Alice spent a few minutes admiring herself in the bathroom mirror. Despite having goat legs and a protruding
tummy--or perhaps because of them--she felt even more delightfully childlike. Her bright blue eyes had a wild
gleam in them, and she couldn't help but see her small lips curl into a tiny mischievous smile.
Excited to see what else she could try on the program, she returned to the computer. At the top of the screen
were a few tabs. The active tab was labeled "Physical," but there were also tabs that said "Mental" and
"Awareness."
"Ah, I should set the awareness parameters before anyone comes home. Otherwise I'll have a lot of explaining
to do." Alice clicked on the tab and saw among the options a box that made her the only one aware of her
previous existence as a human. Hopefully, the rest of the world would treat her as if she'd always been a
faun.
The she clicked on the "Mental" tab that took her to a new menu full of mental traits. Her current attitudes,
likes and dislikes were on display.
She thought for a minute about leaving them alone. "Well, I can always change some of these back if having my
brain altered freaks me out. I just have to make sure not to go overboard with new preferences."
She looked over her mental settings. Her love of the outdoors was already rather high, and appropriate for a
faun. She saw a slider for music appreciation and musical talent. She brought those up a bit and in a box
labeled "Instruments Played" she typed "Flute, Recorder, Panpipes." Instantly three new sliders appeared,
setting her proficiencies in those instruments. Alice kicked all three to maximum.
She tweaked the settings under food preferences to make herself like more vegetables. She didn't care much for
a lot of veggies currently. "New body, new rules. Fauns live off forest scraps, and though I don't plan to do
that myself, having a larger veggie palette ought to do me some good." She also thought that little fauns
would be more indulgent, and so she increased her appetite a little and sped up her metabolism slightly to
compensate.
She looked over page after page of sliders, adjusting some here and there that seemed to help with her new
body. She increased her sense of humor and playfulness tenfold, and decreased her tendency to become sad or
nervous. She noticed her introvert/extrovert slider was middling between the two extremes, and decided to move
it halfway toward extrovert. She found a slider controlling her attention span and reduced this a bit. "Fauns
are flighty creatures sometimes," she giggled.
Also recalled that when fauns became satyrs they were debaucherous creatures. She didn't want that, at least
not totally, after all she was just a little kid. She looked over the menu regarding her sexual habits and
preferences. She snickered at seeing a slider marked "Normal Arousal State." Hers was thankfully low,
unsurprisingly, at about 8%. She decided to bring this up to 10%. "Wonder if I'll get a kick out of that," she
said. "Or if it'll be too much for me to cope with." She really had no idea what kind of grade this slider was
based on. She was confident any higher than 20% was more than she wanted at this point.
This made her think of what to do about clothes. "I can't exactly wear anything on my legs without the fur
itching like crazy," she said. "And satyrs don't seem to wear a lot of clothes anyway. Maybe I can...?" Alice
searched through the program until she found a preference for clothing and clothing types.
"Okay," she said, playing with the sliders. "As far as a general interest in clothing, I should go way down."
She moved the main clothes slider from its original position, close to "strongly like," over toward "strongly
dislike," though she made sure not to go all the way, lest she develop such a mad-on for clothes that she
started to burn her entire wardrobe or something. "Who wants to wear dumb clothes anyway when you have
beautiful fur. However... I do want to wear some pretty things from time to time." She increased her interest
in jewelry and recreational clothes such as vests and scarfs.
"Hmm...that's all I can think of for now," she said to herself. "I covered a lot of ground already. Time to
see if this works." Alice clicked save once, and felt her head spin for a moment as new thoughts and ideas
swept in, pushing some of her other thoughts to the back of her mind.
"Woah," she said breathlessly. She shook her head to clear it up. Her hair tossed around, tickling her newly
sensitive ears and Alice felt a rush of new delightfully miscreant thoughts, thoughts about young human boys
and how silly they looked after being lightly kissed on the nose. "Oooh, that was cool," she said. "Must be
the Arousal factor kicking in."
She felt much more ambitious about her changes than before. "Hmm, lets see what else I can change."
She noticed that the "Sexual Tendencies" bar was set to heterosexual. "Hmm, fauns are known to be interested
both ways..." She hesitated but decided to click it close to bisexual. Another bar appeared, "Sexual
awareness." She set this very low, deciding that she wanted the average knowledge about sex of any eight year
old. "Why not? So long as I'm only just curious about things." She then clicked save.
A more palpable change filtered through her mind as even more new thoughts and understandings filled it.
Suddenly, she couldn't recall any sexual thoughts. Instead, thoughts of sex and sexuality had changed to a
hazy, murky curiosity. She knew about the differences between boys and girls, but the most she understood
about love was to kiss a boy or girl now and watch them blush. She recalled doing so, for some reason, and
feeling a flush of giddy emotion that she really enjoyed. Smiling, she nodded to herself. "Why would I want
to remember grown up stuff like that anyways?"
She giggled slightly. The prospect of going through her day as a faun brought a squeal of joy to her lips.
"Oh, I can't wait to go out and do something. But I have to make sure I'm really ready." Alice skipped to the
bathroom again to take another look at herself, in case there were any more changes she wanted to do.
Upon seeing herself in the mirror, she felt something was different about the way she looked, although she
knew she hadn't changed physically. "Why did I not notice how nice my hair looks like this?" She ran a finger
through her dense brown curls. An urge welled up in her to play with it a little. "I know, I think I saw a
picture somewhere..."
Alice jogged back to her room, feeling her small gut sway back and forth and her hair blow up in a large bush
behind her. She pulled a book of classical art from her bookshelf and flipped through the pages to find one of
her favorite paintings of a young faun. She found it quickly. It was a picture of a little female faun, naked
of course, offering an apple to two cherubs in a beautiful forest setting. The faun was plump, a little
thicker in the limbs than Alice, but she had the same long brown curls. In the midst of these was a braid that
began halfway down, consisting of half her total locks and laying upon the strands that still hung loose. It
lent an ironic sense of style to the exotic disarray of hair.
Alice plopped down on her bed and began working on the braid. Because she only had to start from the halfway
point, it was easy to pull the locks around to her front side and start braiding. She was so gleefully focused
on her work that she didn't notice the time go by, until...