✅ Softlocked

Part 4

This bonus chapter is dedicated to Bill. Thank you for your ongoing support!

"Awwww!" Noelle squealed. "Bock? Is that you? I know you said you were going to change a little bit, but I didn't think..."

"What happened?" Bocce asked, although she was already sure that Noelle didn't have the answers. And then she listened to the meaningless syllables coming out of her mouth, and realised that there was no way Noelle would even know what she was asking.

"Aww, I'm sorry," Noelle laughed. "I didn't mean to embarrass you, but you've got to admit you're an adorable little mink. Look!"

She lifted Bocce up with no apparent effort, and held her out towards the mirror on the wall. Bocce caught sight of her new body, and felt the first seeds of panic starting to sprout in her mind. First of all, she hadn't expected to appear with no clothes on. Couldn't she select something from her inventory? But that was something she could deal with later; the most important detail in her mind was how small she was. Had she accidentally bought a microform mink body, small enough that she practically vanished between the bunny's giant paws? That certainly wasn't what she had intended. But when she stared at her tiny image for a few seconds longer, she realised that she wasn't just small. She was young too, and underdeveloped.

"Okay, can you still nod?" Noelle asked, and Bocce nodded in response. "Is this what you intended to look like? No? Then I guess it's a side-effect of signing up for a trial offer that's intended for when you buy your kids their first form. Presumably the age of the form is locked in, so you're a baby again. Explains the size, excessive fluffiness, and the baby babble. I assume that means you can't actually talk?"

"Abaaah!" Bocce said, trying with all her willpower to say actual words, but nothing comprehensible came out.

She could call up her messenger, though. Not a virtual screen that she could manipulate with these tiny, uncoordinated paws, but a screen with words appearing on it in her mind's eye. She willed words to appear, and sent the text to Noelle.

"𝙸 𝚌𝚊𝚗'𝚝 𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚔!" the angry message said. And as soon as she focused on the 'send' symbol, a response appeared.

"𝙿𝚊𝚛𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝙲𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚛𝚘𝚕 𝙿𝙸𝙽 𝚛𝚎𝚚𝚞𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚍 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚞𝚗𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚏𝚒𝚎𝚍 𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚝𝚊𝚌𝚝"

Bocce gasped, realising the situation was even more serious than she had expected. If she couldn't send messages to her friends, that would make it a lot harder to communicate. Especially given that her new body's speech synthesis was apparently different enough that she couldn't speak aloud either. She tried to figure out what was happening, but it seemed like Noelle's guess was the only one that made any sense. She had signed up for an infant body without meaning to, so she would have to learn to live with it before she grew up again.

It wasn't ideal. She knew that. But she could go eight years without having to pay another subscription fee, and that was still a much more important detail. So she was a bit small now, and apparently the system had reinstated the parental control normally placed on new users. But she still knew all the things she had learned last time, so as soon as she was back in control of her body she would be able to talk, and she wouldn't have to go through all of her education again. It was a brief setback at worst, and then she would have years in which to optimise her body before the bills were due again.

"I don't think you'll be able to live like this," Noelle was saying, looking down at the tiny bundle of fur in her arms. "I know there's people with micro forms, and shopping streets to cater with them. Whole bars whose patrons wouldn't come up to my knee. But seeing your paws waving around like that, I don't think you'd pass for an adult even there. I bet it'll be an effort to even stand up by yourself, right?"