.. you'll never mind getting a bit dirty under the hood!
Had this picture in a caption setting for quite some time, but I wasn't able to get a grip on how to write the actual story, other than I had the ending line already, "once a grease monkey, always a grease monkey." I had a few hours to be creative this morning, so I pulled it up and tried to figure out how I could get John/Jeannie into this situation. After about 3-4 minutes, I was thinking, "what if he broke down in a fancy car and had to walk to a town .. with only women in it?" Then, the name Amazonia came to me, of course due to the Amazons not living with men. It just HAD to be magical to keep men from entering, right? Or perhaps magical in that it kept men from staying men there!
Once I had my hook, I went to work writing it, and yeah, I definitely shorted the transformation itself. Most of us know how this works by now though, and I'm not usually one that cares about the process, and I'm much more interested in that moment of time the picture captures. I guess in a way, this is a story where you don't find a job, the job finds you. I always hear that "a job that you enjoy doing, is never work." It is obvious that he is going to have a lot more fun in his new life than in the pressures of his old one, in that he never got the satisfaction he used to get now that his time was worth more, so he had to buy his way to happiness with the cars he wanted instead of restoring them himself.
Yeah, I know! Another friggin' happy ending, even though it was forced upon him.
I also know that I probably stole the idea somewhat from a set of stories from a LONG time ago on Fictionmania, which had a town in the middle of nowhere that had the old Gods of Greek decent there, and you'd get pulled over for some sort of speeding or crime, Officer Mercury .. and you'd be judged and turned into someone in the town. Just found it .. "Ovid" and it is by The Professor. There are 17 stories in the arc and they are all fun to read, even though I sort of spoiled it for you already!