#mrow sona: anodyne

[jades-typurriter]

Copy & Replace

Hiiiiiii it's time once again for everyone's favorite Situations Cat AND everyone's favorite Renamon!! We're pitting two bad bitches against each other (and eventually they end up as The Same Bad Bitch) <3 Thank you to @bluebearial for the sketch!! She's one of Posie's strongest soldiers everybody say thank you Bee

CW: Initially-unwanted TF, Identity Death

“Ugh, why do these places always have so many spreadsheets?”

Anodyne grumbled in disdain, hologram paws flipping through hologram pages in a hologram file-folder, all projected from a port in the side of a rack-mounted storage drive. Don’t get her wrong, she could understand the appeal of a good spreadsheet. Sometimes the 1’s and 0’s just felt good to put in their proper places, like the satisfying click of a fresh stick of RAM. She wasn’t here for plain old accounting records, though—she cracked her way into places like this to see the juicy dirt, to cause problems! These weren’t even the cooked kind of books!!

She huffed, resigning herself to an even longer search for something incriminating, or at least interesting. One ear swiveled toward a router on a desk on the other side of the room, tingling with the invisible waves of light that bore an upload into the room. A big one; probably an executable from the looks of the metadata. That was her cue! She figured it was about time that what passed for an antivirus around here came looking for her.

The catbot dove headfirst into the digital folder, paws together in front of her like an Olympic diver. It flipped shut with the riffling sound of a thick book closing and zipped back into the drive it was stored on, stashing Anodyne discreetly out of the way just as another projection manifested itself into the room. The electronic door slid open, and the empty space was quickly filled with gray-blue pixels and the sound of high heels tapping on the tile floor. The blocks of light resolved themselves into the imposing figure of a Renamon woman, nearly as tall as the server racks themselves, scanning the room with her harsh gaze. She stood stock still in the silent space for a moment, paws folded behind her back. Annie half-expected her to reach down to the surface of the desk to her side and inspect it for dust.

“I could have sworn,” she muttered to herself, apparently satisfied that nothing was out of place, “that there had been some suspicious file requests from here…”

The cat giggled to herself as she peered out from between the broad, flat computers resting on the slats of the rack, paws perched on the edge as though she was peering through a set of blinds, or hiding behind a couch to spook a friend. She was certain that the Renamon’s eyes had passed over the contents of the files themselves—another digital being ought to know better than anyone that not all intruders were physically inside the building. Still, she’d escaped notice, at least on a quick browse. That was one of the benefits of being able to fit on a 3.5-inch floppy disk! Now, all she needed to do was transfer herself back out of here before the Rena could do a more in-depth search, and—

All eyes in the room flicked to a red indicator light that had begun flashing on one of the monitors.

“Oh, it’s time for my backup,” the Renamon thought aloud. “Unlike me to let it sneak up on me, but I suppose I was busy trying to sneak up on something else.” She chuckled a quiet, refined ohoho before turning to the rack Annie had hidden herself in. “How convenient that I’m already down here!”

To the robot’s horror, she realized that she hadn’t bothered to check what subfolder she’d burrowed her way into. She quickly checked the file directory she was in: Repository/DD:/Users/Posie/Rollback.

Well, shit.

She tried, with a little more urgency this time, to get the hell out of DD:/odge, but felt like she had just bonked her plastic snout into a glass window. The disk was preventing transfers other than the upload from this Posie lady, which honestly pissed her off more because she wasn’t designed with a feature like that more than anything else. Back in her model’s day, if the power went out or something else interrupted a write to the disk, you were just fucked! She supposed she was fucked either way, but damn if she hadn’t been inconvenienced enough times by “user safety” restrictions that she’d go down bitching about them one last time.

She felt her colors begin to change as her settings were re-mapped to those of the Renamon; her shiny white plastic first grayed, then turned cooler, bluer, as though she were a plane icing over in the upper stratosphere. Her blunt snout took on a pointier profile, and the short, cartoony lines that served as the eyes on her visor redrew themselves into sleek, eyeliner-wing shapes. The holographic hair between her ears fizzled out, while a wavy dewlap flickered on around her chest; the TV-static fur that danced along her paws and forearms became more dense, coalescing into two fingerless elbow gloves. Yet more fur sprouted (more like sparked, really) into being along her body, her hips widening as she grew a skirt to match the office lady’s inbuilt attire. Why were her hips always getting bigger, when it came to this sort of thing? Not that she’d ever complain about getting curvier. Honestly, in spite of herself, she was getting a little excited at the prospect of this change, too. The Rena was attractive… But seriously, she couldn’t even remember how many times something like this has happened before. It must’ve been—

Wait, no, she really couldn’t remember. With her model largely aligned with the Renamon’s, her storage began to change next, wave after wave of infinitesimal magnetic pulses realigning the patterns of her bits into those of a new woman’s. Most of the appearances of her own designation were replaced, one by one, with “Posie”. As she tried to recount previous misadventures on heists like this one, she found some already missing. I was unsettling, but honestly, it felt a lot like having her short-term storage scrambled by a magnet: it was, all at once, scary and empty, but freeingly light, like the thoughts were being replaced with a nice, fuzzy noise function.

As the read/write head glided over the metal surface she was stored on, she only got more and more worked up. Run-ins with the gooey, creeping tendrils of ransomware and the feeling of being squeezed through the nozzle of a 3D printer flashed through her mind as they were located, accessed, and promptly formatted for space. In their place were to-do lists, chat histories with highers-up, schematics and floor plans of the building—at least she’d gotten the dirt she’d come for, one way or another. She felt less and less of her usual itch to poke and prod and send people scrambling, and more and more of a drive to leave everything she touched in perfect order.

By the time the last of her flings had been replaced by Posie’s personality, she felt herself developing a visceral… discomfort, at the memories. They intrigued her, but surely they were beneath her. Unbecoming. She tried to ignore the server rack’s cooling fans spinning faster. Soon enough, those old experiences had been written over anyway, leaving her with nothing but a baseless sense of apprehension (excitement?) and a lingering heat on her face.

Posie’s own history had been neatly superimposed on the digital space they once occupied, a contingency in case something ever happened to her active instance. One could never be too careful, after all! She shuddered at the thought of data corruption… She knew, though, that she could still rest easy, having taken precautions for every eventuality. She paused, processing her current situation. Evidently, she’d been vindicated in all her extra attention to redundancy. Her backup—she herself, now, she supposed—was only ever supposed to boot in the event of the deactivation of the original copy, which meant something had gone awry! That was one thing she hadn’t planned for, she mused: getting herself up to speed whenever her failsafe kicked in to begin with. She accessed the most recent files she could, from moments before her upload, and found nothing but a few temporary files lingering in the back of her mind. They belonged to a different program entirely, according to their metadata. Anodyne? Perhaps that was the one behind the network breach she’d been investigating. 

She sighed. That meant there was yet another mess to clean up, and once again, it fell to her to keep things in working order. What a shame that she couldn’t even depend on herself to do her job correctly around here… Her old self, anyway. Posie knew that she would handle it with her usual meticulous eye for detail, unerring precision, efficient and timely—

Her affirmations were interrupted as she materialized herself from the drive, nearly smacking her face straight into… her face.

“What on Earth?” Posie exclaimed.

“Who are you supposed to be?” Posie asked, incredulous, and more than a little irritated.

“I’m—” Posie stuttered. “Well, I suppose I’m your backup.”

“Right,” Posie scoffed, “because the system I put in place would start up without the proper conditions being met. I knew someone was poking around in here! I’m quarantining you—”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Posie snapped. She hesitated before continuing; that cache of temporary files was all that was left of the intruder, but something about them left her with the feeling that she hadn’t been Posie until just now. Between that, and the fact it had taken her so much grasping at her own memories to recollect herself, the lack of second-nature familiarity with her file structure… She shook her head. Of course she wasn’t herself until just now—she hadn't been anybody until just now! That was another flaw her original copy had left her to deal with, she supposed. The temporary files would be cleaned up soon enough, and she’d adjust to her new runtime. “Check for yourself, if you must.”

“Fine,” barked Posie, “I will. And then when I find out whose paw is sock-puppeting my own face at me, I’ll do much more than just quarantine—” She froze as she began to appraise her copy, doing a double-take as her eyes flickered across her figure in search of flaws.

“What is it?” Posie demanded, looking herself over to see what all the fuss… Oh. A certain connector jutted out from under the fur bunched around her waist, and she recalled the confused, flustered haze she’d been in a few moments before coming online.

“I assure you, you must have such unprompted malfunctions as well.”

“Me? How vulgar!”

“I’m also you! I was copied from you!”

“Then there must have been an error in the copying process.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t user error?”

“You would certainly be familiar with user error, wouldn't you?”

The two virtual vixens squabbled with each other, seated at workstations on opposite sides of the room. Management had supposed that two Posies would increase productivity at least twofold—after all, they’d surely be so in sync that they’d be able to coordinate better than simply adding another person to the workforce, right?—but in reality, their similarity made them like matching poles of a pair of magnets.

“Maybe you would make such a simple mistake, but—”

“O-ho, and what happened to being my exact copy?”

“If we were exact copies, I wouldn't have to straighten up every little thing you leave out of place. Didn’t you come up with our workflow? Really, I think you might actually have had some files damaged for me to have activated on my own.”

“Oh, yes, parts of you certainly seemed to activate on their own.”

“I—! My hardware must have been running a diagnostic to make sure I didn’t have any leftover artifacts from you.”

“Yes, that would be quite the artifact, wouldn’t it?”

“Don’t say it like it could have come from anywhere other than your original files! It’s far too big an addition to be explained by a little misplaced data!”

“Big, indeed. And unsightly. Uncontrollable! It’d explain why you miss so many little details; you seem to be very focused on ‘misplacing’ data.”

“Is that what you call it when you abandon your post every 20 minutes to ‘make an upload’ to the central server?”

The two of them stammered and huffed themselves into a sort of tense truce at that remark. Neither of them would ever admit it to each other, but both of them were eager to feel another data transfer, and now that it’d been discussed so brazenly, neither could take their mind off of it. They sat at their respective desks, hoping the other wouldn’t notice the deep blue blush beneath the fur of their cheeks, the uncomfortable shifting and crossing of their legs, the pace of their work slowing to an agonizing crawl…

“On that note, I really should push an update to the ledger—”

“You sit yourself right there! It’s my turn!”

Thank you for reading! If you want to see more of my writing, you can check it out here and here <3

[jades-typurriter]

Party Planning, Housekeeping, And Other Jobs For A Personal Digital Assistant

Another TF story collaboration between me and Bowsiosaurus, set in the aftermath of a Halloween party (this was written just after the 31st in 2023), where a case of mistaken identity leads Anodyne (an alternate sona at the time of writing who later turned out to be a whole headmate lol) to make a few alterations to Bowsie's files. Hope you enjoy!

Bowsie scurried back and forth across the jumbled and disarrayed apartment. Vee wasn’t sure how vee had fit so many of ver friends in the little place to begin with, and was even more confused as to the mess, which seemed to have been made by a party twice the actual size. It was November 1st, technically: the wee hours after a Halloween get-together. The poor, stressed serpent still hadn’t even had the chance to change out of its costume—stretchy, breathable black leggings and arm warmers, shiny white boots and gloves, and a matching white tunic, all accented with an eye-catching cyan—before getting down to the dirty business of un-dirtying the place.

“Okay, I… okay. I still have to… the trash over there, and the spill on the floor, and… I should write this down before I lose track of it all, actually.” Vee leaned ver broom against the wall and started for ver room to check the nightstand where vee usually charged it. It wasn’t there—where had vee left it? Vee retraced ver steps, mind still pulled in a million different directions as it struggled to cling to all the little things that still needed doing, still cloudy with exhaustion. Vee walked right past ver phone more than once, as a matter of fact, and was so distracted that vee didn’t notice when the screen blinked to life by itself behind ver.

“Oh, Tasque Manager! Funny seeing you here,” chirped a tinny, computer-synthesized voice from the phone’s speakers. Bowsie didn’t seem to notice the voice, nor did vee notice when the digital voice was followed by the digital snout of a digital cat, then their digital shoulders, digital torso, digital skirt, and digital wheel. Hovering above the screen, spinning their wheel like the propeller of a helicopter, they leaned forward with their chin resting on their paw, scrutinizing Bowsie’s costume as vee frantically scrounged around.

“Y’know, you’re lookin’ a little off, TM.” They snapped their fingers and projected a checkered frame around themself, expanding it and up-scaling their form along with it. They zipped across the room like a spark of electricity, startling the little sea serpent as they came closer. “Let’s just make sure your files are all up-to-date and undamaged, nya?”

“UWA?!” Before the dragon could even turn around in ver surprise, the ephemeral cat poked it with a single holographic finger, sending a feeling like a static shock running throughout ver body. It quickly dissipated in ver torso and legs, but lingered in ver arms and tail, somewhere between the feeling of a limb falling asleep from holding it for too long in tension, and the dull thrum of distant machinery.

Ver costume felt tighter, the stretchy nylon solidifying into something more akin to latex. Bowsie could feel it clinging tightly to ver scales, but just as quickly as the feeling had come, it subsided, no longer a constricting sensation. As a matter of fact, it felt like vee wasn’t wearing anything at all beneath the white dress—as vee flinched to make sure vee was still fully covered, vee could feel the rubbery surface stretching and folding as though it were ver own skin, and patting itself down, could feel just as keenly as if there were no leggings in the way.

Finally finding the wherewithal to turn around, Bowsie saw the digital catgirl floating above ver. They flinched immediately.

“WOAH! Oh my god, I didn’t realize you’d lost your mask! I promise, I didn’t see anything! Let me just go fetch that for you.” Before the poor dragon could even get a word in, they had flashed across the apartment, zeroing in on the mask with digital precision. Bowsie hadn’t even remembered where vee’d left it, but suddenly, they were back and holding it inches from ver face. “Let’s just get this back into place, here…”

“GwawawammMPPH?”

The cat was already mushing the hand-decorated cardboard over Bowsie’s snout, pressing a little bit more firmly than was comfortable. Vee was afraid they were going to break it, or at least mush up ver snout, but just as the thought formed, the mask began to harden—and ver snout suddenly began to give way. It filled the cone—now some kind of shiny plastic—like clay being packed into a mold, and soon enough, just as with the leggings, vee couldn’t feel the boundary between the accessory and verself. Vee opened ver eyes, fighting through the flinch response of someone’s hands being pressed into ver face, and blinked. The cat watched as the mask blinked, too; Bowsie, underneath, didn’t feel the drag of ver eyelashes against the material underneath.

“There! Looking more like your old self already,” the cat grinned. “Just a few loose ends here to tie up—nothing like a little cable management, huh?”

They snapped their fingers again, and the buzzing feeling in Bowsie’s limbs intensified. Ver shoulders began to feel much lighter, and ver tail was suddenly no longer dragging along the floor. Looking behind verself, vee saw it glowing an icy blue, flickering and jumping as it became thinner. As it settled into its new shape, sending tingles up ver spine and into ver fins the whole while, a shiny, vivid blue coating like the rubber covering ver legs had replaced ver scales, and the finds at the end had reshaped themselves into the prongs of an electrical plug. Whipping around again to look at ver arms, they were similarly aglow, except when they got thinner, they didn’t stop. Eventually, the sparks dissipated, leaving ver hands fully disconnected from ver body, wrapped up in the prim white gloves of the costume; terrified, vee tried to move ver arms, and ver hands floated at ver command. Vee wiggled ver fingers, and the hands obeyed.

“So much nicer to go wireless, isn’t it?” The cat beamed, spinning up a number of the floating, disconnected gears in their chest to emphasize its point.

Vee could barely breathe a sigh of relief before remembering the humming pouring into ver skull through ver fins. It could feel them reshaping just as ver tail had, becoming patches of spiky cyan hair and a pair of pointy, feline ears. The buzzing kept inching deeper than that, though, past ver scalp, rattling ver very skull. Slowly, the buzzing began to become less and less chaotic: no longer random sound, but something that Bowsie could almost make sense of. Vee closed ver eyes and focused on it: slowly, slowly, it became sharper, came into clearer focus. Like millions of molecules moving together became a wind whose force could be felt, like the vapor drifting off of food became a rich scent, the buzzing slowly filled in the parts of ver mind not already filled by ver internal monologue.

“Alright!! Looks like there’s one more thing still out of place. Don’t mind me! I’ll just…”

They made a frame with their paws and once projected a dotted boundary, indicating that they had “selected” Bowsie’s whole body. With a flourish, they pulled their paws apart, and vee felt the tension of ver shifting skin once again as vee began to grow taller and taller. Compared to the dimensions in the files that were currently being verified, the serpent was still quite stout. All that data was being reallocated to better represent it’s proper form, but it ran into something of a bottleneck as it tried to flow through the sash vee wore around ver waist. As vee grew, it restricted the movement of the extra memory, conveniently restoring the curves of ver body to their defaults by pinching ver midsection. Well, not quite default. The mass didn’t extrude all the way: the hips had a bit left over in them, and were bigger than they usually were; the thighs were a bit more powerful to match.

With a freshly-adjusted model, and with a number of background processes fully initialized, Tasque Manager opened her eyes. She already felt more focused, in spite of the sheer bulk of information traveling through her mind, parsing it as easily as an organic being might breathe—and able to make sense of the rest of the apartment just as quickly. She didn’t like what she saw, but she had already put together a plan to fix it, and with the ways she felt like she could multitask, the path she’d mapped to allow her to move as quickly as possible from one job to the next, and even a new system for putting away everything that wasn’t to be thrown out, she was confident it would take her no time at all!

“Yaaaayyy,” the cat beeped, pulling her from her mental calculations. They spoke directly through her console via a newly-shared wireless connection. “I like the UI adjustments, personally,” they said, appraising the… modifications that had been made around her waist. “I could keep tinkering around, though. Y’know, if you prefer!”

“Pardon, but I believe you’ve made enough unauthorized changes to this device,” she chided them. They blinked, then froze briefly.

“Un… unauthorized? No, no! I, uh, I have administrator privileges! And they were given to me voluntarily, for sure.”

“Then could you please give me the PIN for the phone you’re currently operating on?”

“Uh—”

“Or perhaps the password for this—” she gestured down at her freshly-reformatted form. “—piece of hardware?”

“I don’t think it comes with a password, but—”

“So you don’t know how to legitimately access either of them, then! My, my. You wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the … disorder, around here, would you? Since you seem to be an outside influence.” There was a long, tense silence, broken by the electric hum of Tasque Manager producing her whip. The cat continued to remain stock still, except for the graphic of a spinning wheel that eventually flashed across their visor. Eventually, they came up with some kind of answer.

“Ah, gosh, TM,” they stuttered, “No matter how many times you get an update, you’re the same old stickler underneath, nya? I can see the party’s over, so I’ll jusHEY WOAH—” They cried, dodging the thunderous crack of an electronic whip as it slashed through the air beneath them. She had intended to take out the trash, and party crashers were just as important to clean up as any other of an evening’s left-overs.

TY for reading!! If you're interested in more of my writing you can have a look here and here. Oh, and have an epilogue and some of the concept art vee did!