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2. Making Changes

  After a few minutes searching through the work directory I picked out a handful of executables that looked like a fun pce to start. They were all editors with fairly descriptive names, like Character Editor, Inventory Editor, Level Editor, Realm Editor and Status Editor.

  I started with the character editor, but as soon as I ran it I was presented with an alert that said I had to validate before I could access the program. The keyboard was frozen again, and the fingerprint scanner started doing that slow blink. So I ran my middle finger over the window and sure enough it validated.

  The editor finally unched, and I was hoping for some graphics but it was still in text mode. The program gave me a menu prompt with just two options, I could either enter a character ID or I could search for nearby characters. I hit the search option and noticed one of the little status LEDs flickered blue a couple times, which made me think it was maybe a drive activity indicator.

  The screen updated a moment ter with another menu, and this time the title indicated it was a listing of all characters within a ten-meter radius. There were only two names on the screen, and one of them caught me off guard. I wasn't surprised to see Lisa's name there, it was her ptop so it made sense that there'd be a character with her name. It was the second name that threw me. It seemed like a weird coincidence for this old ptop to have a character named Chelsea.

  I frowned at the screen for a few seconds before I shrugged and let it go. I wanted to see what sort of game these characters were for, so I went ahead and selected Lisa's name.

  Then instead of getting some sort of character sheet I ended up with another prompt. This time the computer was compining about some sort of biometric mismatch, and asked if I wanted to re-synch before I continued.

  I had no idea what that meant, but I went ahead and hit the Y key to see what would happen. Unfortunately it didn't seem to do anything, apart from moving on to the actual editor screen. Which was just more pin text.

  On the other hand it looked to be really comprehensive. The small screen couldn't fit much data, but I could use the arrow keys to navigate up and down. I also discovered that most of the fields and other options would drill down into additional screens or menus.

  Lisa's species was listed as a human, her css was 'SysAdmin', and her level was 'root'. Her gender was listed as 'trans-girl (egg)'. Her physical stats were oddly familiar, like she was a hundred and seventy-eight centimetres tall which was about the same height as me, and her hair and eyes were sandy blonde and brown which were the same as mine. Even weirder, she actually had the same birthday as me. We were both going to turn nineteen in a couple months.

  Still, there was enough interesting stuff on the screen that I quickly forgot about the odd coincidences. I navigated to the species box first to see what the other options were, but that was a disappointment. I got a pop-up list with a dozen entries, with Human as the first option. Annoyingly the next eleven fields all just said Locked.

  So my next stop was the gender field, because I was curious. I knew what trans meant, and I wasn't actually that surprised to see Lisa's character identified as a trans girl. After all, half the coders and hackers I followed on social media were trans girls. The thing I didn't understand was the 'egg' reference, I had no idea what that meant.

  Unfortunately the pop-up didn't give me any answers. Like the species field there were a dozen options but more than half of them were Locked. The ones that weren't were all fairly straightforward. Male, Female, Trans-girl, Trans-guy, Androgynous and Non-Binary.

  On a whim I tried changing the gender to female but instead of the field updating immediately I was presented with another pop-up. This one gave me a bunch of options for 'presentation', including things like basic, masc, femme, high-femme, butch, cute, sporty, femmeby, and so on.

  I had a vague idea what it was getting at, so for fun I went ahead and selected the Cute option. That led to one more prompt, the software asked if I wanted it to update the physical stats. So I selected yes, and watched as the screen updated itself.

  Lisa's height dropped down to a hundred and sixty centimetres, and according to the rest of the numbers she was now a petite girl with some nice curves.

  Navigating through the physical stats fields I discovered I could directly change all of them. Some allowed me to just key in numbers or text, others presented me with more pop-ups with pre-selected options, and still others gave me sliders to py with. Some fields even drilled-down into whole new sub-screens with their own sets of fields to navigate and explore.

  So I spent the next twenty or thirty minutes experimenting and messing around with things. I made a bunch of random changes as I got more familiar with how the system worked. Nothing too crazy, but a few things were silly or fun. Like I had Lisa's hair grow longer so it reached part-way down her back, and I figured a hacker girl should have an anime hair colour so I made it naturally bubble-gum pink, the same shade as the ptop. I also made her eyes a bright pale green, and her skin fair but with a few faint freckles in some strategic locations.

  It was kind of crazy how detailed some of the stats got, which left me wondering what sort of game this was for. Then I stumbled onto a sub-menu that left me thinking the game might be some sort of adult-oriented thing, because I was looking at a bunch of details about the character's sexual stats. Like her sexuality, what she had between her legs, what her chest was like, and even what she was like in bed.

  That left me with some very mixed feelings, like I couldn't help feeling a bit weird seeing that sort of thing spelled out in bck and white on the screen. But on the other hand I was a teenaged boy and hormones were a thing, so I sort of found myself exploring all those fields while blushing brightly.

  According to the editor Lisa was listed as a lesbian, attracted to women of all kinds including trans gals. She was a bit shy in bed until she got started, then her strong libido took over. She was very sex-positive, and enjoyed going solo as much as she liked having a partner. Or partners. And she was fond of toys.

  It went on to list a bunch of physical stats, which I may or may not have tweaked a bit here and there when imagination and hormones got the better of me.

  Eventually my embarrassment won out so I navigated away from that screen and back up to the top of the character sheet. And as I stared at it I found myself wondering once again what kind of game Lisa was working on.

  The ck of graphics suggested it might be a text adventure, but there was so much detail it was hard to imagine any text-based game needing that level of information. That st page I'd been on suggested it was an adult-oriented game, and that left me thinking maybe it was meant to be some sort of text-porn-adventure game. Maybe something like one of those old Infocom interactive fiction games, but sexy.

  Except if that was the case then why have fields for stuff like species and css? Then again, why have a species field when the only option was human? It just didn't make any sense.

  I ended up scrolling around a bit more, then tried hitting a few function keys to see if there were any hidden actions or features. Sure enough I found something. When I hit one of them the screen bnked and a message appeared in the middle that said to please wait while it rendered a preview.

  So the computer did have graphics after all, but only rarely.

  After ten or fifteen seconds the screen bnked once more, then I found myself looking at a low-rez image of Lisa's character. It was a head-and-shoulders shot, that depicted a very cute eighteen-year-old girl with long wavy pink hair, fair skin, and pale green eyes. There were faint pink freckles on her cheeks, her full pink lips were curled slightly into a small smile. She had rounded cheeks and overall her expression seemed almost mischievous.

  Her shoulders were bare as if to suggest she was naked in the picture, and that got my imagination and hormones going again. I tapped a few keys to see if it would zoom out or scroll down, but instead the image just disappeared and left me at the character sheet again.

  "Oh well," I sighed.

  By that point I figured I'd wasted enough time messing around with the character editor, and I was actually getting a little hungry. So I figured it was time to grab some dinner, then I could explore the little ptop some more ter on. Maybe I'd have another look at Lisa's character, or maybe I'd check out some of the other programs. Like the level editor or inventory or whatever.

  So I hit the option to exit the editor, and was presented with another prompt. This one asked if I wanted to save my changes or revert all the data back to the original values.

  That made me hesitate for a moment, but I figured what the heck. It was my ptop now, if I wanted to screw with the data that was up to me. So I hit the Y key and the screen went bnk except for a strangely phrased alert in the middle.

  "Updating Character: Lisa" seemed like a weird way to indicate it was writing to her file, and considering it was all just text and numbers it should have only taken a moment to store on the solid state drive. Instead there was a status-bar under the alert with a countdown timer that seemed to indicate it was going to take fifteen seconds to process.

  Then that blue status LED lit up again, but instead of a few brief flickers it stayed lit. And that's when things got even weirder.

  My vision went foggy and I suddenly felt lightheaded and dizzy, then I felt myself flop backwards so my head was on my pillow. I felt weak and my skin was tingling, and I kept blinking as I tried to clear my vision and my head.

  It seemed to take ten or fifteen seconds before the strange feelings ended and my vision cleared. The little pink ptop was on the bed next to me, and I noticed it was finally back to the command line prompt again.

  "What the fu- Ah?!" I yelped and sat bolt upright, then immediately yelped again.

  My voice sounded wrong, it came out high-pitched and girly. And I could feel weight on my chest that moved and shifted as I sat up. My clothes were hanging off me like they'd grown several sizes too big, and when I moved my head I could feel long hair brushing against my neck and shoulders and tickling my ears.

  My heart was racing and my eyes were wide as I stared down at myself. I slowly got to my feet and my pants slipped down to my ankles, revealing a pair of smooth slender legs. I shrugged off my hoodie too, that left me in nothing but my t-shirt and my briefs.

  The tee was tight across my chest and loose everywhere else. Two rge mounds tipped with thick nubs were clearly outlined in the fabric of my shirt, while my briefs were loose enough that I could feel them starting to slip down as well.

  "What the hell what the hell?!" I gasped to myself.

  I stepped out of my pants and shoes, even my socks slipped off. My bare feet looked small and delicate while my hips were wider than before. My body moved differently as I stumbled over to my closet, and some new jiggling sensations were almost overwhelming. My briefs slipped down a bit more as I moved, but they didn't fall off completely. My butt and hips were just big enough to keep the white undies on.

  There was a mirror inside my closet door, and I swung it open and stared. I kind of already knew what I was going to see, but at the same time I couldn't believe it.

  Staring back at me was the same cute girl I'd seen in that rendering on the ptop. She had the same long wavy bubble-gum pink hair, the same bright pale-green eyes, and the same fair skin with some cute freckles scattered across her cheeks.

  After a couple seconds I realized her face actually looked familiar. I hadn't noticed it in the low-rez rendering on the screen, but the pink-haired girl in the mirror kind of looked like me? Except it wasn't my pin ugly face in the mirror anymore.

  I felt a flutter in my stomach, then slowly pulled off my t-shirt. My boobs were perfect, big and rounded but without any sag. They were tipped with thick pink nipples that were quickly starting to contract and harden.

  Finally I pulled my briefs down past my hips and let them slip down to my ankles. I was fully nude, and the girl in the mirror looked exactly like I'd imagined when I was messing with the character sheet. Her boobs were D-cups because that's what I'd set the slider to in the ptop. And she was completely shaved down below, because that's what was written on her character sheet.

  "Holy heck," I whispered to myself. "This has to be a dream. Or I'm hallucinating. It can't be real..."

  I was a girl. I was a naked girl, and my body matched what I'd put in that character editor. Except that was supposed to be Lisa's character. Ignoring the impossibility of how a program on some computer could do this to me, it didn't make sense why it affected me at all. If it was going to change anyone, it should have changed Lisa. Whoever that was.

  Then I remembered the thing with the fingerprint scanner, and suddenly a bunch of things fell into pce.

  The ptop thought I was Lisa. And when it asked about updating the biometrics it must have done something to link my body to the file on the screen. That's why Lisa's physical stats were so familiar. Because it was my body, the computer just tied that data to her name.

  Then when it was saving the changes I made in the character editor, that whole 'updating character' thing wasn't about saving some data to its drive. It was treating my body like hardware, and it wrote the changes to me.

  Except all that was impossible. Or at least, it should have been impossible. What I saw in the mirror told me that impossible or not, it really happened.

  I was really a girl... And for some reason I kind of liked it?

  PurpleCatGirl

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