The Pink Tide

Sorry for the return to slightly smaller text on this one. It got REALLY out of control, I actually deleted like two entire pages worth of text for this to make it fit. It was too late to go in and resize or fix the layout, so I opted for Size 10 font to get it all into the caption area. Expand to see it, but you might want to stick to the text here in the description.

This was meant to be a short, sci-fi caption but again, it RAPIDLY got out of hand and took a turn for the romantic because I'm a big softy sometimes. Hope you enjoyed it.

TEXT.

“Attention. Attention. Pink Tide incoming. All non-changees please exit the water. Repeat, Pink Tide incoming. All individuals not registered to change please exit the water” The bored announcer said over the beach’s PA system. Only a handful of people rushed for the shoreline, while several hundred remained in the warm water just off the Florida coast.

The Pink Tide. It was called that for the abundance of strange, newly discovered algae that had suddenly appeared in Earth's oceans. It was harmless, for the most part, even less environmentally damaging than the Red Tide, but the catch was that whatever was caught in the Pink Tide experienced a sudden and immediate change in gender! Imagine the surprise of hundreds of thousands of beach goers and ocean enthusiasts when a slightly off-color but otherwise normal wave washed over them and turned them into a man...or a woman! Scientists determined that the Pink Tides were caused by ancient, prehistoric bacteria being released in the Arctic regions by global warming and glacier melting. There were several long, boring research papers published on it, the first of it was that it was related to helping ancient amphibian and reptilian species maintain a population balance. But then the meteor hit Mexico and killed the dinosaurs and threw the planet into a ice age and the bacteria all got sealed up and buried. Luckily the effects didn't seem to be permanent and was more akin to an acute 'allergic reaction'. To everyone's relief, the affected individuals returned to their natural genders after a year or two (the longevity of the changes seemed to coincide with length of exposure to the algae), but if you were exposed to a Pink Tide while you were changed...you were stuck that way. Men would stay women, women would stay men, if you didn't let the 'allergic reaction' fade normally then you were stuck as your new gender for the rest of your life! And scientists learned how to track and predict where each new Pink Tide was going to hit, eliminating the threat to all but the ignorant and unprepared. But these discoveries took time, and for many, the revelation came too late and they were 'cursed' to spend the rest of their lives as the wrong gender. But for some...Well, it was a blessing in disguise. So many people that had been born the wrong gender, or come to feel that they were in the wrong skin (and some who were just curious) flocked to the beaches where the Pink Tides were going to hit, voluntarily transforming into the opposite sex! Corporations and other businesses made a fortune off of it, as usual, but it made so many unhappy people happy to give up hundreds or thousands of dollars to finally feel at ease with themselves. Big Pharma once again made bank off the desperation of people in need, but the results were worth the money spent.

And then there were cases like Anne and Grant. Both had been men before the Pink Tide, and both had been affected by it. Anne had been Trans, and she had been thrilled to finally be in the right body; loving her feminine curves, her long hair, big blue eyes and of course, her new boobs and butt. All things that she couldn't afford before, the transition medications and surgeries far beyond her meager income. But careful personal research on the Pink Tides had led her to discover a small cove in Oregon that would experience the phenomenon. She had dropped everything to get there and had thrown herself into the cold waters of the Pacific to wait for the Tide to give her the body she dreamed about. And Grant? Grant simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was simply a fisherman from a nearby town, and a freak wave and his own clumsiness had toppled him out of the boat right as the Pink Tide had begun. He nearly drowned in his suddenly too-large clothing and the sudden weakness in his body, his vision obscured by hair and his centers of gravity thrown off by the swelling in his chest and rear. He was confused by his high pitched screams of terror and had wondered who the woman was, and where she had come from. Tragedy was averted though. Anne had witnessed Grant falling out of the boat and begin flailing in the water. She knew how to swim in the ocean and had bravely grabbed hold of Grant's body and pulled him, well, her to shore despite struggling with her own changed proportions. The two had laid in the sand, panting in their new voices before Grant's inevitable freakout occurred.

That had been a year ago. And in that year, Anne and Grant, now Grace, had become very close. Anne had put everything she had in getting to Oregon, including walking off her job. And Grant, unprepared to be a woman, needed someone to help him adapt to his new, if temporary life. The two had reached an agreement; Anne could live with Grant in the nearby town...If she promised to get a job, help pay rent, and of course, help him with his new 'woman problem'. Anne had, of course, accepted the offer, after all she abandoned her old life to start this new one, but changing genders didn't mean you got a free pass for the rest of your life. The two new woman had moved in together and Anne had gotten a job as a barista, while Grant struggled with the new social difficulties of being a very small, but attractive woman working in construction. Eventually he'd been forced to take an office job to get away from the harassment, and over the year had been coming to terms with the idea of being a 'administrative office assistant', aka a secretary. Anne was making sure she had enough money to make the next Pink Tide in order to lock in her new dream body and Grant was staying as far away from the ocean as possible until he turned back to normal. A year wasn't that long, right?

But what neither had prepared for was the romance. Turns out that being Trans and being an actual woman was...a little more challenging than Anne had thought. She nodded her own coach to help her through the changes, and what she eagerly learned she passed on to Grant; who refused to leave the house they now shared once he was home from work. But learning about feminine hygiene, then teaching it to someone else had gradually formed a connection beyond desperation. Shopping for new clothes, synching up their new cycles and enduring the pain together, finding out just how much their new hormones were changing them…And how they were not. Neither Anne nor Grant, now Grace, seemed all that surprised when Grace slipped her hands into Anne’s on the walk home from her first night out as a woman…Or when they both slept in the same bed and experienced sex as the opposite gender for the first time. It took a long time for Grant to accept being Grace, and she still wasn’t used to her new body…But time had a way of mending all wounds and creating something new in their place. But the biggest challenge of their new relationship was just on the horizon as the next Pink Tide was announced. But the two had refused to fully commit to their feelings until they were both standing, knee deep, in the warm waters of the Florida Keys. Anne had always planned for this, but Grace had been far more conflicted. It was clear to each other that they were deeply in love, but Grace still had trouble accepting that she was a woman…Even though she had come all this way with Anne.

“Well, it’s almost time….Listen, Grac-Grant, you…you don’t have to do this. I’ll still love you even if you are a man again! And you can find a girlfriend! A REAL one!” The girl in the red bikiki and denim cut-off vest said when the announcement ended, giving her girlfriend a small, fragile little smile. Anne didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few moments, but she’d made up her mind that she would be at peace with whatever happened.

The other girl, wearing a pink and white blouse that revealed a fair amount of cleavage, was silent for a long moment, her big, brown eyes staring out at the slowly changing water. Grace looked behind her at the very nearby shore, and then stared into her partner’s gorgeous blue eyes. “No” She finally said, “No I want to do this. And I already HAVE a real girlfriend. You. You saved me, from the ocean, and then from everything else that happened. So many others never got lucky enough to learn how to be a woman…with the woman they love”

Despite the pink water racing at them and the unstable footing of the sand beneath them, Grace dropped to one knee and Anne felt the air leave her lungs.

“Anne, when the Tide comes in and makes us both women for the rest of our lives…Will you spend the rest of that life with me? As…wife and wife?” grace looked up into Anne’s big blue eyes and gave her one of her awkward ‘still figuring out these big lips’ lopsided grins.

“Aww, baby!”Anne squealed, her eyes immediately filling with tears as she pressed herself against the busty busom of her beloved. The tide pulled out and the water changed from a dull green to a off-pink as a wave formed and rose in front of them.

And as the Pink Tide crashed to shore, washing over the hundreds of people eager to become their true selves for the rest of their lives, Anne and Grace kissed, one year to the day they had met, now girlfriends, and lovers, for life.