So hopefully this will be the start of a series! I wrote the below short story before FurSquared, after making the Weeping Robot Inn Con Suite sign! I really wanted to work with some of the ideas I had drawing Gazzy's sona and mine, particularly since his sona is canonically 6 feet tall, and I wanted my dude to be able to move quadrupedally as well as bipedally, and to stand about 3 feet tall on his hind legs. I love the size contrast, and liked extrapolating how that would be specifically designed and chosen to be TFed in the cyberpunk setting!
Going for an Upgrade: Tangerine Tentacles and Blue Spines
The thrumming under my skin as I twitched in the clinic’s crowded waiting room could’ve been from the last three pots of coffee I’d burned through, but it probably wasn’t. I barely even liked the hot, bitter drink, but coffee meant work, and I’d trained my body accordingly; I didn’t have to like it, but if there was coffee on my desk, it was time to get shit done, and I’d had a lot of shit to get done over the past seven months. But with my best, most reliable modding connection about to skip town when the legal noose—driven by the skin-pure human lobbies who were so appalled by the idea of people wanting to be something more interesting—tightened down and squeezed out even the legitimate parts of bodymodding businesses in the next month, it was now or never; and if I didn’t want loose ends from my past to tear apart the new life I’d be hedging myself into, I’d had a lot of extra work to do to get the funds for the job and to pay off my debtors. Fortunately, with everyone racing the deadline, there’d been plenty of work for a bodymod designer.
Designing the mods was about both the aesthetics of the design and coding a program that translated into a working form once the modders applied it to the client without turning them inside-out in the process. The more changes the new form made to the client’s body, the more potential pitfalls—not that any job was often as safe or easy as it first seemed. Tails were easy, and usually pretty safe, but when the client wanted a wide, fluffy, ten-foot-long one, you had to have a lot of discussion to make sure they knew what they were getting into, and a waiver that they understood how a hundred-pound tail twice their current height might affect their lifestyle. What worked in AR definitely didn’t always translate. I made sure all the local modders got copies of the waiver for their files after the second time the client got impatient and took my designs on to a different modder than they’d originally picked. Nobody liked keeping the extra files, but everyone liked having what they needed when the clients started screaming because their tail was too heavy for them to walk.
It had been all I could do to not get myself modded over the years, you didn’t get into this end of the job without an interest. Sure, there were modders who did the weight loss or general performance cookie-cutter mods, but for the fun stuff, you wanted a specialist. And if your modder wasn’t modded, either they didn’t buy what they were selling, or the mods they wanted were extensive enough they didn’t want anything else getting in the way. Modding a body was usually pretty safe, but modding over old mods was truly complicated, because now you weren’t just dealing with your client’s own genetic or aesthetic quirks, but whatever hack job the last modder had done. Don’t get me wrong, I’d fixed plenty of mods over the years, but for myself, I wanted it done right the first time. Modding was expensive, but doing it piecemeal didn’t pay. If the new laws weren’t about to make my life a hundred times harder, I’d almost appreciate the fire the deadline had lit under my ass to finally get this done.
“Korin Steeplechase?”
I flinched at the sound of my name, rapidly gathered my bag, and squeezed through the crowded waiting room to get to the receptionist, who, oddly, in a job like this, wasn’t wearing an AR visor. There were plenty of places and situations where that made sense, where AR was rude or impractical, or, if you had the wrong kind of interface in place at the wrong time, dangerous—one of the many reasons I preferred mods—but working in an office that literally sold the best treatment for dysphoria was absolutely a place where the visors belonged.
“Ms. Steeplechase?” the receptionist asked.
“Mister.” I ground out.
“Oh.” She glanced at my file on the screen. “So it is.”
“Look,” I told her, quietly, “From one member of the professional modding community to another, please use AR, at least at work. It’ll make your cl—patients a lot more comfortable.”
Her look was scathing as she gave me a false smile, “I’ll think about it, sweetie.”
I sighed, scowling as she checked me in, and hoped the large, AR dragon clipping through most of the back wall ate her once—I checked their pronouns in my HUD—once zi was done. Sure, zi might be getting a less bulky form modded, but a guy could dream. She led me back to the exam room, growing visibly more nervous as we approached the door. Well, that was interesting.
She stopped about seven feet back from the door and pointed, “You can see the doctor in there.”
I shot her a quizzical look...and decided to play. “Here?” I asked, pivoting to the door directly to my right, which happened to be a supply closet. I opened it, looked inside, and walked in. I turned to face her gaping face from among the rolls of gauze, bandages, and sterile wipes and asked, “Will I have to wait here long?”
Red rose in her face and she grabbed my arm, pulling me out of the closet, “No! Just—!”
The examination room door opened, a long tangerine tentacle gripping the doorknob, “Is that my favorite designer, I hear?”
I grinned, all thought of continuing to torment the receptionist gone, “Jer!” I exclaimed, “How’ve you been?”
“Busy as a beaver and twice as wet!” my doctor replied, undulating forward on ten orange tentacles. Jer, or Dr. Jerald Cone, was the most heavily-modded individual I had ever met. Even after looking at as much of his progress as I could get ahold of, I wasn’t sure how I’d approach taking a human client all the way to a squid. He’d started out as a skin-pure, baseline human like the rest of us, albeit one with a passion for the ocean and maintaining his saltwater fish tanks, and a love of tentacles and all things cephalopod. When his medical practice had started to veer into a bodymod specialization, no one in his life had been particularly surprised, and when he added on a few tentacles, he’d been chided by friends and family that they’d wondered what took him so long.
But it hadn’t been enough. He’d gone back to designers, modding himself again and again, until he finally shot the moon and went full-on squid. He’d shown me photos, including from the few years he’d spent as a particularly blobby human with tentacles and a beak. His trek to squid-dom had been a truly awkward one, but he was a beautiful creature now, his arrowhead-shaped head nearly five feet tall, his rounded diamond-shaped eyes large and deep. He was fully in control of his chromatophores, and had chosen to be an orange-gold today, offsetting his royal purple eyes. Eight suckered arms writhed gracefully beneath him, smoothly carrying his mass over the tile floor, his two longer tentacles waving easily in the air.
The receptionist recoiled from the large-to-us-but-small-for-a-squid-squid, but I skipped forward to give the big calamari a hug. “So doing well, then! I just can’t believe you’re leaving me here with all these humans!” I pulled back from the squid’s cold, wet embrace to look him over. I was gonna miss him when he ran away to go live in his underwater commune.
Jer’s large, purple, dramatically slanted eyes crinkled in amusement, “I hear you’re finally doing something about that.”
“‘Bout time,” I grumbled.
“Well, let’s not make you wait any longer. Thank you, Alice!” Jer waved a cheerful tentacle at the receptionist, who shuddered and retreated back to her desk.
“Where did you find her?” I muttered to him as he led me into the exam room. It was big, for a doctor’s office, with a ten by twelve in-ground pool taking up a third of the office’s left side, with waterproofed monitors and computer interfaces suspended over the surface. Catty-corner to the pool, the large nanobot dispensary stood next to a regular human-sized exam table.
He sighed, gathering up the leads from the dispensary and pulling up my mod program while I sat on the exam table, “What could I do? Ruth got another job, and they needed her to start right away. I needed someone who could fill in the gap until we have to close, and couldn’t afford to be picky.”
I watched him connect the lines that would administer the serum that would finally change me into what I needed to be, “Oh? What’s Ruth doing?”
His eyes crinkled in a grin, “Skydiving adventure tour guide.”
I laughed, the flying squirrel had been gunning for that position as long as I’d known her, “Good for her!”
Jer’s eyes glittered with mischief, “Apparently a couple of the other guides dropped out.”
I groaned at the pun. I undressed, and Jer finished setting me up, running me through the regular spiel on what to expect, possible complications, the whole shebang. I’d never heard it from this side, so even though what he was telling me was nothing new, I still found myself fascinated. Before starting the serum production and hooking in the needles, he ran my simulation once more, checking it over again just in case.
The tangerine squid chuckled, “Beautiful work, as always. Sure I can’t draw you away from staying a mammal? There’s a lot to explore under the sea.”
“Nice try, Sebastian. I’m solid on this.”
“This is what, the third iteration?”
“Are we counting edits, or totally scrapping from the beginning? Cuz edits would be in the thousands, if not more, just scrapping and starting over is about seven.”
“Ooh, you’ve been working on this for awhile!”
I shrugged, “It’s how I got into the job.”
A gentle tentacle caressed my soon-to-be-furred wrist, “I’m happy for you, Korin. I remember my own transition, and I’ve never looked back.”
I cocked my head, I’d helped him sort out a few complications with his mod early on in our friendship, “Even when the air/water adaptation wasn’t working right?” When I’d met him, Jer had been even more water-bound than natural-born squids, and had needed to rely on waterproof keyboards to communicate.
“That was quite a trial,” he sighed, “But no. Perhaps if it had gone on for a few years longer I may have regretted my procedure, but remember, I was already heavily modded beforehand...or before-tentacle!” He laughed, and I groaned, “But you won’t have that problem.”
I nodded, I’d hated keeping myself skin-pure, but still, “If I messed up the design...that’s all on me. And I won’t have a chance to fix it.”
“I don’t think you’ll need to,” he replied, simply. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, and grinned, touched by his confidence in me, “Let’s do this, Jer.”
The big purple eyes grinned in pleasure, “Fantastic!” A few deft tentacle flicks started the serum production, and the green goo containing the nanobots that would soon reconfigure my body started to slide into the leads. All ten tentacles (or two tentacles and eight arms, as Jer would chide) working diligently, Jer made sure no air bubbles remained, then threaded the fine needles at the ends of the leads into my skin, larger patches of multiple needles for subcutaneous injection in the fleshy parts of my upper arms, thighs, and belly, and twin needles into veins in my hands. I twitched uncomfortably, more unhappy about needing to stay in place until the procedure was complete than the needles themselves. Jer taped the leads down, rolling a slanted eye, “Of course you chose fur, I’ll have to keep an extra close watch on these once it starts growing in.”
“Coulda been feathers,” I remarked, laughing at the squid’s put-upon groan.
He added elastic bands to assist in making sure my growing fur wouldn’t unseat the needles, and patted my shoulder, “Last chance to back out,” he said, voice carefully neutral.
I grinned, “Do it.”
“Excellent!” he exclaimed, and keyed in the final command to start the procedure.
Coolness spread into my skin from the leads as the machinery buzzed, pumping the nanobot-laden green liquid. Warmth started to prickle just under my skin, and I watched hungrily, heart vibrating in my chest, breath hitching as I waited for the changes to develop. Jer’s sharp purple eyes stayed on me, his tentacles gently undulating. The prickling heat migrated to a point deep in my belly, where it began to grow. I gasped, clenching my arms against the alien inferno, my muscles cramping around its core. Ripples rolled over my skin, and the tips of my fingers ached.
Not wanting to miss a moment, I pulled one hand out to where I could see it, and watched my fingernails shift to the ends of my fingers, folding over on themselves into small, neat claws. I traced my face with them, reveling in the rightness. More changes were to come to my hands, but not just yet.
The burn blazed in my core, shuddering through me, and my proportions began to shift. My thighs and lower legs grew shorter and my insteps longer as my toes gained length and claws of their own, my toenails following my fingernails’ lead. My bare skin pulled at the paper covering of the exam table as I started to shrink. Elation rose inside me as my body lightened, already feeling better, more free, than it ever had.
My proportions continued to redistribute as I shrank, my torso and arms maintaining more relative length as my body began to edge its way towards a shape that would be just as comfortable on two legs as four. Bone popped and separated in my backside, and I groaned as a tail, at long last, started to form. My eyes grew proportionately bigger in my face, bone pushing forward to flow into a muzzle. My teeth altered, canines blooming into arched cones, my incisors shortening, and the points of my molars sharpening as they slid to fill my mouth’s expanded shape. I flexed the soft tissue ending out my muzzle as it finished pushing out, twitching the end of my nose as it grew cold and damp. My ears popped, their small human shells unfolding to catch more sound than ever before, and my skin tingled as a feathery wave of fur began to emerge, my back prickling deliciously with its own advent.
I rolled to give my tail and the new spines growing in on my back space, my shorter legs catching the exam table easily as I stood as a quadrupedal creature for the first time, fingers and toes well on their way to becoming dexterous, padded digits. Jer’s clever tentacles repositioned the leads to keep me from tangling up, but he did nothing to stop me. The fur, my fur, was growing plush and dense in a fetching blue and tan pattern, and the tickling growth of smooth, sharp spines became a thick forest on my back, up my neck, and over my scalp.
My organs fizzed as they readjusted, and my previous female anatomy flowed into a new configuration. I reverently ran a digit over the new growth, finally satisfied with what was between my legs. As the changes slowed, the satisfaction spread, and for the first time in my life I was wrapped in a deep, pervading sense of peace. Everything was alright. Everything was good. I no longer needed to block large parts of my experience out, or filter from myself, or just be aware of feeling absolutely terrible in my own body. Because finally...finally everything felt right.
I lay down on my new, drastically reconfigured chest and rested my new, longer head on my long-awaited forepaws and sighed with relief, drinking in the moment, feeling the joyous peace of my own body. Something cold left a cool trail on my shoulder, and removed something that had been strapped to my foreleg, and it wasn’t until it felt better that I realized it had hurt. I looked up to watch Jer remove the rest of the pads and needles, retracting the permanent parts of the traces and disposing of what was technically a biohazard, now, and realized I was really, really out of it. But I felt so good, it was hard to want to stop floating. A tentacle traced behind my furry ear, and I groaned in pleasure. Jer chuckled, and left me to bask for a few moments more. Naturally, I fell asleep.
I woke curled around myself and warm on something much softer than the exam table, which was my first tip-off that Jer must have moved me while I slept. I tensed, and my new spines drew erect at the realization. I genuinely liked Jer a lot, but I hated the idea of being so knocked out that I didn’t wake up if someone touched me. I wriggled, dissatisfied and huffing my displeasure, despite my comfort, despite my appreciation that Jer had given me someplace safe to sleep, despite the oddly familiar scent in my bedding, until I realized what I was doing. I was wrapped around myself, forepaws folded in on my chest, hindpaws tucked up, in a near-perfect spiny ball. I burst open to take stock, giddiness burbling up inside me as I took in the reality of my new form. I knew it intimately, I’d designed it, after all, but the euphoria of actually experiencing it, of feeling it with skin and fur, was entirely novel. I sat on my haunches and ran my forepaws up my belly, over my soft-furred chest, reveling in the feeling, and in seeing my new form beneath me. I jerked my head around, searching for something reflective to examine myself.
I was in a small alcove, a space I guessed to be about six by five until I remembered I’d designed my new form to be about three feet tall standing on my hindpaws, and revised my estimation of the space to “probably a closet”. The padded, cupped nest I was in appeared to be a dog bed on a shelf. I peered over the edge to see more levels of shelves, stuttering irregularly down the walls of the closet to the floor, and realized I was in Ruth’s old office. The last time I had seen the space it had held a lot more of Ruth’s personal items, and I certainly wouldn’t have fit, or been allowed on, what we had called her “fainting couch”.
I spared a moment to miss the flying squirrel, wondering if we would ever cross paths again, before turning my attention to the current problem: How to get down. I knew my new body was pretty great, I had used every trick I knew to eke out performance while meshing with my own personal aesthetics, but I hadn’t had a chance to learn how to use it, yet, and jumps that a four-foor-tall flying squirrel had used like stairs weren’t exactly newly-minted hedgehog-friendly. On the other paw, my other options were to stay put, or call for help, and neither was exactly my style.
Quickly determining the next closest shelf, I tested my understanding of my new paws’ grip, then began to lower myself over the edge to hang off my shelf. It felt strange, dangling in a closet. My body was lighter than it had been since I was a kid, but a lot stronger than I’d been, then. So even though my paws weren’t particularly designed for climbing, this was...easy. I grinned to myself and dropped down, absorbing my own weight as I landed, which after decades as a large, unwieldy human, felt like almost nothing. I marveled for a moment, then unceremoniously hopped down to the next shelf, then the floor, incredibly pleased with myself. I looked up, intent on trying the steps the other way, shoved up with my hind legs, missed my grip, and plopped back down, rolling. Yeah, that was fair, I hadn’t even really tried walking, yet. I grinned to myself at how little the fall had hurt at my new, smaller size, gleefully anticipating testing my new limits.
“Korin? Is that you bumping around in there?”
I was curled in an instinctive, spiky ball before I even registered Jer’s words. Uncurling, I looked up at the squid. And up. And up. “Hell, Jer! You’re a proper kraken from this size!”
His chromatophores shifted into mauve, and his arms and tentacles wriggled appreciatively, “Why, thank you!”
I sat up and shook out my spines. Shakily, I stood on my hind legs, searching out my balance. Jer offered a tentacle to assist, and using it as little as possible, I took a few awkward, bipedal steps.
“It may take a few weeks before you’re comfortable again on two legs,” he reminded me.
I nodded, lost my balance, and looked up at him from all fours, “I know. It’s the trade-off when you’re set up for both.” I skipped forward to him, because hey, I could practice moving quadrupedally, too, “But I couldn’t resist!”
He laughed, “Then I’m glad you didn’t!”
To help me keep costs down, Jer let me stay in Ruth’s old office in exchange for helping Alice with her receptionist duties for the rest of the month until they closed, since I was about to be out all my legal gainful employment. I found I liked it more than I’d thought I would, and that people weren’t as shocked that a hedgehog who’d been behind a desk too long got a little prickly. Alice liked the data entry and scheduling part of the job just fine, particularly when she didn’t have to be near Jer, and to a lesser extent, me, so I mostly left her to it. I helped Jer review our patients’ incoming mods, helping to identify any potential pitfalls or glitches, and giving a few hack bodymod designers a flaming earful for some of the shit they’d tried to pass on as acceptable to my patients. I also stayed busy with my own design clients, squeezing work into every spare moment before the hammer fell.
Carrying a human-sized mug of coffee in my forepaws, I teetered my way back to my desk. It was late, and Jer was finally on his last appointment of the night, which meant I’d be clear to settle in and get cranking on my design jobs without fear of interruption, soon. At my size, the mug was about the same scale the entire coffee pot used to have been, and I appreciated that, but I was still a little shaky on my hindpaws. I glared up at the re-purposed bar-height chair I needed to scale to get back to my receptionist’s station, trying to puzzle out how I was going to bring the coffee with me.
“Hello?” a voice called from above me.
“Just a sec!” I placed my big mug on the floor and scrambled up the chair. “How can I help you?”
Surprise bloomed across the human’s face at my appearance, and I quickly flicked my new, appropriately-sized AR visor down for its input. I liked to keep leaving my old one on Alice’s desk as a form of gentle encouragement. The fact that she icily, vehemently refused was just hilarious happenstance. “Er...is this Dr. Cone’s office?” the AR orca asked.
I grinned, “It is! How can I help you tonight?”
She looked uncomfortable, “Ah, I was hoping to schedule a consultation. But I’ve been out of the country, and don’t have a designer. Is there anyone your office could refer me to?”
“I’m a designer,” I told her.
Her face twisted oddly, and I quickly flicked a digit over my visor’s interface to change its view to one that would show her AR projection in one eye, and her physical body in the other to let me read her expression better. Ah, a wry smile, chagrin. “No offense,” she said, “But I’d like someone with a little more experience. Does your office have a list of designers the doctor regularly works with?” She paused, “Full-time designers?”
Taken aback, it took me a beat to pull up the appropriate folder on the office’s system. I sent it to the office’s AR cloud so she could review the list and samples, “I recommend Korin Steeplechase,” I told her. “He designed my mod.” With that, I hopped down to rescue my coffee.
I sipped the warm drink, embarrassed by how much the exchange had thrown me off. It had been a minute since I’d been so thoroughly dismissed. It was one thing when my designs weren’t a client’s style, another entirely when they assumed I was a newbie with no experience. I sighed into my coffee and started working on climbing my chair with it in my paws. Next time I would give them the file first, then let them know which work was mine.
“Have you been helped?” Alice sneered.
Most of the orca’s attention was on her AR interface as she gestured through portfolios, “Thank you, I’m just reviewing your office’s designer list. Do you have anyone you personally recommend?”
“No,” Alice said, shortly.
The orca turned her attention to Alice, surprised, “Why is that, dear?”
Alice scoffed, shouldering her purse, “I just don’t see why anyone,” she glared down at me as she said it, “Would want to be a freak.”
I shrugged and sipped my coffee, settling into my conquered chair and pulling my hind legs up underneath me, “And I’m glad you’re comfortable as a human. Wasn’t for me. Pretty much hated it.”
Alice sneered and turned away, which was business as usual for us.
The orca gaped. With one final scoff, Alice settled her purse on her shoulder and left for the night, the bell on the door ringing behind her. Once Alice was out of earshot, the orca turned to me, “Why does someone like that work in a place like this?”
I shrugged, “I’m not sure why she applied, but Jer, Dr. Cone, needed a warm body for the front desk when his previous receptionist got her dream job two months before this office was set to close. I’m here to ride herd on her so she stops making patients cry.” I sipped my coffee, “And for my design skills.”
The orca stared at me, “I’m sorry...I thought you were just starting out.”
I waved a paw dismissively, “No worries. I’d like to do work for you, but I’m more comfortable with you picking your designer based on their portfolio anyway. But I will be checking over the designs and making sure you don’t get screwed.”
A tired squid rounded the corner escorting his latest triumph, “And if you have any questions, Mr. Connor, Korin at the front desk can help you. Just Korin, of course. He’s got much more experience with body modification than Ms. Humphries.”
The man with dragon wings and tail next to him nodded, “Um...where do I find pants?” He awkwardly gestured to his towel-wrapped lower half, his upper body even more bare to allow the crimson wings their space.
I shook out my spines and hopped off my chair. I still thought Mr. Connor would look better with a set of horns and modded ears to go with his wings and tail. Of course, he’d also been right when he’d claimed I wouldn’t be satisfied until we gave him the whole eighty foot dragon treatment. His loss. I got Mr. Connor a set of emergency pants and connected him to the suite of vendors with extensive clothing options for bodymodded individuals.
Jer and the orca lady, who turned out to be Dr. Susan Jones, marine biologist, were old friends and professional acquaintances. He took her aside for a consultation, despite my insistence that he was well past due for a break. Of course, given the glare he gave me when I objected, and the way they bent towards each other, his arms twitching as if enticed to touch, her admiring gaze and unbridled fascination, maybe he had a different sort of constitutional in mind. I put together a list of designers who specialized in marine mods and sent them on to Susan.
Jer and Susan’s reconnection went, heh, swimmingly. She had indeed been looking to be modded into a non-morphic orca, it was what she truly wanted to be, and felt she could continue her work with reasonable accommodation, but it did present a whole new set of logistics for us to work out. Jer invited her to join him in living in the ocean creatures’ commune once she was modded, and she accepted. Which was great, but complicated, since we needed to find a saltwater location big enough for a full-sized orca in which we could safely run the very expensive bodymod equipment, and a way to bring the orca to the commune’s remote location, particularly since we needed a controlled site for the modding equipment, and a long migration was a risky venture for an orca who would be only just beginning to acclimate to herself. Eventually, Jer decided not to close his practice after all, but to simply move it to a newly-purchased barge that exclusively operated in international waters and happened to stay within a sea-creature’s reasonable commute from the commune.
Alice moved on to a new receptionist’s job, where she was praised for her fortitude and open-mindedness for having worked in “that terrible place.”
And I threw in with an old friend, a recently retired pit-fighting rabbit. He and I began a perfectly reputable establishment, fully on the up-and-up, the Weeping Robot Inn. Any allegations that I was still doing bodymod design work were entirely fallacious, and also I never visited Jer again, and especially not every two weeks, and I definitely didn’t enable business contact for potential clients with him. Ever.
