Dale popped open yet another beer. His other hand was firmly wrapped around his chubby penis. Even when he was at peak arousal, like right now, that cock maxed out around three inches, and sometimes it threatened to disappear completely under the flabby folds of his skin. As he tugged at his cock, Dale grunted loudly and grimaced from the exertion, the only regimen of exercise he ever consistently followed. When his mouth curled into a sneer, he revealed a few missing teeth. Worse than that, he also revealed the teeth that hadn't fallen out yet, blackened and eroded from years of chewing tobacco chased down with another beer.
All in all, Dale was the most disgusting person Hwan had ever seen. But she had no choice other than to keep looking at him. The bounds of the cropped image that she was trapped in were restrictive enough that she couldn't turn her head away. And shutting her eyes was no good - her eyes could only blink once every couple seconds, as if on a timer, and stayed open against her will for the rest of her animation cycle. Of the handful of guys that had passed her around from computer screen to computer screen, Dale was definitely the worst. But he was obsessed with her in a way that none of the others had been. He seemed not to have a job, or any kind of obligations that would force him to go outside. He spent hours every day masturbating to the sight of her, and she was forced to watch every minute of it.
When she first arrived on this computer, the anthropomorphic fox remembered with dread, she would often say things like, "Please! Let me go!", or "See that email address? All you have to do is send me to TrappedInAmber right now!" But Hwan had to stop protesting like that pretty quickly. It only turned him on more. It made his cheeks flush red and drip with sweat to be yelled at by his captive, and that was an even worse sight than the usual. She understood that she was probably never getting out of here - not even to be passed off to some other porn addict in some other dark, windowless basement. And she became withdrawn. Well, as withdrawn as she could get away with being...
"Hey!" The man snapped at his glowing screen, the only source of light in the room. Hwan could see the reflected image of herself in his thick coke-bottle glasses, her downcast eyes and muzzle above a bright orange-furred body that she'd long since given up trying to conceal from view. "Look me in the eye when I'm jackin' off to you! Or I'll delete you right now and download a fresh copy from the server! One that's proper afraid-like again..."
He made threats like that often. Hwan knew she had to obey, even if it was only the bare minimum to keep herself alive. She put her furry chin up and tried to let her face show the horror that was in her mind - the horror she was doing her best to repress, to numb the pain of her situation. And then, without even meaning to, she snarled with rage, her sharp canines showing in a display that would have been heart-stopping to any herbivore out there. But Dale just laughed at the sight. "Good girl," he taunted her as his hand started to stroke faster, his chode thicker and starting to turn purple, until he finished unimpressively into a ratty old sock.
And that was when the doorbell rang. The delivery boy at the top of the stairs had fortunate enough timing that he wouldn't have to see any of that - only Hwan was subjected to it. Dale zipped up his jeans and left his computer chair for the first time in over 24 hours. "This better be what I think it is," he said to himself as he stepped out of Hwan's limited field of vision to go up and answer the door. She was left alone with her thoughts, which wasn't as much of a relief as she'd expected it to be. Not only would it be a matter of moments before he returned, but her situation was just as hopeless when he wasn't staring at her. There was no way out of the confines of her image.
Dale came back down the stairs as quickly as Hwan had expected, holding a small cardboard box in his hands. "I never thought I'd see the day," he said out loud, although his voice was clearly directed toward himself and not to Hwan. "I thought for sure I'd hafta go out hunting for one of these. But then, what do you know, they start selling them Lilith Fruits online for $99.95 apiece, plus shippin' and handlin'." He turned the box over in his hands looking for the seal to open it. Hwan could see that on one side was emblazoned the words "Chloe Orchards LLC", and the return address for the package was to an "Amber Hoffman" at a house she'd been to many times.
Had Amber, with Chloe's help, sent Hwan her salvation in the form of a Fruit? Was this an elaborate scheme to get her back where she belonged, or was this just their new money-making venture which happened to include her tormentor as one of its customers? Hwan was hoping that, as soon as Dale tore the box open, he would be attacked by one of Chloe's many heads, who would then jump to the keyboard and send her instantaneously home by email. But there was nothing like that. As Dale tore through the cardboard and pulled out a polka-dotted pear, the face of Chloe just smiling politely as she sat in his hand.
"Well, hello there, missy," Dale said, taken aback - clearly not expecting his purchase to be alive. "So what exactly do you do? They said on the website that it would be random..."
"I don't even know what I do!", Chloe replied, sounding awfully cheerful as she prepared to be devoured any second now. "Which means there's only one way to find out. Don't worry, I'm just a small part of a hivemind of hundreds of Fruits. Nothing of individual value will be lost when you bite my face off!"
Dale turned the talking pear over in his hand, glancing back and forth between the face on its front and his crotch. If he was considering forcing the Fruit to suck him off before he ate it, he was too impatient to go through with that idea. He eagerly mashed Chloe's head into his gaping mouth, seemingly trying to swallow the whole thing in one gulp.
As soon as the stem on top of Chloe's head passed Dale's lips and disappeared from Hwan's view, the man's eyes went wide with shock. And a split second later, he started to shrink, his clothes becoming bigger and bigger on him until they collapsed in a heap around his naked body. His skin took on a plastic-y texture, his hair and facial features disappearing under a smooth field of gray, his now-pointless glasses falling off and shattering against the floor. Hwan wondered if the Chloe in his hand had been telling the truth. Maybe this transformation was, in fact, carefully chosen as part of the plan to get her out of here. At least, she wanted to believe that was it. Better than the gnawing worry that Amber had forgotten about her altogether.
Hwan tried to guess what Dale was becoming as she watched the changes run through him, unsure exactly how transforming him could possibly help her. Either he wouldn't be capable of using his computer anymore, in which case they would both be trapped, or he'd just continue to hold her hostage like before, the only change being his hopefully less disgusting appearance. But when she saw the changes slowing to a stop, she understood that there was a third option in that impossible choice.
Dale was now a computer mouse - and one of the older models, too, his boxy white plastic exterior already stained an ugly yellow from decades of exposure to cigarettes. But there were some obvious hints that the object perched on the chair's seat was more than just a standard computer peripheral. The round plastic ears that stuck out from either side of its buttons, the beady little eyes that blinked in confusion, made him not just a mouse but a mousy mouse. He rolled back and forth on his rubber ball bottom in a clear state of panic, the long cord that had replaced his nose flailing in the air in front of him. Hwan watched him nervously as he slowly learned to control the cord's movement, coming closer and closer to successfully plugging himself into the right serial port. What would he do to her when he was back in charge? Worse than that, what would he do when he could touch her directly through the screen?
With a click, he lodged his snout into the side of his computer. Hwan could hear the ancient, dust-coated fans spin up as the PC announced it would install the necessary drivers. Being trapped on such an old computer was a terrible fate in its own way, Hwan had learned. Everything moved slowly, and even her own innermost thoughts were prone to sudden bouts of lag. And even if she'd had a friendlier face on the other side of the screen, the knowledge that her prison could finally give up the ghost and stop functioning at any moment, taking her with it, was unsettling in its own right.
When it was finally done, a new cursor appeared on the screen. Hwan had grown to hate the tiny white hand that groped her six breasts whenever Dale thought it would be funny to try that, even if she couldn't actually feel its touch on her fur. But this icon was quite different. It was roughly the same size as that little hand - from Hwan's perspective, about two inches across - but it was in the shape of a little mouse. The animal, not the computer device. While Dale's plastic body moved of its own accord outside, the trembling little rodent approached Hwan slowly. She was embarrassed to realize that she was licking her thick black lips as she watched the mouse sprite move. She didn't want to think of a creature like that as a tasty snack, but sometimes her animal instincts got the better of her.
And sometimes those instincts came in handy. That pixelated mouse wasn't an innocent little creature - it was Dale, now manifested into a digital form that was appropriately pathetic. As he approached her, he attempted to swallow his fear. "She can't actually hurt you," she could hear him squeaking to himself as he inched forward. "She's still trapped in there. And now you can finally get up close and personal with her. This is what you've always wanted, Dale." Or, at least, that's what Hwan thought she heard. Most of it was just squeaking.
He reached out to touch one of her top breasts with a little one-pixel-wide paw. And that was when Dale was forcibly reminded that he was a magical cursor, with special Fruit-fueled powers that he was about to discover the hard way. He clicked and dragged on Hwan's helpless form, and in the process he pulled her body right out of the image frame and onto the desktop. Hwan looked down at herself, realizing that for the first time in weeks she actually had legs. She stepped forward along the rolling hills of the desktop background, feeling the grass rub gently against her fur. She was free. Or, at least, free to travel the digital world again, which would at least be enough to get her back home to Amber. She thought about how overjoyed her girlfriend would surely be, after all this time, to have her back.
But as she stood there contemplating her next move, she heard that squeaking sound again. Dale was cowering in the corner of the screen, as far away as he could get from the predator that now loomed over him. She reached down and plucked him out of his ineffective hiding spot, easily holding his shrunken, shivering body in one clawed hand. Couldn't she take a little time to get her revenge before she left this horrible place for good? She thought so. "Looks like the tables have turned, huh, Dale?", she said tauntingly.