Pixel, Wont You Be (Er)Mine?
(A creation story for Pixel, copyright 2002 Bumblebee (Victoria Borah Bloom). The characters of Pixel and Horance are copyright their players.)

Horance shouted as he clambered down the stairs after her, the long straight-edged razor still in his hand. But the young woman had already stormed out the door of his apartment and halfway down the block, the long black hair newly carpeting her otherwise naked body quickly becoming heavy with wet snow, the long strands straggling into puddles on the wet pavement.

He leaned out the door. "Wait! I can fix it, beautiful! I promise!"

She turned toward Horance, pushing the tangled and still-growing curls out of her eyes. "Fat chance, you incompetent excuse for a wizard! Magical hairdressing, hah! I look like a gorilla!" She disappeared around the corner, leaving him standing alone on his front porch, melting snow mixing with frustrated tears and dripping down his round cheeks.

The mage closed the door, dejected. He pulled off his damp sweater, using it to wipe his glasses and dry his own thinning hair before tossing it in the corner. "There must be a better way to get at this sexy woman with fur thing."

He grabbed his lab notebook to scribble some final notes on his latest failure, and collapsed into the couch. "Yeek! Damn!" He pulled the remote control out from under him, and began to flip through the channels, passing by the news, two game shows, some Star Trek reruns, and an infomercial before an image of two tiger cubs tussling caught his eye. "There we go. Wild Kingdom. I could use a little bit more wildness in my life, that's for sure."

He sighed, stretching his legs out. The next scene showed a lion and lioness mating: he leaning over her, scruff in his teeth, she growling passionately underneath him. "Wow. No miscommunication between those two!" he mused. "Animals have it easy. They know how to fuck without fussing about who's buying dinner or anything stupid like that. They don't have to pretend they aren't horny all the time." A huge grin crossed his face to match the thought crossing his mind.

Horace nearly leapt out of the couch and ran over to his study, notebook in hand. He pulled book after book off the shelf, flipping through all of his references excitedly. "If I can't put the pelt on the girl, I'm going to put the girl into the pelt! She'll be really horny, and not so whiny as everyone else I date!" The room was littered with papers full of notes and calculations by the time he fell asleep on the floor, and by the time the morning's first light woke him, he was more ready to work than he'd been in years.
***
The small wheelbarrow full of magical supplies he wheeled in front of him made deep wheel-gashes in the snow on the forest floor, books and scrolls and jars tumbling out at every sharp turn. He found a clearing soon enough, and set up his circle there. "I'm going to collect the horniest thing in this whole damned forest!" He built the circle, lit the incense, closed his eyes and chanted. The magic reached out from his hands into the forest, finding the creature that met his request, charming it to bring it safely into the grove. He smiled to himself as the power washed over him, rippling. This would be easy.

He quite nearly purred as he felt the warm wet nose of his catch touching his knee. The sharp jab to his ribs that immediately followed was much less pleasant, and he jumped and turned, ending up face to face with the newly-lovesick stag, who looked at him with soft teary eyes and tried to headbutt him playfully.

"Arrgh!" he yelled, and the spell disappeared with a pop, and the stag ran back into the deep woods with a crunch of leaves and ice. "I'm going to collect the horniest female thing in this whole damned forest! Um, er, the horniest female mammal, I mean! No plants! No birds!"

The second time through was a little harder, the rose incense and essence of amber being all used up, but the spell rose up into the forest again even stronger than before. Horace didn't look up this time when he felt the first taps of curiosity against his thighs from wet noses and furry paws, didn't open his eyes when the tiny ball of fur settled into his lap cooing, didn't stop the spell at all until he felt tiny claws digging into his sweater, climbing up his chest. The little kiss-lick on his lips was too much for him, though, and he found himself muzzle to nose with a tiny ermine, coat soft and winter white except for the tiny black tip of her tail, eyes sparkling with a cheerful expression of only slightly charm-induced love.

He picked her up in his hand and looked at her from a bit further away, her long lean body hanging down along either side of his palm like a rag doll. "You are certainly a lovely one, aren't you? You're going to love it back at my place. I just hope you don't get whiny once we get you a real voice." The ermine gave a little squeak, which he figured served him as a promise to not be any trouble. He tucked her inside his sweater, packed his things into his cart, and trundled back home, whistling to himself.
***
The ermine was a curious little thing. Horance could barely keep track of her as she dashed around the apartment, getting into his sock drawer one moment, on top of the bookcases the next, under the blankets of his bed after that. Each time he lost her, he swore he'd cage her until he was ready to do his work. But when he came near to where she was hiding, she'd pop her head out cutely, looking at him with big sweet eyes, and he would forgive her, time after time.
He spent most of the next week in his study working out the spells to make the little weasel into the girl of his dreams. "One piece at a time, we'll get you where you need to be, little one," he'd coo to her as she stopped a moment to watch him work before she'd go to knock over a few books, or crawl up his pants leg, or perhaps dip her paws into the melting candle wax.

Horance woke up grinning the morning he thought he'd be able to start. He picked the little ermine up off of his face, and carried her into the study. "I've got two choices here," he said to her, holding her up in the air, as if she could understand him. "Either you can stand still here while I do the magic, or I can contain you in a magic circle so you can't go anywhere. Your choice." She responded by squirming out of his grasp, dashing into the kitchen, and diving head first into a jar of cookies. He sighed, fished her out, and began his work.

It was nearly evening by the time he finished. The little ermine didn't really look much different. She sat in the middle of the rug, staring at Horance with what he was sure was new intelligence in her eyes. He tried tentatively to talk to her. "Come here." She scurried right over him, leapt up and dug her claws into his sweater, and within moments was on his shoulder, nuzzling his cheek. Yes! She could really understand him! "Kiss me." She leaned over to the front of his face, and pressed her little muzzle against his top lip. He laughed loudly. "Okay, c'mon upstairs…"
The second piece of the spell was quite a bit more complicated, although getting the weasel to sit still the second time was much easier. He sat her in a nearby chair so she'd be comfortable once she was transformed into a beautiful furry woman, his perfect new girlfriend, just a few hours from now. Her tiny face tilted up to watch him as he gestured and chanted, as he dove deep into trance, losing the sense of his surroundings, moving around her in fluid motions.
He teased himself at the end of it, keeping his eyes closed as he stood in front of her, delaying that first sweet moment of looking at her a moment longer, wanting to hear her beautiful voice first.

"Can you hear me, beautiful?" He breathed slowly in the moment before she spoke back to him. Would her voice be a lovely deep alto? A wispy soprano? Soft as a whisper or…
"Waaaah! Waaaah!"

He opened his eyes, startled by the cry, and gasped. Wailing on the cushion of the chair was looked like a tiny baby girl, perhaps two months old, except for the soft white fur covering her body, and the long muzzle, and the long claws on her fingers and toes, and the tail thrashing back and forth behind her. He groaned.

This wasn't right, not at all. He was aiming for a carefree life with his new lady, not two decades of single fatherhood! But he picked her up anyway, and sat her in his lap, and she cooed.
He kept her in his lap, feeding her out of a baby bottle, as he searched through the natural history books in his library. He flipped through the pages, looking for information about ermines, trying to figure out where he'd gone wrong. He finally found something promising, and read out loud to the tiny furball. "Ermine are a polygynous-promiscuous species. The young grow quickly and are able to hunt with their mother by their eighth week. Although females do not reach adult size until at least 6 weeks after birth, they are able to mate when they are 60-70 days old, often before they are weaned." He sighed, scritching her gently under the chin. "That's the problem. You're probably only a month or two old." She responded by grabbing the waistband of his slacks with chubby clawed fingers. "But sort of a grownup too, in your terms. We're going to need to fix this."
***
He'd lost her again by the time the sunlight through his library window woke him, and it took the crash in the kitchen to help him figure out where she'd gone. A furry little one-year old was sitting on the tiled floor, cookies in both hands and in her mouth, the broken remains of what must have been the jar lying around her in all directions. "Bad girl!" He scooped her up and out of the kitchen, and into the bathroom to clean up. She'd certainly gotten bigger and heavier since last night! The weasel-girl cried out and clawed a bit when he placed her into the bathtub. A little red trickle of blood washed out of the black fur of her tailtip and into the water, and when he took a closer look he realized that she'd cut herself on a shard of broken pottery. The baby began to wail, having just noticed the pain herself. "Okay, okay, baby. I'll fix it, don't cry sweetie."

He began to improvise a spell, holding her hurt tail in his hand and chanting quickly, though he didn't actually know the right words for a tail, never having worked with a person with a tail before. It may have been that he was holding her tail too hard, but he was surprised when she bit him, and he yelled. 'What are you thinking?!" Just that quickly, the spell was over, and it had worked. Her tail was healed. And the tip was glowing purple.

By evening she appeared to be nearly two years old, and was toddling around Horance's house, cooing and chattering. Her tail was cycling through a rainbow of colors, blue and green and red and purple. He was enjoying watching her, though he had to keep getting up to keep her from pulling bookcases and furniture down on top of her. "We've got to pick you a name, little girl." She looked up at him, eyes big and sweet. 'Pih." She tried the sound out, her voice sweet and high. "Pick." "Pick…pick…pick..pickpickpickpick…pick." She began to spin in circles, playing with the sound and the movement until she fell down dizzy and laughing. "OK. Pick it is." Her tail flashed a happy blue. 'Pixel, even."

He played with her for a few more hours, until she wore herself out with hide-and-seek and bookcase-climbing, and finally yawned and curled up in his chair, fast asleep. He yawned too - baby-watching was exhausting work! He scooped her up under one arm, placed her gently on his bed, and curled up around her, to dream sweet, soft dreams, dreams of strolling with her through the park, her tiny self held up on his shoulders, tail tickling along his back.

***
The four-year old in his bed startled him when he woke up. She was staring at him, big brown wet eyes looking right into his as he opened them. The previous day's events came back to him in the next few moments, and he began to piece things together. She was getting big, fast! She squeaked, and pulled his hair, then jumped out of bed and tore down the stairs, as if she'd been waiting for hours. By time he got down to his study, she'd knocked a book off the shelf, a thin leather bound volume titled "Tales of Wondrous Beasts". She grasped it with her tiny hand, and her tailtip turned an expectant green as she looked up at him. "Pixel!" she screeched, then giggled uproariously. "Pixel name girl baby fix!"

Her declaration made no sense, but he understood her anyway. "Sure, I'll read it to you." He sat in his chair, and she clambered into his lap, and he began. "Once upon a time, in the beginning of the world, it would have been only a fool or an idiot who didn't believe in dragons…"

Book after book came off the shelf, fiction and spellbooks and histories, and he read. She picked up the words first, almost instantly, the sounds. "Fool dragon incense pentagram English Channel Abraham Lincoln." By lunchtime, his throat was a bit sore, but over ham sandwiches and milk he realized she'd picked up sentence structure, grammar. "The smelly Franco-Indian War incants griffins loudly," she told him seriously. In the afternoon, he chose more carefully, stories about people, the encyclopedia article on ermines, tourist books full of pictures of beautiful places. He read all the words, then explained to her about what everything meant in gentle tones. His voice was almost gone by the time the clock struck ten. She looked up at him, her face nearly that of a six year-old by now, and smiled. "Clock is noisy! Pixel is ermine girl. I love you, Daddy." Almost immediately, as weasels do, she curled up, asleep in his lap. And he sobbed happily, holding her.

***
Pixel was at the kitchen table, reading a cookbook, legs crossed under her like a studious nine-year old, looking at the words and the pictures. She looked up at him, then pointed at the book. 'What's that word?" she asked.
"Roux."
"Roo? Like in kanga-roo?" He nodded.
"It's spelled funny."
"It is. It comes from French. Sometimes words in French have a silent 'x'."
"Oh." She sat contemplating this. "I learned how to read this morning. I wasn't sleepy. I love you, Daddy."

He let her study all day, bringing books to the kitchen table, not minding the crumbs getting into the bindings, the grape juice drips on the pages. He watched her in wonder, so smart, growing so fast, so cute. Almost…beautiful. Or going to be. When she was older. Which was going to be very soon, at this rate.

He knew she would have grown some more by the time he woke up in the morning, but the beautiful teenager, sitting naked in his big leather chair, poring over the diagrams in his illustrated Kama Sutra, still surprised him. He saw her before she saw him, her hair grown long and tossed over her shoulders, her breasts gently furred, small black nipples perking stiffly up through the whiteness, her tail looped over her lap and glowing a passionate sort of purple-red at the tip. She looked up at him, and smiled tentatively. "Kiss me?" she asked him, in a soft, low, tender voice. And he did.

An achingly broad smile was plastered to Horance's face all day, as he shopped for jeans and dresses, lingerie and T-shirts. She ran up to his bedroom to try it all on, dancing in front of the mirror. She made him put on all of his clothes, too, helping him with worn jeans and itchy sweaters, laughing with a voice like tiny bells. She was wearing a sheer red gown when she pulled the book back out from under the bed. She opened it to one of the pages she'd been studying in the morning. "I don't understand this one. Show me?" And he did.

She was a dream come true, tender and loving and soft and furry, and insatiable. He missed the next three days of work, pleasing her. Making love, washing her hair, teaching her. By the fifth day, he claimed he needed to go back into the office, just to give his exhausted body a break. The little all-of-a-sudden curlup naps she took were not long enough for him to rest before she was crawling all over him again.

She greeted him at the door when he came home, dressed in tight jeans and a cutoff T-shirt. "You left!" she whined. "I'm…sorry," he said. "Kiss me." And it started again, touching and tumbling until they both collapsed from exhaustion.

***
"Want to meet the other weasel people," Pixel told him over breakfast.
"There aren't any."
She dug her little claws into her fingers, and frowned. "Want to meet them anyway. You never take me out to see them."
Horance got worried. He wasn't sure if what he'd done was legal. Wasn't sure if she'd be considered underage, somehow. Wasn't sure if his beautiful Pixel would get shot at the moment she went outside. He stammered. "OK, little one. I'll..I'll…invite them all over to dinner soon."

She smiled brightly, satisfied, utterly trusting of Horance. "Let's have more sex now."

By the fourth morning, Pixel was stamping her feet on the kitchen tiles, ripping into her waffles ferociously with sharp teeth. "Let me go meet the other weasels!" she called out frustratedly to him. He escaped to work, looking a strange mixture of satisfied and terrified, his body exhausted from her attentions, his mind racing with worry about her.

It didn't take her long to figure out the locks on the windows, once she decided to. Dashing from bush to bush, backyard to backyard along the suburban neighborhood, hiding in the greenery, seemed utterly natural to her. She recognized the wooded area that was her old home as soon as she got there. And, somehow, she recognized the gunshot of the hunters, the gruff low voices, the long-strided footsteps coming closer, and her body found the dark hole in the ground behind an oak tree, big enough to hide in. She dove.

Down, down. The ermine rolled her up into a protective ball when she realized she was falling. Down. Dark. Then thump. She fell on soft mossy earth, rolled, then stopped. She shook her head, brushed herself off. "Where?" she said, to no one in particular. The echo of her voice suggested a direction. She crawled, the ceiling low, the tunnel close and warm.

Pixel popped out of the tunnel at the other end, and found herself underneath a little wooden structure. It was dark, though warm sunlight filtered in between the slats of the floor. There were a lot of people sleeping under here, all furred: vixens and panthers and odd looking wolves. She crawled over them, and out into the day, and found herself in a wide open park, green grass tall at the edges and groomed in the middle. Among the dragons and tigers, a tall handsome ferret sat lounging against a tree. He watched her as she stretched and yawned, and winked when her eyes met his. She strolled over to meet him. She still didn't know quite where she was, but she thought she was going to like it here…

***
Horance panicked when he got home and found her gone. "Pixel! Love! Where are you?" No answer. Days of scrying spells turned up nothing, as if she were nowhere. As if she never existed. But he knew she did! He could still find the crumbs in his books, the empty cookie jar. He could still smell her warm musk on his sheets. He put them to his face, breathed deeply, thinking about her. "Yes!" He jumped up. "Bloodhound!" Theory of Transmogrification came down off the shelf, and by morning the desperate mage was ready to transform himself, give himself the sensitive nose of a hunting dog.

He rushed through the spell work, anxious. It may have been that a juice stain obscured a few of the words of the spell, or it may have been his bad luck again, but the whiskers on his nose didn't seem very doglike to him. More feline. Sensitive though, still, so he put the sheets to his face again, marked the scent, and headed off.

Her trail was easy to follow, the mix of ermine musk and human sweat unusual and strong. He didn't notice that he was shrinking as he bent down under bushes to catch her scent, didn't realize that he was running on all fours by time he was at the edge of the hole near the oak tree, didn't realize how high his inertia was as he ran into the tree, bounced off, and tumbled down the hole.

It was a drenched and mewling kitten that finally showed up on Pixel's front doorstep, a few days later, fur wet against his sides, but sticking up in all directions at the top of his head. "Y-y-you…you…you wanna let me in?" Horance stammered, hoping to get in out of the rain. Pixel smirked. "Sure, Horance, come on in. We'll let you be the little one for a change…"