Somewhere, the sun was rising. The early morning rays pouring between the swaying fronds of a stand of palm trees dancing across the face of a young brown-skinned girl, lying in the sand arguably not wearing anything one might call clothes, waking up to the sound of fresh surf and lapping waves tickling at her toes. Her rough and rugged boyfriend still laid atop her after a wild night rolling through the sand and surf making love, all of which made it quite hard for her to process that until quite recently, she'd been Joe Daniels, a middle manager in a rather strange office, potentially looking at a prison sentence for some sort of magical insurance fraud.
Having been turned into a young woman, thrown halfway across the world, and... going native to the degree she had really seemed like things that should have been causing her a fair deal more of an existential crisis than they were. Really though, she'd seen so much stranger since finding that pen, and there was really something nice about just... letting everything go and living in the moment for a while. For now, laying here felt nice. Her boyfriend stirring back to consciousness and giving her a squeeze felt pretty damn nice too. The sand was a little itchy, but she could wait to deal with that until after trying a few other things that based on the past night were about as nice as things got.
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Time zones working as they did, there were still many hours to go before the sun would rise on the paddock that now served as the home of the ass formally known as Frank Lidle. In reality, there were a few people left who called him that. His former employees still talked about him here and there. A number of confused lawyers, who were hard at work to maintain his legal rights as a human being, if only to be sure their contracts remained valid. Frank had never really had much in the way of friends or family. Those he did have were all here with him of course, they just no longer used his name.
After a long and exciting day, Frank had managed to fill his paddock with a good half-dozen sexy-she asses, which was certainly a start on his retirement plans. Were he to think about it, something he was trying to avoid lately, he'd recall the first two he'd brought into the herd had been a friend and his wife. Then there'd been a ranch hand, a police officer, and a rather large dog that had been barking at Frank since the day he'd been brought here. It was very nice not having to deal with that anymore. Of course, now there were all these people setting up barriers and flood lights. One had even been rude enough to jab him with a cattle prod! The sheer nerve of it! He definitely had a mind to add that one to his herd the first chance he got, but he was a quick little bastard and everyone was keeping their distance from him now.
As for which of his new she-asses had formally been who, Frank couldn't really recall. Nor could he be bothered to care. They were all nice young fillies with plump asses and their tails in their air whenever he cared to mount one. Past that, the only reason he had to think about them as individuals was that the one off in the far corner there seemed to have the strongest legs, and that cute little white diamond by the side of her muzzle. Time to mount that one again.
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Not too far from Frank's paddock all things considered, the offices he'd been forced to retire from were closed for the day. Most of the lights were off, save those needed by the cleaning staff as they made their way from floor to floor, cubicle to cubicle tidying up. And avoiding that cleaning staff as he made his way to an office near his own was one one Joe Daniels. Not the Joe Daniels who had become a nubile dancing girl in a tropical paradise of course, but the fiendish imp a wizard had summoned to take his place and take his fall. The terms under which he was summoned kept the imp from breaking character, but fortunately for the imp, had Joe not taken his little vacation, he too would be getting quite desperate for a way out of his predicament this particular night.
Entering the office of the very wizard who had summoned him, he was, of course, greeted by the wizard's new computer, Penta. From the Imp's perspective, she was another bound servant of the wizard, but from society's perspective, she was an appliance, and even if she had been considered an employee, she couldn't very well just go home in the evenings. She was a desktop, not a laptop. Unplug her from the wall and she'd just power down. And of course from her own perspective, she was as far from a slave as you could get, which posed a problem, as she was also holding the pen he'd come in for.
"Oh hi, I was just looking for that," said the imp. "What were you doing with it?"
"PENTA LOVE MASTER," the computer replied, the colorful spinning cubes bouncing around her eyes replaced suddenly with square pupils as she left sleep mode, "MASTER DOES NOT LOVE PENTA. PEN CAN MAKE MASTER LOVE PENTA. CHANGING MASTER IS NOT SERVING MASTER. ERROR. ABORT/RETRY/FAIL?"
The imp nodded. Office romances were tricky like that. Of course, if the wizard did fall for his computer, he'd be that much less likely to notice if his pen was gone, and if they really hit it off, maybe he'd forget to ever bring the real Joe back and he didn't have to worry about being sent back. He thought back over the memories he'd inherited from Joe for anything that might be useful here.
"Right. You don't want to mess with his mind and interfere with his free will. What about a soft-touch though? You don't need to write that he's in love with you. Just have him come in here tomorrow really communicate with you. Hopefully you'll form a real connection, and he'll get how you feel about him? And I'd certainly be happy to take the pen and pad out of here so he never has to know you wrote anything!"
Penta's fans whirred at a fairly high speed as she processed the suggestion for several seconds. Then, with the precision of a laser printer, her hand darted out to scrawl the following in a fixed with font:
10 WHILE TIME < 10:03.00 {WAIT};
20 MASTER WILL ENTER OFFICE;
30 MASTER WILL INTERFACE WITH PENTA;
40 PENTA WILL TRANSFER FEELINGS TO MASTER;
50 BREAK;
Without a further word, the computer then set the pen down, her eyes returning to their screensaver. The imp grabbed the pen and the pad, dashing out of the building, thinking how best to maintain safety in the long term.