Transvestia

totally strange room, staring into a full-length mirror at a figure he could not believe he saw. The height and age were about right, but this was all; the rest was a lovely, ash-blond girl in a transparent night gown, with the most beautiful body and the most horrified face in the world. Even his years as a trans- vestite had not prepared him for anything like this, and he was already feeling his sanity slipping when another force entered the problem as the rightful owner of this body awoke. First a silent scream WHAT ARE YOU? WHO ARE YOU? GET OUT!!!! and then she hit him. She was a wave, she was a flame, a tor- nado; and he would have been overwhelmed in a second if she had not been inconsistently trying to expell him, encapsulate him and simultaneously tear him to pieces. While there are ways for fighting another person in- side your mind, neither was the least skilled in them, and so the bitter, futile struggle would have gone on indefinitely had he not hit on a brute force solution. After a timeless interval, his left hand (over which he seemed to have the most control) was bending her right ring finger backwards until their vision was red with pain, and she slacked off her attack. A sort of armistice was arranged, and they began to take stock of their position. The long legs, not otherwise in- structed, had folded up under them, dumping them in an untidy mess on the floor. Aside from the throbbing finger, a few bruises and scratches were all the real damage, but the state of her hair shook her up so much that things were nearly equal.

He agreed, as a first step in peaceful compromise, to explain what must have happened, and started to verbalize it. Then, impatient with this slow progress, he simply lowered his defenses enough to let her SEE what had happened. Although a chemist by training, he was dabbling in the strange-half-science of psionics-

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