After waking up in the morning, I decided to just lay there for a bit and I thought about what had happened yesterday. Ava is now a tiny bipedal tiger girl and she thinks that any time she makes a wish, it comes true after being interpreted intentionally different than it was meant. Well I guess that part really is true, but she doesn't know I'm the one interpreting it!
After laying there contemplating yesterday's events, I decide to get up. I stretch and open my eyes and immediately check on Ava. She's still curled up in a ball and snoring like she was last night. She's just so adorable like that! Deciding not to disturb her, I go and make some scrambled eggs. When I get back, I stroke her back a bit, "Wakey, wakey Ava," I whisper, "breakfast if ready." She stretches like a cat before ruling over and smiling at me, "thanks" she whispers quietly. "So, you feeling better today?" I ask her. "Yea, I'm still a bit confused, but I won't freak out again today." She says, "Thanks for dealing with me yesterday, I'm sorry for yelling at you." "No problem," I reply, "you shrunk to the size of my thumb, that's good enough reason to panic in my eyes. Anyway, finish your breakfast so that we can get to work figuring out what happened to you." Having finished my own breakfast, I watch her devour the tiny portion of eggs I broke off from mine, before pushing the rest to the side. "I wish every morning could be like this one." She says before clapping her hand over her mouth. Thinking, I decide to implement that as a ground hog day scenario where each day, we wake up in my apartment. Though I decide that if I transform us, We stay transformed. I also decide to let Ava know exactly what's happening with that. "Oh" she said, "that's not bad for now." "What did the wish do?" I ask to keep up appearances. "Essentially ground hog day, except if I'm transformed I stay transformed" she replies, "we can deal with that later." "You said you were going to try to figure out what happened to me?" She asked, "How do you plan to do that? It's not like magic is something the world acknowledges, I didn't believe it existed until I got shrunk without any explanation, and I've never heard someone truthfully argue that magic exists." "Ahh, this one doubts the power of the internet" I boast, "if it's happened in recent times, it's probably on some corner of the internet, someone just probably wrote it off as someone being crazy." Ava looked doubtful, so I picked her up and said, "come on, let's at least try the computer first, there's no harm in it." "Yea, I guess." She said.
I gently place Ava on the desk and boot up my PC. While we wait, I tickle Ava a little bit, "Hey! Stop that!" She yells, grinning. When it boots up, I pull up a web browser and search "unexplained wishes coming true" and get a whole bunch of useless self help websites or something. "Alright, maybe it will be a bit harder than I thought" I say, rubbing the back of my head. "Let me try." Ava says giggling. She starts jumping from key to key spell out "Changed transformed wish". "You know you could have just asked me to type it out" I say, "I know but this more fun" she replied, grinning. She really is adorable like this, I'm glad she's getting comfortable with the changes, means I can leave her like this longer. As Google loads, I can see that her search came up with the weird results we were originally looking for. "That one looks maybe like what we're looking for." Ava said, pointing at one of the links. We spent a while searching and looking through the websites. None of them seemed to be real though, just stories people wrote. We were going to give up when we saw one result that described Ava's situation exactly. I personally was really surprised, seeing as her situation was one I created. When we followed the link though, there was an error 404. "Agh" Ava screamed. "I wish I could just understand why the computers never work for me..." She trailed off and clapped her hands over her mouth. I decided to make a wish for time to stop so I could think of a fun way to interpret her wish. At first I thought of turning her into a computer, but I decided against that as boring. Maybe a flash drive with her as a file on it? That sounded better, but looking at her terrified face, I didn't want to leave her like that. Thinking I came up with a pretty elaborate wish. I wished that she would gain a switch on her back that really only appeared if someone knew to look for it and wanted to find out, otherwise it wasn't there, that would turn her into a flash drive. She's going to need to be charged about every 14 hours assuming she's charged fully each time. I arbitrarily decided on an 8 hour charging time for a full charge and upon getting low on charge she'd get tired, before finally falling asleep until she's recharged. When she's a flash drive I want there to be a program that allows me to simulate her inside the program, and edit everything about her. I also wished for am instruction manual, both for appearances, and because I wanted to know what the program can do. Upon finishing my lengthy wish, I unpaused time.
"Oh, no, not again" Ava mumbled. I quickly grabbed her and pulled her to me. "It'll be okay" I said pulling her deeper into the hug, "I'm sure all that well happen it's you'll get knowledge about computers, right?" "Yea, I guess, nothing's happened yet though." She responded, muffled by my shirt. I put her on my hand to let her stand up on her own and she immediately sat down. "Whoa, I'm feeling really tired all of a sudden." She said, looking worried, "something must be happening, don't let me fall asleep!" "What do you want me to do?" I asked. "I don't know, tickle me!" She said drowsily. I made a half hearted effort to tickle her, until finally her eyes closed. I carefully put her down into the desk and looked around for an instruction manual. I was greeted by not just an instruction manual, but a full blown box with space for Ava, carrying case and a quick start guide and instruction manual. For a second, I reach for the quick start guide, but then I decide that if my best friend has an instruction manual, I should probably read it. The manual instructs me to gently place my fingers in her armpits and squeeze lightly, then to flip the switch which appears on her back to usb mode. I watch as her and shrink into her body and she takes on a silvery sheen with "Ava" stylistically engraved on the front in black. I plug her into the computer and a battery charging symbol appears on the top as a green bar of light starts to appear on the side. Flipping to the next page in the manual, it tells me that it's recommended I make a backup before opening my "usb friend", by dragging the contents of the flash drive to the desktop, it says that the backup can be edited and simulated the same way add the main one can, and it can be used to restore the "usb friend" to it's original state. When that's done. I open up the program. Ava appears in a T-pose with options to edit her off to the side. Rather than mess with her yet, I press the big "simulate" button at the top of the screen. The main window changes to a picture of a room with Ava curled up on the ground. According to the manual, she should be able to hear and see me, so I tentatively say her name, "Ava, Ava, you ok?" At this she stirs a little so I try again, "Ava, wake up!" That works better as she opens her eyes. Well, it worked until she slams then shut again, "What happened, the wish did do something to me didn't it... Last thing I remember was being really tired all of a sudden.." "Yea, you passed out in my hand and nothing would wake you up. Then I noticed a box sitting on my desk," I say holding it up, "apparently your something called a usb friend now. Anyway, I followed the instructions and you turned into a flash drive apparently you need to charge. In the mean time, there's a program that lets me "simulate" you inside the computer." During this, Ava just sits there looking confused, "What...?" She asks. "One second, I think I saw something in the instruction manual that might help." I say as I flip to the index, then to the page marked "transferring objects into the simulation". The instructions walked me through pressing a button to scan the room I was in for objects, then I selected the instruction manual from a list off objects in the room and dropped a copy into the room. "Eek, where'd that come from" Ava shrieked. "Calm down, I dropped it in with my cursor, see like this." I said as I lifted her up a bit with the cursor. "Whoa, that's weird," Ava said, "and sorry, just a bit freaked out at this." "With good reason, now read your instructions!" I said laughing, "My instructions," Ava muttered, "this is so weird."
As Ava read the manual, I entertained myself by playing with the options. First I added some furniture to the room. Then I moved over to the options for changing Ava. "Would you like to save this body to bye used later?" The computer asked me, to which I clicked yes. The program then expanded to fill all the of the screens I have hooked up to my computer. One with Ava in the room reading, one with her in a T-pose, and one with a bunch off options and tabs. On the one with options, it opened up a tab marked "saved bodies" which had a grid with pictures of a bunch of people in T-possess and a few animals, then added Ava and asked more to name the body. I typed "half-tiger" and looked at the others. The were labelled things like "example male 12 yr" and "example cat". I clicked on the one with a picture of a little boy and he replaced Ava in the screen with a 3D T-pose. A button marked apply turned from grey to yellow. "I'm going to try something ok Ava?" I ask, "yea sure" she responds, not even looking up. I grin and press, apply, then watch as Ava begins to turn into a young boy. "She looks down after a few moments as her fur falls away, then looks at me, "did you figure out how to turn me back?" She asks, "err, not quite, but I made you human again." I say, "here" I drag in a full body mirror from the default objects and watch as she shrinks into a little boy. "What did you do?" She asks me, "Well there were default bodies to try so I picked one as a test". "Can you put me back please, being a boy feels weird, especially so young." She says, "alright" I respond, and click to change her back. "Try looking in the morph options," Ava says, "the manual says those allow you to change specific elements." Clicking through, I see another option, "there's also an option to create bodies from pictures." I say, "it'll be easier to just copy the species attribute, wouldn't it?" She asks, "yea, I guess" I say, "could you tell me how?" Ava walks me through finding the attribute list and paring down the list. Apparently the list shows everything by default but can be sorted and searched so you don't have to scroll through a million different entries. Looking through, I turn off claws for the tiger body and save out before searching for species. Better safe than sorry. I select species and type in "human", and I save the body as "human" but I pause before clicking apply, I kind like her as a tiger. I look over to see Ava's reading through the manual again to I click the pause button above the simulation quickly while she's not looking. I then switch to the mental tab to see if there's anything I can do and I scroll through the options. After paring the options down, I find one that says "affinity to species" when I hover over the i next to it, it displays "control how much the usb friend prefers to btw a given species given a choice." When I clicked on it, it displayed sliders for human and half-tiger, I guess it can only affect ones she's already been. I raise up half-tiger to near the top and leave human where it is. I scroll through the list and find affinity to people which has the description of, "the order of who the usb friend likes the most, higher up is better." It's a list off people with arrows next to their names. I'm pretty pleased to find myself near the top already, but I can't resist bumping it up a few times. After that, I decide that's enough meddling, and I unpause Ava and say, "alright" as I click apply.
Ava puts the instruction manual down and stretches as the fur retracts into her body and her tall disappears. She looks down at herself and smiles for a moment, before her face changed to embarrassment, "Uhh, can I have some clothes please?" She says as she covers herself. "Sure" I say as I pull up the list of default options. I grab some underwear and start dragging it to the window and drop without looking. "Whoa" Ava says, "that was cool." "What?" I ask. "The clothes appeared right on me" she says, could you finish though?" "Oh yea right." I say as I grab her a her green turtleneck, and some brown pants. Once dressed, Ava looks more comfortable than she has for a while, though she looks like she has something she wants to ask me but is too embarrassed to. I briefly consider going to the "mind reading" tab, then decide that I want plausible deniability for snooping in her head. Instead, I mentally wish that the program had a pop-up notification service for when the usb friend wanted something. As soon as I think that, I see a pop-up saying, "Your usb friend has been thinking about this intently, 'I kind of like the fur I wish he'd turn me back into the half-tiger, I don't really want to ask him though.'" Apparently Ava could see it too because she looked down embarrassed, "I wasn't going to ask, but, well, could you?" "Sure," I say, "and don't be embarrassed, that fur does look really comfortable, I remember how soft it was from earlier, I'm kind of jealous. Plus it's pretty" after that she's beaming as her fur grows back in, she doesn't know what to do with her tail for a moment, but I select her clothes and change the designated species option from "human" to "half-tiger" and a slot for the tail opens up. Now Ava finally looks fully comfortable, with nothing bugging her. "Well, it looks like there's still a few hours before I'm charged," she says pointing to a meter on the wall, "want to mess with the other settings?" "Sure," I say, maybe a little too excitedly, but my best friend just basically gave me permission to do almost anything that I can think of to her, that's kind of cool that she trusts me that much. "If I can ask though, why are you ok with me changing you, I thought you were terrified of being transformed earlier." I ask. "There's two reasons," she replied, "the first is simply because my body's backed up now, you can't do anything to it you can't fix, the second is really just because I trust you." "Thanks," I say grinning, "any idea what you want me to change?" "Just mess around with stuff, you err complaining about all the options, see what they do!" She replied. "Ok" I say as I go to the options and scroll until I find...