Not yet, damn it... My fingers twitched across the keyboard, refreshing the page yet again. Online tracking is a wonderful, convenient thing, but well has it been said that it also makes you crazy; turns out this is doubly true if you're already a little crazy from being cooped up in your house for weeks on end. I'd followed my package all the way from New Hampshire in five-minute intervals, except when I was asleep; not because I was that desperate to get it, so much as that I didn't have much else to occupy my mind lately, other than the thing I was trying to keep it off of.

It'd shown as "out for delivery" since 5:30 A.M., and it was now 6:15 P.M. "Scheduled" delivery was "before 7:00 P.M.," but I knew how good the local delivery apes were about punctuality and professionalism;^° they were prone to ding-and-dash even before the pandemic, and now it was nearly the end of their shift, to boot. I'd been keeping vigil all damn day because, if I didn't catch them at exactly the right moment, they'd slap a we-just-missed-you-we-swear tag on the door and scamper off...

^° (Not at all. Not even slightly.)

I glanced out the window, waiting to catch the tell-tale beam of headlights when a vehicle rounded the corner onto my street, but...nope. Nothing. I turned back to the computer, reflexively refreshed, and huffed in irritation. I wanted to put on some music, or zone out in a game, or anything, but I just knew that if I let my concentration lapse for so much as a minute, that's when they'd strike...

I scrolled through the new posts on my usual forums, keeping one eye on the window. So many movies getting canned or rescheduled or kicked to streaming due to the pandemic; well, that'd bother me more if there were anything in the pipeline I actually wanted to see... Over to webcomics I'd meant to catch up on, but it was hard to get drawn in when I kept glancing outside...

There! Headlights washed over the opposite wall; tires rolled across the concrete outside. I got up and sprinted to the door, ready to catch them the moment they set foot in my territory, but I could tell at a glance, through the window, that the vehicle parked next to the Bug wasn't a delivery van. I stopped, confused; who else would be coming to my house at this time of-

Oh. Right. I'd ordered out for dinner, so I wouldn't get distracted with cooking and miss my package. Restaurants were quick to expand their delivery/pick-up options once the lockdown hit, and even a lot of places that'd been dine-in only were getting into the game. It lacked in atmosphere, sure, but I was never much for that myself.

I donned my mask and opened the door, right as the delivery girl was about to ring the bell. We both started and jumped back a couple feet, and it took us a minute of awkward strangers-in-a-hallway dancing to sort out where our personal boundaries were; once we'd established a safe distance between us, the transaction could proceed.

"Uh, I have an order here for a Christopher Robbins?" she said, holding up a sack. I felt myself twitch slightly, but she gave no indication that she thought anything of it. No point in correcting her, I might never see her again anyway... I reached for the receipt she was holding out at arm's length, signed it, and we completed the handoff. She gave me the standard thank-you-and-good-evening and left.

I watched her go, thinking how uncomfortable even the most basic interactions had become the last few weeks. It was so strange seeing all your fellow human beings as a potential risk...I'd never been a particularly social animal,^° but that used to mean I could just tune people out if I had no business with them. Now I had to actively avoid them...

^° (Sporadic attacks of social urges due to pandemic-induced isolation notwithstanding.)

It was interesting that she seemed almost as ill-at-ease as I was, there. Was it just the human social instinct where acting awkward and uncomfortable makes everyone around you sympathetically resonate with that? Was someone in her household allergic to cats?

Or...was she genuinely uncomfortable with the idea? She wasn't risking quite as much of a change, but it'd definitely be an adjustment for her - and women might find the behavioral aspects just as disturbing, however blithe my neighbor was about the idea. And she could get more than just the ears and tail, I thought. How would it be to wake up every morning and see a face in the mirror that wasn't even human...?

I shoved that question to the back of my mind. It was cold out, and my dinner wasn't getting any hotter, corrugated box or no. I went in, poured a drink, and tucked in. I couldn't help but sigh; it was great that take-out options were expanding, but it wasn't always the same. I could've killed for a real quality hamburger about now, for example.

Pizza and pasta can be delivered in 10-15 minutes and be more or less right, but even in this day and age, nobody can keep a good hamburger in proper condition that long. Wrap it in paper and you squash it; insulate it too heavily and it gets soggy on its own steam; put it in a lighter box and it gets cold - and you can't just microwave it, or you're basically having McDonald's if it were made with actual ingredients. There's just no winning that one...

I felt like an ingrate as I idly batted a meatball around with my fork, watching it tumble and roll. It wasn't that I didn't like pasta, but it was easy to get so focused on what I couldn't have that the things I could lost their lustre. Part of me just wanted a hamburger, dammit... But this was pretty decent stuff. I twirled a forkful of spaghetti absent-mindedly; there was a loose strand, and I couldn't quite get it to snag on the tines, no matter which way I turned it. I had a brief urge to just bat the dangly end into place, but resisted; I'd get marinara on my fingers.

I was surprisingly hungry, despite the wistful hamburger cravings, and powered through half the pasta and all the garlic "cheesy bread" before I was somewhat sated. I glanced at the clock: 6:53. Yeah, no way were they coming, whatever their site said. I heaved a sigh, settled back in my chair, and took a long pull off my drink. Well, I had the evening free, at least; maybe I'd-

Out of nowhere, the doorbell rang. Oh damn it...! I lurched out of the chair, scrambled to my feet, stumbled and nearly tripped over myself sprinting out of the room, and got to the front door just in time to see a cherry-red glow of taillights^° wash over the opposite wall as the truck lumbered out onto the street, and found a notice stuck to the door cheerily informing me that they'd just missed me - or more correctly, I thought, that I'd just missed them.

^° (...damn it...?)

Gahhh. Well, nothing I could do now, though I briefly considered jumping in the Bug and running them down at the corner. And I'd frittered away the whole damn day for this, too... I groaned, shaking my head, and went inside. Might as well make the most of the remainder, now that I didn't have to keep an ear out; I put on some music and zoned out while I finished my dinner, letting it salve my irritation. Afterward, I took a minute to square away the dishes, returned to my desk, and fired up my MUD client.

I'd gotten into this back in college, for the same reason I sometimes played it at work: it helped fill my downtime but looked like work to the uninitiated. MUDs've always been fairly niche, and hadn't gotten less so over the years - these days, they were mostly a social hangout for furries and other fringe Internet subcultures - but my go-to was still fairly popular, and actually designed as a game.

I liked that, and especially the fact that it was much better balanced for solo play than modern MMORPGs. I didn't have to get involved with guilds or special events or anything else intended to coerce me into "social" behavior; I could just tromp around an imaginary world, living an imaginary life, tinkering with imaginary crafts, and tune out the stresses and concerns of reality...

...Or so I thought; but I tapped past the usual logon messages - reminders of upcoming events, the day's almanac for the magic-users out there, a notice about a mysterious scroll that'd turned up in my pack - to find myself standing in the town square with an argument going on around me that seemed to be approaching flamewar proportions. This was already unusual; the vibe here was much more low-key, good-natured, and relatively drama-free, which was another thing I liked about the place...

It took me several minutes of "overhearing" the public chat to figure out what was going on. Multiple players were arguing about someone else, who was absent but was being accused of breaking character (which wasn't a big deal, but was supposed to stay confined to private chat or designated areas) and dragging real-life drama into the game (which was considered to be in very poor taste, or even a bannable offense.)

The defenders countered that the accusers were being hypersensitive and reading too much into a perfectly legal use of game mechanics, that there'd been no real indication that it was a reference to current events, and that anyway it was every player's right to decide what to do with their character, subject to the official content policies. Both sides, by this point, were so deep into the argument that it was totally impossible to determine the context; I finally had to ask a fellow bystander what on Earth they were talking about.

As it turned out, the accused was one of the better-known regulars; not quite a pillar of the community, but somebody pretty much everyone knew of. Like myself, he played a crafting/artificing build; but he styled his character as a burly barbarian blacksmith, and cut about as recognizable a figure around the mercantile quarter of the city as one could in a text-based medium.

I didn't know him myself, but I kept up enough, "professionally," to know he'd recently hit the level cap. There'd been some speculation on what he'd go for when he "reincarnated" - meaning, in-game, that your character level was reset, but your stats were boosted substantially over a genuine first-level player, and you gained access to the advanced races and classes - but he hadn't indicated any plans to do so just yet.

To make a long story short, he'd been AWOL for a couple weeks, which was unusual for the regulars, and when he returned, he'd reincarnated as a female enchanter of the game's catfolk race. The new character bio had "her" as a petite catgirl witch who used to be a burly human barbarian until an experiment with wild magic went awry, resulting in a complete transformation.

I didn't know what to think, frankly. It wasn't hard to see why people might interpret that as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the effects of the virus, and coupled with the fortnight AFK, it certainly raised some questions about what might be going on with him IRL...

On the other hand, it seemed too planned-out to be something done spur-of-the-moment in reaction to outside events; the catfolk race wasn't one of the advanced ones, but it was a good fit for an enchanter build, with a reasonable intelligence score plus high dexterity and luck, and the boosted stats from reincarnating would mitigate most of its weaknesses.^°

^° (Aside from the unique susceptibility to certain kinds of herbs...)

Plus, the bit about "wild magic" was a clear attempt to make things lore-accurate - it was supposed to be a thing in-universe, and the "wizards" - as the devs and moderators liked to call themselves - were supposedly working on an update to implement it in-game. It'd be hard to make a case that something which was officially canon represented an unwelcome intrusion of reality^° into the game...

^° (Or what passed for "reality" these days, anyway.)

On the other other hand, the specificity of it was hard to ignore. In the middle of a global pandemic, with the world turned topsy-turvy and everyone talking about it, what were the odds that a "reincarnation" which just happened to match its effects and a revised bio that just happened to link the player's "before" and "after" states with a story about getting unexpectedly transformed would be a genuine coincidence? It didn't seem terribly plausible.

I even felt myself getting irritated - was it not enough for this stupid thing to upend every aspect of daily life and dominate public discourse out in the real world? Did it have to worm its way into my outlets for escapist fantasy? God, what next, were my favorite bands going to start recording themed charity singles? - but I tried to get my emotions under control. It wasn't fair to jump to conclusions like that, and as far as I could tell nobody had actually asked him/"her..."

At any rate, it wasn't much longer before one of the "wizards" showed up on the scene. They preferred to take a playful approach to moderation, and ultimately all involved were slapped with a minor curse that rendered anything they said in chat as comic gibberish. That was the end of it for the moment; probably they'd have a talk with them in private later, but that was none of my concern.

I left town and headed down a quiet back road towards a favorite spot to gather materials. My mood had soured a bit at having real-world drama dragged into what was usually such a nice space to just relax and forget about the real world, but it'd pass; I just needed to get out away from things for a bit, mellow out, get lost in my usual activities, and...

...oh, right. I'd forgotten about the mysterious scroll, in all the hubbub. I checked my inventory and indeed, there it was. This was how the "wizards" usually rolled out their announcements; there was a notice board in the town square, but a lot of people (myself included) didn't bother checking it.

I opened it and was informed that the update they'd been working on was finally out of testing and into release. There was a short rundown of the new features plus a list of minor fixes, but given the circumstances, I was mostly interested by the part where the "wild magic" system was finally part of the game mechanics. Not that it was something I'd been holding my breath for, but maybe it might prove useful for enchanting...?

Basically, it was another approach to spellcasting with the potential for much more powerful effects, but much less predictability. Normally, spell failure for magic-users meant nothing happaned; or with a really critical failure, it might blow up in their face. But according to the lore, when you invoked raw, wild magic even successes weren't necessarily free of surprises, and with failures anything might happen to you...

Obviously, in-game that'd be limited to whatever the developers felt like implementing, but they were a creative bunch, and the rumors of possible consequences in the lore ranged from accidentally teleporting to a desert island to having your treasured armor set exchanged for a frog costume to your component atoms being scattered across the entire universe to turning into-

I stopped, glanced a little further down, blinked, and looked again. There, at the end of the message, was something that, I realized with a sigh, would never have been necessary six months ago:

Trigger warning: involuntary transformation.