Everything seems normal... Except herself

She walks heavily through the mall, each clicking footfall never quite landing when she expects it to, as if walking up unfamiliar stairs in the dark. She feels clumsy, like she used too feel after being changed, but before she had gotten used to it... But she hadn't changed again, had she? It was the clicking that gave it away. Every step gave the sharp click clack of her short cherry red heels. She hadn't even noticed when she was on autopilot in the diner, but when she reasserted her former memories, her REAL memories, the shoes suddenly felt awkward. She had never gotten used to walking in heels, despite all the playacting she had done, and even now her uniform brushed and bounced in awkward ways that made her blush. She felt silly in such a ridiculous outfit, like she did playing dress up with Amy, but without the mischievous charm. Scrunching her face in frustration she continues to plod forward as she tries to think of any other oddities she might find. She had some new memories and habits, which she was definitely not exploring right now. She had a new job, which she wasn't thrilled about, yet took strange pride in. But physically the only difference was the absence of her bunny ears and tail... As best as she could tell anyway. She flips her backpack around to her front, and starts digging through it.

"Phone... Phone..." She mutters to herself as she pushes clutter aside.

It was overflowing with disorganized junk. She sees papers she didn't recognize, a drawing pad, messy and beat up folders, A color blotched rag, A smushed sandwich in a bag, and a tumbler of something hot. She pushes aside a shirt and pair of jeans, the same clothes she had worn to the mall that morning. She finds her beanie at the bottom of the bag, and slips it on her head just to get it out of the way. She finds a long skinny bag which contains only pens and pencils, another larger pouch that's full of half used messy cosmetics, and a black vinyl wallet embossed with a floral design that was far too long, stiff, and bulky to fit in any pocket. Despite her searching, she couldn't find her phone. She huffs and stops walking long enough to unzip the side pockets where she discovered some cheap off-brand smart phone, much smaller than her actual phone, and protected by a black and pink phone case.

It sits heavily in her hand and feels larger than she was used to despite being a smaller phone. Staring at the login screen, she is both distressed and relieved to find that she can remember an unfamiliar password to unlock it. Unfortunately, Amy's name was not in her contacts, and to her frustration, she can't remember Amy's actual number. A case of technological dependency biting her in the ass, she isn't sure if she ever knew Amy's number, or had punched it in her phone once years ago and forgotten it.

"Dammit!" She hisses, then shoves the phone back in her pack, throws the pack over her shoulder, and starts running for the tech store.

"JACK YOU BASTARD!" Brenda cries as she slams upon the door to the backroom of the techstore. One of the piles of exposed circuit boards clatters over on the shelf behind the door, and a coiled wire falls to the floor.

"Whaa.. Hey, Brenda." Jack stammers as he swivels the chair around, and stares with a bewildered exprssion. "What's going ..."

"Don't bullshit me! What did you do?!" Brenda charges forward, and tries to push him from the desk and get to the computer. It is a largely futile effort with her spindly arms, but Jack acquiesces and rolls the chair out of the way.

The room falls silent save the buzz of the old fluorescent light above the desk as she takes the mouse and starts navigating the screens on Jacks computer. A few black screens were open with white text. Most of the terminology was unfamiliar to Brenda, but she still scrolls through the various windows, trying to make sense of it.

"I was going to text you once I learned a bit more" Jack offers apologetically.

She throws a cutting glance at him out of the side of her eyes, and he holds up his hands defensively.

"I just didn't want to bother you while you were at work..." He explains.

"Oh! Yeah! WORK." She snaps. "You mean the job YOU gave me? What, did you like the uniform? Maybe you should wear the skirt for a change?" She turns back to the screen, She could see her new name in the lines of code rather than her original name, but it was otherwise a confusing jumble of dashes, characters, and notations that she can't easily decipher. Throwing up her hands, she faces him and asks. "What did you do?"

"I was fixing it, just like you asked..."

"Yeah, and fixing me how you wanted." She rips her apron off her skirt and throws it at him.

"N-No... I just.. Look. There were a lot of error screens at first. I mean A LOT. They were saying something like 'wave cache error' and 'em frequency failure' and stuff, so I cleared the errors, dumped the corrupted data cache, and since the help menu said that normalize would fix things I ran the normalize command."

"Show me." She insists.

He scoots back to the desk warily, then scrolls up on one of the menus. "The dash and 'n' runs the normalize command, and then the options had stuff like normalize person, world, memories. That's what all the other characters after it are." He points to the string of nonsensical letters, then continues explaining, "Then, there's your name. '-t Brenda' means you're the target, and that everything normalizes around you."

"So you just thought you'd change my memories without permission? Why would you even do that?"

"I didn't want to change your memories necessarily, I just sort of assumed you wanted me to fix things."

She growls in frustration, "I didn't want you to normalize things, I wanted you to undo them!"

"But the cache was corrupted..." He stammers.

"What does that mean?"

"I mean... unless this thing has some sort of main memory I can access that's impossible."

Brenda staggers back.

"Look, I'm sure I can figure out how to swap your braces back with that girl, and then we can just run the normalize function again... I saw what happened yesterday. Sorry I should have told you, but it all worked out, right? Because I sort of already knew what was going on." He pleads with her.

Brenda was holding a hand to her face.

Jack continues, "Normalizing things could help keep away unwanted attention. The help menu said it would make people think this was how things have always been... smooth out impossibilities... That sort of stuff."

Brenda peaks through her fingers. Jack was sweet, and he was smart. That's why she liked him, from they first time they met at the local community college, but this wasn't the first time he had messed things up. He had the technical knowledge, he just didn't think things through. He didn't have common sense and was always... always... Her eyes flare as she realizes what she'd been thinking.

"Dammit!" She shouts. "So, How come we're dating?"

"W-what!?" Jack stammers.

"You heard me." She points an accusatory finger.

He stammers again. "I-I mean, that's not that bad of a thing, right?" He smiles that cute sideways smile, and Brenda couldn't help the tug at the corner of her own lips.

"Yes it is." She insists, but the venom in her tone was gone. "Look. My life is completely different than all of this. It's not just the braces, it's everything." She glares at him. "Don't you get it? I was just having fun at the mall when the gun broke."

"Oh." He mutters.

"Oh" she shot back

"So you and your sister were just playing aro..."

"She's not my sister." Brenda interrupts him.

"I thought... No wait." He scratches his head. "I definitely remember you telling me she's your sister."

"I've never even talked to you about Amy."

"No, you definitely did, remember? You said you moved to the city to get away from you parents, and she was at a local lawfirm and had a spare room for you to stay in while you went to art school."

"Art school?!?" Brenda flushes. "Of all the stupid... Art school?! I'm a lawyer, god dammit. I didn't work my ass off for 4 years, and pass the bar to get demoted to art school!"

Jack shrugs. "You're really good though. Your concept art for the game I'm developing is legit."

Brenda faces him and grabs his shoulders. He blushes. "You've got to get a hold of yourself Jack, Those normalized memories are getting you confused, we just met today." She rubs her brow. "Can you undo it? Undo the normalize thing you did?"

"I can try." He shrugs.

She let him go, and he wheels the chair back to the desk. His fingers snap out the command in a blink, and he hits 'return' on the keyboard. A moment later the gun pops, firing a spark out of one of the crystals.

Brenda feels dazed like she had just been sucker punched. She feels the bunny ears on her head again. She feels the tail flickering beneath her jeans. He was Brendan, a lawyer displaced into the wrong body after having fun with a friend and crush. And then she was Brenda again. everything made sense. She was back with her boyfriend, back in her work uniform, back with the braces. She was still annoyed with her sister over that one, and even more annoyed that Jack had just normalized things instead of undoing them, but at least the bunny ears and tail were gone. Things are normal.

The terminal window flashes an alert stating, "Insufficient EM - SUDO required to **** command. Reverting undo."

Jack shrugs. "I guess we need to wait for it to recharge. Wanna walk around the mall?"

Brenda sighs. "Sure, I already took the rest of the day off anyway." Only a vague sense of confusion in her mind prompts her to ask why she had taken time off in the first place...

---Authors Note: I was back and forth about whether or not I wanted Jack to be a more nefarious manipulator or more of a bumbling guy who accidentally makes things worse. I might go back and write a more sinister version in another branch.