When they arrived in Germany two days later, Tori opened the car door and let Justin out. He was still handcuffed, but he had grown to simply accept it.

"Come walk in the forest with me," said Tori, locking the Bugatti after parking it in the gravel off the road.

Justin looked around the woodsy area. They were headed towards the edge of a forest, the Bugatti a long walking distance away. It was near a long countryside road lined with abandoned farmhouses and a few mom-and-pop convenience stores. There was nobody around; the closest person would be at least ten kilometers away.

Justin hesitated, listening to Tori's footsteps stepping over small twigs and grass. Though he was bigger and tougher in build and size, he felt vulnerable with Tori and didn't like it. "Why should I? What are you going to do with me?" he asked, feeling the last of his confidence drain as the early afternoon sun started dwindling into twilight.

They had spent last night in the Bugatti instead of a hotel room since they were really close to the border. When Justin had woken up from sleep, he was reminded of the Ace Hood rap song's lyrics, "I woke up in the new Bugatti." Never thought I'd actually live out that song, he thought, amazed.

Tori turned, her hair fluttering in the small wind. She changed clothes in the car without any shame or embarrassment, Justin finding it hard to look away though he did so out of politeness. He realized she had a certain dangerous beauty about her. There was something classy yet an ethereal element about her. It must be the glitter, he thought, wondering once again why she sparkled so much. She didn't seem the type to wear flashy clothing, as evidenced by her business career wardrobe. Today she wore a light blue shirt and jean leggings with brown boots. It's nice to see her wear something different, Justin thought, thinking she looked cute in that outfit.

"You're the murderer, and you're worried about me hurting you?" Tori shook her head and started to gracefully walk back towards him.

Justin took a step back towards the Bugatti. "Save your breath," he said in a cold voice, getting defensive. "If it weren't for these handcuffs, I would've snapped your neck a long time ago."

Tori smiled a cruel, sadistic smile. "I'm stronger than a normal human," she said. "You wouldn't have made it to my neck before I broke one of your wrists."

She materialized her wings then, startling Justin as his jaw dropped ten meters. He gawked at her wings, an astonishing greyish white that, in rainy weather, would certainly give off the illusion of looking like mist or fog. Her skin shimmer increased to full brilliance, casting aside all façade of powder. Tori moved towards Justin with almost-instantaneous speed, stopping right in front of him and making him yelp and fall backward in astonishment.

He stared up at her as she stood over him in her full irangel appearance, looking almost like –

"Y-you're an angel," Justin stammered.

"No, not an angel: an irangel," Tori corrected him. "Irangel is the term I came up with to name former humans who became Iredescents. Iredescents are aliens from planet Iredescent. The Iredescent people look human, but they have wings and sparkly skin. Some of them might even be mermaids and mermen."

"No way," Justin breathed. This was way too much for him to take in. He was starting to think maybe this really was heaven and that Tori was an angel, not an alien called Iredescent.

Tori took the handcuffs off Justin, dropped them on the ground, and picked him up with little difficulty. Justin awkwardly held onto her, surprised that a woman was able to pick him up like that, and a gorgeous one at that. Tori lifted upward, making Justin gasp and cling tightly. He was almost too afraid to look down, but when he did, the view took his breath away.

They flew over the forest, the trees underneath them as their shadows passed above them. The shadow of Tori's wings astonished Justin more than the view. Tori reached a large clearing spotted with trees and landed on a thick tree branch that could support both their weight. Justin's eyes widened as he saw the glass building for the first time.

"What is this?" he asked, staring at the almost invisible building. It was as big as a school and had an opening on the top. It was mirror like and woodsy, with an elegant futuristic feel, made of glass material that was Iredescent invisible cloaking technology, a glass that was stronger than steel, hard as a diamond, shiny as quartz, smooth as the surface of a mirror, a glass that would never break. The glass building was unlike any building Justin had ever seen.

"My lab," Tori replied, dropping into the opening. Justin held tightly until Tori's feet landed on the floor, the opening shutting above them.

Justin let go and straightened, looking around the inside of the glass building. He saw a few rolling carts against the wall with neatly organized medical equipment on top. It looked like a small storage room that had an open ceiling as the entrance.

He walked further into a larger room with many beds. Each bed had different colored sheets, blankets, and pillows. For example, the first bed was a pastel brick red, the second a greyish light blue, the third a sage green, the fourth a dark purple, and so on. Those weren't cheap either; they all looked like they were made of high-quality Egyptian cotton material.

On the other side of the beds facing them was a frosted wall. It divided the transformation room from the multi-bed room. Tori allowed Justin to explore, standing in the hallway as he took the time to look around in both rooms. In the transformation room, there were four huge clear cylinders about three meters tall and one meter in diameter. Justin looked at them for a moment before going in the hallway. He checked out closets and then ventured in Tori's private office.

Tori had a rich deep brown office desk, a filing cabinet with glittery deep magenta stripes on them and the same color wood as the desk, an Ikea couch with a fold-out bed, and a small table with real flowers on them in a sparkly clear vase. There was a picture frame on the desk that caught Justin's attention. He picked it up and studied the picture of Nate and Tori on a mountaintop in Switzerland. It was taken while they were still dating. While they were still human.

"He your boyfriend?" he asked her, not quite sure how he felt about this personal part of Tori's life.

Tori stiffened, then said, "Ex."

Justin whistled and put the picture frame back. "My apologies, Tori. You still love him?"

She was silent for a moment before she said, "That's none of your business." She moved to the far end table where there were two wineglasses and poured herself a glass of Chardonnay.

Justin came over, looked at the bottle, and said, "You want real alcohol, try Jack Daniel's. Got any beer?"

"In the fridge," said Tori. She watched him go over to the kitchen where he got himself some Corona and frozen enchiladas.

"You do know Corona is shit beer, right?" he asked her before taking a sip and dumping it in the sink. "Tastes like piss."

Tori ignored him and got herself a bowl of ravioli. Justin heated up the enchiladas in the microwave and sat across from Tori at the kitchen table. It was a small holographic kitchen, simple in design, but had a fridge, microwave, pantry, a stove, oven, and cooking pots and pans hung over the wall.

They ate in silence for a while before Justin asked, "So you're not human? Like, at all?"

"I was human, then I turned myself into an irangel after I discovered Iredescent." Deciding to tell him everything, Tori told him how she discovered the file that heavily inspired and drove her to finding planet Iredescent, how she killed two Iredescents, studied them, did a tremendous amount of research, built the glass building and her mansion, stole/bought equipment to fashion them into cylinders, and finally became the first human to turn into an Iredescent.

As Justin listened in enraptured silence, Tori went on to show him the closet where she stored some of her most precious equipment, including the secret file, and the secret underground room where the two Iredescent bodies lay in individual carefully preserved glass cases. It reminded Justin of the fairytale Snow White in her golden glass casket, dead but in perfect condition, without any rot or decay. The two Iredescents were in the same kind of caskets he had always imagined Snow White would be in.

The Iredescent man was blond and very handsome. The Iredescent woman had long black hair and ivory white skin. Both had their eyes closed and a white medical sheet about the width of a filing folder laid horizontally across their suggested areas for privacy so they wouldn't be entirely naked. There was a bullet mark on the man's chest and another on the woman's abdomen right underneath the heart chamber. The wounds were cleaned but not bandaged.

Justin approached the dead Iredescents, studying them. He felt sad and somewhat reverent. "Did you kill them out of self-defense or selfishness?" he asked Tori, turning to look directly at her. There was a certain ice in his tone, as if he wanted her to confirm what he was thinking.

Tori met his eyes and didn't falter in her speech. "I had to bring them to Earth somehow. Using force was the only way."

"They were innocent people." Justin looked at once again at the Iredescents, then shook his head sadly. "You should've left the Iredescents alone. If they didn't want you to mess with them, you shouldn't mess with them."

Tori retaliated in self-justification. "I had made perhaps the most important discovery since the day mankind discovered the solar system. I wasn't going to leave without any proof of evidence. And the fact that they had wings intrigued me. I wanted to have wings too, so I – "

"So you killed two innocents just to become like them?" Justin walked around the glass cases. "You think you can do whatever you want just because you have money and power. I'm telling you, that's gonna destroy you someday."

The barrel of a gun suddenly faced him, a firm hand and a fierce looking face wielding it. It wasn't a cheap gun either; this was a powerful Smith & Wesson Magnum gun. Judging from her stance and the way Tori was holding it, he realized she knew how to handle it.

"This wasn't your first kill," Justin said quietly. "In fact, you've killed much more than I ever have in my lifetime."

Tori raised her head high, saying nothing. A long silence passed before she finally said, "Humans are so limited. If we were Iredescent instead of human, we could do so much more. And it's not just being able to lift cars like Superman."

Justin scoffed. "So that's your grand plan, to change the world by becoming superhuman? Is that what you intended, to turn me into an Iredescent too? What about your ex? I'm assuming he left you after you turned him into an Iredescent. Who else have you turned?"

"Just me and Nate," Tori replied. "I was the first and Nathan Shaw was the second. We were supposed to be a team, a start of something greater. But he disagreed with my dreams. He wanted to stay human and was upset when he became an Iredescent."

"Let me guess, you forced him to," said Justin.

"I had to," Tori inferred. "He had a broken back, damaged nerves, and he was in a coma for over a week. I had to restore him before – "

"Before he died or worse," Justin finished.

"Yes," Tori whispered, emotion leaking in her voice. "I love him, Justin. I wanted a future with him. I wanted us to marry and start a new generation of humanity. I wanted us to become a legacy."

Justin laughed without humor. "Let me guess, he had none of that. Just listen to you. If I didn't know you any better, I'd say you're crazy. Your fantasies of marrying your dream guy and having little cherubs with him needs to go. Nobody's perfect; even irangels and Iredescents aren't perfect. Despite what you think, Iredescents have flaws too. They aren't supposed to be this glorified being. I mean seriously, becoming a human-like alien being? Do you realize what you're doing?"

"Yes, and I choose to alternate humanity this way," said Tori. "I hated being human. So many restrictions and limitations. But as an Iredescent, there are so many possibilities. Who knows, maybe someday we might be able to teleport or discover immortality. Wouldn't that be something?"

"Why on earth would you want to be immortal?" said Justin, not liking where this was going. "As for the possibilities, I'd rather stay human."

"And continue to pay taxes and bills and struggle and be miserable for the rest of your life? We weren't meant to just pay bills and die. The Iredescents were onto something. I want to learn everything I possibly can about them, maybe live with them. So far, I can only become like them.

As Justin remained silent, Tori continued. "Just think about it, Justin. No more bad vision, no more fatigue, no more acne, no more aging. At eighty you'll look the same as you did as you did when you were a young adult. You'll become much stronger than you ever were as a normal human. You'll get to do things you would never have been able to do had you remained a human the rest of your life."

"What's wrong with being human?" Justin asked. "You have your reasons for being anti-human, but that's because you only see the negative side to being human. I see both the positive and negative." He started to head for the stairs, saying, "Those Iredescents did nothing to you, and you killed them for your own personal gain. If the federal authorities find out about this – "

Justin was suddenly flat on the floor, barely having the time to breathe when he got the wind knocked out of him during the fall. He smelled something that made him feel very weak and realized it was a smelling drug. He felt Tori pick him up and take him upstairs. She walked over to the transformation room where she placed him in a cylinder.

Before he could figure out what was going on, Justin felt a weird suction air strip him of his clothing as he was lifted up and suspended in air. A burning pain severed through him as various gases and liquids began to cover him entirely and forcibly seep into his skin. After about a minute, Justin abruptly passed out from the pain.

________________

Justin felt an awakening inside, prompting him to open his eyes. He felt like he had just been reborn; he was, in a way.

It was like the feeling you get after you take a shower. Refreshed was the word that came to mind. Justin sat up just as a certain brilliance shone at him like a spotlight. He shielded his eyes with his arm and noticed something different about it. He slowly moved his arm and looked at it in wonder.

His skin was sparkling. Literally.

I'm a dude, and I'm sparkling? Justin glanced at the rest of his body and realized everything was sparkly. Even the windowless room seemed to sparkle from the modern interior lighting.

He realized he was on a bed with sage green sheets and blankets. He was dressed in jeans and a plain white shirt. He was barefoot. There was a bowl of fresh hot steaming soup on the bedside table. A silver spoon lay on a small stack of napkins. There was a water bottle on the table.

Justin got up and walked past the other beds towards the bathroom at the end. He turned the lights on and locked the door, staring at himself in front of a mirror. His eyes and hair stayed the same, though the sight of his wings startled him. They were crude, navy blue and black that glimmered darkly when they faced the light a certain way. Slivers of white latticed in stripes between the vastness of the navy blue and black, giving it some hint of a light to him that was overshadowed by the dark. Justin furled and unfurled them, trying them out as he attempted to get used to them. No wonder all the rooms in this building are so big and spacious, he realized. It's so our wings won't get cramped.

Wings. I have wings. Tori turned me into an irangel. Justin felt his hands clench into fists as he burst out of the bathroom in fury, storming past the beds and grabbing the doorknob to fling or push it open.

It was locked. Justin angrily beat his fist against it and went to inspect the cylinders facing the room, figuring he might as well check out his new prison.

There were fifty beds, some all in a row lined against the wall, others bunked on top of the other beds. Justin just stared at them, shocked. She planned to turn a lot of people into irangels. Like a whole army of them, he thought, realizing now the full extent of her intent.

Each bed was a different color and different shade of color, in order to distinguish the one from the other, and to sort of personalize each one, since it would belong to an individual irangel. There were nightstands and chest of drawers next to each bed. There were curtain walls dividing each bed for privacy. But it still wasn't private enough, Justin thought. It's like we're in the military or a prison. He decided prison was more accurate in his situation.

The cylinders were in the room opposite from what Tori called the transformation room. The wall separating the cylinders from the beds was like opaque frost. Justin could see the shapes of the cylinders, but he couldn't see them clearly. The frosted wall was very thick and made of a durable material that didn't break easily. There was very minimal noise, so if for example there were to be a loud party in the cylinder room, Justin would only be able to hear a small echo.

The cylinders looked very much like Bacta tanks from Star Wars, but dark and futuristic looking. The entire room the cylinders were in reminded Justin of a 1930s Frankenstein lab. It had a dark, cold feel to it with some noir touch.

Justin stood facing the cylinder room for a moment, then he went to take a seat on the bed he woke up on. Realizing he was hungry, he started eating soup. It was chicken noodle with buckwheat and tiny sliced carrots/onions in it. Hearty and healthy, he thought. And very good. He was beyond the thought that Tori might poison him. Why would she turn him into an irangel just to kill him? She wanted him alive.

A certain fury burned inside him as he sought not to become the next Nate. He would not, would not, be her next. I don't even think of her that way. Now that I'm as strong as her, I can finally take her down. He tried again and again to break through the door, but it was like punching at an iron wall.