Four Hours of Character Customization Later...

When the American bio-tech company, Tithos Group Inc. released their internal cyber-space program, Continuum, a few years ago to compete with Empire Bay’s Sandoval Innovations, several strict limitations were placed on the civilian user experience. This was mainly because despite spending billions of dollars on research and development into Continuum, the truth of the program was that it had been created through a happy accident. Almost none of Tithos’ programmers and engineers understood exactly how Continuum was able to so perfectly simulate visceral experiences for the users. Some employees whispered in hushed tones that maybe it had been a bad idea to base the program on Sandoval Innovations’ proprietary Hyron Code which enabled human-to-machine interfacing in the first place. Of course, Sandoval Innovations’ were uncompromisingly secretive in regards to the Hyron Code so there was no chance of reading the documentation to figure it out.

Even before the public beta tests of Continuum, there had been an entire office floor’s worth of documented human-to-machine interfacing bugs, and it would take ten times more programmers than Tithos employed to even find them. So the compromise was simply to place strong restrictions on what any user could do with and within Continuum. One of which was Avatar customization.

You were only allowed a single instance of customizing your own Continuum Avatar. After the first time you could change clothes and resize your avatar, but that was it. If you wanted to change anything again, you’d have to contact Tithos Group’s support, and usually they would say no. And you could not even make a new account since the Hyron Code initially interfaced directly with your DNA. Trying to create a new account would just overwrite the new with the old.

To one user this was… very frustrating.

Alexis LaCroix was someone you would pass by on the street and never remember, or at least that was how she saw herself. In truth she was a lovely woman, if a little shy, but once you broke through her shyness you would get to know someone who was delightfully passionate, kind and most of all, brilliant. Alexis loved coding and hacking, but due to her insecurities she relegated that hobby to just that; a hobby.

When news of Continuum broke, Alexis was ecstatic, she loved playing in less sophisticated Virtual Reality games where she could create avatars that allowed her to feel empowered to be her innermost self. Where she could fight like a tall and imposing space marine or seduce cuties as a waifish Elf. Continuum promised to do all of that but with a much greater degree of immersion. She stayed up late for the launch and in her hyped-up state, she accidentally passed through the character customization prompt that said “Accept this as your Avatar? This Avatar cannot be changed later.”

And when the facts dawned on her, it broke her heart. She was set on an avatar that represented her real world self.

For months she had appealed to the developers to let her change her avatar at least once but never got the reply she wanted. She would not let that defeat her though, and so she spent a lot of free time trying to hack the program into giving her that one chance to customize her avatar again!

On some nights it seemed hopeless. The code was dense, chock-full of dead-end spaghetti code and useless but locked-away features. The security measures were easy to pass through but the real trick was finding the Avatar customization system. But through just as much stubbornness as ingenuity, Alexis broke through and found something similar.

“Avatar Restoration System.”

Accessing the system opened up a plethora of menus, some that she recognized and others that she did not, but regardless of her familiarity with them, she enthusiastically got to work re-configuring her avatar.

“So many options…” She thought loudly while looking over them all with wide eyes. “What to do first? Maybe just start simple…”

She began by changing the height of her avatar, from its old medium height of 1.6-ish meters to a full 2… “Actually make it 2.2, that’s pretty good.”

From that point, Alexis would mess with the sliders and color options at a frenetically eager pace. She changed her hair’s texture, length, color and style over and over, but in the end she settled on a version of her own style and texture, but with a warm maroon color. That same color stuck with her and she began customizing the rest of her with that color in mind, things had to match it.

She tried several different kinds of archetypal appearances, from trying to look like her table-top RPG character, a cute Elf paladin, to her favorite VR chat avatar, a large-breasted Orc. With so many options to choose from, Alexis almost decided to call it for the day and try to make a final version the next day when she was less hyped-up. But just before logging off, one option popped up that seemed especially enticing.

“Cyber-Demon.”

She had never been fond of Tieflings or Luminants in the other games she had played, but something seemed oddly intriguing with this one. So against her previous decision, she selected “Cyber-Demon” and waited for her Avatar to morph into shape. After a moment of buffering, she felt her toes tingle and itch. Looking down she saw her index and middle toes of her feet grow rapidly while her other three toes diminished in size until they had fused into her new cloven hooves. Her calves and thighs filled up with powerful muscles. It was quite the sensation for Alexis to feel them grow like that, a very different sensation than the ones she had felt when changing into her previous avatars.

The same feeling of muscular fill-up migrated to her butt which had already been quite sizable before. But she knew that even though it looked no bigger than before, it had changed a lot. She clicked away her clothes to better see the changes that were happening, and with her ass bare she gave herself a sound slap to feel just how firm it was. As she guessed, it was practically bone-hard and for some reason that felt really nice. Getting stronger felt pretty dang nice…

She kept on grabbing and massaging her backside, enjoying the feeling as much as she admired her continuously growing form. She could not deny it at this point, she was definitely getting turned on by this. But a tickle from the base of her spine caused her to slow down a little just to be able to appreciate the changes more. A cracking feeling shook through her as her coccyx shifted its angle and started to grow outward. Alexis twisted around to get a better look at the tail that grew from her back. It grew incredibly fast, reaching its final length in mere moments, a length that Alexis knew was just under two meters.

She swished her tail around, fascinated by how real it felt. She knew that Continuum had “special code” that allowed for biological interfacing that made virtual stimuli feel as real as the real thing, but from her own experiences there was always a tiny degree of separation from the virtual reality and the real reality. While walking around on her hooves and using her tail for balancing she remarked that it felt more real than anything she had felt before in the program. It did not just feel real, it felt natural.

And that natural feeling was something else… Just walking around, swishing her hips in sync with her large and thick tail filled her with hot pride. She bit her lip and looked around reflexively, even though she knew she was in a private instance of Continuum. No one could see her as she began to cautiously rub herself. Although she was pretty horny, she did not want to miss the next set of changes.

What came next was a set of ripple and shakes across her belly. She had often been insecure about her pudginess in the real world, but that was all fading away as her fat shrunk away and into her core, revealing a tasty set of hard abs. Just like with her ass, Alexis felt compelled to test the hardness of those abs and almost cruelly stroke her hand over them, testing to see if they were as hard as they looked. And indeed they were. Like cobblestones covered in soft velvet, she admired how incredibly beefy she was turning out. Rubbing both her muscular tummy and her hot sex, the rest of her changes to her torso sped up.

She already had big breasts in the real world and although she would not mind a bigger set as horny as she was, the changes instead focused on her pectoral muscles that grew firmer and larger. Every fiber of muscle across her chest tingled like it was electric and with their growth, her breasts rose up with the stronger muscles. But there was something else there. A flash. Fast as lightning, her whole body lit up before going back to her normal mocha skin color.

“What was that?” She thought to herself before shrugging and continuing to sear at her hot folds. Waves crashed through her core and out to her skin. It was most spectacular across the remaining parts of her that had not changed yet. The flashing thrills concentrated across her deltoids, biceps, triceps and then through her forearms as they all grew to match the rest of her blazing body.

Alexis moaned softly as she began to reach her zenith. Calescence burned through her body, its center and source found by her fingers that she felt were so much more powerful now with the strength she had grown. It all focused like a laser through her and her body flashed in climax as she howled with pleasure.

White hot.

Followed by inky blackness in a split second that lasted for hours.

“Ouuw… That was awesome.” Alexis sighed as she lay on the floor of her private instance. She rose up to her hooves and groggily looked over herself to see some developments she must have acquired through her orgasm. Across her body, seams had appeared over specific joints and muscles. She had grown a pair of metallic horns and both her breasts and vagina looked as if they had been replaced with gel-based replacements. The same kind of gel now appeared over the top half and tip of her tail.

Instinctively she knew that her avatar was now robotic in nature and that the gel was like a kind of glial tissue that filled out every part of her that was not fully mechanical. One benefit was that the gel adapted to Alexis’ wants, changing form and density according to her wishes. Meaning that even though she was technically a robot without muscles, the gel could actively assume the appearance and function of the muscles she had “lost.”

Testing it out, she posed and flexed to see the full capabilities of the gel when suddenly a prompt appeared in front of her eyes.

“Full Avatar restoration at 99%”

The End.

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Big thanks to BisectedBrioche for the suggestion of this month's first pinup!