karaiwulf

Heya, its been a whole year!  Can't believe that.  Time really flies away.  Anyway, this chapter has been sitting around collecting dust.  I'll get some more out when I can, which means I guess this project is still technically on hiatus.  I do have some more chapters queued up for editing, and I've just about finished another tonight, though, so maybe not much longer.

Vivian:

The world warped.

First it was pain.

Then it wasn't.

I had form.

I could feel its changes.

Its horrifying and very uncomfortable changes.

An instant later, it stopped.

I knew I shouldn't have synced my physical and virtual bodies, but I really wanted to see for myself.

I figured my implant couldn't get a read on my constantly volatile form and flipped out.

Reminder to ask Lucere about that.

I opened my eyes and colours pierced into me. I couldn't describe the impossibility I bore witness to; it would be like teaching a housecat technology.

Anyway my headache came back in full and I groaned. "What in the fuck did I do that for?"

With a fuzzy head I sat up. Chromatic impossibility aside, the room looked mostly the same, save the pretty woman slumped on a chair to my right.

Her shoulder-length hair looked ever-so-slightly-off-white with several highlights of yet another impossibility, framing a rounded face. Her eyes glowed a blue, familiar, yet alien.

"You passed," said Lucere.

I snapped my gaze to her, eyebrows raised. "Passed what?"

The melody in my voice signaled me an interrupt. "Wait. What the hell?" I looked down at two small lumps that were not there before. "What. The. Hell."

The girl beside me groaned, her exhaustion evident. "You needed an avatar boss."

"So you just dropped me into a woman's-" Somehow I still had a modicum of awareness. "Wait. Boss?"

I wasn't her boss, was I?

"Yeah," Lucere replied with her own fatigue, "You are her immediate officer. We mentioned you were an officer, right?"

"Yeah," I whispered, "I just didn't think it was gonna be an immediate type of thing." I had no clue how to lead. Never had I worked a single day in that kind of capacity.

Before I flipped out again I did the smart thing and plopped back down with my hands on my forehead. "What's with the new colours?"

"Probably messed up a setting," my I-guess-an-employee said, "I was really rushed for time; fix it yourself."

I nodded and surfed through the menus to adjust my visual input processing. Before I knew it the world was normal again.

"Thank you," I said, realizing I hadn't earlier.

"Whatever; I'm Eilidh. Designation of, um... I guess tactical something-or-other."

"I'm Talon," I said for the first time with the new voice, "Shit. That doesn't sound right. Let's go with Vivian."

Where did that come from? Had I been thinking about it without realizing? Was my brain subverting me again?

Lucere laughed herself back awake. "Vivian... wow that fits really nicely. I figured you would go with something like Tali: keep the first letter a T."

I grew far too aware of myself and dropped my head straight down. I was a guy. Right? Guys weren't supposed to blush. Even if I looked like a girl.

I saw my thighs and lost myself yet again. They looked really soft. Before my brain could catch up my hand reached and bliss alit my tips.

"Woah," I mouthed.

"Are you good there?" Eilidh asked. I looked up to see her wearing a bemused look.

I felt my pulse in my face for a bit before I answered. "Um, I'm not sure."

"Looks like you aren't really in the headspace to build much of anything," said Lucere, "Do you want to keep that avatar or start on one a little more what you're used to?"

"I'll keep this one!" Did- did I say that?

"Like being a woman?" Eilidh asked.

"I-" I wasn't sure. This was all so fast and I got a say in none of it. Even my brain worked against me here.

I left my inner panic for a moment to see Lucere touching unseen menus. In an instant, we had returned to the cyan-sanded beach.

"I'm going to go join the others, Vivian; please feel free to come join the party once you feel you're ready." Lucere walked toward a pop-up tent. "Eilidh, feel free to do whatever you like. Though, your boss looks like she could use the company."

In the idea that Lucere would just abandon me I found only sorrow.

I looked to Eilidh and realized her hair was a pretty blue maybe a shade darker than the sand underfoot.

Eilidh locked her gaze with mine, her eyes alight, a faint green. Seeing past her magic I found deep hazel interspersed with blue, green, and gold.

A pulse of heat radiated from me and electrified my skin.

"Wow," I whispered, feeling tears in my eyes, "I'm sorry; this is all really new to me and I'm having a hard time dealing with all of these new feelings."

She shrugged. "Its fine; just do whatever you need. Cry, talk, sit there brooding like a maniac. Whatever, really. I'll be here for you. Obviously I can't tell you how to figure yourself out, but I'll offer what help I can."

I mumbled a thank you and leaned against the cliff towering overhead, feeling thankful to have a friend.

Eilidh sat next to me and fiddled with something out of sight. We sat in comfortable silence, despite my tears welling up, despite my thoughts. This body felt so much more comfortable than the guy I had been less than an hour ago.

It was odd, thinking about it; the guy was almost more cage than person. I still wasn't sure what to think of that.

The beach, Eilidh, it all faded away as I sat there, lost in thought.

This was a peculiar problem. I never thought it would feel so good to be a girl. Sure, I'd taken some trips in virtual reality before, but just seeing a girl when I looked down was a whole lot different than this. And this felt so very right.

Maybe they'd been right. "I am trans?"

"Maybe?" Eilidh replied, very much to my surprise.

I squeeked and mumbled in embarrassment "Fuck. Don't startle me like that."

She gave a rather cryptic stare. "Wow. That was the most adorable thing I've ever seen."

"Adorable?" I'd never been called adorable. It felt... nice? Certainly felt better than if I'd been called weak or childish for not being manly enough. My face risked permanent redness if people just kept telling me stuff like this. And I probably risked addiction.

Eilidh smiled and nodded. "You look like you're feeling a lot more comfortable. Wanna join the party?"

I resigned myself to fate. "I guess I'm just going to try this out for a while. No need to put a label on anything yet, so yeah; let's go join the others." I might as well, right? Maybe it would be good for me.

I got up and brushed the sand from my butt. Feeling my hips and butt so viscerally made me faulter. They were a lot wider than I'd expected. And softer, too. I tried putting it out of my mind.

One deep breath later I followed Eilidh to the tent in the middle of the alcove. Looking around I noticed a lot of people lounging in beach chairs, others resting atop towels, more playing volleyball, and yet more chattering amiably.

I estimated something like fifty or sixty people here, but wasn't certain. Despite that, and much to my surprise, I felt no aversion to the crowd.

I noticed I was confused.

I wouldn't question a good thing until later when I was alone, though. Well, for whatever value of 'alone' that my implant would allow. The very same implant that malfunctioned me into a weird painful void.

So what if I misconfigured it? It was still super dangerous!

To be fair to it, most new technology is dangerous. Like, very dangerous.

For example, in the late parts of the last millenium, humanity decided to put all of its most important systems on the net without care for security.

Only later did we realize how insane that idea actually was.

In a virtual world nineteen decades later, we still hadn't recovered from that mess. If anything, security had become at least an afterthought; an improvement, but my stomach sunk nonetheless.

When I finally entered the tent an androgynous voice greeted me. "Hi. Xela Melrose, Technology Officer and massive pain in the ass to heterosexuality."

"Hi," I replied sheepishly, "Newly minted whatever and not even sure what heterosexuality means anymore."

"Oh," fae responded, "its like, strai-"

"I know," I interjected, "Just, not sure if its applicable to anything I understand."

Fae laughed. "Ah. Well in that case, come by my 'what the fuck is gender, anyway?' fun house later. We're gonna have cake and break your idea of gender. Either that or bore the hell out of you, one of the two."

I wondered if fae wes joking. I couldn't tell and wasn't entirely sure.

I nodded. "I'm not really sure I'm ready for something like that. This is already a hard enough week."

Fae hummed with comprehension. "You must be Tactical Officer Young. Maybe next time then. How are you enjoying the new digs?"

"Its complicated," I admitted. Wow, was I really talking with someone I'd never met about this stuff?

"How do you feel about the absolutely stellar body you have waiting for you in the real?"

I blinked. "Um, I know I have horns, but why don't you enlighten me?"

Fae feigned a look of horror. "Oh shit, you don't even know? Goddess above, you're gorgeous! A step above anything we've ever seen before. Your perfect self is something that nobody else could have thought of. I mean, hell, your wings are this beautiful ice blue like morning frost covering an indigo bloom. And your skin is this beautiful mottling of..."

I tuned out faer ramblings about my body. It was neat, but those warm pulses were growing stonger along side my steadily rising anxiety. I did not want a panic attack right then and there.

Needing to make a clean break, I mumbled, "I'll catch you later I need to find Lucere."

Exit stage literally anywhere else.

Fae nodded and pointed toward the water. There were a few people and I figured one of them might be Lucere.

"Thanks!" With that I walked right off in the please-don't-scare-me direction with a few people in my path. They was nobody I recognized and I'd lost Eilidh in my conversation prior. She was somewhere, no idea where, but hopefully with Lucere.

I arrived to a familiar voice. "Hey, wasn't expecting to see you here."

I turned to Tamaki's smile and nodded.

"You look lost," she said in notes of sympathy, "Anything I can help you with?"

Curiousity took my larynx. "How'd you recognize me?"

"I get alerts when implants go into emergency mode," she replied, "I got a brief rundown of events and saw the new avatar." She paused, apparently noticing the worry on my face. "Only team members can upload new configurations when an implant fails like that but I still have to see what was done in case one of our own is malicious."

"No cause to believe that I hope," I said, asking a question really, but not wanting to be that direct.

She shook her head. "We've had a few cases where demimages directly threatened team members' lives, but never any issues where anyone uploaded faulty code. Implants haven't failed all that frequently. Emergency mode on those things only happens once every few years across the whole network."

I giggled. "Oh, so I really fucked up then."

Again she shook her head and smiled. "Not really; normally the implant can use predictive analysis to analyse the DNA structures as they're changing, but it appears yours isn't registering as-"

A long pause.

"As what?" My anxiety swelled, catalyzed by concern. My inner boiler wasn't looking good.

Tamaki's voice grew serious. "Let me preface this by saying you are obviously a living person and we will always treat you as such, but your DNA no longer appears to be registering as human. We've had some of the genetics experts looking into it, but your DNA is starting to look more demonic in nature."

"Okay, so I'm no longer even human?" On the surface I was surprisingly calm about this. Underneath, however... the boiler popped. Violently. If I didn't find somewhere to be alone and fast, I'd be a mess in front of all these people.

"We're not entirely sure; we're looking into it. There's a lot of overlap and a lot of fuzzy stuff. We're working on it."

Enter manic sarcasm. "Well fuck Vivian, jeez, its not enough to dump gender and sexuality in your lap; before you've had time to process that, let me also dump humanity in your lap! And don't forget the entire concept of literal magic. As a treat, you can also deal with the ridiculously advanced technology that I've implanted in your head without any warnings! Yeah, you should be able to handle all that no issues, right?"

System Error: Expected "Anxiety" object, received "Rage"

Segmentation fault