:: Enter Mr. Hilliard's Office.
"Good luck and have fun," [[Ethan]] says as he walks out.

With a little nervousness, [[you|You]] enter Mr. Hilliard's office.

[[Mr. Hilliard]] sits behind a large desk and gets up to greet you.  "You must be Parker Comstock," Mr. Hilliard says.  "Welcome to Rosestead High.  I am Principal Hilliard."

You shake his hand and he motions you to sit down in front of his desk and then sits himself.  He shows you your schedule and makes sure you know the layout of the building and speaks pridefully of the many facilities available at the high school.  

After he's done, he tells you, "Now I'm going to bring you to Coach Donovan and his wife and they'll continue your orientation.  Coach Donovan is the wrestling coach and physical education teacher and his wife, Mrs. Donovan, is the math teacher.  We don't have separate guidance counselors, so we assign two teachers to act as guidance counselors.  They'll take care of you and they'll be able to answer any questions you might have.

"However," he goes on, "there is one, well, peculiarity I should tell you about Rosestead.  It's nothing to worry about, but it might seem a bit strange to an outsider.  Our area was founded about forty years ago by Mr. Anderson's father."  You think back to the portrait in the library and shudder a bit at your memory of the stern, disapproving old man.

Mr. Hilliard continues, "He believed that there were serious problems with gender relations in the world because some people were born into the wrong bodies.  That is to say, he believed that some men were born with women's brains and some women were born with men's brains.  His theory was that if we could fix that problem, this would be a great boon to gender relations everywhere.

"So he developed a Process for finding these poor gender-confused people and changing their bodies' genetics to the gender that matches their brains."  He paused.

"I'm not sure I'm following this," you say.  "You're saying he developed a way to change people's sex, right?  Sort of like gender change surgery."

"Something like that, though not nearly so crude.  It actually rewrites the DNA, giving a Y to women who need one and duplicating the X in men.  He also found a way to activate it and have the external changes show up in a remarkably small span of time, all without surgery and actually changing the person's gender.  The women so created can bear children and everything.  It was a remarkable achievement."

"If it's so remarkable, how come I haven't heard about it?" you say.

"We are still testing and studying it so nobody has published on it.  Everybody in Rosestead knows about it, but we keep it quiet.  There has been the occasional reasonably accurate rumor, but nobody takes it seriously since it sounds so incredible."

[[Continue.|Mr. Hilliard's Office]]