NOTE: This chapter has been split into two pieces in order to fit Tapas guidelines for episode length. If you landed on this episode first, please go back and read the one before it! This is episode 2 of 2.

ANOTHER NOTE: As of 12 July 2024 this is a rewrite of the rewrite. I was never satisfied with the "Biology lesson" chapter because it came off as... well... a biology lesson, and did not seem like something that Owen would have told Daecon on their first meeting. I have now redone it so that Daecon gets a basic lesson on the physiology and reproductive habits of the Shapeshifters but not the whole biology. 

Owen nodded. “Sadly, you are correct, and that is exactly how many of us view ourselves when it comes to birthing. It wasn’t always like this, of course. Thousands of years ago we could produce our own offspring, but somehow we lost the ability to do so. Even still, our methods are not sustainable. There is too much work involved and not enough offspring are being produced to replace the dead. Our numbers have been shrinking for millennia.”

At least he had the decency to feel shitty about the situation, so I was satisfied. Except… “So why can’t your women have children, anyway?”

Owen gave me an odd look, then a faint smile. ‘Oh, I forgot, you wouldn’t know this because you were raised without knowing about us. The answer to that question is simple: There are no female shapeshifters. Technically there are no males, either: We are all hermaphrodites. We possess both male and female reproductive parts, though by external appearance and for all intents and purposes, we are all male.”

OK, so this one shocked me. “Wait… What? How can you…”

“Not just us, but you too”, Owen interrupted. “You are one of us.”

“Ok, fine. How can WE have male and female bits? I've done a lot of exploring down there and I don’t have any of that woman-y stuff!”

“Oh, but you do, my friend. You don’t know it, but you do. You may have the external organs of a male, but you also have certain internal female organs as well. You do not have a uterus or vagina, but you do have an ovary and a fallopian tube. You can produce eggs and in fact will have been doing so regularly since puberty.”

This shocked me. “No”, I said. “There is no way. How the hell could I have laid an egg?”

“You are thinking of eggs like those of a bird”, Owen said. “Your eggs are microscopic unless fertilized, and they would simply pass out of you unnoticed.”

Now I had to ask: “And how do these eggs get fertilized?”

Owen actually blushed a bit before answering. “The same way most eggs in nature get fertilized”, he replied. “Through sexual intercourse. We form couples and have sex just like humans do.”

“But wait”, I said. “You said you’re all male. Does that mean that you’re all gay?”

“For the sake of simplicity, I will say yes. We form same-sex couples in the same manner that homosexual humans do. A key difference is that although we will both appear to be male, we are not actually male. Remember, we are both sexes.”

“So are all gay men…”

“Shapeshifters? No. All shapeshifters present as gay men, but most gay men, certainly any that you may have met in your… *ahem* ...exploits,  are just that: Gay men.”

At these words a spark of excitement lit inside me. Owen was hot as fuck. And now I found out that he was gay, or at least close enough to it. That might mean that he was DTF. I could work with this: If he was willing then I certainly was… but still, I had more questions so I packed this tidbit away for later.

“Wait. You’re saying that I have eggs inside me and that they come out of me regularly. How does this even happen?”

“Your eggs come out of you through your cloaca”, Owen stated matter-of-factly.

I stared at him blankly. “My what?” I asked.

“I am sorry, once again I am forgetting that you did not grow up among us. Your cloaca. In a human (or most mammals) this would be your anus, but with us it is a combined organ: A cloaca functions as an anus but also as a reproductive organ. Most animals in nature have a cloaca of some sort, everything from insects to reptiles to birds. Even some mammals such as the platypus have one. Your eggs pass out of you through this cloaca. It is through this same opening that eggs are fertilized through intercourse. If an egg is fertilized, instead of just passing out of you it will attach itself to your cloacal wall and begin to grow. This triggers hormonal changes in you that will let you know that you have produced a viable embryo. Once it grows to about the size of a pea it will be ready for transplanting into a surrogate. If it is not transplanted, it, too, will simply pass out of you in the form of a small blue object similar in appearance to a robin’s egg.”

I was floored. But this still wasn’t making sense. “OK, wait a minute! That can’t be. At the risk of sounding like I’m bragging, I am no virgin. I have been “fertilized” countless times, and I’ve never seen a pea-sized blue egg come out of my butt!”

“Ahh”, Owen said with a raised eyebrow, “But you have been ‘fertilized’ only by humans. Human DNA is incompatible with our own. A human cannot fertilize your eggs, nor could you fertilize one of theirs were you to have sex with a human woman. Only another shifter can fertilize your eggs. And before you ask, yes, it must be another shifter who does so. You cannot fertilize your own eggs.”

I would be sure to keep that in mind the next time somebody told me to go fuck myself. Meanwhile…

“Ok, I can accept that”, but wait. I was an orphan. I was dropped off at an orphanage as an infant with nothing more than a note requesting that I be named Daecon. I spent my entire life there. If I am a Shapeshifter, why was I not born into your colony and raised by your people?” 

“Our people”, Owen corrected me. “I am what you are, and you are what I am. Never forget that. And I do not know the answer to your question. Somehow a pair of shapeshifters must have conceived you and implanted you into a human but for some reason did not retrieve you at birth. Even more remarkably, the human female must have cared for you at least until you were the size of a normal human infant before depositing you at that orphanage. That is something that needs to be investigated.”

“But why is this such a big deal, and why did my shapeshifting abilities wait until today to show themselves? Shouldn’t I have had some signs before?”

Owen gave me a very worried look and started wringing his hands. “It is such a big deal because it is an enormous security breach. As I’ve mentioned, all of our births are strictly planned. This is necessary to ensure that no word of our existence ever gets out. Most of us do not even possess the magic required to carry out the birth process, and yet somehow somebody was able to create you in secrecy, and then they went and left you to live with humans! It is only by sheer luck that you did not accidentally shift when you were younger or in the presence of a human. Imagine how those other humans at your orphanage would have reacted had they found a blue heron in the bedroom where there was previously a young child? Or, worse, if they had watched you change into a fox or deer before their very eyes! There would have been hell to pay! I don’t even know how we would have handled such a situation!”

“What do you mean, ‘accidental shift’?”

“Most of us experience our first shift at a very young age, usually before the age of five. Shifting into our primary animal form eventually becomes as natural to us as walking is for a human, but at first we have no control over when it happens.”

 “Primary?”

 “Yes. Our primary animal form is some kind of bird. Most of us master a secondary form as well, as you have seen with my bear. Some even can do a third, and very rarely, even more than that, but for most of us we have two animal forms in addition to our human-like natural form.”

“So wait, you’re saying that I should be able to change into a bird? Like you?”

“You should be able to, yes. In fact, it should have happened without your even thinking about it. But what I don’t understand is how you managed live this long without ever doing it, and then how you managed to do half a shift while growing an extra set of limbs. I have never seen anything like this before.”

“I didn’t try to do it halfway!”, I protested. “I didn’t even know I could do this!”

“Yes, yes, I realize that now, and that’s what worries me,” Owen said. “Your shifting power seems to be severely underdeveloped for somebody your age, while at the same time you’ve done a transformation I’ve never thought possible. This is going to cause a lot of trouble with our people, I can assure you.”

“What? Why?”

“Because, as I’ve said, humans are not supposed to know about us. Over thousands of years we have gone great lengths to keep our race hidden. Your act of flying away from those attackers of yours without even cloaking yourself was noticed even by those dimwitted fools. I heard them hooting and hollering the moment your wings appeared.”

“Cloaking?”, I asked. “What the hell is cloaking? You mentioned this as I was falling. You kept on hollering at me to cloak, but I have no idea what you were talking about.”

“Cloaking is the art of making yourself invisible to humans. It is a minor charm we cast over ourselves to be unnoticed. While I was flying alongside you I was cloaked. I would have been quite invisible to those humans. Cloaking is usually done automatically when you shift, though it is possible to shift without cloaking. I’m proud to say that I’ve never been spotted by a human whilst in animal form.”

“But wait. I could see you”, I protested.

“Yes, you would have been able to see me. Our cloaking mostly only works against humans and animals. You’re not human, so you could see me. Those attackers of yours would have seen you but they couldn’t see me. If you knew what to look for, you’d have been able to tell that I was cloaked, though. Cloaking alters the way light reflects off us. To humans it routes light around our bodies and renders us invisible, as if we aren’t even there. Shifters can see through most cloaking, but the light distorts our image slightly.”

“Oh. Ok. I think I understand. But one more thing bothers me. If we fertilize the eggs by having sex with each other... well, HOW?!? How does the sperm from one guy fertilize the egg in another? It’s not even possible!”

“Did you take any biology in school?”, Owen asked.

“Yes, I did, and while I didn’t pay close attention, I did learn enough to know that dudes can’t have babies with each other! As sure as there’s shit in a cat I know that nothing like this was ever covered.”

“I find that hard to believe, that you didn’t pay attention”, Owen said as he rolled his eyes. “Well, the quick and dirty answer is that we have two Y chromosomes instead of an X and a Y as humans so. The presence of a Y chromosome makes for a biological male, and so since we can only have Y chromosomes we can only have males. Females are not possible.”

“This is quite possibly the most fucked up thing I have ever heard. And that’s saying something, considering some of the things I’ve just heard.”

“Well, that’s how it is. Granted, it’s only a very basic biology lesson, but you should get the gist of it. Anyway, we’ve talked enough for now”, Owen said. “Your wings should be dry enough that you can walk. Come on, on your feet. We’ve got to get out of here before those humans find us.”