Effie felt like she was going to throw up. Ever since she'd been rescued from the Internet vigilantes who'd held her captive, sentenced her to be torn to death, sliced away her old identity and her own name...ever since that had ended, and Mikey had taken her in and treated her nicely, and nobody had brought it up...she'd almost been able to forget how she'd got in that mess to begin with.
Shadow666, as she'd called herself, so bored and hungry for attention that she'd turned to virus authoring - or rather, virus assembly from existing components. It had all seemed like a good prank at the time, a way to raise hackles and get people to pay attention to her - but even before things had changed, she'd known deep down that she was causing real damage, costing people time and money. It seemed almost forever ago; so much had changed since then...
And now? Now things had taken a much more horrifying turn. The stakes were much higher now than pissing off some people; now there were people like her, people whose very existence was data in a computer system - people who could be injured or killed by viruses like the one she'd created. She felt like a monster; she almost thought she would be happy to lose herself completely to the form she now wore, if it only meant she'd stop being the person responsible for this.
She looked down at the helpless digital fairy before her, feeling worse than she ever had in her life. The little girl lay there, occasionally coughing, occasionally glitching out, parts of her body flickering briefly into gibberish. This wasn't a game anymore. It never had been, she knew that, but it definitely wasn't now.
Effie took a deep breath and approached the girl. "S...stay b-back!" she murmured. "Don't wanna get infected..."
Effie shook her head. Even if she did get infected, she couldn't say she didn't deserve it. "I want to see if I can fix you," she said. "Will you let me try to edit your code?"
The little girl weakly turned her head to look at Effie with an expression of amazement and gratitude. "You'd...do...that...?"
As awful as she felt, Effie forced a smile. "Yep. But I need you to do something for me. Can you go into suspend mode? That way I can work without having to keep up with the virus."
The girl nodded. "Th...ank you," she smiled, then froze in place. Dennis had been watching, concerned both for the girl and for Effie, and moved in towards the patient. "If there's anything I can do to help..." he said. Effie nodded. "Thanks. I'll let you know if I think of anything."
She paused for a moment, trying to clear her mind, trying to focus on the problem at hand. The same sensations that she'd found distracting still remained - the soft rise and fall of her small breasts with her breath, the tickling of her hair at the base of her neck, the gentle sway of her dress in the nonexistent breeze - but she would not let it get to her. Not now. She thought of what Amy had said to her, about this existence being as real to a digital fairy as the physical world was to a human...she still didn't know that she agreed with that, but it was certainly real enough to be vitally important. She could make this work. She would make this work.
Effie sat down beside the girl and opened up her editor, and found that she had been granted permissions to view and modify this girl's code. She began scanning through, looking for the familiar patterns. She knew now that she hadn't been anything close to a real programmer when she'd banged out the Nova virus with the help of more toolkits and tutorials than she really cared to admit, and Bonzo had taken away all of that stuff, but she remembered enough about it that she had a rough idea of what to look for.
There! That looked like the start of the main loop. She could work out from there where else the virus code resided, and from that she could try to figure out where it had hooked into this girl's main routines. With any luck, the virus, being a simple old-style computer program, wouldn't have integrated itself into the girl's form the way digital fairies' code and data did - that would make removal simple. She could do this. She had to.
She suddenly found herself breaking into a sobbing fit.
Dennis knelt down beside her and put his arm around her shoulder. "I know," he said. "It's scary. But I know you can do this."
Effie pulled away from him, her expression one of irritation and misery. "No!" she sobbed. "D-don't you get it? Don't you unders-s-stand what I was telling you!? I m-m-made this!"
She cringed, watching his face, waiting for the inevitable horrified rejection. A moment of confusion passed over his face, then a brief flicker of realization, then astonishment, and suddenly it was back to the same expression of concern it had been before. Nowhere did she see anger or disgust...but he had to feel that way, right? There was no way to just ignore what she'd done...
He embraced her. It didn't feel like a boy/girl kind of embrace, but a friend-to-friend hug - which was exactly what she needed. "I told you," he said, "I know you're a good person. You risked yourself for me, you're risking yourself for her - that's not something that just happens by accident. You can do this, Effie. I know you can."
Effie took a deep breath, tried to steady her nerves, and he gently released her. "Go on," he smiled. "The sooner you get started, the sooner she's all better."
Jon sat quietly at her desk, trying not to think too much about what she'd just heard from her raptor-girl friend. It wasn't that she was all that bothered by the idea of transformees having instincts from their new bodies - after all, even Michael admitted that she wasn't controlled by them, and Jon herself seemed to be free of such urges.
No, what bothered her was the not-exactly-subtle implications of what Michael had almost said. She was having sexual urges. Not that that in itself was unusual or horrifying - she was a teenager, after all. But Jon was pretty certain that her friend was a heterosexual female now, even though she was hardly girly in any other respect. Had she retained her attraction to women, Michael would probably (like many teenage guys) have been open and shameless about it, especially in the confidence of a friend. But the way she blushed, and the way she quickly stopped herself and changed the subject...that said a lot.
Even this wasn't all that unsettling - while it definitely qualified as too much information, what Michael was into was Michael's business, and Jon didn't have any investment in the raptor-girl's sex life, though she certainly hoped her friend could keep these instincts under control, or it could get her into some trouble. But...what did this imply for Jon?
The question had been nagging at her ever since she'd gone back to school, to an environment where she'd be exposed to people of both sexes outside her immediate family, but now she had pretty solid evidence: yes, the sun could change someone's sexual preference - whether this was at random, or to match their new body, or relative to what they'd been, she didn't know. Did this mean she'd changed? She hadn't been feeling much of anything in that department recently, but if she did...what would it be?
She had absolutely no idea, and it was this as much as the prospect of being attracted to guys that bothered her. The uncertainty was unnerving, but she was equally afraid of actually *finding out...*really she just wanted to stop thinking about it. Five more months...
She got an almost-welcome distraction when she leaned her head back and came face-to-upside-down-face with Tiffany. Much to her surprise, though, the...whatever she was didn't seem ready to tear off her head or anything; she was just sitting at her desk and looking over a list of something. The black aura wasn't gone, but it was reduced to the occasional flicker around the edges of her body. Tiffany seemed shaken by something; Jon wondered what.
David and..."Adora," was it? - no way that could be her real name, but Jon didn't really know - returned to the classroom as well, the devil-girl circling the angel, always managing to be either up close in front of her or hovering over her shoulder. Jon wondered how David could stand it; she'd have told Adora to shove off after half an hour, herself. The angel-girl must be amazingly patient...
Or, alternatively, she just wasn't good at asserting herself. After all, she'd let Tiffany pick her up by the neck and then drop her without fighting back at all - that couldn't be healthy. Jon could respect someone not wanting to fight, at least when it was only them at stake, but that still wasn't going to get people to leave her alone, was it?
Then again...something had certainly gotten Tiffany's attention.
