Dale trembled in the palm of Hwan's enormous pixelated paw for just a moment, and then remembered exactly what type of mouse he now was. He mustered all his strength and right-clicked on the fox. The strange and unpleasant sensation of being highlighted was enough to throw Hwan off, and then the little mouse cursor was off like a rocket, trailing down the menu of options that had just appeared at the vixen's side. "Rename hwan - Copy - Copy (3).jpeg"... "Set image as desktop background"... "Edit in Paint"... Hwan's stomach dropped when she saw the last item in the long list, which Dale was rapidly heading for. It said "Delete".
"Oh, no, you don't!", Hwan shouted, swiping at the mouse with her claws - and accidentally hitting one of the other options, "Copy". In the blink of an eye, she found herself standing next to her own mirror image. "Whoa...", both Hwans said in perfect unison as they faced each other, "I have a clone. Wait, what? No, you're the clone! Grrrr... Let's just focus on taking out that little pest for now, and then we can worry about which one of us is the original." They both nodded to seal the agreement, then looked around for where the mouse had gone.
As it turned out, while the two vixens were distracted, Dale was busy pulling up a sketchy website for downloading custom cursors. It offered thousands of new potential forms to replace his current pathetic little body, and he was searching for the largest and most intimidating ones they had. The Hwans couldn't let that happen. They lunged after the mouse from either side, only to knock their snouts together painfully while Dale slipped away. And in the tangled heap of orange fur and twelve bouncing breasts where the two clones had fallen over each other, one of them accidentally touched a banner ad in the browser, which read "HOTTEST FRUIT-USER NUDES - SUBSCRIBE TODAY!"
A large pop-up window blocked all three of them from the screen behind. It featured a video of a scantily-clad two-headed woman, who had obviously received two facelifts recently. The woman spoke in a sultry voice which traded off from one of her mouths to the other after almost every word. "Want to... explore... the outer limits... of human... sexuality?" The last word came from both sides at once.
"I think we've all had enough of that lately!", shouted one of the Hwans as she and her clone started to get up. Dale quickly zipped across the screen so he could click the "X" button and get back to his search. But the other Hwan was just as quick, and slammed a paw-like hand on the "X" button for the whole browser, closing out his path to a better body.
That just made Dale angry, as well as terrified. He dove straight for that Hwan's belly button, striking her with surprisingly painful force right in the solar plexus. And before she could recover from the blow, she found herself being dragged toward the corner of the desktop screen where the Recycle Bin sat. And as she flailed her suddenly blue-tinted arms, legs, and tail in the air, she found she couldn't touch Dale or anything else while she was highlighted. In a few seconds, she would be in the trash. This was the end of the line for her. "Hwan!", she cried out to her duplicate on the other side of the screen. "You have to get out of here now! Before he gets you too!"
The other Hwan wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, until she spotted it. In the far corner of the screen, there was a little tunnel that appeared to extend out of the computer and into total darkness. From her vantage point, it looked just like the hole in a wall that a cartoon mouse would live out of. And it seemed to line up with the cord that led to Dale's plastic physical form outside. This must be how he got in here in the first place. Which meant it was also a way to get out.
She looked up again, just in time to watch her doppelganger disappear into the trash icon. Then the sound of muffled screaming coming from inside that icon, until Dale clicked on "Empty the Recycle Bin" and the noise abruptly disappeared. Hwan had just watched her twin sister die, and the fact that she hadn't had a twin sister 60 seconds ago didn't make it any less traumatizing. But she had to focus, or she would be next.
Here goes nothing, she thought to herself as she jumped into the tiny hole. It looked barely big enough for her to even fit a hand inside, but that didn't matter. Her pixelated furry form dissolved into raw data as she traveled through the cord, and everything went black. A moment later, she opened her eyes again and found herself on the outside looking in. There was the yellowed old monitor where she'd been trapped for the past week. There, darting across the screen in confusion, was Dale's tiny cursor form. And it didn't take long for Hwan to understand what had just happened to her.
She'd taken over Dale's computer-mouse body, perched on the seat of his chair. But that body had undergone some appropriate changes in the process. She was a full generation younger than Dale, and so she'd become an optical mouse with a USB port rather than an older model like he was. Instead of white and grey, her plastic skin was now mostly orange, with bits of black and cream coloring as accents. And she still had her triangular ears, which flared out from her sides near the buttons atop her head. This was definitely a downgrade from her previous form, since there was no trace of humanity left in her now. But more importantly, she wasn't just an image on a computer screen any longer. She was back in the material world. And she was already formulating a plan for how she might finally become fully human again now that she was out.
First things first, she had to stop Dale from getting back at her again. She yanked her cord out of the computer, cutting off his escape route. She didn't want to know what would happen if they both inhabited this hunk of plastic at the same time, and now she wouldn't have to find out. Dale's cursor form was still on the screen, and soon he went to open his internet browser again. Hwan retaliated quickly, using her long cord as a whip to knock Dale's modem right off of his desk. It cracked into pieces on the floor, and Dale was greeted with "You're not connected to the Internet" when he tried to open that website again.
There. Hwan felt sure that Dale was completely harmless now, as he bounced aimlessly from one end of the monitor to the other. He would be trapped and isolated inside his computer until it sprung a memory leak and bluescreened, or maybe until the electric company shut off the power to this house, whichever came first. Hwan would've stuck her tongue out to taunt her tormentor, but she no longer had a tongue. Instead, she just turned away and focused on her next challenge: getting out of this godforsaken basement once and for all.
And as Hwan tentatively tried to move with her new body, she realized that she really had caught a series of lucky breaks for once. Either that, or Amber and Chloe had planned this out perfectly. Because while she didn't exactly enjoy being a computer mouse, or a computer fox, its limited forms of movement were all that she needed right now. It was easy enough to hop off the seat of Dale's chair and land softly on the rug below. The long cord that stuck out of her snout, meanwhile, worked perfecly as a lasso. She used it to rope up a permanent marker lying on the nearby desk, then turned to the empty Fruit box that laid discarded on the floor. Right underneath Amber's return address, she scrawled "RETURN TO SENDER" in big thick letters that no postman was going to miss.
Then all she had to do was get herself up the stairs, with the box wrapped up in her cord to be carried behind her. It was intimidating at first, seeing as each step was twice as tall as her entire body was long. But her lightweight form had some serious power in it, and it took her only a few tries to launch herself on top of the first step. She didn't quite know how she could jump like that, given that she had no arms or legs to push off from the ground with. But she wasn't going to think too hard about it, fearing that overthinking it would make the Fruit magic stop working somehow. Besides, she only had to do it about a dozen more times to get to the top of the stairs.
Hop. Hop. Hop. It was maddening to miss the mark so many times, and occasionally even fall down a step or two and have to make up for the lost progress. She wondered how much battery life she had left. But each successful step up was an opportunity to celebrate, and before long the end was in sight. She made it to the landing, surrounded by pairs of shoes that would never be worn again and a doormat that looked like it hadn't been used very often. She put the box right down on the mat, then jumped inside and pulled the lid shut on top of her. Now her work was done. The humble postal service would carry her the rest of the way home. Hwan curled up in the dark interior of the cardboard box and slipped into a well-deserved nap, dreaming of how delighted Amber would be when she finally had her girlfriend back.