Amber rocked up to school the next morning with her girlfriend tucked away inside her purse. She'd long fantasized about doing that with Hwan in her normal plush form (and Amber was still getting used to the idea that it wasn't Hwan's normal form), but the girl's mom would never allow it. Well, now Hwan was an image file that Amber had figured out how to transfer from her laptop to her phone, and getting her mom's permission for any of this had been thrown out the window. And it was time to renew her mission from spring break: make Hwan into a normal human ("again", apparently), or at least something closer to it. Amber would certainly be satisfied just to make the gorgeous fox-woman on her screen into a flesh-and-blood reality.
Hwan had a bumpy ride to school that morning. Unlike the laptop, Amber's phone could detect motion, and that meant Hwan could feel her digital cage bumping and jostling around inside the purse as if she was really there. She wished she knew how to turn that feature off. The phone careened around in nausea-inducing fashion, clacking constantly against tubes of lip balm, car keys, and Isabella - the doll girl was taking advantage of the dark and secluded space to get a little more sleep before it was time for their first class.
Hwan was wondering if she could email herself back to the safety of Amber's laptop when the violent shaking suddenly stopped. Then Amber's enormous hand reached in and pulled the phone out, giving Hwan a view of... a tree. But clearly not just any tree. The hundreds of brightly-colored fruits - no, Fruits - that hung from its branches gave Hwan some much-needed hope. If none of those could save her, then probably nothing could. And wait a second... the faces on those Fruits all looked awfully familiar...
As Amber finished explaining the situation to Chloe, one of her many faces stuck its juicy tongue out in deep thought. A nearby leaf prodded at the touch screen that Amber held out for Chloe's examination. Hwan flinched at every press, the leaf whipping against her pixeled fur like a wet towel.
"Hmmm... Maybe if I... We could try... No, that wouldn't work..." Each sentence fragment came out of a different head scattered throughout the tree canopy, Chloe now capable of having many conversations with herself at once. "We found a way to do it for Maddie... Yes, but this is different... None of us can get in there... Sorry," the Chloe closest to Amber and Hwan finished, the rest of them all falling silent. "I just don't think any of my Fruits can pass through the digital barrier like that. I could probably turn your phone into something pretty cool and unique, if you wanted, but I doubt it would really help with Hwan's issue. Why don't you call Natasha? This seems like it's really more in her domain."
Amber swiped away from the Photos app that contained Hwan and sent off a quick text message. Within 10 seconds, Natasha's pixelated form popped out on the screen. "Sorry about that," she said. "I would've gotten here sooner, but I got stuck behind one of those captcha things asking me to confirm I'm not a robot. And for some reason, I kept failing it."
Of course, Natasha already knew about Hwan's situation, being the one who pulled her into cyberspace in the first place. But a lot had happened since the two had last seen each other, and the intervening changes left Natasha just as awed as Amber had been. "Sorry I left you behind on that desktop," Natasha said, poking at Hwan's muzzle like an eager veterinarian. "But, to be honest, if I had known this was possible, I probably would've done it to you first. Isn't this so much better than what you were before?"
"It's not that big of an improvement," Hwan replied, baring her fangs until Natasha backed off and stopped touching her. "Plus, we never discussed the most important part of your plan - how to get me out of here."
"Oh, right!", Natasha said. "I mean, I was just going to send you home and zap you back into your plush body, but I don't think that's going to work anymore. Not when your digital form is so different from what it's supposed- um, what it used to be. But honestly, Hwan, being made of ones and zeroes isn't so bad. I don't know if I'd ever want to go back to the physical world after seeing what this form can do!"
"That's easy for you to say, Ms. Free Spirit," Hwan grumbled. "I can't even get out of this picture!" She jabbed a clawed finger down just below her uncomfortably exposed pussy, feeling it bounce off the hard barrier that was the bottom edge of the image. "And I can't feel my legs, which would probably be pretty helpful for stepping out of here and running around the world like you've been doing..."
"Well, we can fix that!", Natasha said cheerfully. "Haven't you heard of those AI things that can expand an image to show what's outside the frame? We'll just run you through one of those and you should be good to go!"
"I don't know if I like the sound of that...", Hwan replied, but it was too late. Natasha's new lightning-quick reflexes had already brought up the image editor app and dragged Hwan right into it. "Let's see here," Natasha said to herself, preparing to type with her hands into the prompt box. "Gorgeous anthropomorphic vixen, magically capable of moving and speaking from within the image, 4K quality, trending on FurPredilection. How does that sound?" Hwan gulped, but she didn't have any better ideas. The instant she started to nod, Natasha slammed the "generate" button.
As the narrow confines of her world grew around her on all sides, Hwan noticed that she could feel her legs again, which was a start. But something quickly felt off to her about her changing body, and it wasn't just her desire to stop being covered in fur. She tried flexing her feet down below her, but she couldn't quite tell where they were. Her knees bent wrong when she moved them, and taking a step forward made her stumble until she hit whatever part of the void around her passed for the ground. Looking down at her legs, they weren't even legs, just a misshapen orange blur that folded in on itself.
"This is not working!", Hwan shouted, pointing a finger in Natasha's general direction for emphasis. But she noticed that her hand looked wrong, too, with seven or eight fingers of varying different sizes and lengths that crowded around her leathery palm. She realized that she must have gotten it caught in the part of the image that the AI was adding to, and now it had been replaced!
"It always takes some trial and error to get it right," Natasha said, shrugging. "Give me a minute." She knelt down to look over her prompt and add some more key phrases in there: "two arms and two legs, each with normal fox-person fingers and toes at the end... hyper-realistic... capable of escaping from the image and traveling around the wider internet." That last part was mostly wishful thinking, but how cool would it be if the AI could actually make that happen on the first try? It was at least worth a shot.
Hwan felt her surroundings wobble as they began to change again. She quickly stuck her deformed hand into the shimmering light, which had already overtaken her mangled legs, hoping that whatever it was doing would fix every part of her. She closed her eyes, a grimace forming on her snout as she felt the algorithm run over her lower half. But it didn't stop there. This time, the AI filter was being applied to the whole image, since Natasha had forgotten to specify any particular part to fix. The painful sensation, very much like the pins-and-needles that would appear when a part of her old human body lost circulation, pressed inward on all sides until it had overtaken her entire body. Her head throbbed. And when it all finally cleared up...
Hwan looked down at her hand, which was now melded into the impossible curves of her legs. She tried pulling it back out, but it was stuck - she couldn't even tell where her blurry thighs ended and her arm began. She looked to her other hand, which seemed to change shape as she turned it back and forth, becoming more like a paw at one angle and closer to a human hand the next moment. She tried to call out to Natasha, but her mouth wouldn't even move, her black lips fused shut as they overlapped and flowed into one another. Instead, she just made a muffled screaming noise.
"Oh, shit," Natasha said as she examined Hwan's updated body. At a glance, the girl looked like a perfectly normal fox-woman. But the closer she looked, she could see that every tiny detail was wrong somehow. "I thought the AI model was better than this nowadays! I guess they must not have too many pictures of anthros to train on. Okay, never mind. Undo! Undo!" Those words were enough, and Hwan was sent hurtling back to the form she'd had before this failed experiment. Hwan panted heavily with relief, now that she could open her mouth and breathe again. Granted, she didn't actually need to breathe in this digital world - there was no air inside the screen, and her two-dimensional body had no lungs anyway - but it made her feel better.
"New plan!", Natasha announced, before Hwan had even finished catching her breath. "Let's just use regular old Photoshop. The result won't be as polished, but at least we'll have some control over what it looks like. We just need to find some legs that we can stitch onto you. Hmmm..." She jumped from app to app and started rummaging through the saved photos on Amber's phone. "Hey, Hwan!", she called out as she flipped through thousands of images. "Did you know there's a ton of pictures of your mom in here?"
Hwan just shot a look at Amber, who had been watching all of this unfold from outside the screen with rapt attention. Amber's giant face blushed a deep red at the implication, but neither of them spoke.
"This is perfect!", Natasha shouted, breaking the awkward silence. She trundled back into the app window that contained Hwan, carrying a large digital rectangle under her arm. Natasha was holding the frame at an angle that seemed intended to hide the image from Hwan, but she caught enough of a glimpse to see what it was anyway. And it made Hwan want to throw up. She knew her mom had become a lot more... open about things since she first ate that Fruit. She always tried to avoid thinking about the nudes her mom had started selling online, even as she appreciated the extra cash they brought in for the family. But that was the smallest issue that came to Hwan's mind right now. How, and why, did Amber get ahold of them?!?
The question hung in the air as Natasha got to work, essentially Frankensteining the legs from one picture onto the bottom of the other. It was done quickly and, admittedly, in a sort of sloppy fashion, which Hwan noticed the moment she regained the feeling in her legs. Her mom, after all, had thicker thighs and a much wider build than Hwan had ever had in any of her forms. The mismatch was obvious, even at a glance. Natasha hadn't lined the two pictures up perfectly, and there was a distinct seam that ran across her upper thighs, the orange and white fur being in a completely different pattern on either side of the line.
Still, the important thing to Hwan was that she could walk again. It didn't have to look pretty - hopefully she wasn't permanently stuck with it anyway. She had her freedom. Hwan took a few experimental steps, her paws moving just the way they should underneath her, and breathed a sigh of relief. Now she could finally get out of this-
She smacked her snout on the edge of the image frame, her whiskers tingling from the impact. No, scratch that. Hwan was still trapped in her digital prison - it was just a little larger now than before.
"Well, would you look at the time...", Natasha said awkwardly. "I'll have to come back later and see if there's anything else I can do to get you out of there. Catch you on the flip side!" And, in a flash of pixels, the girl was gone. Hwan was left staring up at her much larger... "girlfriend" - as if she hadn't started thinking about breaking up with Amber over this already.