Editing Project Valkyrie Bellatrix (section)

=Origin=

When Johnny Colt's parents split up, he elected to live with his dad. Who wouldn't, right? Traveling the world, meeting exotic people (including exotic girls), exploring ancient ruins, hanging out with superheroes. John Colt Sr. was an adventurer, archeologist, and treasure hutner who made a career out of keeping dangerous artifacts out of the wrong hands. In his time, he'd fought beside some of the world's greatest heroes, getting by with skill, daring, and judicous use of a few treasures. Johnny wanted to be just like him.

Then came the Thelesca expidition. Mystical convergences revealed a hidden city of the ancients. Dad's maps and charts, along with a restored ancient computational device, told him when to be there. The city was in almost pristine condition, but totally uninhabited. It was a treasure trove of history with several mystical artifacts as well.

Johnny ran afoul of one of those. He was taking high-def, multi-spectrum photos of an ornate, but empty, pool from the inside. One of the other guys must have figured out how to get the water going again, because all these statues around the edges of the pool started spewing water, fast.

Johnny was engulfed in seconds, even though the pool was only about four feet deep. The rushing water knocked him off his feet and the cameras and instruments he was carrying weighed him down. He started to drown, and the world grew dim. But then everything was suffused with glowing light.

"You are a most unusual supplicant," a beautiful voice said. It seemed to be right in his head and simultaniously everywhere else. When it spoke, there was nothing else in the universe. She was speaking Latin, which Johnny actually understood. "But I have had no supplicants at all for a very long time. Your sacrifice is accepted. I will accept you as one of my handmaidens."

There was a moment of searing pain mingled with overwhelming estacy that drowned out every other sensation.

Then Johnny returned to the world. Abruptly, the weight that was dragging Johnny down abaited. He surged for the surface, coughing and spitting, and flew several yards into the air. And that was just the beginning. He found out really quickly that some significant things had changed.

All his camera gear was gone. So were his clothes, which had been replaced with a short linen tunic, sandals, and a gladiator helmet. So was his y-chromosome. It took a second for him to figure out what happened, moments of pure mental rebellion. But he was now a she, a little shorter than he'd originally been, with olive skin and what seemed like yards of black, wavy hair.

Other members of the expidition had heard him cry out and rushed to help. They'd seen what happened in the pool. His dad was excited at first. Sure, turning into a girl was embarrasing, but it was real, authentic magic. All they'd have to do was reverse the effect, and everything would be fine.

Except that there was no way to reverse the effect. One brave female intern tried the pool again, but it did nothing. Back stateside there was still no luck. None of the mystics John Colt knew could reverse the spell, or even detect signs of a spell having been cast.

Johnny found that she could, with a little willpower, dismiss her vestments, and the clothes she'd been wearing would come back, but she didn't turn back to who she was before. No matter what, she was still a hot teenage girl who happened to be about as strong as an olympic powerlifter and a little knowledgable about everything on earth.

After that, Johnny's life kind of went to hell. Big, macho John Colt couldn't really handle having a transgendered son. So Johnny changed her name to "Jonni" and went to live with his mom, taking her maiden name, too. But Allison Hamilton had divorced John Colt because she couldn't handle the weirdness of his lifestyle. Being trapped in an alternate dimension for two years was the end for her. She had less trouble accepting a girl-child than John did, but she couldn't handle the superheroics. A child who could pick up the front end of the car was just too weird for her.

So John Sr. pulled some strings and arranged for his daughter to be enroled at St. Catherines in Metro City.

Jonni has been female for just a few months now, long enough to learn the mechanics and hardly ever walk into the wrong washroom, but nowhere NEAR long enough to really adapt. But she doesn't really want people to think she's a freak, so she doesn't go around telling people she used to be a boy.

Evidentally, Ms. White decided the best therapy for Jonni would be sporadic terror and violence. She was appointed to the Valkyres on her first day