Meet Ruth

The screen, undamaged, glared up into the room. Sara's eyes were welling with tears as she returned to the app. Even though it was no longer pointed at a subject, it still registered the last person it scanned. At the top, clear as day, it read 'Ruth Cohen', a sub-line listing she/her pronouns. Taking the phone into her hand, Sara walked over and sat at her sibling's feet, looking up at... Her for the first time.

"Maybe this app doesn't have to be a bludgeon after all," Sara said to herself as she looked up at her middle sister with a careful eye. In the folds of Ruth's upper eyelid, eyeshadow could be seen, poorly removed. The position that Ruth was in wasn't of simpering weakness, she was an **** victim who didn't even have the strength to ask the people in her life who should respect and love her without reservation what her own name was. Maybe Sara could make her strong enough to start her journey.

Looking back down to the app, Sara saw that Lita had popped back up like a vaguely horny Clippy, "Hey there pal!" she squiggle squeaked in her chibi tones, "Looks like you're interacting with someone who already has a lot of things they'd like to change! What a wonderful time to explore ways that you can more expressly explore the will of your subjects, and changes to the time stream." Under the Will tab, a button Sara hadn't paid attention to was highlighted, a simplified drawing of a ghost. Clicking it, Lita appeared again and struck a Vana White pose. With an animated poof, there was now a second animated figure, not an image of Daniel in drag, but the middle sister Ruth. As the text box popped up above her, her voice was still that of a villager in a handheld game, but it sounded like Ruth was making the noises herself, "Hi there sis! Odd seeing me like this, eh?"

There wasn't a place for her to enter text. Trying something, she said aloud, "So... Ruth huh?"

"Yeah," the older sister said in text, "I picked it out back when I was twelve. Mainly use it online."

"It's a nice name. I take it you have been wanting to do something about it for just as long?"

"Honestly... I tried to talk to dad about it once, and he told me not to think those sorts of things. That I was a man and should see myself as one"

Sara clicked her tongue, rolling her eyes, "That sounds like dad. Why didn't you ever tell us about it? I mean, mom and I had a bit of a tiff when I came out as queer, but we settled it within the week."

Ruth was about to respond, but Lita stepped forward, and proclaimed, "This sounds like it would be a great time to go over temporal alterations!" Ruth had a little anime frustration sigil on her temple as Lita swept across the screen, though as the main interface returned, Ruth sat next to Lita as the tutorial bounced around the screen.

"Now, as far as changing time goes, we have to be very careful and make small little changes to only a few people at a time. You don't want to know what perversion caused centennial plagues for the past four hundred years," Lita said with an animated shiver, before continuing, "But simple things like sliding a moment into the memories of people involved only a few years ago, and the resulting changes to the time stream are more than easy to do."

Sara smiled a wicked little smile, before saying aloud, "So... If I were to say, go back and make Ruth come out, she'd be different now?" Lita nodded emphatically, before directing Sara through the menu tree where she could change both of their minds. All the while, Ruth bounced giddily with joy next to their guide. On the page describing their shared relationship, good interactions were highlighted in green, and bad interactions in red, with a number on each of them.

Sara found an interaction around the right time three years back, where they'd shared an awkward talk about just Sara's identity, and Sara typed over the interaction, 'When Sara came out to mom, Ruth had the courage to come out to her little sister, and Sara helped her do her makeup for the first time,' set the memory as a green seven and hit enter. Ruth's frame was in Sara's periphery, and she saw her sister wreathed in shifting blackness for the briefest of instants. She would have focused on the physical changes, but her mind was wracked with sharp stabbing pain.

Sara could suddenly remember the exchange, with them sitting together and pouring over their non-standard ideas and attractions. It hadn't been just one night where Sara did Ruth's makeup, but a nightly bonding experience they'd had for weeks, before one night Sara found herself straddling her sister, their bodies impossibly close as they lay together, a small applicator delicately lining Ruth's eyes. Sara could viscerally remember looking down at Ruth, and her sister so close, her mind already so perverse. The memory, even though it was being generated in this interstitial gap between Now and noW, was somehow foggy. She couldn't remember who kissed who first, but it was Ruth that broke the kiss off.

The rest of the alterations were relatively minor. Ruth started doing her own makeup after that, and it became a constant thing once Miriam found her out. Starting on E two years ago, an awkward adult person going through teenage girl fashion phases, second puberty happening in the background, and the occasional awkward moment shared between them as Ruth became a woman. The past now resolved, Sara could open her eyes, and couldn't help but smile up at her new sister.