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Rauthmont Consolidated Secondary School loomed before me in all of its grey, brutalist glory, two imposing stories of drab concrete blocks and round, sunken windows that seemed to glare back at me in mute challenge. The building was forbidding enough that even the plants around its perimeter seemed to unconsciously shrink back from its walls, and an unfortunate planting of ivy had shriveled in futility halfway up one of the walls, the sparse green growth at the bottom betrayed by the blackened, withered skeletons of vines barely adhering to the concrete above. Inside, probably, the place was the same as any post-junior school, but its exterior was enough to make me shiver involuntarily as I walked up the gravel path to its wrought-iron front doors.

That the building was intimidating was hardly a surprise; after all, long before it had been a high school, it had served as the regional command bunker during the Half-Century War. Even now, there were still visible gaps in the front through which heavy turrets had once pointed outward, and in places the concrete was still chipped and pockmarked from small-arms fire, the damage left intact as part of the preservation of its historical legacy. The war itself had taken place long before the current time, but to a certain extent, it was that war's resolution that ultimately led to me, or at least to my currently inconvenient conundrum.

At the time the war had taken place, there had only been one type of sentient people: humans, and all the lesser animals and other life below them. Sometimes, they had enjoyed and promoted peace; other times, they descended into conflicts, ones that occasionally merged into devastating, globe-spanning war. It had been a world devoid of magic, supplanted by wondrous and terrible technology, and during the Half-Century War nearly all of it had been brought to bear as nation fought against nation, continent against continent. Still, it wasn't enough to be decisive, which meant that the warring parties had looked for any possible edge to ensure their victory. In a long-forgotten cave in South America, one such group thought that they'd found such an edge, tucked away beyond a puzzling seal that they finally managed to pierce with technological ingenuity.

When they did, though, what they discovered, what they released, was far different than they'd imagined. The thing about magic was, the world had never really been devoid of it after all - an ancient civilization, aware of the dangers of its manifestation, had somehow managed to trap it and seal it away. The warnings they'd left alongside it, though, were in a language that had long since been lost to time, and in their mad dash for power, it was doubtful that the interlopers would have heeded it anyway. So the seal was breached - and just like that, magic, and everything that came along with it, had flowed out into the world once more.

In a sense, those who broke the seal got what they wanted - in the chaos that ensued, the military campaigns of the war collapsed into confused retreat, and a few years later a reluctant armistice was signed that left borders basically unchanged. After what had transpired, though, such borders had become of considerably less import, mainly due to what had arrived along with the magic.

In most parts of the world, the main religions had been monotheistic, but upon the release of the seal that concept was quickly dashed - the main thing released beyond the magical energy itself were the beings, the deities, that were so indelibly intertwined with it. All of a sudden, instead of one unknowable god, there were hundreds, thousands of smaller but terrifyingly powerful deities, each one released to seek out followers and power, along with its own niche within the natural world that it would control. And when it came to followers, most wanted more than worship and loyalty - to cement the bond, the followers would be transformed in their image, an indelible mark of which deity they served.

There was one deity, taking on the name Ningen, that had claimed dominion over people; it had put down stakes on the island of Hokkaido and had left its population of people, of humans, intact. Everywhere else, though, people had changed, with the whims of whichever deities had settled upon the region. Many of the powerful, commanding deities had settled on animal interpretations of some sort, or at least the ones that were the most territorial; the ones who had claimed the region where I grew up were a sort of canine pantheon that had banded together to control a whole chunk of the continent. The humans that had resided in Canada and the northern parts of the United States, then, had been transformed into dog-people of one sort or another, the precise type determined by which canine god ruled over each specific region. The southern part of the country had become more fragmented, with scorpion-people in the desert west, sand lizards in the Texas expanse, and gators in the swampy east. On the other continents the transformations had been different, if just as dramatic: towards various sorts of rodents in South America, avians in western Europe, cat-people in Africa and bear-people lumbering about the shivering expanses made up of the former Soviet republics. There were even more unusual types that were rumored, although rarely seen in person: tree-people on the British Isles, now sequestered by their deities with impassible mists, mer-people abandoning small South Pacific islands for the surrounding seas, even cloud-people transformed by the regional weather deities to assist them somehow, invisibly, in the skies.

Apart from the ones powerful enough to claim specific dominion over their own territories, there were even more deities beyond that, staking their claims where they could: there were now lords of lakes and streams, demigods claiming dominion over everything from computers to toasters to grandfather clocks, each with their own drives and motivations and demands for prayer and loyalty, even if it usually wasn't of the transformative sort. The result was that, for a time, the world had largely dissolved into chaos as its people came to terms, both with their transformations and with the new world order.

Now, though, two hundred years hence, things had stabilized, and people had adapted to the new world, at least for the most part. Satisfied that they were paid their due, the distributed gods had far less incentive to meddle. Woe betide the one who crossed any of them, intentional or otherwise, but beyond that the world generally worked. Sure, we had to do things like wearing special headbands on Thursdays to honor the goddess of clothing, and I would certainly have to genuflect for a moment to appease the Lord of Doors before opening an important set like Rauthmont's front portal, but it was something I had long grown used to. Still, if it hadn't been for the release of the magic and everything contained with it, there wouldn't have been any such deities present at all, and certainly not the particular one that my mother, in her youth, had made the mistake of accidentally insulting.

She'd been in Malaysia for a month as part of a college-exchange program - while in the early days, the regional deities had wanted to keep their followers close, after the transformations travel had again been encouraged, both as a way to show off the caliber of their followers to other deities, and to provide spies or small bits of influence in the territories of others. While there, things had largely gone smoothly, both with the local deities and with the native salamander-person population.

In fact, it all would have been fine had it not been for one single, fateful day. It had been getting on towards summer, hot and humid, and she'd spent the morning with some friends hiking up to a temple, commercialized and touristy as it had become, to take pictures, enjoy the surroundings, and drink plenty of chilled, aromatic tea from the nearby cluster of vending stalls. The place had been crowded, though, and once the tea had caught up with her, she'd headed for the facilities only to be faced with a long line for the women's bathroom. She couldn't wait that long, though, and upon heading to the other side, she discovered that the male bathroom, fortuitously, was both empty and had a door that could be temporarily locked. All it had, though, were urinals, and a single stall with a seat so covered in dubious secretions she'd been afraid to sit down on it. So, with some effort, she'd managed to angle herself properly over one of the urinals and relieve herself in an effective, if unconventional, manner.

To her misfortune, however, such an act had not gone unnoticed by a semi-local deity that had apparently laid claim to some aspect of masculinity. For some insane reason, perhaps simply because it was one of the few things used exclusively by men, it had decided that urinals were sacred bastions of masculinity, and that only men could consecrate them with their urine; for a woman to use one, then, was a defilement of its ridiculous and petty principles.

The deity, upon seeing this, seethed and stewed, and finally, that evening, manifested itself before her. It told my mother of her defilement, a violation of its pointlessly rigid social order, and that to make it right, said order had to be restored - she would have to be "consecrated" in the masculine way in compensation for her defilement of the urinal. The consecration the deity called for, however, was for her to submit to some of his male canine "followers" that resided on the island, and in being so taken confirming their masculinity and thus honoring the deity. Seeing that rape for what it really was, though, my mother had indignantly refused its demand. This riled the deity up, and it resolved to punish her in a more traditional way: with a curse. Problem was, though, if it had cursed her, or her potential daughters-to-be, it would have offended the local goddess of femininity just as much as if he'd ordered his followers to just commit rape on their own, which was why it had asked my mother to submit to that treatment instead. The deity, not wanting to create a row and have to deal with that sort of trouble for both it and potentially its followers, had to refrain from such curses; but it had no restrictions on levying a curse upon her potential unborn sons. And that was exactly what it did, placing upon them a curse that they would no longer be entirely, or constantly, masculine; for their mother's crime of defiling a urinal, there would be times when they themselves would be put in a state where they would be largely unable to use them.

So it was, then, that for my older sister, there had been no consequences from my mother's petty transgression. I, though, was her firstborn son, and from the moment of birth the curse had been at least partly apparent. Even at that point, my penis had been smaller than normal, not so microscopic that sex-reassignment was mooted, but only slightly above the minimum where it would have come into consideration. It was otherwise healthy, though, and in my earliest years everything went apparently normal, apart from being a little overly fond of playing dress-up, and not always in gender-appropriate clothing; that was long before I really understood gender, though, and while I don't think my mother approved of it overly much, she was nervous enough about further messing with what the deity had done, and worried about her behavior offending him further and levying an additional curse on me, that she never said so much as a critical word about it. In most other respects, I was basically normal, just like any other boy.

At least, that is, before one day in kindergarten, when a certain part of me had mysteriously gone missing. It had been getting on towards recess, so it was unsurprising at that time for me to have the anticipatory urge to pee. Except this time, the urge was moving somehow, from up in front, at the base of my penis, to somewhere else further inside. Something else didn't feel quite right, like things between my legs were in different spots, and my briefs suddenly felt like they were on slightly wrong, looser in some places and tighter in others. I instinctively tried to reach down my pants to figure out what was going wrong, but some kids had already gotten in trouble for that kind of exploration, and when the teacher noticed and glared at me, I pulled my hand guiltily back. Things felt strange enough, though, that all I could do was cross my legs and watch the clock count down the few minutes until recess, even that motion strangely perturbing. I should have felt... things down there shifting when my legs crossed, but all of a sudden I couldn't feel them at all.

As soon as the bell rang, I darted to the bathroom, driven by anxious curiosity as much as the urge. I had rushed to one of the urinals, unzipping my pants and grabbing at the fly of my underwear, but there wasn't anything to pull through - instead, the fabric was just empty, pushing back against a flat expanse of fur where my penis was supposed to be. I felt around for a few seconds, but nothing was there - even my balls seemed to be missing.

The anxiety was fast approaching terror. I knew enough to know that boys had penises, and girls had... something else, but as far as I knew having a penis was a permanent part of being a boy. It wasn't something that could just go missing... could it? And if it did, how was I supposed to get it back? I had to figure it out, and I still needed to pee somehow, but both seemed impossible standing in front of the urinal. And what if some other boy came in, and started laughing at me because I'd lost my penis and couldn't find it again?

I ducked into one of the stalls, locking the door to make sure it wasn't going to swing open and expose me, pulling my pants and underwear down around my knees, trying to see what had happened. Sure enough, both my penis and balls were just gone, regular belly fur trailing down where they were supposed to be. Except... there was something else further down, between my legs, just a little fleshy bit of something below the fur, though I wasn't flexible enough to really bend down and see what it was. It was easy enough to reach, though, and when I put my hand down between my legs, I realized that something else was different. Before, there had been my penis and balls, and of course my butt, but between them, between my legs, had just been a fluffy bit of nothing. Now, though, it wasn't fur, but some sort of fleshy thing, weird and squishy, ridges and valleys that seemed to move and stretch around where my fingers touched them, while the touch itself against... whatever it was felt unquestionably squirmy and strange. What wasn't in doubt, though, was that the urge to pee was still coming from some area vaguely in the center of it.

Not knowing what else to do, I just sat down on the toilet and tried to go, although the muscles I had to release were slightly different somehow, and it took a couple of tries to figure out how to do it right. Once I did, though, the pee came out like normal, although it was strange to just feel it pouring out like that, without being able to aim it around at the thing in the bottom of the urinal like I was used to. It also kind of sprayed out against the squishy bits that surrounded it, leaving them uncomfortably wet, and while it seemed strange to have to wipe myself after just taking a piss, I couldn't think of any better way to do it. It still felt strange to touch whatever it was at all, and my underwear felt even stranger against it when I pulled it back on. As I did, though, and the strange feelings persisted, a certain sense of terror was beginning to creep into my mind. Everything had disappeared when I'd needed to take a piss, but doing so hadn't fixed it, and nothing seemed to be coming back.

Something, then, was definitely wrong with me. I'd been sick, before, and strange things had happened, to my nose, to my throat. This was nothing like that, but at that point I wasn't old enough to know better - maybe, I'd wondered, there was some sort of cold that made your penis go away? It was the reason, at least, I'd started to head down to the nurse's office, but midway there things started feeling weird between my legs again, and then my underwear started to feel like it was back to normal. Glancing down the hallway to make sure it was empty, I quickly jammed my hands down the front of my pants, and immediately I could feel that things were back in place - and when I reached lower, behind where my balls were, it just felt like nothing, exactly as it had before. Whatever had happened, things were back to normal - and it also meant that if I told the nurse, and she couldn't see anything wrong, I'd probably get a talking-to for making things up. Instead, I went back to class, and for the rest of the day everything was fine, but that hadn't kept me from feeling that something had gone very, very wrong.

Maybe I couldn't talk to the nurse, and my dad had never been one to put up with a lot of questions from me, but my mom was a different matter - which was why, as soon as I got home, I immediately told her, in a trembling, worried voice, about what had happened. From the look that came over her face when I told her, I knew that something really was wrong, although the first words she said was that none of it was my fault, not at all; rather, it was hers.

That was the first time she told me the story of what had happened between her and the deity, or at least as much of it as I could understand at the time. It was still confusing enough, especially when she explained that the other configuration, the thing that had been there instead of my penis, wasn't some alien thing but the part that was the female equivalent. That was really the only difference between boys and girls? If it was, they sure didn't act like it. And even then, it didn't really make sense, so I'd asked my mother some more: are boys and girls really supposed to change like that? Wasn't is supposed to just be one or the other? And if it was, then... was I a boy, or a girl?

"A boy," she'd said, without a moment of hesitation. "A boy with a curse, but still a boy. Maybe you won't always be physically, not all the time anyway, but I'm not going to let that deity take being a boy away from you if that's who you want to be. I should have been the one to be punished, not you. I'm sorry you have to deal with this, but... it'll be okay. You're still a good boy, you can be a good man, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise."

And with that, she seemed to consider the matter settled: I would be a boy, except when I wasn't, and those times would simply be something I'd have to deal with until things went back to their normal state. As straightforward as it was between us, though, it wasn't something that could be kept entirely private - apparently, there would be a big hassle if people found out I wasn't always a boy, and they hadn't been informed.

As it turned out, though, my situation wasn't all that uncommon - with the number of demigods floating around, it was a regular enough occurrence for someone to have pissed one or another of them off, and suffer various levels of inconvenient consequences as a result. In fact, it was common enough that the school even had a specific process for registering various potential curses on their students, including the usual paperwork, and evaluation by a district-assigned professor of multiplicative theology. My particular conundrum wasn't exactly common, but common enough to have its very own box on the intake form: "non-specific gender-morphic imposed condition."

The whole process was very deliberate, including listing and classifying the specific deity in question, and answering a laundry list of questions directed at both me and my mother in the professor's office. About all I could end up remembering about the experience was that the professor's office was brown and boring, and the questions seemed to go on and on, about things as trivial as whether or not my shoelaces sometimes came untied of their own accord. After all the data was collected, a functionary finally handed down their conclusion: that as my normal state was male, and the fact that my "imposition" occurred for durations lasting usually less than one full day at a time, that it would be the simplest to do as my mom had done: operate under the assumption that I was a boy, and continue to have me use male facilities, with specific interventions or alternative accommodations provided as needed on a case-by-case basis during the occasional times my curse became active.

For the most part, I was happy enough with that - I could go on the way I had before, without being directly singled out, and as the changes were limited only to an area that was almost always covered by clothing, which meant that the change, when it happened, could be weathered without calling any attention to it.

Whether I would still be able to do that once arriving at the age when boys and girls started developing more physically noticeable differences, though, had been an open question, but at the time I'd been hopeful that I could at least keep things under wraps around my peers.

True, it wasn't like I was the only one with a curse, and some had to suffer through them far more publicly. One of the girls in the next class up from mine had somehow inadvertently pissed off the local Lord of Doors, and now every time she walked through a doorway, there was a chance that whatever she was wearing, skirt or pants or even leggings, would fall down around her knees, both tripping her up and, to her extreme embarrassment, revealing her underwear. Despite the fact that enough kids had their own curses to worry about, she still got more than her fair share of teasing over it, although there wasn't much anyone could do, out of fear of having some similar wrath, or worse, brought down around their own heads by the irate lord.

In fact, it had taken several months before, of all things, another deity stepped in - this one a local goddess and protector of all things female, at least when she deigned to intervene, who'd take the lord to task over what she saw as a punishment doing double-duty as an unfair perversion. The two had had a brief row over it, a day during which doors would randomly refuse to open and some women were unable to unzip their jeans for hours at a time, but eventually the situation was resolved: from that point forward, the girl would only randomly trip across the occasional transom, without the accompanying wardrobe malfunction. Still, she'd gotten enough grief over her curse from the other kids that I certainly didn't look forward to having knowledge of mine spread far and wide. The teachers and administrators, apparently, were required to know; my peers, not so much.

Most of the time, at least, it wasn't a big deal - at least I didn't have to watch out every single time I walked through a doorway. At the same time, though, even if I made an effort to hold it in for the maximum extent possible, I still had to take a piss a few times during the course of a school day, which meant I still faced a conundrum. According to the ruling, I was still to use the boy's bathroom, which, because it was normal, I would have wanted to use anyway. The problem was, most of it was urinals, without any sort of partitions, so it was easy enough to look over at someone else while they were taking a piss. None of the other boys cared, of course - why would they? I didn't want to either, and for the most part it was okay. If I did use the urinal, though, every two or three days, I'd unzip my pants, only to find out that there was nothing to pull out. If no one else was there, it was easy enough to just zip back up and take care of things, as alien as they were, in the privacy of a stall. When someone else was there, though, zipping up without going would earn me a weird look, one that I worried would eventually result in more pointed inquiry. But if I just used a stall all the time, that would be noticed as well, which meant that every trip to the bathroom became a nervous balancing act of trying not to be found out.

Still, somehow, I made it work for some number of years, and no one seemed to be the wiser that for an hour or two a couple times a week, I was somewhat less of a boy than they assumed. Eventually, though, I found out that things were a little more complicated.

As it turned out, the curse itself, once applied, was basically automatic, kicking in on occasion when I tried to take a piss in a "masculine" manner that, because of my mother, was somehow an affront. What I didn't know, though, was that this particular deity wasn't satisfied with laying on a one-off curse and leaving it at that; no, he actually went around and checked up on those he'd cursed to see if their punishments had left them significantly chastened and respectful. He hadn't been so much of a jerk as to embarrass me in front of the whole school, but when he'd halfway materialized in my bathroom, while I was taking a piss, that had been shock enough. It wasn't every day, after all, that a wizened but still ferocious tiger-man, with black-striped silver fur, glowing red eyes, and a giant hornlike codpiece jutting out from his pelvis just materialized in the middle of the floor - although, admittedly for the times, it wasn't the most uncommon thing either. Needless to say, though, it hadn't been the most pleasant experience, as I'd been standing there, my still-dripping penis hanging out of my fly, as the deity had begun a long-winded rant, excoriating me in a shrill, raspy voice for continuing my mother's disrespect - to make up for what she'd done, I was supposed to take every piss sitting down, until my cumulative, comparative lack of masculinity in such things made up for her desecration of something so sacrosanct to men. And when I, still too young to really know not to argue with someone like that, tried to argue that I should at least be able to piss normally into something that wasn't even a urinal, his eyes had flashed annoyance, and for my defiance he'd angrily stabbed a finger in my direction before fading away. True, I didn't have to worry about still standing their with my dick in my hands, but at the same time his dismissive gesture left me stuck as a girl for an entire week.

At first, nothing came or that particular lapse - I didn't even bother to tell anyone, and just used the stalls for the whole week, dealing with the alien feeling between my legs grumblingly until things went back to normal. This time, though, avoiding the urinals for an entire week didn't go unnoticed. One of the other boys started calling me out on being too embarrassed to be seen, and started a rumor that maybe I was shrinking, or had had my penis turned into a wriggling worm or something (a curse which had been, horribly, actually inflicted on his second cousin). I got through the week basically unscathed, at least, but now that it was established, the boy's taunting showed no signs of abating.

Naturally, that had pissed me off, and one day when I'd walked into the bathroom and he'd started going on about it, I'd actually whipped it out in front of everyone in there just to prove him wrong. It shut him up, for a while at least, but he started watching me suspiciously whenever I made a beeline for one of the stalls. Which meant, while he was in there at least, I had to use the urinal if I could. Frankly, I still wanted to - having to actually take things off and sit on the toilet to take a piss seemed like a hassle, even if girls had to put up with it all the time, and I still wanted to act like a normal boy.

Every so often, though, when I did the deity would show up later in my bathroom at home, and even when I just stood there and accepted his rant, promising to do better or something, he'd still stick me with being a girl for several days at a time just for pissing him off. Which meant more of the other kid's stupid rumors, and eventually led to him calling me out on it again in the middle of the bathroom - only this time, thanks to the deity, I was stuck in the middle of a multi-day span of being a girl.

I was stuck - I couldn't just show him off like before. So, in my youthful stupidity, I challenged him back. I knew I couldn't challenge him to a dick-waving contest, but he was a little smaller than me overall, so I challenged him to a fight instead to prove who was more of a boy. Neither one of us really knew how to fight, though, so we both ended up sort of wrestling around on the floor, which had resulted in his hand finding my crotch, and not, in fact, finding what was supposed to be there. At which point he'd crowed in triumph, and as I tried to extricate myself, he managed to dislodge the button of my pants and pull them down, and my underwear along with them, in front of several other boys who'd gathered to watch the tussle. It was only for a moment, after which I got free and quickly pulled things back up to cover myself, but the damage was done - with that momentary exposure, my curse was decidedly far from secret.

So, with no other choice, I'd had to stand there, supremely embarrassed, and explain about the stupid deity and the stupid curse that meant I would be a boy one day, and forced to be a girl the next.

The boy who'd been bugging me about it, Marco, had actually seemed a little disappointed at the revelation. "That's it? You just turn into a girl? That's not interesting at all!" Apparently, having several sisters, for him there wasn't much mystery about such things. Most of the other boys there, however, seemed more than interested - as girls weren't particularly keen to put those parts of them on display, it was the first glimpse most of them had had at the main difference between them. Naturally, they were eager for a second, more detailed glimpse, and one that I was in no mood to give. A couple of them, nonetheless, tried to go for my pants again - at least until I told them that if they tried it, I'd kick them in the balls so hard they'd wish they were girls. Somehow, I managed to extricate myself from the bathroom without any further issues, and as it was late enough in the day, made it home before anything else could happen. My curse was out there, though, making its way from ear to ear, and I knew that soon enough everyone who cared would know about my curse.

Somehow, though, it wasn't quite as bad as I'd imagined. Yeah, a few of the boys got on my case about it, how I should go hang out with the other girls and stuff like that, but after I punched the first couple of them in the face, the others generally shut up. Of course, that also got me suspended, and earned me visits from the deity, who ranted that by fighting with my fists whenever I happened to be in a female configuration I was desecrating the most ancient manly art of pugilism, and sentenced me to additional weeks in girly purgatory. Still, the teasing didn't really work - sometimes I had girl parts between my legs, but I looked, dressed, acted, and sure as heck fought like a boy. Plus, once the whole story came out, and people realized I was being punished for someone else's mistake, there was at least a little more sympathy about it, although the girls understandably scoffed at my grousing - after all, they didn't see what was so bad about it. And maybe they were right - it felt strange, to be sure, and it was a little more annoying to use the bathroom, but for the most part it didn't make a difference. Then again, though, while most boys that age wouldn't even think of asking a girl to flash them, given how much trouble that would get them in, since I was ostensibly a boy they didn't have any similar qualms about me. Which meant that every time I used the stall, even if I actually had to do business that required it, a proposition from some boy or other to "play doctor" usually resulted.

And so it had gone for much of my childhood, an aggravation more than anything else, but more than enough of a hassle nonetheless. People really only pestered me constantly about it for the first few weeks before it faded at least somewhat into the background, just that one thing about me that I was destined to get ribbed about, the way that Randy got ribbed about his height until a late growth spurt years later, or how James had a few weird, blond splotches in his otherwise brown fur.

Still, it wasn't exactly easy to get used to the occasional insults and casual derision. Some of the guys thought that because I became a girl sometimes I should go play house with them or something instead of the sports the boys were playing - although that ended once I blustered my way into a couple of pick-up games and showed that I could play at least better than average. Other than that, it was mostly penny-ante stuff - Marco, for some misguided reason, for a week or two had had taken to grabbing a pair of his sisters' panties, wadding them up, and then throwing them at me at random. That only happened, though, until his sisters found out what he'd been doing, and then he'd been inexplicably absent for a week, returning much more subdued and never hassling me again. Other boys, though, took up the slack well enough. I was thick-skinned enough to deal with it, although it certainly didn't put me in an agreeable mindset when those same boys sidled up to me during one of my week-long curses to ask for a peek.

While I had obviously denied them, I'd been curious enough early on that the next time I'd been stuck with being a girl for more than a brief spell, I'd tried to take a good look myself. It turned out that was easier said than done, as even if I bent all the way over and pushed the nearby fur aside, all I could really see was a little bit of pinkish skin.

Even when I finally figured out that I could use the hand mirror that my mom kept in her bathroom drawer, holding it between my legs to look at things as I sat naked on my bed, what was there was still fairly mystifying. My penis had made sense - it was this little fleshy bit that you could aim your pee with so it went where you wanted it to. In its place, though, was mostly just bare, featureless flesh, except in the center, where there were some slightly pinker, squiggly bits kind of pressed together. I had tried pushing at them with my fingers, and while I discovered that they could kind of be stretched away from each other, all that revealed was even more weirdness: even more pink squiggly bits, smaller with a little nubbly thing on top, bigger and even more squiggly below, and between them was a little dot-like opening like the one on my penis, which I could only assume was where pee came out. All in all, I couldn't figure out what girls saw in it - from my perspective back then, the configuration just seemed somehow both stupid and incomprehensibly complex, a bunch of weird stuff that didn't seem to have any point to it other than to feel thoroughly weird and out of place. Why were the big squiggly things even covering up the other bits, like they were actually trying to make it harder to take a piss?

For a while, I actually felt bad for the girls because they had to be stuck with all that weirdness, and whenever the curse came on I couldn't wait to get my normal stuff back. I just wanted to be a normal boy and not have to deal with it, so much so that I kept using the urinals regardless, even if that ended up meaning, paradoxically, that I'd ultimately have to spend more time dealing with the weirdness of girl-parts between my legs.

After a time, though, I even became used to that when it happened, at least to the point where it eventually faded into being a vague annoyance rather than a continual aggravation. For the most part, I just tried to ignore it, concentrating on studies, sports, and just trying to enjoy being a boy. And through grade school, at least, I hadn't put much thought into it at all.

Junior high, though, had been something of a different story. That was, of course, because it was around that time that puberty had begun in earnest, and everyone's hormones had started flowing. Because I'd spent so much effort on proving myself and being one of the boys, girls were still sort of a mysterious other to me, despite occasionally sharing their genitalia. All of a sudden, though, they were growing, their figures blossoming, and almost overnight they were attractive, intriguing... arousing. I found myself thinking about them, lusting after them - in short, about exactly what a young teenage boy would do. The feelings were new and exciting, and not at all confusing - until, that was, I somehow managed to piss of the deity again, and had to spend another week as a girl.

All of a sudden, those feelings were dramatically different. The next day, when I arrived at school, the girls who had attracted my eager glances and and vague yet lascivious thoughts were suddenly just... girls again, with no real intrinsic attraction at all. For the most part, the same could be said for boys, but some of them, the fit ones from the sports teams or others whose faces all of a sudden looked somehow just right, made me feel... something, although I honestly wasn't sure what it was. As a guy, seeing a hot girl was as immediate as it was predictable: you just felt excited all of a sudden, that particular thrill running through you, and a second later you'd popped an uncomfortable boner that you were shifting your legs around to try and disguise. In that female state, though, seeing those particular guys, I just felt... bothered, somehow, kind of unsettled, less of that electric thrill and more a weird, diffuse sense that was kind of like butterflies in my stomach, but offset from where my stomach actually was. It felt... heavy, almost pensive somehow, like some part of me was tensing in anticipation of something I couldn't even begin to understand. At the same time, though, it was a sensation that I couldn't ignore, and even though I wasn't really sure whether or not I liked how it felt, when those particular guys were around my gaze kept returning to them unbidden, almost like it had with girls when I was fully a boy. The main difference, I supposed, was that in that state I seemed to focus more on their faces, where with girls it was probably only the third or fourth place that my gaze usually landed.

Whatever the feelings, though, they hadn't gotten me in trouble at that point - mainly because, for the most part, people had stopped caring about my curse, and my overall form hadn't given them any reason to start caring again. Whatever happened between my legs on occasion, and whatever might have additionally been going on inside me, I was primarily a boy and went through puberty like one, at least for the most part. Overall, my body developed into a clearly boyish shape, although there were a couple of oddities. I still was active in sports and was certainly fit enough, but the muscles in my upper body never developed quite as much as my peers. And while I never grew breasts, or the additional rows of nipples that some girls ended up with, my nipples also hadn't stayed the vestigial, nearly-invisible dots they had been, instead swelling up as big around as my forefinger and poking far enough out past my fur to think twice about wearing form-fitting shirts, and even more self-conscious about changing for gym than I had before (I'd long since learned not to even try showering or changing underwear in the locker room while I was cursed, a precaution even more clearly reinforced once I realized just how much more interested in girl parts every guy in my class was becoming).

To say that the situation was confusing was wildly understating the facts, but I'd made it through without doing anything too boneheaded for the most part, and somehow I'd even managed to more or less have my female occasions fly under the radar, especially with a whole lot of actually feminine-looking, and permanent, girls to lust after. Sure, the occasional prankster took my spare underwear from the locker room and stuck pairs of panties in their place, but I was used enough to not changing and dealing with it that it hardly mattered. There were even a couple of instances of guys coming onto me, but neither of them had paid much attention to my state - upon figuring out that I was, in fact, a guy they were trying to make a move on, they suddenly lost interest, and the few openly gay guys didn't have much inclination towards someone who could become female at any given moment. As a result, even junior high hadn't been all that eventful, and I'd even had a girlfriend for a whole couple of weeks, although we'd both been nervous enough that things hadn't managed to progress beyond a couple of relatively brief, chaste kisses.

High school, though, seemed like it was shaping up to be another thing entirely. And it wasn't even, really, about a new school with new people in it. No, it was, unfortunately, about yet another deity - this one local, vocal, and in charge of a new canine aspects of femininity and all the females it affected, myself rather uncomfortably included.

Shiarai, it seemed, had wanted to be the goddess of fertility, but had been stymied in that pursuit by the fact that there already was a fertility goddess resident in the region who took affront to her imposition. Luckily for her, though, when it came to canine morphs, sex and fertility were divided up into several different aspects, of which the fertility goddess had really only claimed the part actually involving babies, from conception to birth. How those babies came to pass in the first place, and how those contacts were encouraged, were a different story entirely, and so Shiarai had latched on to the one part of it that seemed like fertility, and the part that was exclusively feminine. So, to every woman's consternation, Shiarai had become the Goddess of Estrus, and with it a planned, tri-monthly schedule that was to be simultaneously enforced, with her magic if necessary. No longer would such things be detailed exclusively by nature - within the region, at least, upon reaching a state of full sexual maturity, every woman would go into heat precisely when Shiarai dictated. And stay that way. For a full entire week.

Even in junior high, I'd still technically been developing, so while I'd felt a certain burgeoning arousal from both the male and female standpoints, I hadn't been subject to such requirements. A couple of weeks before high school, though, during the pre-entry physical, my doctor had confirmed it: from a sexual standpoint, I was fully developed, which meant that the female self that I sometimes became would surely be as well. At the very least, the stupid masculinity deity had thought so, as he had shown up a week before school to gloat about a couple of salient points: that Shiarai's next scheduled estrus would take place on my first day of school, and that because the curse had led to my being considered female enough, I would fall under it; and, furthermore, because I would have to be female to satisfy such a requirement, my maleness would be gone for the entire duration. However, it had at least intimated one hopeful thing: seeing me experience such a female phenomenon would go a long way towards assuaging my mother's affront, and that perhaps it would eventually be seen as sufficient obsequiousness that I might be allowed to go back to honoring him in the traditionally masculine way.

Still, it meant that I was standing in front of my new school in the sort of configuration I didn't exactly prefer, my already too-large nipples puffed up and rubbing uncomfortably against the loose fabric of my shirt, and the not-male parts between my legs were feeling decidedly unsettled in an especially squirmy way, the fleshy bits swelled sufficiently that I could actually feel them touching the fur on my inner thighs in the area where my underwear didn't quite separate them. Apparently, wearing loose underwear while in heat was a bad idea, so I was basically wearing girl-style boxer briefs without the pouch in front, but still tight enough that I could feel them clinging damply to my crotch where the other weird part of heat had been dripping down into them.

At least, thanks to the masculinity god's forewarning, I had time to read up on estrus before I actually had to experience it. By then, I'd had enough sex-ed to have a general idea of it, although not much more than that, since I was still considered a boy and hadn't had to attend the detailed sessions about all the widgy stuff that happens with girl parts; the assumption was that I wouldn't have them for a long enough stretch that they would become an issue.

I knew, though, that heat wasn't exactly pleasant, and my research seemed to confirm it: not only would be stuck with the female parts, but they would all be swollen and sensitive, and that weird arousal that I'd experienced before would be multiplied tenfold. Boys would look not just intriguing, but downright attractive, at least in some subconscious way, and their underlying scent would be enough to aggravate the various types of sensitivity further. While my mind would be more than happy to ignore the guys, and the estrus, entirely, my body would most likely want to... do them, basically, and would be more than happy to facilitate such a thing if it happened. Which explained the uncomfortable dripping, oozing sensation from between my legs. At least it didn't feel like I was pissing myself, as I had feared, but the stuff actually managed to be even more perturbing: slick, slimy, coating the bare skin and making the involuntarily female parts of me feel even more alien than they usually did. Thinking about it, though, was even worse - the notion that my body was actively preparing and encouraging itself to have a guy's penis buried inside it was not something that I really wanted to consider. In fact, all I wanted to do was just get through my first day of high school, but with what was happening to me, somehow I figured that things would be more difficult than I'd hoped. At the very least, I wasn't alone - all of the girls on campus were probably going through the same thing, so hopefully the guys would be distracted enough by all of it that my own condition didn't merit attention. Still, though, there was nothing to do but walk through the doors and get through it.

The first couple of classes were... soert of squirmingly uncomfortable, and confusing to say the least, but as I'd predicted, I made it through mostly unnoticed - plenty of girls similarly restless in their seats, and plenty of male eyeballs directed at them rather than me. Problem was, though, the third-period class was physical education - and, since I was ostensibly a boy, I was assigned to the boy's locker room to change into P.E. clothes. Which, being a boy, was something that I was generally happy with, and would have been during any other day. Thanks to Shiarai, though, this wasn't one of those days, but it was kind of too late to change things around - my assigned locker was in there, and if I tried to go into the girls' locker room, I'd probably get in trouble whatever my form. Still, maybe if I was quick about it, and didn't strip down past my underwear, I could just get changed and make it work. Not that running around with things rubbing against my chest and between my legs sounded like much fun at the moment, but it was better than getting hassled over my condition. That I had to endure it was bad enough; having to deal with snide comments from the same guys I was trying to get to know would be even worse.

Of course, when I walked in, I noticed that some of the guys were ones I'd shared previous grades with, and who probably knew about my curse, but hopefully they'd stopped caring, or would at least be understanding. Marco, though, happened to be assigned the locker next to mine, and while he'd ostensibly stopped caring about my occasional changes years ago, I couldn't help but notice him sneaking glances at me as he stripped down. Still, I couldn't just stand there fully clothed for the whole period, so I did the same, just trying to be quick about it. Looking down, though, only reminded me of the fact that thanks to the situation, the underwear I had on wasn't loose enough to disguise my status - the lack of any bulge, plus the rather obvious damp spot seeping outward from the crotch, made my condition pretty clear.

I tried to angle my body away from him as I reached for my gym clothes, hoping to pull them on without incident, but I hadn't turned quickly enough to escape his notice.

"Heh... didn't know they were letting girls into the boy's locker room now," he said, not exactly shouting, but loud enough for people nearby to hear it. If I was going to head this off, I'd have to do it quickly.

"Shut it, Marco. You've known about my curse for years now."

"Yeah, sure whatever." I glanced over, to notice that Marco was just standing there, leering at me, still in his boxer briefs and in seemingly no hurry to get dressed. Worse than that, though, the front of them was starting to expand outward rather noticeably. "You ask me, though, I think you probably like it."

"What, seriously?" I turned towards him, snarling a little, although when the sound actually came out of my mouth, it sounded considerably less than hostile, more of a... disturbingly feminine purr than anything else. While I wanted to feel anger, the rest of me seemed to be heading in a different direction, and the perturbing sense of excitement that had been settling into my belly most of the day was suddenly flaring even more acutely. Just looking at him was starting to make my heart beat a little faster, starting to make me feel... something that I didn't really want to feel, especially towards him. And yet, the more I glanced at his face, at his body, the more handsome he seemed, and the more I wanted to, to...

I turned quickly away from him, staring back at my locker as I could feel myself blushing beneath my fur, my muzzle flushed with a strange heat that was rapidly spreading into my chest to only further excite whatever strange things were happening further down. All I wanted to do was get dressed and get out of there, away from the awkward situation and the pointed stares of my peers, but my befuddled reaction had left me frozen there, in my T-shirt and clearly feminine boyshorts, something that I needed to remedy quickly. Marco, though, was still talking, seeming like he was edging closer in my peripheral vision.

"I mean... sure, it's a curse. Don't tell me you've never tried to see what it felt like to... y'know..."

"Eww, that's disgusting! I'm a guy! This stuff's just a... an inconvenience, so why the fuck would I do that?" I glanced back over at him, realized immediately what a stupid idea that was, and glanced back, unconsciously sidling closer to the bank of lockers as he took another casual step closer.

"And you really expect me to believe that? C'mon... it's pretty obvious you're affected, like all the other girls. And yet, instead of hiding out with all of them somewhere, doing sexually-frustrated yoga or something, you're in here, with us..."

"What are you talking about?"

"Didn't get the memo, huh? You really think they'd have a bunch of girls in heat running around playing sports and stuff? Nah, they're all off from normal P.E. this week, probably stuffing dildos into themselves or something. But here you are, with all of us..."

"Yeah, because I'm actually a boy. And assigned to the boys' locker room. See?" I closed the door of my locker to show him the nameplate on it, although a moment later regretted doing so, as my gym clothes were still on the other side of it.

"Except you're not." He was close enough that when he pointed down towards my crotch, his fingers stopped only a few short inches away, looking like they wanted to move in just a bit closer. I turned away from them and tried to step back, but all that did was leave me with my back flat against the metal door of my locker.

"S-so what?"

"So, it's not like you didn't know you were in heat, and yet you decided to walk in here and hang out around a bunch of half-naked guys. Which makes me think that whatever you want to protest, you're more of a pervert than you let on. Just standing there, being a girl, ogling all these guys who have got to be turning you on, since there's no way you'd be that wet otherwise..."

I glanced around, and to my consternation, a fair number of other boys had taken notice, gathering around Marco and forming a sort of loose semicircle around where I was standing. Being surrounded by a bunch of guys on any day wasn't exactly encouraging, as it brought back memories of earlier harassment; today, though, I had a feeling - well, a certainty - that it was something more. I looked around for a teacher, but none seemed to be around, and while I thought about calling our for one, the male part of me, inured against telling on people, stilled my tongue. The other guys, though, were also either in their underwear or making motions to strip down to it, and they were all noticeably swelling as their gazes seemed to uniformly focus in on my crotch.

I brought my hands down to cover it up - although it was too late to hide what was going on, I didn't have to let them keep staring and getting even more worked up over it.

"Marco, you know how much that's bullshit, right? Estrus just... makes that stuff happen! That doesn't mean I'm getting turned on or anything! Like I said, I'm a boy, so I'm not interested in, in doing that while I'm in this stupid, cursed state! I just want to go and get this class over with, like anyone else!"

"Sure... you just keep telling yourself that. The fact that you're here, though, means that you're definitely interested." He glanced around at the other guys, grinning. "But hey, we're guys, right? I mean, if one of us sneaked a peek into the girls' locker room, we'd probably end up with them screaming and chucking stuff at our heads. I mean, why they gotta do that, for one harmless peek? Hey, at least guys have the right idea about it. You want to take a peek? Go ahead, look all you want." He actually ran his tongue along his muzzle as he tucked his hands into the waistband of his underwear. "For that matter, if you want a touch, or a taste... or a ride... you're more than welcome."

"In fact," he said, leaning forward even more imposingly, "I really gotta wonder just how much it would take to let loose what we all know has to be lurking inside you. Whether all it would take is one... simple... touch..."

The hand on his waistband was already beginning to tug downward, revealing the fur on one hip as his straining bulge held the rest of his underwear up, at least for the moment. His other hand, though, moved forward to my own hip, and even through my underwear I could feel the pressure and heat of his touch, far more exciting than it should have been, especially as it pushed in towards where my hands were blocking - and for a moment, I honestly wondered if I could even convince my own hands to fight his off from where it seemed to be going.

At the point our fingers actually touched, though, he suddenly, inexplicably stopped. I couldn't figure out why, and when I looked up at his face, the expression didn't seem different, the same arrogant sneer that had been there before. Except... it took me a couple of seconds to realize, but his expression wasn't just frozen, it wasn't moving at all: eyes staring forward unblinking, not even the slight ruffle of fur around his nostrils from the intake and exhalation of breath. And it wasn't just him - the rest of the boys were still as well, completely rooted in place in the suddenly silent locker room. In fact, I was the only person who seemed to be moving at all... except for another figure, who didn't so much walk as glide into view, an actually glowing tableau of flowing robes, ostentatious musculature, terrifying codpiece, and almost stereotypically masculine facial fur, capped with an imposingly dominatingly severe expression emphasized by eyebrows so squared-off as to be borderline comical. There was nothing funny about the situation, though, and less so about the deity now front and center in my vision, one that by now I knew far too depressingly well.

"Ah... what have we here?" the deity rasped, his strangely reedy voice nevertheless echoing in my ears. "Perhaps I shall finally see you do something feminine enough in atonement after all..."

He stepped back, seeming to start a gesture that would put things back into motion, and leave me in the precarious position of trying to fend off Marco's attempts to get his hand somewhere very problematic. At the apex of his gesture's windup, however, a slim, light-furred arm seemed to appear out of nowhere, and long, delicate fingers wrapped around his wrist. The arm seemed too slim to hold him in place, but despite his surprised struggles, his own wrist was held firmly in place. Then another arm joined it from a different angle, and yeat another, and I quickly realized that he was far from the only one who was here to observe this particular situation...