Amber was exhausted. Her responsibilities as the “designated human” in the friend group didn’t end when they got back from spring break. And it was getting harder and harder to keep track of where all of the transformed girls were - and what they were. She’d skipped two of her classes this afternoon trying to track down Chloe, eventually noticing the colorful fruit tree that wasn’t there before. Amber grinned at the possibilities created by an endless supply of exotic Lilith Fruits right in the middle of school grounds, but it also made her job even more confusing.
Like, for instance, earlier today she’d been walking down the school hallway, tiny Isabella perched on her shoulder, when she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye. There was a wooden frame mounted on the wall, and Maddie was trapped behind it, silently banging on the Plexiglass barrier that kept any sound from escaping. Amber immediately sprung into action and slipped the sheet of paper that contained Maddie out of its prison. Maddie explained that someone had stuck her in there as a prank, and then she couldn’t get anyone walking past to notice that she was there. Then she said, quietly, “I don’t know if I really like being in this form any more...”
So Amber tucked the sheet of paper under her shoulder and went back out to the spot where Chloe was planted, explaining to one of her hundreds of Fruit-faces that Maddie needed a change. Chloe thought for a moment, and then the tree’s branches shook violently, tossing a little purple lemon into Amber’s waiting arms. Amber smeared the juicy Fruit-head against Maddie’s face until it burst into a mashed-up liquid. Maddie’s lips puckered from the sour flavor - and Amber realized that it wasn’t just part of the drawing. The paper was starting to crease and fold up, starting at her mouth and gradually spreading outward until Maddie could no longer be seen in the wad of crumpled paper. “What’s going on?!”, Maddie’s garbled voice said as the wadded-up ball shifted and rolled around in Amber’s palm.
“Okay,” a couple different Chloes said in unison, defensively, “I admit, I don’t actually know what that one was supposed to do. I just had a vague feeling that it would help an inanimate person move again. And it seems like it’s working.”
The ball stopped, then started to roll back and forth again in Amber’s hand, though this time it seemed a little more deliberate. “Wait, yeah,” Maddie mumbled. “That’s me doing this! I wonder if I can...” Her voice trailed off as the wad started to change shape, a messy arm-like structure protruding from one side. “I can control it,” said the folded paper hand, whose misshapen fingers flapped back and forth to mimic a mouth moving. “But I think I’m gonna need to study some origami techniques before I can make myself something useful.”
As exciting as it was, it gave Amber a headache to keep running back and forth like that, caring for several altered friends at once. She was glad that Natasha and Hwan could both fend for themselves, although she hadn’t seen either of them so far today. Amber put the thought out of her mind as soon as she got home and opened up her laptop. Now was her time to unwind.
Well, admittedly, “unwinding” was a little different for Amber now, with all of her new interests. She spent a lot of her free time following the latest developments in the so-called “TF” community, on obscure message boards and sketchy file-sharing sites. And some parts of that “research” were more pleasurable than others. When she was sure nobody else was around, her parents not yet home from work, Amber opened up an incognito window and typed in one of her new favorite URLs.
A year ago, she wouldn’t have been caught dead logging into FurPredilection dot com - that type of stuff had always seemed weird and gross to her. But now that half the pictures on there were unedited nude selfies of people who’d just gotten their paws on their first Fruit... suddenly she could see the appeal. She clicked on her favorites and soon settled on a pin-up of an anthropomorphic fox-woman with six ample breasts. Okay, this one had actually been drawn several years ago, before the first Fruits were even discovered, but Amber didn’t care about that anymore. It was amazing how accurately those furry artists had predicted what real-life animal-people would one day look like.
Whenever Amber stared at this picture, which was often, it made her think of Hwan. Well, it looked a lot more like her mom - who Amber always thought was a MILF, even before she went all foxy. But to Amber, this was what her girlfriend would look like if she wasn’t a stuffed animal. It was what she was hoping to turn Hwan into when she brought the girl with her on vacation, to no avail. It was a little frustrating sometimes, dating a six-inch-long plush toy. It ruled out a lot of fun possibilities, even though it created a few others. If only Hwan could look like this... Amber’s hand was sliding down into her panties as those words ran through her mind.
“Special delivery!”
Amber blinked at the strange, yet somehow familiar, voice that had just interrupted her, emerging from the laptop speakers. Then she saw the tiny browser icon crawling out from the corner of her screen, turning into a full-featured cartoon fox - anatomically correct, too. What on earth was this? Did she pick up some sort of very sexy malware from one of those sketchy sites?
“Sorry to bother you,” the fox said, his orange-pixeled fur popping out against the dark blue background next to Amber’s favorite picture. “I don’t usually do this, especially when somebody’s in incognito mode. Great taste there, by the way. But I have a user named Hwan here who’s been searching all over the Web for you. Do you mind if I drag-and-drop her in?”
Hwan? Amber was curious what this was about. If it was some sort of weird computer virus that was trying to steal her credit card information, this would be the way to do it. She nodded eagerly in response.
“Uh, sorry,” FoxFlame said, “I can’t see or hear you. You’ll need to take that piece of tape off your webcam first.”
Amber didn’t feel like it. She jabbed a finger down on the keyboard, pressing hard on the Y key.
“Okay, here goes,” said the fox, reaching backward off the edge of the screen. “I’ll just put her right in here for you.” And, in the blink of an eye, he was gone. And the other fox, the naked female in a sultry pose, was suddenly moving.
“Amber?”, the vixen said, in a voice that reminded her of her girlfriend’s adorable yipping. “Are you there?” The anthro fox’s face and snout had changed a bit, too, more closely resembling the plushie features Amber knew so well. “Where am I- Aaah!” Suddenly looking down, noticing that she was naked and exposed, the vixen on the screen rushed to cover up. She placed one arm over her top pair of breasts, then realized that wasn’t enough and grabbed the middle pair with her other arm. The last two boobs still swung freely just above her waist.
Amber ripped the tape off her laptop camera. “Hwan?”, she asked incredulously. “What are you doing here? How did you...”
“It’s a long story,” Hwan replied, realizing that her wildly flicking tail was just flexible enough to reach around and cover up her fifth and sixth nipples. She explained everything: the reality-warping public-domain Pinocchio, the false memories that had been created in everybody she knew, the disorienting trip through the bowels of the internet. She wisely left out the part where she was technically cheating on Amber with a hunky corporate logo, though she suspected her girlfriend would probably be sort of into that. But she made sure to mention that she wanted to be a normal human again, a desire that seemed increasingly rare in this world.
Amber was immediately intrigued. In everything she’d read online about Fruit culture, nobody had ever mentioned anything about a transformation that made people think it was normal. The changes, no matter how extreme they might be, were always obvious for all to see. But then again, as far as Amber knew, Hwan was the only living object in the world before the Fruits appeared - that was kind of weird, now that she considered it. And if somebody was warping reality to their heart’s content, how would anybody ever know? They could do anything! They could even take a world where turning into radically different forms was seen as weird and perverted, and make everybody strangely chill about it somehow. Theoretically speaking, of course.
“This is amazing!”, Amber said, her brain blitzing through possibilities. “I’ve got to tell the forums about this!” She was pushing the cursor up to open a new tab when Hwan interrupted her.
“Wait!”, she said. “Get me out of here first! I can feel those eyes staring at me! And not just yours, Amber. There’s like a dozen people watching me right now, from all over the world! It’s really freaky...”
Amber right-clicked on her girlfriend and saved the image as a GIF, making sure Hwan could still move. “There. You can hang out on my hard drive while I try to figure out how to get you back into the physical world.” She went back to the browser, where the vixen from before had returned to its normal state, and started typing away frantically into a chatroom to explain what she’d just learned.
“Thanks, Amber,” Hwan muttered with a touch of sarcasm from behind the browser window, now relegated to a thumbnail in a sea of files. Her girlfriend could no longer hear her. “Not that the other girls in here with me don’t seem nice or anything, but... did you really have to save me in your porn folder?”