The Rise

Story by bobthecreep

Finally got a new story going! Trying a few new things with this one, most notably a third person perspective instead of first person. Should lead to less "meanwhile, over in this part of the world" chapters. Tags will be per chapter.

“... It was that year when the president signed the bill allowing full rights and privileges to those special people.”

The projector was the only source of light in the darkened classroom, sending most of it to the blank dry erase board. While most of the students diligently took notes, one girl in particular snoozed quietly in the back.

Erin had heard it all before, mostly from her grandparents. They had been very young at the time when that particular law was put into effect, but they knew the events leading up to it like the back of their creaky, arthritic hands. Thanks to their more or less being there, Erin was confident in her ability to ace this section of the history class and took the hour-long period to catch up on any missed sleep.

The loud buzzer rudely shook Erin awake before Miss Poke turned the lights back on, even though some of Erin's classmates were already out the door and on their way to the long four day weekend. Without a heavy book to return to her backpack, she made it out the door quickly, yawning as she joined the horde outside. It wasn't long before she was tackled from behind, lifted from her feet and thrown over a shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“Hey squirt! Fall asleep in Pokey's class again?”

Erin sighed.

“Please don't call me that, Jo. And could you put me down?”

Joanna, Erin's younger sister, quickly shook her head, sending her long copper locks into a frenzy before settling back into their normal positions.

While they had a little more than two years between them, Joanna towered over her sister by a few inches over a foot and was quite a bit wider as well. Only a sophomore in high school, if it were less than a century earlier, she would have stuck out like a sore, but very sexy, thumb with the pair of full perky melons stuck to her chest and hips and butt that strained even the most elastic of clothes, not that she wore any. Erin had a hunch her sister enjoyed looking like she was bursting out of everything she wore, which got her more than a few trips to the principal, especially when a button would score a near perfect headshot on one of her teachers.

Erin, on the other hand, looked like she belonged back in grade school. Not a single womanly curve on her body, which just barely scraped the five foot mark if she stood up on her toes a little bit. She spent very little time with makeup and grooming; Jo would always get the stares anyway.

Aside from their obvious differences, the two sisters got along fairly well and were otherwise quite similar, at least physically. Like Miss Poke had been lecturing on, both Erin and Joanna, along with a growing population of the school and the world, were different. It was usually obvious which people were different by their increased average height, as well as other dimensions and general attractiveness. Some saw it as a mutation in the human genome, some thought it was evolution at work and others still knew it only as a disease. Whatever it was, it was spreading and those that were affected almost unanimously hoped it would continue.

The sisters were hermaphrodites.

The mutation, disease or whatever only appeared in those that would be otherwise female and was first recognized long ago, but only in very rare cases and very imperfect. The initial few were completely infertile but as time went on, things seemed to figure themselves out and the first perfect, fertile hermaphrodites were born. With almost blinding speed, a few became hundreds, hundreds became thousands, and thousands became more than a third of the entire worldwide population.

The major cause of this 'third gender's' ability to spread so quickly was almost entirely due to how their genes spread. Any children born of a woman and a hermaphrodite were almost guaranteed to be either female or hermaphroditic, with chances leaning towards the latter and males almost unheard of; between a male and a hermaphrodite, the chances were mostly equal across the board for all three sexes; finally, two hermaphrodites birthed only more and multiple pregnancies were common. Hermaphroditic children would go through puberty very early in their lives, years earlier than their single-sexed counterparts, and would reach sexual maturity just as quickly. Despite this, the law saw these children as any other, keeping the age of consent where it had been, though it was very rarely enforced since it was so difficult to tell the child's true age. Plus, nine times out of ten, the child in question was the instigator.

Erin had always felt she was the exception to the 'tall and pretty' rule that seemed to otherwise apply to all the other hermaphrodites, though she preferred a

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