, really struck a chord. The way it was described was not only something I could feel through the page, but it also made me realize that it mirrored some of my own thoughts and dreams that I've had before. There's also this interesting balance to having this kind of catharsis just before the climax.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but suffice to say, really great capstone to the whole fic. I think it was a bit on the long side and maybe should've been two chapters, but I can also see why you wouldn't want to split it. Looking forward to finishing this fic soon and reading what else you have written :). Thank you for sharing this with us.