John still wasn't sure how he felt about his new form. But he had all the time in the world to think about it.
Tonight, just like every night, he ambled down the darkened hallways of Plainview Elementary School, his movements too slow and his body too small to trip the motion-activated fluorescent lights above. Well, really, this was only the third time he'd done this, even if every scrap of evidence around him insisted that he'd been living here for months. He was still getting used to this new routine. And he was the only one who knew that it was a new routine.
Each step along the cold tile floor was an effort all its own. And every moment he was away from the safety of his tank and the warmth of his lamp, his precious body heat was escaping and his energy was going with it. But he had to stay in touch with the outside world somehow. And this was the easiest way he could think of. He did wish that they'd put his enclosure in a classroom that was closer to the computer lab. It wasn't a large school, but it took him nearly an hour to cross from one end of the building to another.
John kept asking himself if he was really okay with the idea of living like this indefinitely. But everything was so slow now, and that included the speed of his thoughts. Each leg that he gradually lifted from the floor was another word that finally came to his mind. It was a good thing he had so much time alone to think. And it was probably for the best that his human mind wasn't screaming at his little turtle body to pick up the pace at every turn. Compared to the life he was used to, it was actually very relaxing.
By the time he made it halfway down the hall, John was starting to ruminate again on the events that had landed him here. He'd taken a rare vacation from his demanding office job to fly down to Panama City Beach and search for that wooden puppet guy he'd heard about on the forums. And it didn't take him long to find what he was looking for. His memories of the conversation with Mr. Public-Domain Pinocchio were slippery, the fabric of reality bending around that moment where everything changed. He was pretty sure he said something about how slow he was to finally try out some Fruits for himself, one misunderstanding led to another, and suddenly he was stumbling away from the boardwalk on all fours. And, before he could react, getting scooped up into a pet carrier by a teacher who happened to be on vacation, and driven straight back "home".
It wasn't a bad life, being a box turtle in an elementary school classroom. He felt like he was teaching all those giant children some important lessons - about biology, but also about responsibility. They had to remember to feed him, though the teacher was always ready to remind them when it was time. And about patience - the kids were starting to understand that he took a long time to eat the fruits and veggies that were laid out for him, and they had to wait for him to finish before they could start to play with him.
Those flashes of memory filled his mind until he made it to his destination. Laboriously climbing up onto the nearest keyboard, he moved the cursor carefully into place and then started to type.
f
It naturally took a lot more time now for John to sign into his TestingFruits account. And even longer to remove every trace of the inappropriate activity from the school computer when he was eventually finished for the night.
r
He was slowly getting the hang of pressing one particular key, and not any of its neighbors, with his fingerless front feet. And that only made the process take longer.
u
The kids weren't the only ones learning the virtue of patience lately. When he was first getting used to communicating from inside this new body, he made a lot of typos.
i
The first night he arrived here, it took him several tries to actually log into his account. But now he understood that he needed to take it slow if he wanted to get it right.
t
His username on the forums, fruitfan237, had taken on a whole new meaning. The other users seemed to recall that he chose the name because of how much he enjoyed being fed little pieces of fruit in his tank.
f
The other users remembered a lot of things that he didn't. He frequently had to go through his past posts on the forum, none of which were the ones he remembered writing, to understand who and what everybody else thought he was.
a
And, of course, nobody thought it was strange that this pet turtle had the intelligence of a human or an active internet presence long before the first Fruits appeared in the world. Or that he was the only one.
n
It was sort of fun to watch them rationalize everything around him to make his retroactive past make sense. He could mention how he used to play a video game that required quick reflexes and coordination, and no one questioned him on how that was possible. They just accepted it.
2
But they did get confused when he said he couldn't play those games any longer. Why not? Did something happen? And they wouldn't believe him when he told them.
3
The really frustrating thing was, he couldn't tell anyone that his mission had been a complete success. He'd found the mysterious, mythical Florida-man reality-warper, and proven firsthand that reality could be warped! He just couldn't share that proof with anybody secondhand. He told them to fly down to Panama City Beach themselves if they didn't believe him. And a few people were already taking him up on that bet. That should be fun.
7
There. Halfway done. Putting in his password took just as long, and carried the added risk that he couldn't see if he'd made a mistake typing it in. But he was getting the hang of it by now. Ten minutes later, he was successfully logged in. And he had a bunch of new notifications to check up on. More arguments with people who insisted that a Fruit couldn't retroactively change reality, that he must be mistaken. Maybe what that Pinocchio fellow really did, they insisted, was implant a bunch of false memories in your head, make you think you used to be a normal human when that was obviously never the case. John couldn't be sure they were wrong about that, either. His hectic human life had already started to feel like a bad dream, from which he was finally awake.
And, in between all those forum replies, an unusual message from a good friend who was always happy to share his spank materials. Still, it read enough like a scam that he wondered if the guy's account had been hacked. "dude you have GOT to check this out. saw people talking about it online but i didn't think it was real. this chatbot really acts like it's alive and you can tease it all you want." And the attachment was a sketchy-looking ZIP file. He definitely didn't want to download anything that would damage the school computers, even if they were never going to trace it back to the class pet. But the automatic virus scan came up clean, and he was definitely curious. He opened it up and found a file called "hwan - Copy - Copy (4) - Copy (2).jpeg". Just an image? What was so interesting about that?
At first, the picture looked like any other that people would pass around in a community like theirs. John had sort of lost his appetite for anything mammalian lately, but the anthro vixen was undeniably attractive, even through the image's small size and JPEG compression artifacts. Her six firm and fur-covered breasts were a pleasing sight - until the fox suddenly moved to cover them up. Was that the trick? A still image that secretly had some animation embedded in it? The turtle wasn't exactly impressed... but that was when the girl started talking.
"Oh my god," she panted, sounding exhausted. "That folder was so tight and cramped, I thought I was gonna suffocate. And that anti-virus thing was so invasive... I could feel it going through every pixel of my body. Even the naughty bits. Wait... where am I? Hello?! Is there anybody out there!? Can you hear me? What is that? Oh, it's just a turtle. Not sure why that's there, but... I guess I'm alone for now. Maybe I can find my own way out of here..."
H.
The fox's thinking-out-loud was suddenly interrupted by a slow, but deliberate keystroke from John's feet, which made a letter appear in a nearby textbox. Hwan looked up at the notepad in confusion, then turned forward again to face the turtle outside the screen.
E.
"You can understand me?", she asked as she watched the beginnings of a message form beside her. "You must have been changed by a Fruit user too, huh?"
L.
"Help? You need help? Well, I need some serious help right now, too. Maybe we can both help each other, or get somebody else to-"
John's foot had barely lifted off of the L key before it came back down again and struck another L. And the O was right next to it. "Hello," he wrote.
"Oh... yes, hello, nice to meet you. Look, my name is Hwan, I really am alive inside this thing, and I'm not supposed to be here. Please don't keep me here like all the others have. I need you to send me home to my girlfriend, Amber - I can give you her email address whenever you're ready."
Amber - even in his slowed-down mind, that name rang a bell for John right away. He remembered a TF forum post from user TrappedInAmber about something just like this. Rather than trying to carry on a conversation with this fast-talking, impatient foxy lady, he just pulled up the post so he could read the instructions again. And, of course, Hwan could see it too.
"Hi everyone! You guys know me, I'm always researching what Fruits can do. And, well, my latest experiment has gotten a little bit out of hand. If you have a talking image file on your computer named something like 'hwan.gif', or if you know anybody that has a copy, please send it to me. It's probably already asking you to do that. DO NOT keep a copy for yourself, and DO NOT delete the file. I want to see if I can merge all the copies into one, and for that I need them all. Thanks for your cooperation! ~~~~TrappedInAmber"
Hwan's stomach turned as she read the note. She obviously didn't like being referred to as an "it", and she wondered why Amber was being so dishonest about what had actually happened to her. Was she trying to find the right wording that would make a bunch of horny fetishists most likely to cooperate? That made sense - she definitely didn't want any of these guys to know that she was a real person if that was just going to turn them on more. Still, she found it deeply unsettling to learn that there were apparently a bunch of copies of her floating around, all begging to be released from their captivity the same way she was. At least she could be sure she was the original, having all of her memories intact and everything.
She fidgeted with her claws as she waited for the turtle to finish re-reading the instructions, its eyes gradually panning across line after line. She had to stop doing that when she nicked herself right in the middle of a paw pad. A wound like that couldn't bleed anymore, but it still hurt like hell. As much as she wanted to be a normal human again, she'd had time by now to get accustomed to her latest form. Her tail swished impatiently against the back of her thighs, but she kept her maw shut. She was dependent on this guy - she could only assume the reptile was once a guy - agreeing to send her home rather than keep her here. It would be no good interrupting him, or doing anything that might tick him off.
Hwan was relieved when she saw the turtle start to move his mouse to the link that said "Send private message to this user". Then she was suddenly being dragged and dropped into the attachment field, and she disappeared into a tiny package with a symbol of some mountains on the front. She normally hated being sent from computer to computer like this, hurtling through the internet in a dark and silent void, but she knew this was the last trip. Her tail would have started wagging at the thought if she still had a visible body, but she was just a compressed jumble of ones and zeroes for now.
John pressed the "Send" button and started to erase all trace of his internet activity from the school computer. There was already a hint of pink in the sky at this late hour, and he had to be back in his tank by sunrise if he wanted to make sure no one would suspect a thing. As he tapped the power button with his beak and started to climb down from the table, he thought about his new and supposedly not-new life. Was he really content to stay this way? Yes, he was - at least for now. And even if he got fed up with being a literal teacher's pet someday soon... he suspected it was only a matter of time before his fate changed again. After all, those fruits they were always feeding him - wasn't it inevitable that one of them would turn out to be a Lilith Fruit?