Story: Centuries Woman

Centuries Woman

 

 

 

Ellen. She decided that she would be called Ellen this time. No real reason, she just hadn't used that name before. She studied her new body in the 3-way mirror, it was in perfect condition. As always she would have to live with it as it got older and her breasts sagged but right now they stayed where they were supposed to.

She rubbed her flat tummy and then turned around to admire the firmness of the buttocks, and the curves were to die for. Yes, this body would do quite well. The auburn hair on her head was silky and softly fell across her shoulders, in contrast to the gray stringy hair she had grown used to. This might be one of the best bodies she had ever gotten from the process.

A whole new life, but starting the with a nice piggy bank she had accumulated over the past two hundred years, she had plans to make. Still naked, she left the spacious bathroom and entered the expansive main room and crossed the bar that separated the kitchen. She took one of the bottles from the wine chiller next to the fridge and then she took a glass from the cabinet above the bar.

She poured the red liquid slowly, thinking of her next move. Should she buy an island and spend her new youth on the beach, living it up? It would get old after a while, it usually did. Two hundred years of work and play hadn't really amounted to more than a nice fortune. Ellen, she thought, was kind of a boring name, come to think of it.

It was hard to remember her first life. It hadn't lasted very long. Life was brutal and short for many in those days of the frontier. Native Indians had raided the town, burned the barns and taken off with horses, cattle, whiskey and some of the girls. Rosa, she had been called Rosa back then, remembered seeing her father killed and scalped before someone grabbed her from behind.

She had lost her doll when she was forced down on her belly, the attackers had their way with her for a long time. All she could do was stare at her doll and try not to see past it to the lump that had once been her father. She was left for dead, and Rosa was dead, because her next memory was waking up and looking totally different.

She named herself Ruth. She found herself adopted by a tobacco merchant and his wife. She attended a good school, something Rosa never really got to do. Ruth would become a nurse for the US Army before the British came and sacked Washington DC. She had been evacuated on a ship but before the ship really reached the sea a British ship had taken it.

The prisoners aboard the ship weren't released until a week later. Ruth treated those who became sick as best she could, even the British crew that had captured them. Some of the other Americans grumbled that these men had barely fed them in all that time and why was she helping them? What else could she do?

She found herself in Georgia and penniless. Ruth took the first position she was offered and rode in a carriage all the way to a plantation. The War of 1812 and the War with the Creek nation were over, so it must have been 1815. Her employer was called Master Jones, he owned rice fields and a few dozen slaves.

On arrival the foreman of the plantation said he had caught one of the slaves, a young male, stealing a piglet. The boy said the piglet had escaped through a small hole in the fence and he was just trying to catch Master's pig to return it.

The boy had been wounded trying to catch the pig, his leg was bleeding. Ruth walked right through the men trying to decide what to do with the possible thief and started tending the wound. The boy was as shocked as the men were.

“Where is the piglet now?” Master Jones asked

“I put it back in the pen, sir” the foreman answered “What do you want me to do about the thief?”

Just then a loud squealing pig ran by.

“You can fix the fence on the pen.” he told the foreman, slightly amused. Then he turned to the boy “Think you can catch the runaway again?”

Her employer wasn't angry. Even if he saw the slaves as property, he knew how valuable and expensive they were with the ban on importing slaves. “You'll have to forgive the foreman, he's recently back from fighting the Creeks and the British. So he's a bit rough around the edges.”

“You probably would say I'm too soft around the edges.” Ruth had answered.

Ruth married the son of Master Jones, but became upset and withdrawn after years of being unable to bear him a child. Finally they adopted, then they adopted again. They ended up with two sons and two daughters. The last two had been a package deal, they were real brother and sister, their parents had been unable to care for them.

When the War Between The States began, Ruth was a kindly grandmother who sat in a rocking chair on the back porch keeping the company of slaves. Her husband had long since agreed to keep the slave families intact and to teach them reading and writing. Runaway slaves from other places were often hidden there until they could be brought to the coast and put on a boat to the north.

After the war she had placed much of her assets in property far from the plantations, she bought land in the cities. She was sure the value would increase, someone had to rebuild what General Sherman had destroyed. He might have been fighting for the Union, but he was a devil nonetheless.

A newfangled trust and a paper company assured that her property was safely invested. She had planned to leave it to her children and grandchildren but she fell in front of a train. When she awoke in a new, young body she was in shock for a while, just sitting against a tree in the woods. Her old body and the clothes it had worn were nowhere to be found.

She found the satchel she had been carrying though, in it was a thin summer dress and sandals she had bought for her granddaughter Cecilia. It fit well enough. The satchel also contained all the documents and the shares for the paper company, meaning all that property and investment. All she needed was a new name.

Samantha, she called herself, had it rough for a little while. She was always scared that she would be arrested for stealing her own company. No one else had known about it, so she was safe. After a while she began to feel more like a real person.

Blond hair. Where had that come from? The blue-eyed yellow-haired girl looking back from the mirror contrasted so much with the old Ruth. How could she have become a different person? That was followed by an emotional roller-coaster, euphoria, depression and lots of alcohol.

Samantha had been the adjustment period. Of course, she didn't know if it would happen again. She was young and didn't really dwell on that. She wasn't going to test it and tempt fate, that was for sure.

It all seemed to go well until at a rooftop party to celebrate the turn of the century Samantha fell off the top of a tall building.

Anna was next. She had already set up the identity in advance, she would be Samantha's niece for the purpose of reclaiming the fortune she had saved up to then. She could hardly believe that she had been given another life. She started to wonder if there was purpose? Was there something she was supposed to do?

Anna would move west. St. Louis was her home for a while, but she found no real point there. After a short time she moved on and on, traveling all over. Her money was well-invested and she still owned many commercial properties that were giving her a big income. She never lacked for male companionship if she wanted it.

Her traveling and partying took a toll on her and she settled down outside of the cities, on a mountain ranch. Occasionally she and a single older gentleman from down the hill would spend time together like two lonely souls.

Anna would die in an accident with a horse just before the outbreak of World War 2. That is when she became Lisa, moving to a nameless private island in the Caribbean for some time to be alone and figure out what she wanted to do with her new life. That's when she found the German sailor washed up on the beach, she nursed him back to health and he became the man in her life. Whether she liked it or not.

It was two years before US sailors dropped by the island and arrested Heinz. Lisa was pretty broken by then and she had actually fallen for the abusive man. There had been plenty of nights where he was gentle and she chose to dwell on those. She sold the island and moved to the desert, became an alcoholic again (there was a pattern, almost) and painted as a hobby.

Anna lasted until some time during the Vietnam War. When she saw herself in the mirror again, she was blond again. She just called herself Mary and was surprised by the large bosom on this body, maybe she could become a model or go into show business. She could self-finance a film without any real problem.

Instead she had gone to college. It was something that she had thought of but hadn't done since Ruth became a nurse, and that wasn't really the same as college. As Mary her personality became a little more conservative, she was into reading literature. When she met Alexander she knew there was something between them.

They married after college and within a decade he was a broke drunk and she was an abused wife. Her fortune, thankfully, had been hidden far from his ability to find it. She left him and moved across the country to one of her properties and tried to forget him. Mary found a new man to fulfill her needs and he was a former Marine sniper, who was well prepared when Alexander showed up. Stan was locked up for murder and Mary was a free woman again.

She moved to Florida and became a real estate agent, as her public face. Mary spent time with several men and an occasional woman, but she never fell for anyone. In her later years she wondered again if there was a point to her lives. Why was this happening? She started making all kinds of plans, trying to see if any of them hit a nerve but other than laughing out loud to the idea of “world domination”, nothing struck her.

It was now the internet age and she looked in vain for other people to claimed to be like her, a few did but they all turned out to be obvious nutcases. With everything well prepared in advance, Mary took her own life by jumping from a tall building.

Now she was Ellen. World domination didn't seem funny now. It made as much sense as anything else she's been through. She finished her wine, it was time to put on some clothes and meet the mercenary she wanted to hire. Time to put her billions to good use in a chaotic world while the money was still worth something.

They would start in the poorest third world country and spread out from there. Mary had bought the salvage company and won the rights to tear up a couple of naval vessels, but she had plans for those and the Navy liaison who was sent to make sure the dismantling too. He was young and fit, hence the new body, she would have no trouble seducing him and keeping him quiet afterward.

Ellen smiled as she slid into the restaurant booth across from the man who was representing the mercenary organization. “We're supposed to be dating.” she told him, reaching out and feeling his biceps that were stretching the short sleeve of the black t-shirt.

“I agree with the terms as set forth from your side.” she told him quietly as she held the stubbly cheek and pulled him toward her lips. Stopping short she whispered into his ear “I will be a very grateful queen...”

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