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Life goes on

Marcus pulled his hair back, putting a hairband in. Perhaps it was time to cut his hair, but-- given how every other male friend he had outside of school had long hair anyhow--

"Marcus, I don't know how to bring this up," Clem started.

It had been two weeks. Marcus had figured something could be done by combining time adjustment artifacts and haste potions, but Purple said it was just plain bad idea to speed things up too much, so, he was now a female. And would be one till summer comes around. Luckily Aheals had a spatial artifact to hide the growing belly, but that one clashed with illusory ones, so--

"Did you also change your sex?" He asked, because--

No matter how one looked at it, Marcus was a female - shape, shapes, and everything. Even his voice had become softer.

"Do we call you Marcia?" Mats asked, because he didn't need to ask to be pretty sure that was the case.

"No, Marcus is fine, I'll be back to normal when High School rolls around," he said.

"Is that why you are feeling up your own chest?" Clem asked.

Whoop. Marcus put his own hands, now figuring why Bill looked so flustered. He had thought it was about the question, but-- not the case.

"Sorry," Marcus said, turning a bit rosy, not an excuse, but-- "Female bodies are incredible." So many sensitive spots all over. He wasn't even sure at this point if he should be upset at Stephanie or thanking her. Just thinking about it made him remember the morning-- Or their entire winter break. Two weeks of exploring what they could do and they were still only getting started.

Even despite knowing they would get a kid by summer Bill didn't seem to get even nearly as upset as one who planned to have children in two decades would be. Why as soon as summer, though?

It had started from a small desire to have more time together and had been something that had seeped into Bill's free time creations subconsciously. He was learning to make clocks of that sort at his apprenticeship, but with those, he was still struggling to meet Lize's standards.

Normally it would be no good to speed up anything at all, but since their bodies were both used to it up to that party and the artifacts were matching to one of the parents of the planned child, Purple appraised it to be alright.

August was the one who had it hard because he'd be stuck like that till September or so and he couldn't use the haste potions he was hooked on by this point unless he learns to make some himself. Which-- Marcus had a feeling August would end up learning.

Marcus could, of course, walk a similar path and try going into time-distortion, but he had so many other things he wanted to focus on now, that it felt like a hassle rather than something he would like to do. And time-distortion itself would be on the hard end, for him particularly, to learn.

He understood the theory, but he was still a Hadean at soul - there was a sort of inherent resistance in him about messing with time. He made use of items of the sort and he was grateful to Bill for buying them more time and he understood and appreciated the time machine in Hades - it had saved a lot of lives thus far. But it was far easier for Marcus to make artifacts that resisted time-distortion rather than ones that caused it.

And now that he got into the joys of exploring a different type of body for a while, he might not even mind if they would be like this till September either.

"Marcus, whatever you are thinking about, can you quit that for now?" Will asked and Marcus looked up to find everyone, including Xitlali who he didn't ever recall seeing blushing, with rosy cheeks.