Consciousness didn't return in a wave - it returned as a jagged, white-hot spike of pain through my temples.

  The first thing I felt was the wind. It wasn't the artificial breeze of a simulation. No matter how good Tentacle Sovereign had felt, it wasn't quite real. There was that little bit of you that knew it was a simulation. This was a biting, freezing gale that smelled of salt, exhaust, and wet asphalt. There was a richness of sound - horns honking in the distance, the cry of birds - that felt like a true world. I tried to groan, but my throat felt tight and the sound that escaped was a soft, airy whimper that made my skin crawl.

  I was lying on my stomach. The surface beneath me was rough, gravelly, and flat. My palms were pressed into it, the graveled texture digging painfully into tender skin. As I pushed myself up, my heart didn't just skip - it tried to hammer its way out of my chest like ejecting from the cockpit of a Gundam. Something was very wrong with me, with the world around me.

  My arms were slender, pale, and impossibly delicate. My hands - the hands that had spent a decade typing helpdesk tickets and searching for doujin online - were small, with tapered fingers and manicured, pink nails. I looked down ... and the world tilted.

  I was naked. Completely, terrifyingly naked.

  Where my chest should have been flat and doughy, two heavy, pale mounds of flesh hung forward, their weight pulling at my shoulders in a way that made my head swim. My waist had vanished into a sharp, narrow curve, and my hips flared out into a shape that I'd only ever seen in my figurine collection. I reached down, my breath coming in frantic, shallow gasps, and my hand met a smooth, terrifyingly sensitive cleft. A finger accidentally slipped inside, feeling something warm, slick, and wrong. A jolt shot through me and I yanked my hand away like I'd been burned, cheeks throbbing with shame.

  "No," I gasped. The voice was a bell, melodic and feminine, vibrating in a chest that felt hollow. "No, no, no! This isn't right! Eject! SYSTEM EJECT! ABORT! ESCAPE!"

  I clawed at my face, my nails digging into soft, supple skin. I expected to hit the plastic rim of the VR goggles, to feel the sticky residue of the electrode pads, but there was nothing. No goggles. No wires. Just long, sudden strands of hair. Purple? No, a deep, dark violet color. It whipped around my face in the wind as I stood on the rooftop.

  I was on a rooftop. A real one. I could see the glow of a city below me, the neon signs flickering in a language I recognized as English, but the names were wrong, confusing. Bay City. Starlight Plaza. This wasn't San Francisco, nor was it any VR game I'd ever heard of. Not even Tentacle Sovereign had looked like this. Where was I?

  Panic, cold and sharp, flooded my system and I sank to my knees. I tried to stand once more, but my center of gravity was gone. My legs felt too long, my hips too wide, and the weight on my chest made me feel like I was going to tip forward. I stumbled, my knees knocking together, and a jolt of sensation shot through my spine that made my toes curl.

  Zzzzzt.

  A spark of violet static jumped from my fingertip to the gravel. I stared at it, my eyes wide. My skin was humming. Not a metaphorical hum, but a literal, physical vibration, as if my very nerves were still plugged into the power grid. Tiny arcs of sapphire light danced between my breasts and across my thighs.

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  "Get me out of here!" I screamed, the sound lost to the wind. I began to scramble across the roof, my bare feet stinging on the gravel. I had to find the exit to this simulation, to find a way out. To run head-first into the wall of my apartment and knock myself out, waking up in the real world. Anything.

  As I reached the edge of the building, my vision blurred with tears I didn't know how to stop. Hysteria gripped me tight around the throat, nearly choking me, as I struggled to confront my apparent reality. What is going on with me? I looked down into the alley below and felt my denial take a critical blow, the situation suddenly seeming so much more authentic as the city expanded around me.

  Two stories down, a struggle was happening. A man in a hooded jacket with a mask on his face had a woman pinned against a dumpster. The man had two fingers pressed firmly into the side of her neck and, as I watched, something impossible happened. A dark mist escaped from the pores of his body, wrapping itself around his arm and then followed the path of his fingers into the woman.

  The woman's arms just ... dropped. They didn't go limp like she'd fainted, she was still on her feet, but the arms fell like lead weights, swaying uselessly at her sides like they weren't attached to her brain anymore. She tried to scream, her mouth opening wide, but no sound came out. It was like he had muted her with a touch.

  How in the world is he doing that? I struggled to process the visual. Was I still in the game? Still stuck in VR? This doesn't seem like the same thing anymore.

  "Just relax, sweetheart," the man hissed. His voice was oily and calm. "You can't feel a thing, right? I unplugged the wires. Nobody escapes the Phantom Pincher!"

  He reached into her coat, his fingers trailing over her waist with predatory slowness. He removed her purse, but then his hands lingered on her breasts. Even from two stories up, I could see the sick, gloating expression on his face as he groped the woman, taking time to savor her breasts, squeezing them, weighing them, bobbling them back and forth as he laughed.

  My new body reacted with a primal, instinctual fear. This was wrong. This wasn't a game, this wasn't right for him to do to this woman. Should I yell for help? Try to summon the police? Scare him off?

  As I glanced down at myself, I realized that nobody was going to be afraid of a naked woman on a rooftop, so that plan wasn't going to work. I had no way to call for help and nobody would hear me. I took a frantic step backward, my heart racing, but my heel caught on a protruding vent pipe. I flailed my arms wildly, my top-heavy frame betraying me and my eyes went wide. I didn't have the muscles, the coordination to catch myself. My balance was all wrong.

  I tipped forward over the edge and fell.

  The air rushed past me, a scream tearing itself from my throat - a high, piercing sound that cut through the alley's noise. As I fell, the static on my skin didn't just hum, it exploded. The sapphire sparks grew into a blinding, crackling aura around me, my terror feeding whatever energy was stored in this new body.

  I slammed into the strange man's back.

  The moment my skin made contact with him, the static discharged reached a crescendo. A massive CRACK of electricity, like a localized lightning strike, jumped from my body to his.

  The man didn't even have time to gasp. His entire body convulsed, his muscles locking up as thousands of volts of violet energy surged through him. He was thrown forward, slamming into the dumpster with a sickening thud before sliding into the trash-strewn gutter, smoke curling from his singed clothing.

  I bounced off him, my head hitting the asphalt with a dull, echoing crack.

  The world started to dim around me as I lay there. The last thing I registered was the woman - her voice suddenly returning in a sharp, gasping sob - staring at me in amazement. She wasn't looking at her attacker, the strange guy who had paralyzed her. She was looking at me - the naked, glowing girl who had just fallen out of the sky like a broken star.

  "What in the ... ?" Her voice trailed off, trembling as she reached out a hand toward me. She was cute - probably late 20s, long brown hair, Asian looking, but before I could reply, before I could ask her what the hell was going on, the static in my brain finally won and everything went black around me.