Katelyn.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, Katelyn chose the final option. Watching as the blinking star solidified, something else transpired a moment ter.

  Her stats remained the same; however, next to each of them was a tiny modifier with a small x and a tiny little number two side by side…

  Katelyn squinted at the anomaly she'd nearly missed for a fraction of a second before something was—shunted into her mind!

  New instincts, she realized with a cold but decidedly excited smile.

  Well, she didn't need a mirror to get herself started, her phantasmal form merely drifting slightly so she could better observe what she was doing.

  The sensation wasn't too far removed from when she twisted herself to create the small makeshift legs, Katelyn—molding her own body into the vaguest shape of a human she could manage, starting to carve out the details beyond the amorphous shape.

  The muscuture, the coloring, defined details of individual fingers and nails before she felt something—snap, and her form rushed right back into itself like a quivering rubber band!

  "Fuck... w-well, that was—reasonably close…" Katelyn grumbled, sighing with acceptance before shrugging and forcing patience into herself. "Proof of concept is definitely there." She agreed, somewhat glumly. "All that's missing is the power to make it happen."

  An easy enough fix so far as she was concerned and an observable goal that would probably keep her from drifting away as she had before was, if nothing else, appreciable.

  Now that there was something to actually look forward to, she felt her spirits soaring by the second. "If only the other half worked so well…" She mused, almost whimsically, as she opened up her Kate page, yet was somewhat surprised by what she saw.

  Instead of the expected blinking number, her broken status had seemed to have resolved itself, and, in doing so, there were now several more aspects of it that demanded her attention.

  Without anything else to really do while stuck where she was, Kate perused the startlingly long list of feat options with widening eyes, verbally speaking each one with slowly moving lips while she considered what was on offer...

  "'Unerring throw'… your throw will never miss; however, use a small injection of mana each time you do so to ensure accuracy…"

  "'Dark vision' allows you to see in all low-light situations as you might in daylight."

  "'Trap detection' automatically highlights nearby threats of a trap-like nature…"

  "'Aether savant,' the fuck, this one just—outright doubles mana regeneration? Well, yes, yes, please, you're, yup, don't mind if I do." She rambled, quickly using one of her feat points to select the chosen boon on offer.

  Wow... what an absolutely absurd thing to offer for such a seemingly easy reward to get!

  "'Magic prodigy'… allows one to learn all basic forms of magic without the prerequisite css—the hell are these things?" She demanded a second ter, staring in utter shock at the absurdity of it all. "And the second question, why are they all so powerful?"

  Katelyn stared at the screen for several moments before flicking back to her monster page, looking intently upon her magic regen and noticing it was at forty points a second. She frowned for a moment, confused as she gnced at her health. Then, at her endurance.

  She had forty-eight points in the stat as it stood, which somehow equated to nine-hundred and sixty health. The number—not concerning in of itself, however, it wasn't lost upon her that, were she to divide the quantity in two, then it would neatly sit perfectly divisible by ten, which would leave her with forty-eight.

  It wasn't uncommon for people back home to work out such statistics as she was already doing, but one more factor, already observed, rose to her mind as she once more gnced at the times two modifiers beside her stats.

  "So… I just get—double everything now?" She asked, confused but not willing to really let the connection slip once it was made. "Just like that?"

  Again, she hesitated, almost apprehensive in her genuine confusion while still trying to wrap her head around what was happening here...

  "And, because I chose Aether savant… My ten points in intelligence, or ten mana regen, would have been twenty, but because Monster Me did—something weird, now it's just… doubled again to forty? For real?"

  Naturally, nobody replied to her posed question, however, Katelyn smiled all the same. This seemed exactly like the sort of advantage she was perfectly willing to abuse!

  She returned to her personal page and re-immersed herself in the list of feats on offer.

  With time, she was able to sort of—filter for specific categories, her primary interest ying with anything that involved the arcane. There was a feat that allowed her to retroactively gain an extra point of intelligence for every primary level she achieved, which was picked up without question.

  Thus, turning her forty points of regeneration into eighty, and though she couldn't say she was smarter, things felt like they processed at a much more efficient rate in her mind.

  It all became clearer; her ability to push aside and compartmentalize worries or concerns she didn't want to focus on became much like child's py as she marveled at the sense of—serenity she felt in offloading the apparent dump truck of baggage she'd been carrying around.

  Suddenly, her circumstances didn't grate so hard in her subconscious. The fact she'd died in her real world was trivialized once coming to terms with the fact there was a light at the end of this bleak tunnel.

  She felt—better about herself, not happy exactly but certainly less frustrated…

  Another feat she quickly colpsed on was a magical prodigy, more because it was more interesting than much of anything else. And, as soon as she took it, several new categories of skills appeared in her status sheet, finally starting to help fill the damned thing in.

  She mulled over the options for what felt like hours before blowing through the majority of her feat points, keeping three of them, not including the more restrictive one, which, after some brief investigation, she pced into something called con man.

  "Conman. This feat allows an individual to set up a falsified status page. Modified by the user's intelligence. Warning: falsified information that does not appear genuine is easier to detect. Combated by external user wisdom scores."

  There had been a few good choices for this feat point; however, once she'd seen that one, nothing else had really mattered… Her prior fear of being discovered as a mimic through an identification skill like her own was a genuine problem.

  And though she seemed to possess some sort of natural defense against it, not unsurprising given what she was, the ability to change that information could only make her pns that much easier to implement.

  She was standing at a whopping eighty mana regeneration which was up from the twenty she'd had when previously making her profane attempt at humanity.

  Finding that, while monsters possessed some frank absurdity when it came to their stat allocation and outright free improvements by way of doubling scores, people, by contrast, were sitting just as pretty.

  The fact that one of her feats just—made her arbitrarily fifty percent more resistant to physical damage while another was resistant to elemental magics by the same was, simply put, unreasonable.

  Yet, that was why she'd chosen them to begin with!

  She was practically giddy as she, once more, formed the shape of her would-be form. Watching as her box-like figure melted upwards into the vague silhouette of a human, its skin stretched out and terrible, looking for all the world like her flesh was painted so she might blend in with a giant mural of a treasure chest...

  She fixed the abominable appearance of her exterior rather quickly, Katelyn wasting little time working through all the small details of a form that she was intimately familiar with.

  It didn't matter how long she'd spent—secluded in the dungeon as she'd been… Her mind helpfully and, with startling crity, retrieved the image of a familiar young woman who she'd seen grow with her all her life.

  Katelyn stood before herself, silent as a manikin. Unmoving and unresponsive, her gzed green eyes looked dully forwards without the hint of life about them…

  The form was—perfect, copied down to the st detail. From the odd—snaggle of a bottom tooth that hadn't ever been fixed with braces to the slightly off-kilter way, her left breast hung from the right. An almost imperceptible fw that had only garnered attention through sheer force of observation, given how many times she'd stared at herself in the mirror.

  From the birthmark under her right arm to her long golden hair, straight as the day she'd been born… Everything was perfect. And yet, she wasn't happy with the result.

  Everywhere she looked, improvements could be made!

  Tiny details, sure, small odds and ends that she'd always been annoyed with, always seen and wished she had the very opportunity she now possessed to change things, but… was Kate really about to start messing with her own body?

  She unquestionably wanted to make the most of it all, to take things to the very pinnacle of her abilities and create something that was—idealistic. And not just in the way of biology, but in a much more refined and purposeful nature...

  She did somewhat dislike the idea of doing so with her face, but then again, she probably didn't need to change that much...

  Katelyn loved herself!

  Sure, she had her grievances, but her self-esteem had never been as such to give her cause to dislike the body she'd been born to. She had a cute face that was a little more square than ovur, great tits, and an ass that was packed to the point it rightfully should be worshiped.

  Likewise, she wasn't fat, looked pleasingly athletic given she'd always visited the gym, and, just, overall, she honestly detested the premise of changing what she'd been and making something entirely different.

  Never had Katelyn looked in the mirror and said, 'Wow,' time to get colgen injections… it just—didn't happen, nor was it, in her opinion, needed.

  And though she knew why some girls chose to turn themselves into dolls through filters and makeup, not too indifferent to what she herself wanted to do, only, with a more—real result, it felt like a betrayal to her own self were she to start fudging things.

  Her frown only grew deeper, this time, starting to be replicated by her own form staring into the distance, which only served to pique her disgust that much more.

  Eventually, Katelyn swept her hand. The form of her previous self disappeared into a bnk, featureless mask.

  No, that had been who she was before coming here.

  She had been her own person, separate from who Katelyn was now. Absent all the deaths, all the—eating and possible insanity that had worked its way into her mind…

  Katelyn—well, that Katelyn which she'd just made had… died.

  She'd lived her life how she'd wanted to, and Kate was reasonably pleased with it. Sure, it hadn't sted as long as pnned, nor had it gone precisely as she'd envisioned... Big thanks to Brandon for all that mess...

  Yet, this body wasn't the same, regardless… It wasn't—her, at least, not that version of herself…

  She didn't want to cheapen who she'd been, to turn herself into a twisted mockery of some long-dead corpse of a girl who'd been id to rest and should remain as such because nothing she could ever become was better than who she'd been!

  It was a fact! Not just an ideal, but a certainty in her mind... And she refused to budge on the matter any further.

  But where did that leave her?

  Katelyn found herself pondering that question for a time… allowing all the details to fall away until she was left, once more, with the fully androgynous shape of a human without any features…

  A face arrived unbiddenly to her mind when she came to the conclusion that she would maintain some of her more—general attributes. She wasn't so vain as to even consider making herself ugly… hell, she'd put everything she had into making the hottest new body she could because, fuck it, who wouldn't in her shoes?

  Likewise, women.

  Not up for debate.

  While being a guy could be fun, she was used to what she was used to, and when she considered that all the more—frustrating bits of being her gender were probably not an issue anymore, it made things that much easier.

  Height, however, was a—question she was trying to chew on while adjusting the proportions of her new form.

  Thin the waist too—well, likely improbable dimensions for one's poor organs, which she didn't have. Widen the hips, bubble the tushie, make the ta-ta's nice and big, rounder, perkier, irresistible to almost silly proportions. She was a trap, after all!

  Then, the legs. Thighs for days, pretty feet, all of it long and elegant, artwork in its own fwless right… follow suit with her arms and hands, paint the toes and fingers, avoid anything remotely reted to the evil that was hair follicles where they weren't wanted, and, before she knew it, Katelyn was, again, left with her face.

  She began with the image that she pulled up as though it had been a snapped picture… A young woman she'd caught off guard some many cycles before… silencing her as she did her handsome companion, the girl's scream never making it to the light of day before Kate had moved on to her comrades.

  She'd been—beautiful in a way that had seemed hand-crafted. Ovur bone structure, sharp cheeks and jawline, straight nose, and wide, innocent eyes. Too adorable not to feel a flush when she looked at you, too angelic to really feel tangible…

  It was a starting pce that Katelyn found she didn't really have to deviate from… doing small things like thickening the eyeshes and gently curving the eyebrows, but… for the most part, it was—good…

  And perhaps most importantly, enough of a deviation from her old self that Kate didn't feel like she was betraying what she'd been...

  She altered her gaze to a deeper blue color, which approached the oceanic, throwing in more saturation to make them appear bolder and shockingly vibrant while adjusting the pigmentation of the hair.

  Though golden like wheat in her victim's final moments, she went for a more golden brown, tinting the skin away from its tanned glow to a paleness of a more haunting pallor that would probably stand out more while inside a dungeon.

  The—ears were a bit of a conundrum for her; the girl had apparently been a—demi, a half-elf half-human as she correctly recalled, which sounded all well and good until one remembered just how racist humans tended to be.

  And though Kate wasn't exactly one herself, mostly because skin color didn't mean shit when everyone was equally filthy in her judging gaze, her father and his country-club friends had definitely been rather vocal about their opinions on the matter...

  That being said, nobody ever hated elves, so… why not? She could embrace her inner cospyer and roll with the face-knives until they gave her trouble.

  When she was finished, Katelyn found herself staring at a deviously enchanting beauty that commanded the eye to gaze upon her. Sucking oneself in as her overwhelming bewitchment grabbed hold of the heart and cimed it as her own.

  She was—indescribable…

  Purity in its most basic form…

  The almost sickly virtue and piousness radiating off of her pouting and innocent lips just—made Katelyn want to look away in knowing what that heart-melting and demurely dimpled smile would do at its earliest opportunity…

  Honestly, she felt almost dirty...

  And she would be doing it. Eating people, that was. She was a monster, after all.

  However, if ever she found something else equally appealing in more of a carnal nature, it wasn't like she wouldn't explore it. That was part of the reason she'd made her new form so scivious and sensual while also as vulnerable-looking as possible to a—somewhat despicable degree.

  Forgoing any significant muscuture beyond faint impressions of athleticism and even going so far as to make herself decidedly both petite and short, she would be offering the implication of defencelessness.

  Oh, she was sure that somebody was in for a horrific surprise when they discovered she wasn't as harmless as first she might seem...

  Regardless of what she looked like, Katelyn was both a predator and, if she had the right of it, absurdly strong… A monster in every sense of the word, not indifferent from a succubus meant to lure and beguile with her captivating appearance...

  Only, she'd sort of gone a different direction with it all. Either way, she'd be ensuring to devour her unwitting victims with extreme efficiency, in a perhaps alternate manner than the typical soul-sucking demon.

  She was undeniably stunning to behold, but that was just part of the ruse now, wasn't it? Form and function come together in a deadly dance of duplicity meant to tug upon one's heartstrings and confuse an individual's baser emotions.

  Overwhelming them with lust and sinful desires by equal measure to pity and a chivalrous need to protect something so clearly precious and in need of a white knight to save her!

  She almost wanted to cackle at the mere thought of it! Oh, but how wrong they would be...

  Brandon had often called her a monster... And while she hadn't really taken it as an insult, it was becoming quite clear that the bel might just have been somewhat accurate.

  Kate was very enthused about the prospect of it all... Excited even!

  The stimuting thrill of foreseeable control and deceit that she'd get to py with while puppeteering her prey upon strings for which they would dance for her was... yeah... Exactly what she'd always wanted...

  Allowing her hair to dangle to her back in a cascading waterfall of artisanal waves was, simply put, the icing on the cake. Finishing the final touches upon a new form that needed no makeup, its presence doing nothing but subtracting from what was already, as per design. Perfection in all its forms.

  Katelyn grinned at her handiwork, slowly getting a feel for what it felt like to move her limbs in a human-like fashion while absent any meat, needing to be entirely careful not to bend herself the wrong way, given she cked the actual structure below the surface to prevent that sort of slip-up.

  It was—easy, in all honesty, different from being a human, to be sure, yet her mind still remembered how everything should feel, thus making internal adjustments here and there as she went, acting out various poses and past interactions she'd had; the Monster was reasonably certain she had it down pat.

  In fact, things were going so smoothly, so astoundingly faultless, that it was probably pre-ordained somewhere that she would eventually reach a hiccup that wasn't so easy to breeze over.

  It arrived when she tried to open her mouth to speak and, in doing so, found that there was nothing for it. Her lips moved, false tongue shifting to form sylbles and words against the teeth within, her smile genuine in its mask of falsehood as she practiced as though before a mirror—yet, nothing came out.

  Frowning, she began to wonder if it all had something to do with the void that she was still stuck in, assuming she had connected the right dots before; abruptly, she found herself standing amidst a rge dark room.

  As before, her eyes were realistically just for show as her true self, or—soul, rested outside of her physical form, allowing her to move independently, which was weirder now that she had a proper body… sort of like existing in duplicate...

  But… from what she could see, this was the first time she'd been—manifested in a room that wasn't what she'd come to imagine as her own.

  "Wow… someone's been busy." A naggingly familiar voice intoned, just the barest hint of scarcely contained amusement clear to the ear.

  Katelyn caught sight of the tiny creature that had imprisoned her and turned, wincing slightly as her new form—moved just a little stiffly while she wasn't paying it her full attention...

  In what she was sure to be terrifyingly horrific, her neck bent too far as it spun around to regard the floating creature, who also visibly winced.

  Maybe she'd been stuck in a bloody box longer than she thought… old instincts found themselves slow to reignite and remember how this whole—person thing really felt.

  “Okay—creepy but… by and rge… yeah, wow… pretty good job… Don't know how you ended up so—sexy-cute, I guess is the phrase, but… sure, bravo!

  You officially look like you might be carried off by the next boss goril I make instead of the usual princess… ah-heh… not that you probably even—ugh... understand that reference…" The Pixie growled, her tone rising with exasperation before sighing a moment ter as Katelyn's nonexistent heart began to race.

  She opened her mouth, trying to say something, trying to ask a metric boatload of freaking questions she was already amassing, but all she could manage for her effort were the fish-like and smacking sounds of her lips and saliva while her mouth tried but failed to communicate.

  The tiny woman before her narrowed her gaze, leaning in as though watching the very specific movement of her lips before a sort of wide-eyed and hysterical dawning expression formed! She regarded Katelyn for several long moments before speaking again, this time with a hesitancy that was guarded.

  "You—made that body for yourself… didn't you…" She whispered, her form floating as though in defiance to gravity as she began circling Katelyn with a critical eye. "You're smart… clearly… but what would have made you choose this form?

  There are plenty of others and, honestly, better ways to just—trick people into getting close to eating them, and this has gotta be pretty prohibitive with the whole mana thing… So, ignoring how you're even pulling it off, to begin with, given those wildly confusing stats…"

  The girl froze, immediately fshing back into existence before Katelyn's face, her own expression shocked as though she had just seen a ghost. "Air." She blurted quickly. "Your issue is air! I bet you didn't go for any organs in there, considering they'd cost more to replicate, but you need lungs to talk! And vocal chords!"

  Katelyn gasped as she took in her first breath of air in a long time. The tiny creature's suggestion manifested by her will even as the thought hit her like a brick to the temple. "You know Donkey Kong?" She painfully wheezed, coughing and fighting as her new lungs threatened to defte.

  Before, of course, she remembered she had to keep the whole mechanism moving else it would all be useless...

  "Oh fuck… Fuckity, fuck, fuck, holy fucking shit, you're from Earth!" The Pixie screamed, eyes bugging in her head!

  "And you apparently are as well," Katelyn replied, beyond excited but also annoyed as she massaged her vocal cords until what came out was more—feminine and in line with her appearance than the bnd borg of sound it had been before.

  "I—am…" The other girl agreed, tentatively replying and returning to a somewhat suspicious state. "Who are you, and what are you doing inside me?"

  "Inside you?" Kate countered, clearly looking at the Pixie with her own—well, the eyes were real now, as with many other aspects of herself that she was constantly changing, but, after a moment, she decided she should try to anchor herself in her new form for—better continuity.

  "Yeah, dungeon here, you know, the thing you've been plundering mindlessly while I left you alone because…" She—paused, eyes narrowing a fraction further before she continued, this time slightly accusingly. "You've eaten like a lot of people… Like, a lot, a lot…"

  "Well, you're the one who shoved me in a man-eating mimic, so whose fault is it really?"

  "Hmph, I didn't do anything. You're just one of literally hundreds of mimics I've made over the years."

  "Mimics who eat people," Katelyn stated, folding her arms at her chest and causing the small woman to immediately gnce at what happened there. "Hey, eyes up here, cookie."

  "Oh fuck off, nobody with the ability to do so makes those things that big without wanting the attention. They are literally biologically designed to make people want to look at them, kid.

  "Kid?"

  "Yeah, likewise, nobody would ever in their right mind consign themselves to that much back pain after having dealt with it firsthand."

  "Says the girl with tiny tits." Katelyn grinned, eyeing the Pixie's chest with a sort of smug satisfaction as she lifted her own and—jiggled.

  "Oh… I have a feeling we're probably going to hate each other and be best friends, aren't we?"

  Katelyn hesitated, still smiling, before offering up a small and noncommittal shrug. "I don't know… what is there to—do around here?"

  "Eat people?" The Pixie asked, both of them smiling despite the somewhat grim joke.

  "Okay, yeah, probably a good start, but… seriously… what's happening?"

  "Were you—reincarnated?" The girl asked carefully. When Katelyn nodded her affirmation, not having anything to go on beyond the empirical proof of her demise and rebirth as a monster, the pixie girl visibly defted as she sighed, eyes closing to take a deep breath before opening them again and staring at her.

  "You should probably remember to blink more…"

  Her voice was not—mean by any stretch, but Katelyn took the suggestion for what it was. Given this was her first actual conversation in some time, she knew she'd be rusty.

  "And as for the other bit… I guess—welcome to the Lacunae! Hope you enjoy your stay because your soul is here forever now…" When Katelyn didn't exactly respond, the girl sighed again. "Listen…"

  "Katelyn."

  "Abby." She offered in reply, smiling weakly as she did so. "I—uhh... know what I probably did to you, with the whole storage thing might have been a—bitch move… but in all fairness, you did try to eat me, so, assuming we're square, I should probably bring you to my—well, somewhere safer than this…"

  She paused for a moment, looking away before taking a deep breath and adjusting her demeanor, pnting both hands on her hips as she powered through her clear uncertainty like it was practiced. "Look…" She began again. "I—we don't exactly have all the time in the world here…" Abby's tiny arm swept about the room in a grand gesture to help make her point. "At any moment, somebody could stumble in on us and, well, interrupt…

  I've got a safe pce where we can talk that's not my storage pce." She quickly added, seeing Katelyn's reaction. "But, also not really part of mmhmm... this part of me? Does that make sense?

  I don't know, it's really hard to try and expin if you can't just see it all first hand, but I figure that if we're going to be cordial about all this, then at the very least, I should, you know, warn you before whisking you away and teleporting you willy nilly."

  Katelyn bobbed her head in understanding, knowing where the somewhat excitable and unhinged girl was going with it and, on some level, appreciative, even if she was stumbling over herself for little reason.

  Sure, she'd put Katelyn in time-out. But, just as she said, Katelyn had tried to eat her. Twice. She wasn't so proud of a person she couldn't reconcile when she'd done wrong and been rightfully spped on the cheeks for it. Also, it had sort of helped with the fugue...

  Nevertheless, the girl brightened with her silent acceptance, smiling somewhat shyly before, again, Katelyn found herself somewhere—else.

  There'd been a brief fsh of darkness, as though she'd blinked, but… now… she was standing in what she'd probably called an untidy bedroom... Complete with scattered clothes, a few cans on a nearby desk, unmade sheets, and a full-grown human woman who was standing amidst it all.

  She was frantically piling articles of undergarments and jeans into her arms before she abruptly stopped, looking outright horrified as she did so.

  Tall, probably as tall as Brandon had been in her previous life, thin though with enough curves to be undeniably pretty. Her face was, likewise, a sort of ideal conclusion to what the human race might one day achieve through genetic tampering and adjusting of their own genome.

  Fwless, lightly freckled, grey-eyed, and bck-haired, which was, like the room, messy. As though she'd just gotten out of the shower but not brushed before letting it all dry.

  Her cute features were marred by the utter mortification written clearly for all to see while Katelyn gnced around the room, lifting a bare foot off a sports bra that, disgustingly, was stuck to her sole as she sighed and shook it off...