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Description

  "This is it, Hoshi, this is it!! Just one last piece and this magnificent device will finally be complete!"
    Hoshi gave him a sidelong glance. "Mr. Powers, the functional components of the mechanism have been fully installed for some time. The addition of the final cover plate is inconsequential to the device's overall performance."
    Mr. Powers slapped the small Japanese man on the back. "Come now Hoshi, you should be excited! Where's your spirit of adventure?”
    "Lost somewhere in the last five years of writing and debugging the code..." he muttered too quietly for his boss to hear. Not that he needed to bother; Mr. Powers was lost in a world of his own.
    "Imagine! To be finally able to experience video games from the inside! To surf the digital code and interact with characters as easily as living humans."
    "Of course, sir." Hoshi was more than used to this speech. He'd heard some variant of it at least once a week since he'd joined the project. He had tried to push his employer to see the wider implications of the technology, but his fixation on visiting his beloved game worlds was as deep and bottomless as his funding for the project. Still, his boss was a rational man and despite his passion, he never pushed the project too hard or too quickly.
    "Prepare the machine, I'm going in."
    Hoshi stumbled and nearly dropped his tools. "Mr. Powers! But we have only done small tests! Probes sent to empty test worlds! Trials on living matter, let alone humans, are years away! It-"
    He cut off as a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. Mr. Powers crouched down and looked him in the eye, all grandiosity and frivolity gone from his voice. "Hoshi... I started this project in the early 20's and have spent over half my life working on it. Every penny I've made, every patent I've sold has been willingly poured into this venture." He sighed, and rubbed a hand over where his salt and pepper hair was thinning away. "I may not be as young as I once was, but I know this project better than anyone. It's ready."
    Hoshi faltered for words, unused to such frankness and sincerity from his boss. But the moment was killed just as quickly as Mr. Powers slid back into his usual dialect.
    "Besides, how can I call myself a scientist if I'm not willing to lick the science?"
    "...Sir?"
    "You heard me. This project is my baby and my baby need a new pair of shoes and those shoes are a good warm-up lap around the track, wherein the track is me. Now go fetch a game from The Archive. Bring me... one of the Mario Karts. Those should be safe enough for my test run."
    Knowing it was no use trying to argue when he was like this, Hoshi nodded silently and made for the door. Behind him, he could already hear the pneumatic hiss of his boss entering the Transcyber Migration Capsule, clearly having not taken off his clothes as per the instructions he himself had devised.
    Hoshi was not as 'into' games as his employer. He'd played a few in his time and thought they were amusing, but ultimately trivial and distracting. No, it wasn't the games that had brought him on to this project, but rather the larger implications of the technology. The act of digitizing a physical object and bringing it into the digital world.... it was the stuff of science fiction! Only it wasn't. It was here, it was now, and he was a part of it. Regardless of Mr. Power's admittedly tunnel-visioned reasons for developing the technology, the sheer scope of its possibilities would change the world. That was why Hoshi continued despite the eccentricity of his boss.
    Coming up to a sealed room, Hoshi reached "The Archive". At least that's what the plaque on the door said and what Mr. Powers tried to persuade everyone to call it. Personally, Hoshi thought of it as "the storeroom where Mr. Powers keeps his extensive collection of video games". And what a collection it was. If Mr. Powers was to be believed, the room contained a copy of every video game produced before the turn of the century as well as a majority of those produced in the following years before physical games died as a profitable medium. Hoshi ran a finger along one of the shelves of the long room, attempting to parse out the English names of games as he went. Some were easier than others, particularly Japanese titles that had somewhat retained their original names. He paused as his fingers stopped midway through the K's. A Mario Kart game. What was it doing there, away from the rest of the Marios? Even if he couldn't read the rest of the title, it certainly said kart and clearly had Mario and other familiar characters on it. He shrugged, chalking it up to some strange sorting system that only his boss could understand and pocketed the cartridge.
    ~~~~~
    Jonathan Powers arrived with his eyes closed. He had spent years of his life preparing for this moment; he didn't want his first memory of cyberspace to be filled with afterimages or unloaded assets. His body practically quivered in giddy excitement. Finally! Finally he could achieve the dream of millions. He was going to meet his favorite characters. Talk with them, play with them on their own turf, hold her close and embrace her and... Well, if things went well, a lot more than that, questionable ethical issues aside.
    He could practically feel it now. The wind off the racecourse, the smell of diesel and grass. The sound of the crowds cheering in their stands. It was all so close!
    Actually, upon reflection, he couldn't sense any of that. The world seemed...odd. The air was dry and tasteless and the ground as smooth as linoleum. He opened his eyes... and then widened them even further in shock.
    This was not the world he had been expecting.
    He was in a dark forest, not so much full of shadows as it was full of patches of void. Even the sky was a black abyss, blank and starless. What few colors existed were in simple patches with clear edges and delineations. Instead of trees there were enormous mushrooms with unnatural triangular caps.
    But beyond all that it looked... fake. Cheap. A strange sort of plastic-like aesthetic, like the set pieces for a children's fantasy movie. This... wasn't right.
    A slight motion caught his eye. Powers turned and choked back a scream.
    It didn't look human. He'd been prepared for that. He knew better than anyone that cartoonish characters never translated well to real world dimensions, but this was something else. There was enough detail that he could recognize the character, or at least the intent, but it was wrong. So wrong in so many ways.
    Princess Peach stood before him, posed and battle-ready. That is, if Peach had been drawn by someone only loosely familiar with the character and if she had then tried to cosplay as Chun Li using nothing but a pair of scissors, a blindfold, and the dress she was already wearing.
    But more than that, she, no, it didn't look like something alive. It reminded him of a poorly made latex suit, misshapen and unsettling. Its face waxy and without detail, with beady soulless eyes. Its hair was a solid black mass the moved as a single piece. Every slight movement it made was jerky; too stiff to be organic but just fluid enough to not look wholly artificial.
    The monster wasn't just settled comfortably in the uncanny valley; it had put down roots and started a homestead.
    He knew this abomination. He knew this game. But he had to be sure. "Hoshi?" He tapped his earpiece, his one lifeline to the real world. "Hoshi... I need you to tell me exactly what game you put me in."
    There was a pause before he got a response. "Ehhto... A Mario Kart, sir."
    "Specifically."
    He heard the sound of a chair being pushed back and footsteps over the line, followed by Hoshi's mutterings as he took the time to parse out the title as accurately as possible. "Kart... Fighter."
    Blood drained from Powers’ face at the words. Of every possible title in his collection, out of thousands of games, Hoshi had chosen that one. The bootleg. The very icon of cheap Chinese knock-off games. Known by gamers worldwide for its blatant character theft, clunky controls... and often game-breaking glitches.
    This was not in any way a safe situation. A glitch now, while he was still inside the game, could mean death... or worse.
    But before that train of thought could travel too darkly, he was interrupted by music. A whiney tune that had sounded bad in low-bit chiptune and wasn't any better now. Not-Peach darted forward and threw a punch that Powers only barely managed to dodge.
    "Hoshi! Are you doing this!?"
    "No sir! It is autoplaying!"
    He ducked beneath a hair whip. "Extraction protocol now, now!"
    Clacking keystrokes echoed in his ears, clashing horribly with the music as Powers dodged as best he could around his soulless opponent. The screen tore as she moved, parts of her body disappearing and reappearing at random making it harder to predict her moves but all the more critical that he did so. It seemed that even on the most sophisticated computer system in the world, the infamous game still ran about as well as a three-legged horse underwater.
    "Hoshi," he said warningly, "Why am I still in here? If you're not too busy-" Dodge. "I'd be most appreciative-" Drop and roll. "If you could extract me already!"
    "I am trying sir!" Came the frantic reply. "The controls- they keep freezing!"
    Powers took a kick to the stomach. It hurt. The pain was just as real as any he'd ever felt and for a heart-stopping second, he could have sworn he felt her foot inside him. "Use the emergency abort!"
    "It is not ready! Completely untested!"
    "Do it!" he yelled, "Or else I'm going to test out the Hutch MacNeil hypothesis the hard way!"
    Back in the real world, Hoshi flipper up a plastic cover and slammed his fist on a large red button. Immediately, the flashing error messages on his console winked out and the rematerializer roared to life. But what was near instantaneous in meatspace was perceived as much longer in the cyber realm.
    Powers felt his body freeze as bands of code wrapped around him, grasping and squeezing like giant cords. A soft buzzing feeling returned as his edges began to blur and lose resolution. But why was it taking so long? The process should have been instantaneous!
    From outside the field of vision he could no longer shift, Not-Peach was still active. She charged and turned as she began her spin attack.
    Powers noticed more of the background flickering and a mushroom that popped in and out of existence. The game's sloppy code was struggling to process the realms of data it was never meant to handle. The sooner he could get out of there, the better.
    Not-Peach continued to spin, her sprite glitching and cutting out as she gained speed and closed the distance.
    Powers closed his eyes as he felt his senses fade away. Not long now. In a moment, he'd be back in the real world, once more safe from cyber combatants.
    Not-Peach's spin attack connected, too fast for the system to properly process her position...
    And Powers winked out of existence as the world snapped to nothingness.
    ~~~~~
    Hoshi wrung his hands nervously. What was taking so long? It never took this long! In every experiment they'd tried, samples and probes had always rematerialized within seconds, a minute at most. And yet here he was, five minutes in, and the machine was still chugging along.
    Finally, just when he was starting to weigh the risks of attempting a hard reboot, the whirring fans began to slow and the light faded from the pod of the Transcyber Migration Capsule. The door opened and something emerged, but its figure a far cry from Mr. Power's broad shoulders and barrel chest.
    It was human though, thankfully. And though the being shared an unmistakable resemblance with Mr. Powers, she was equally unmistakably a woman.
    She wore a pale pink labcoat with short, puffy bell sleeves. Beneath it, a button-down leotard with an attached flared skirt (plausibly formed from Mr. Powers' old clothes and Not-Peach's qipao) clutched to her body as tightly as if it was painted on, highlighting every curve and valley of her perky breasts and toned waist. Knee-high go-go boots in a shade of garish orange clad her lower legs, leaving her flawless thighs bare. Down her back ran a thick mane of jet black hair, veined with silver and with enough volume to give any 80’s glam rocker a run for their money. She was surprisingly attractive, if in a peculiar and nontraditional way, but with a change of outfit would pass as an ordinary woman.
    She seemed dazed at first, unbalanced and uneasy as she stumbled from the capsule. Her breasts, large though they were, were cupped so perfectly by her outfit that they moved without jiggling, throwing off any sort of natural gait. Hoshi was too stunned to react and could only open and close his mouth uselessly at the new arrival.
    She stumbled a few steps before bracing herself on a desk. Her eyes traveled down and fixated on the tented mounds on her chest. She grasped them, firmly and without hesitation. She gave each a firm squeeze, wincing only slightly in surprise at the sensation, before settling on cupping them from beneath to better gauge their qualities.
    “Well then,” she spoke after a time, “This is certainly unexpected.”
    “M-M-M-Mr. Powers?” Hoshi’s shaking hand tried to adjust his glasses but only succeeded at making them more askew than they were before.
    “So it would seem.”
    The woman that had once been Mr. Powers took a few hesitant steps, gradually growing more confident, and walked over to inspect herself on a reflective bit of chrome plating. After a few moments of hemming and hawing at different poses, she nodded in satisfaction. "Could be worse, could be worse." She traced a dainty finger along the lines of her face. "Not a look I would have chosen, but there are worse options. Yoshi, for one. Or, Miyamoto forbid, Toad."
    She turned as a noise caught her attention. Hoshi was down on his knees, his eyes brimming with horrified tears. "I am so sorry sir! I should have known that the device was not ready. I should have tried harder to stop you. I should have cleared the problems without having to resort to the emergency extraction. This is all my fault! Do not worry! I will work day and night, without rest, to fix this bug and restore you to your-" He stopped as he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.
    Hoshi looked up to a face that was so alien, yet so familiar. She was grinning. That wild grin that made Hoshi's hair stand on end and spoke of troubling things in his future.
    "Hoshi, my friend, you've worked in software for many years now. Surely you've heard that age old expression, beloved by programmers and gamers alike?"
    Hoshi could only blink in confusion. Powers stood up, placed one hand on her hip, and struck a pose.
    "That's not a bug, it's a feature!"

Description

  "This is it, Hoshi, this is it!! Just one last piece and this magnificent device will finally be complete!"
    Hoshi gave him a sidelong glance. "Mr. Powers, the functional components of the mechanism have been fully installed for some time. The addition of the final cover plate is inconsequential to the device's overall performance."
    Mr. Powers slapped the small Japanese man on the back. "Come now Hoshi, you should be excited! Where's your spirit of adventure?”
    "Lost somewhere in the last five years of writing and debugging the code..." he muttered too quietly for his boss to hear. Not that he needed to bother; Mr. Powers was lost in a world of his own.
    "Imagine! To be finally able to experience video games from the inside! To surf the digital code and interact with characters as easily as living humans."
    "Of course, sir." Hoshi was more than used to this speech. He'd heard some variant of it at least once a week since he'd joined the project. He had tried to push his employer to see the wider implications of the technology, but his fixation on visiting his beloved game worlds was as deep and bottomless as his funding for the project. Still, his boss was a rational man and despite his passion, he never pushed the project too hard or too quickly.
    "Prepare the machine, I'm going in."
    Hoshi stumbled and nearly dropped his tools. "Mr. Powers! But we have only done small tests! Probes sent to empty test worlds! Trials on living matter, let alone humans, are years away! It-"
    He cut off as a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. Mr. Powers crouched down and looked him in the eye, all grandiosity and frivolity gone from his voice. "Hoshi... I started this project in the early 20's and have spent over half my life working on it. Every penny I've made, every patent I've sold has been willingly poured into this venture." He sighed, and rubbed a hand over where his salt and pepper hair was thinning away. "I may not be as young as I once was, but I know this project better than anyone. It's ready."
    Hoshi faltered for words, unused to such frankness and sincerity from his boss. But the moment was killed just as quickly as Mr. Powers slid back into his usual dialect.
    "Besides, how can I call myself a scientist if I'm not willing to lick the science?"
    "...Sir?"
    "You heard me. This project is my baby and my baby need a new pair of shoes and those shoes are a good warm-up lap around the track, wherein the track is me. Now go fetch a game from The Archive. Bring me... one of the Mario Karts. Those should be safe enough for my test run."
    Knowing it was no use trying to argue when he was like this, Hoshi nodded silently and made for the door. Behind him, he could already hear the pneumatic hiss of his boss entering the Transcyber Migration Capsule, clearly having not taken off his clothes as per the instructions he himself had devised.
    Hoshi was not as 'into' games as his employer. He'd played a few in his time and thought they were amusing, but ultimately trivial and distracting. No, it wasn't the games that had brought him on to this project, but rather the larger implications of the technology. The act of digitizing a physical object and bringing it into the digital world.... it was the stuff of science fiction! Only it wasn't. It was here, it was now, and he was a part of it. Regardless of Mr. Power's admittedly tunnel-visioned reasons for developing the technology, the sheer scope of its possibilities would change the world. That was why Hoshi continued despite the eccentricity of his boss.
    Coming up to a sealed room, Hoshi reached "The Archive". At least that's what the plaque on the door said and what Mr. Powers tried to persuade everyone to call it. Personally, Hoshi thought of it as "the storeroom where Mr. Powers keeps his extensive collection of video games". And what a collection it was. If Mr. Powers was to be believed, the room contained a copy of every video game produced before the turn of the century as well as a majority of those produced in the following years before physical games died as a profitable medium. Hoshi ran a finger along one of the shelves of the long room, attempting to parse out the English names of games as he went. Some were easier than others, particularly Japanese titles that had somewhat retained their original names. He paused as his fingers stopped midway through the K's. A Mario Kart game. What was it doing there, away from the rest of the Marios? Even if he couldn't read the rest of the title, it certainly said kart and clearly had Mario and other familiar characters on it. He shrugged, chalking it up to some strange sorting system that only his boss could understand and pocketed the cartridge.
    ~~~~~
    Jonathan Powers arrived with his eyes closed. He had spent years of his life preparing for this moment; he didn't want his first memory of cyberspace to be filled with afterimages or unloaded assets. His body practically quivered in giddy excitement. Finally! Finally he could achieve the dream of millions. He was going to meet his favorite characters. Talk with them, play with them on their own turf, hold her close and embrace her and... Well, if things went well, a lot more than that, questionable ethical issues aside.
    He could practically feel it now. The wind off the racecourse, the smell of diesel and grass. The sound of the crowds cheering in their stands. It was all so close!
    Actually, upon reflection, he couldn't sense any of that. The world seemed...odd. The air was dry and tasteless and the ground as smooth as linoleum. He opened his eyes... and then widened them even further in shock.
    This was not the world he had been expecting.
    He was in a dark forest, not so much full of shadows as it was full of patches of void. Even the sky was a black abyss, blank and starless. What few colors existed were in simple patches with clear edges and delineations. Instead of trees there were enormous mushrooms with unnatural triangular caps.
    But beyond all that it looked... fake. Cheap. A strange sort of plastic-like aesthetic, like the set pieces for a children's fantasy movie. This... wasn't right.
    A slight motion caught his eye. Powers turned and choked back a scream.
    It didn't look human. He'd been prepared for that. He knew better than anyone that cartoonish characters never translated well to real world dimensions, but this was something else. There was enough detail that he could recognize the character, or at least the intent, but it was wrong. So wrong in so many ways.
    Princess Peach stood before him, posed and battle-ready. That is, if Peach had been drawn by someone only loosely familiar with the character and if she had then tried to cosplay as Chun Li using nothing but a pair of scissors, a blindfold, and the dress she was already wearing.
    But more than that, she, no, it didn't look like something alive. It reminded him of a poorly made latex suit, misshapen and unsettling. Its face waxy and without detail, with beady soulless eyes. Its hair was a solid black mass the moved as a single piece. Every slight movement it made was jerky; too stiff to be organic but just fluid enough to not look wholly artificial.
    The monster wasn't just settled comfortably in the uncanny valley; it had put down roots and started a homestead.
    He knew this abomination. He knew this game. But he had to be sure. "Hoshi?" He tapped his earpiece, his one lifeline to the real world. "Hoshi... I need you to tell me exactly what game you put me in."
    There was a pause before he got a response. "Ehhto... A Mario Kart, sir."
    "Specifically."
    He heard the sound of a chair being pushed back and footsteps over the line, followed by Hoshi's mutterings as he took the time to parse out the title as accurately as possible. "Kart... Fighter."
    Blood drained from Powers’ face at the words. Of every possible title in his collection, out of thousands of games, Hoshi had chosen that one. The bootleg. The very icon of cheap Chinese knock-off games. Known by gamers worldwide for its blatant character theft, clunky controls... and often game-breaking glitches.
    This was not in any way a safe situation. A glitch now, while he was still inside the game, could mean death... or worse.
    But before that train of thought could travel too darkly, he was interrupted by music. A whiney tune that had sounded bad in low-bit chiptune and wasn't any better now. Not-Peach darted forward and threw a punch that Powers only barely managed to dodge.
    "Hoshi! Are you doing this!?"
    "No sir! It is autoplaying!"
    He ducked beneath a hair whip. "Extraction protocol now, now!"
    Clacking keystrokes echoed in his ears, clashing horribly with the music as Powers dodged as best he could around his soulless opponent. The screen tore as she moved, parts of her body disappearing and reappearing at random making it harder to predict her moves but all the more critical that he did so. It seemed that even on the most sophisticated computer system in the world, the infamous game still ran about as well as a three-legged horse underwater.
    "Hoshi," he said warningly, "Why am I still in here? If you're not too busy-" Dodge. "I'd be most appreciative-" Drop and roll. "If you could extract me already!"
    "I am trying sir!" Came the frantic reply. "The controls- they keep freezing!"
    Powers took a kick to the stomach. It hurt. The pain was just as real as any he'd ever felt and for a heart-stopping second, he could have sworn he felt her foot inside him. "Use the emergency abort!"
    "It is not ready! Completely untested!"
    "Do it!" he yelled, "Or else I'm going to test out the Hutch MacNeil hypothesis the hard way!"
    Back in the real world, Hoshi flipper up a plastic cover and slammed his fist on a large red button. Immediately, the flashing error messages on his console winked out and the rematerializer roared to life. But what was near instantaneous in meatspace was perceived as much longer in the cyber realm.
    Powers felt his body freeze as bands of code wrapped around him, grasping and squeezing like giant cords. A soft buzzing feeling returned as his edges began to blur and lose resolution. But why was it taking so long? The process should have been instantaneous!
    From outside the field of vision he could no longer shift, Not-Peach was still active. She charged and turned as she began her spin attack.
    Powers noticed more of the background flickering and a mushroom that popped in and out of existence. The game's sloppy code was struggling to process the realms of data it was never meant to handle. The sooner he could get out of there, the better.
    Not-Peach continued to spin, her sprite glitching and cutting out as she gained speed and closed the distance.
    Powers closed his eyes as he felt his senses fade away. Not long now. In a moment, he'd be back in the real world, once more safe from cyber combatants.
    Not-Peach's spin attack connected, too fast for the system to properly process her position...
    And Powers winked out of existence as the world snapped to nothingness.
    ~~~~~
    Hoshi wrung his hands nervously. What was taking so long? It never took this long! In every experiment they'd tried, samples and probes had always rematerialized within seconds, a minute at most. And yet here he was, five minutes in, and the machine was still chugging along.
    Finally, just when he was starting to weigh the risks of attempting a hard reboot, the whirring fans began to slow and the light faded from the pod of the Transcyber Migration Capsule. The door opened and something emerged, but its figure a far cry from Mr. Power's broad shoulders and barrel chest.
    It was human though, thankfully. And though the being shared an unmistakable resemblance with Mr. Powers, she was equally unmistakably a woman.
    She wore a pale pink labcoat with short, puffy bell sleeves. Beneath it, a button-down leotard with an attached flared skirt (plausibly formed from Mr. Powers' old clothes and Not-Peach's qipao) clutched to her body as tightly as if it was painted on, highlighting every curve and valley of her perky breasts and toned waist. Knee-high go-go boots in a shade of garish orange clad her lower legs, leaving her flawless thighs bare. Down her back ran a thick mane of jet black hair, veined with silver and with enough volume to give any 80’s glam rocker a run for their money. She was surprisingly attractive, if in a peculiar and nontraditional way, but with a change of outfit would pass as an ordinary woman.
    She seemed dazed at first, unbalanced and uneasy as she stumbled from the capsule. Her breasts, large though they were, were cupped so perfectly by her outfit that they moved without jiggling, throwing off any sort of natural gait. Hoshi was too stunned to react and could only open and close his mouth uselessly at the new arrival.
    She stumbled a few steps before bracing herself on a desk. Her eyes traveled down and fixated on the tented mounds on her chest. She grasped them, firmly and without hesitation. She gave each a firm squeeze, wincing only slightly in surprise at the sensation, before settling on cupping them from beneath to better gauge their qualities.
    “Well then,” she spoke after a time, “This is certainly unexpected.”
    “M-M-M-Mr. Powers?” Hoshi’s shaking hand tried to adjust his glasses but only succeeded at making them more askew than they were before.
    “So it would seem.”
    The woman that had once been Mr. Powers took a few hesitant steps, gradually growing more confident, and walked over to inspect herself on a reflective bit of chrome plating. After a few moments of hemming and hawing at different poses, she nodded in satisfaction. "Could be worse, could be worse." She traced a dainty finger along the lines of her face. "Not a look I would have chosen, but there are worse options. Yoshi, for one. Or, Miyamoto forbid, Toad."
    She turned as a noise caught her attention. Hoshi was down on his knees, his eyes brimming with horrified tears. "I am so sorry sir! I should have known that the device was not ready. I should have tried harder to stop you. I should have cleared the problems without having to resort to the emergency extraction. This is all my fault! Do not worry! I will work day and night, without rest, to fix this bug and restore you to your-" He stopped as he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder.
    Hoshi looked up to a face that was so alien, yet so familiar. She was grinning. That wild grin that made Hoshi's hair stand on end and spoke of troubling things in his future.
    "Hoshi, my friend, you've worked in software for many years now. Surely you've heard that age old expression, beloved by programmers and gamers alike?"
    Hoshi could only blink in confusion. Powers stood up, placed one hand on her hip, and struck a pose.
    "That's not a bug, it's a feature!"