Chapter Text
Have you ever blinked your eyes and opened them again only to find that you've found yourself in an entirely new place? The feeling of confusion as your brain tries to make sense of how everything has suddenly shifted so completely with seemingly no time passing between your eyes closing and then opening again?
Jonathan Jones, our intrepid protagonist, finds himself in such a situation, blinking owlishly as his low to the ground perspective replaces the familiar sterile whites of his longtime hospital room, confusion screaming through his brain as the chronic pains of his failing body are suddenly replaced by muted sensations alongside a feeling of being so much smaller than he had been mere moments ago.
He jumps as the sounds of gunfire fill his ears, and his confusion only intensifies as he realizes two things. The first being that his landing is on four limbs, and the second being the text that scrawls across his vision [Primary user has been severely injured, attempt to contact Trauma Team has failed, postulation: A jammer is in effect?]
John stumbles backwards as the text flashes across his eyes, moving backwards on all fours as if he had been quadrupedal his entire life before his rear makes contact with something and his vision is suddenly obscured by a fluffy tail. His confusion swells into panic as it immediately moves out of his field of view the second he no longer wants it there, feeling it move from where it's connected to his rear. His attempt to focus on anything other than his current predicament leads to him staring in horror of the cat staring back at him from the reflection of the mirror in front of him, unable to look away as the cat raises a paw into view just in time for a mirror perfect paw to raise into his field of view.
"Find that fucking data before our jammer runs out you fucking idiots!" a voice screams from the same direction as the gunfire he'd heard before discovering he was in the body of a FUCKING CAT- "Anything valuable you can klep is a bonus!"
Footfalls rapidly approach, and before John can scamper into a hiding place a man who looks like a cyberpunk Mad Max reject walks past the door and spots him, "Well, well, well, whadda we have here?" said Mad Max reject says, his six eyes immediately locking onto John and forcing the no-longer-man's back to arch in a primal feline threat display. "That fuckin' Gonk had a 'Ganic pet?"
The man grabs at John, and with grace unnatural to his previously bedbound life the now-cat leaps back, "Back the fuck off, freak!" John snarls in a voice that seems almost like his own, something airy, and gasping coming from the cute little cat body he's currently inhabiting, making the man blink in confusion before John does something monumentally stupid.
John leaps forward, claws ejecting from his paws and digging into the man's face as he rockets back to a standing position, shaking his head in a vain attempt to dislodge the robotic cat currently latched onto his face while letting out muffled swears. John scrambles around the man's head as he tries to grab at and pull him off, only for both of them to freeze as something comes out of John's tail and insets itself into a port in the man's neck, making both of them suddenly freeze.
John is suddenly seeing out of four sets of eyes as the man's voice screams ineffectually in the back of John's head, sluggishly, the man raises a hand to the front of his face, seeming to struggle against John's forcing it to move, the sensation of being in control of two bodies being shaken as a voice speaks up.
"What the fuck?" a voice asks, and John and the person whose body he's puppeting both turn to look at the source of the voice, showing a man with a neon green mohawk looking at them in confusion, before all four sets of eyes widen at the man raising up the gun in his hand and pointing it at John's new cat body.
John moves as the man lines up the shot and an explosion of sound fills his ears before the three pairs of eyes from the person he had somehow hijacked glitch and go dark, the man's screams in the back of his head permanently silenced as John feels the person he's connected to die a sudden death as his fellow thief's bullet ventilates the poor bastard's head and sends him toppling backwards.
[Rear leg damaged 50%, wired connection snake damaged 89%, sudden disconnection may cause error-] the words flash across his eyes as he yanks himself out from under the head of the dead bastard that had partially crushed one of John's legs and showered his light brown fur in gore, shaking his head and sending the words swimming across his eyes shattering into artifacts as more error messages tried to pop up as a wave of pseudo-nausea washes over him, and it's only him slipping on some of the dead man's blood that keeps him from having his head blown to bits as the fucker with the gun takes another shot at him.
Scrambling back to his feet and barely suppressing a full blown panic attack, John bounds past the gun toting man and tries his hardest to simply repress everything that's happening to him right now, he has to get out of here, he is in danger, he doesn't want to DIE!
A doorway with light that looks natural, freedom, a way to escape, he can find some hole to crawl into or find something to hide under while he suffers his existential nightmare in peace, despite his damaged leg throwing off his rhythm he manages to make it out the door in what feels to him like seconds. He's going to be safe, he's almost there, just a little bit-
John freezes as he sees the urban nightmare on the other side of the door, one that he's familiar with thanks to hours spent watching videos about it and his half remembered exposure to an anime that had made what many had considered a mediocre game at the time something worthwhile, when John had called the man who he'd gotten killed a Mad Max Cyberpunk reject, he had been more right than he possibly could have known at the time.
His mental blue screen of death was interrupted by something hard smashing into his side and sending him sailing though the air, and he actually screamed as agony flared throughout his new body, a wall of bold text blinding him as all the error reports and damage statistics hit him at once before one of his eyes out and out failed.
"Nice kick choom!" the voice of the gun wielding gangoon cheered, and as John managed to regain his vision his brain stalled again at the sheer size of the fucker that had just punted him. "That little hellcat short-circed Borris!"
"Did it now?" the walking fridge of a man asked as he approached looming over John to the point where he couldn't see past the man's knees.
"Jammer no longer in effective range, Trauma team has been contacted," John found himself saying despite having no idea how he knew this, making the man looming over him jump. "Arrival estimated in one hundred thirty seven seconds."
"Fuck, you kicked it out of the damn jammer's range!" the gangoon screamed before screaming into the building. "NAT, DO YOU HAVE THAT FUCKING DATA OR NOT!?"
"I'll handle it," the walking fridge said, and John began to panic as he raised one of his giant feet high enough that John could no longer see it anymore.
John struggled in vain, trying to wiggle out of way of the boot that would crush him into scrap, begging for something or someone to save him from this seemingly unavoidable death, his life bound to a bed flashing before his eyes as a part of him raged at the sheer unfairness of it all, he had been ripped away from a failing body only to find himself jammed into one that was doomed to die and be forgotten.
"N-" he tried to scream as the boot came down and crushed the entirety of his lower body into scrap, turning his attempt at bargaining into a scream that fried whatever his body used for a voicebox as his vision was one again obscured by a wall of burning white error messages, darkness and corruption sparking though his functioning eye before a red message appeared and he was plunged into darkness.
[Critical damage taken, entering data-save powerdown]
Hours later, when no witnesses were to be seen, a odd spider-like drone approached the mostly smashed body that John had found himself forced into, a scanner deploying from it and seeming to take a picture of the junked Cyberform before a hatch opened and the Drone gently swept the damaged but miraculously still functional machine into itself before sealing its security hatches and returning to its mistress.
"How interesting," a beautiful woman said as she observed the files in the head of the Cyberform laid out before her before she began to gather her tools. "This warrants further study."
Path decided, Yuri Tenma began to repair the broken mess in front of her, for anyone else this would have been a herculean task. But for her, it was Tuesday.