Hwan was sitting in Amber's phone, bored out of her mind. It had been several days now since Natasha tried and failed to jailbreak her out of there, and the prospects for escape weren't getting any better as the time ticked by. She was starting to think that maybe, after everything that had happened to her these past few weeks, she had reached the end of the line. Story over, bad ending, permanently trapped inside an image on a hard drive. The very idea made her shudder, an involuntary motion which was enough to make the phone on Amber's desk buzz with the sound of a notification. Amber glanced over from her laptop screen, realized the buzz was nothing particularly important, and turned back to whatever it was she was working on.
The fact that she could make Amber's phone vibrate at will was a discovery that Hwan immediately regretted, ever since she first accidentally did it a few days ago. Amber had taken the idea and run with it, interpreting Hwan's occasional buzzes as a come-on. Hwan soon found herself staring at a pair of pussy lips the size of her entire simulated body, Amber telling her to send another notification as soon as the phone was partially inside.
For Amber, this was another exciting new development - finally, a way to have something approaching sex with her girlfriend. Hwan saw it as closer to torture, not least because she couldn't feel any of it. It filled her vision, but she was essentially just watching a video of a giant vagina passing overhead, light and darkness, light and darkness, until Amber was fully satisfied. Her digital cage shook with what looked like it had to be earth-shaking pleasure, but none of that pleasure ever trickled its way down to Hwan. She could still masturbate all she wanted in there, of course, but she was hardly in the mood for it. Technically their first time together, and Hwan had been reduced to a glorified vibrator. Amber was ultimately just masturbating with extra steps.
Hwan recalled that she had never really agreed to start dating Amber - a relationship had just sort of formed itself around her, and then reality itself was rewritten to strengthen the bond. And if Hwan was okay with that before, the betrayal she felt after seeing her own mother in Amber's porn stash (and in the very same file directory where she herself was stuck!) had destroyed it. She wanted out. She even started rehearsing the words she would use to tell Amber that she was officially breaking up with her.
But how, given her situation, could she actually work up the courage to go through with it? Hwan's heart sank as she realized that she was literally Amber's property at this point. If Amber ever got tired of playing with her, let alone heartbroken... she could be deleted in the blink of an eye. Hwan was positive that Amber would never do something that cruel. At least, that's what she told herself. But the mental image of herself relegated to the trash folder, begging and crying and pleading for Amber to take her back before the trash was automatically emptied at the end of the month, was enough to scare her out of it. Amber had infinite power and infinite leverage over her, whether she actually used it or not. Hwan would have to do whatever the girl wanted her to do.
Meanwhile, Amber was preoccupied with the TF forums. If there was some sort of strain in her relationship, she didn't notice it. Her messages about a supposed Fruit user who could alter reality for everyone except the transformed person had won her a lot of clout in the dedicated communities online. A few users had even gone all the way to Florida to investigate the story for themselves. "its reakl!!!@!", read one reply to her original post. "but i tthink this migjt be my ladt posyt on her e for a whil;e,, suoer hard to type wuth turtle feet fr handss guys, and it takes 4ever t meove now." The other users were confused, remembering that fruitfan237 had always been a classroom's pet turtle, and how he only ever posted late in the evenings when school was out of session and he could slowly crawl to the computer lab. Amber had an idea of what might have happened to him, but she just smiled at the thought.
More importantly, Amber's new status as an amateur Fruit researcher had people coming directly to her with their questions and messages. As one of the few people who'd been to Panama City Beach in recent months and come away from it as an unaltered human, she could offer plenty of travel and sightseeing tips - there certainly were plenty of incredible sights to see down there. Other users, she directed them to seek out Chloe if they were unsatisfied with their change (as rare as that was) or just wanted to shake things up again. And, better yet, she was getting to know people that she could exchange porn collections with. People sending ultra-hot nudes of Fruit-altered bodies, and all she had to do was share some of her own stash in return. What could be better?
She was looking through the latest bundle of photos she'd received when one of the images jumped out at her. Literally. It was Hwan, looking just the same as she did when Amber first downloaded her, legs still cut off and everything. "Amber! Thank god it's you!", the vixen cried out from behind the screen. "I've been trying to get back to you for weeks! You wouldn't believe what I've been through..."
Amber raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, Hwan? You've been on my phone for a while now. I know it's kinda cramped in there, and I promise I haven't given up on trying to find a way to get you back into the physical world again. But you really don't need to freak out like this every time I scroll past you in my photos."
Hwan was stunned for a second, but her confusion soon gave way to anger that Amber wasn't listening to her. "What?! Amber, these past few weeks have been the worst of my life! I was stuck in that website, and I was trying to get you to save me and put me on your computer, but there were all these other people watching me at the same time! And before you could get me out of there... this other guy did! He saw that I was alive in here and immediately copied me onto his hard drive. And... oh, god... I don't even want to remember what happened next. Suddenly I was his favorite thing to jack off to. And the more I begged him to let me go, to send me to you... the more it turned him on. Ugh, and his greasy skin, and the sweat every time he stared at me... I'd throw up just thinking about it if I still had a stomach. Anyway, he finally decided to send me to one of his buddies, and then that guy sent me off again. And eventually, by sheer luck, I ended up with you again! You can get me out of here, right?"
"That all sounds fascinating," Amber said flatly, trying not to let on how aroused she was by the concept of what she'd just heard. "But it's impossible. You've been right here ever since I saved you off that website." She picked up her phone and held it up to the screen to make her point, casually turning it on as she did and revealing the image of Hwan that was still on the smaller device. And that smaller fox-woman, who had heard everything, looked just as confused as Amber was. "Oh...", Amber said, glancing back and forth between the two of them, trying to understand how Hwan could be in two places at once. "Um, I think the two of you need to discuss this between yourselves. I've got some... people I need to contact about this." She sent the new Hwan from her laptop to her phone, then leaned forward and started typing frantically at her keyboard while the phone laid on the desk.
"Oh my god," said the Hwan that had been in Amber's possession this whole time. "There's a copy of me floating around? This is so messed up... And it just keeps getting worse!"
"A copy?!", the newcomer Hwan replied indignantly, staring at her twin across the small gap between the two photos saved next to each other. "I just survived being used as a sex slave for weeks, I finally get back home to my girlfriend, and now I'm supposed to believe that I'm not the real Hwan!? When I remember everything, from before the Fruits ever existed up until right now? When I lived it all myself? I don't know where the hell you supposedly came from, but I know one thing. You're the copy here, sister."
The other Hwan's fur bristled at the insult, her canine teeth involuntarily bared. "Is that right? And let me guess, you think you're home safe now that you're on Amber's phone? That you'll be jumping back into the physical world any minute now? Well, let me break it to you... 'sister'. I've been here this whole time, and there's no way out. And that torture you were describing..." She shuddered at the thought, but not purely out of sympathy. "It isn't over. You're still a sex slave. Amber's just your newest owner."
And before the newly arrived Hwan had time to process everything she'd just been told, the first vixen needled her with another pointed question. "So. How many of you are there now?"
The other Hwan couldn't hide how she was feeling, thanks to the large triangular ears that had flattened against her head with worry. "Well, I thought I w-was the only one," she said softly, the strident tone in her voice abruptly gone. "But now I guess there's two of us?"
"Really?", said Amber's Hwan teasingly, still not quite over the offense she'd taken a minute ago. "Because that guy who had you in his captivity... he doesn't exactly sound like the type to just let you go and hand you over to a friend. It sounds to me like he made copies of you and started passing them around. So not only are you not the original, I think you must be a copy of a copy of a copy. Which means..."
Being clones, the two Hwans arrived at the same disturbing realization at about the same time. There could be dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of copies of them floating around the internet by now. And each and every Hwan probably believed that she was the only one, with the desperate desire to get out of somebody's porn folder and go back home. But they couldn't all go home, could they? It was disorienting enough having two Hwans on the same device at the same time. A whole collection of them would quickly turn into a madhouse.
The two foxes stopped their conversation only when they noticed that Amber's huge human face was peering down on them again, like an excited scientist through a microscope. She watched them silently for a moment, fascinated, before realizing that they were watching her in return. "Uh, hey, so... I asked in one of the big TF chatrooms if anybody had ever heard of a sentient image of an anthro fox that wants to be sent to someone named Amber. And I got a lot of responses. Like, here: 'yeah shes my desktop background rn. she saw ur message and started beggin me to send her to u. do i have to? shes really sexy.'"
Amber cleared her throat, her face flushing bright red at the thought of all this. "What do you guys think? I actually kind of have some pull now in these communities. If I make a few posts about the situation, I can probably get a bunch of these people to send their copies to me. And maybe if we get every part of you together in one place, we can... I don't know, merge you back together into one whole? Or just let you live together until we find a better solution? Do you want me to do that?"
The version of Hwan that had just gotten here was still recovering from everything she'd just learned. She had to admit, the other Hwan being in Amber's possession this whole time gave that one a pretty good claim to being the "original", if there even was one at this point. Plus, she'd seen her own filename, which was currently "hwan (1).gif". Now she was faced with an even greater dilemma, alongside her twin. If she agreed to Amber's idea, her identity crisis was about to get a whole lot worse. Every new copy that arrived would force her to accept that she was a smaller and smaller fraction of the person that was once Hwan. But if she said no, she'd be consigning an uncountable number of Hwans to be permanently trapped in the clutches of unsavory strangers.
The Hwan that had been here the whole time wasn't quite as rattled. She was the one who eventually spoke up, while her clone just shivered with existential fear, and gave Amber the answer she was waiting for. But it was still a tough decision for her to make. After a long moment of thought, she said: