Canned soda, leftover pizza fresh from the microwave, and a 2D fighting game with a stable internet connection. Sue had everything all set up for her usual Saturday night, with the exception of her favorite off-brand flamin'-hot nacho-flavored tortilla-chips, which happened to "accidentally" be finished off the night before during another impromptu anime binge session. A session which may or may not have lasted to 5:00 in the morning. Fairly conscientious of the hygiene of her gaming equipment, she was never the one to eat nachos while gaming, at least not until she discovered some unnatural new abilities, and (as she would put it) a more "efficient" way to eat, that said abilities allowed for.

Maybe it was something in that unholy concoction of a drink one of her friends whipped up at her birthday party... of which she was the only one who accepted the dare to drink it. Maybe it was that fortune teller who she accidentally insulted, and now had a curse put on her. (No, that's unlikely.) Maybe some mad scientist accidentally released a radioactive mosquito. Oddly, the thoughts of questioning how it happened were far more common than on the abilities themselves.

You know... malleability wouldn't be her first choice in superpowers. Flight, telekinesis, and invisibility were her top 3, but hey, beggars can't be choosers, and ever the pragmatist, "Anything's better than nothing" was often her life motto. Aching questions still lingered of how any of this is possible, and what her limits are? Always the daring one, Sue would've considered herself ready to test the limits of her powers the day she got them... had they been easy to master at all. Turns out it's not as easy as it looks in the comics that she reads... which lay in a large pile in the corner of the room. Each day looking at the pile presented some variation of the same thought; 'I really should clean that up before I have guests over... whenever that'd be. I wonder what everyone's been up to. Well I've still got to learn the ropes of these new powers before I can even think about having guests over.'

Sometimes having superpowers is easy to hide from others, sometimes you're a blob of sentient humanoid silly putty that caves in and stretches out at the slightest resistance. It's safe to say that Sue's had to've been a bit of a shut-in as of recent, but hey, at least the lockdown meant that working from home is now a viable option. All the easier to spend time alone learning how to master these powers. It wasn't easy, but Sue always did find videogames to be much more approachable than people anyway. Even the most RNG-heavy games usually have all the possible outcomes in a set list. People were so often much more complex and equally confusing to her.

She was never shy, but nowadays, there was pretty much no choice but to be a hermit. The first time she noticed her powers would've been about 3 to 4 months ago. For the first few days, Sue could hardly keep a humanoid shape. Every bump and pinch deforming her body. An annoyance, but by now she had at least a slight amount of control over her entire body... at least to the extent of restoring deformed flesh to a roughly normal shape. Though she couldn't quite manipulate her body through sheer will yet; requiring force be acted upon her to cause any deformation, she did gain an amount of prehensile control over stretched-out appendages.

The newfound control had opened up many new ideas to Sue, the first being no longer having to set the game controller down to eat. A simple pull of the tongue and a new arm presented itself. No more worrying about nacho dust on the controllers. 'I knew I should have bought another bag.' She pondered. 'At least stuffed crust pizza was on sale. Eh, makes up for it.' Many people practice table manners, even when not in the company of others. Sue was not one of them. After lassoing a pizza slice from the box, it's impossible to tell if she even chewed it... or if she even could without her pliable teeth caving in, not that swallowing an entire slice of pizza would be a problem when her body offers practically no physical resistance to being misshapen.

It had become habit at this point, trying to find uses for her powers. 'With this long-ass stretchy tongue thing, I don't even need to eat food to enjoy it' was her excuse for stretching her tongue out and laying it over the entirety of the remaining pizza, taste-bud-side-down. 'I'll really need to break this habit before I have guests over...' A half-hearted reassurance she didn't consider actually putting into practice within the near future.

Promptly sitting down on her couch with the tongue-topped box of pizza on the cushion beside her. She tugged at an arm, stretching it long enough to power on her game console and return with the wired controller connected to port 1. It was a clear-plastic controller with built-in lights. A bit extravagant for her tastes, but it was a birthday gift from 5 years ago.

"Alright, here we go again... I wonder what today's double XP game mode is. Surprised they still have the servers up on this game. I guess the fans would be hella pissed if they shut em' down though." Sue ponders for neither the first nor last time. A quick loading screen and login popup before leading to the opening cinematic. "And... Skip."

Relying only on muscle memory, Sue made her way through the game's menus in a split second to reach the online lobby. 'Let's see... double XP mode is...' Her eyes darting around the mode selection menu. '2v2 unranked. Crap. I was hoping to reach level 200 tonight. I really need that XP boost. Really wishing they used matchmaking to put randos on teams instead of forcing you to have an additional friend over playing on the same console. Do I look like I can have friends over considering the circumstances?!?'

A thought struck her. 'Maybe... Maybe I don't actually need a friend over to play co-op. I wonder just how much control these powers give me.' Some might consider Sue already tall enough at 6'5", nevertheless, she tugged on her legs, stretching them until they were just over 15 feet in length. 'Only one way to figure out.' Her legs snaked out onto the floor, making their way past the couch and into the kitchen. A bit of struggle, but she was eventually able to brace them against a cabinet and push her feet upwards to the kitchen sink. "Gotta have em' clean." Looking towards the kitchen sink, she watched her feet stumble around to turn on the faucet, taking no less than 10 second to do so. Rinse, soap, scrub, rinse, and dry. Sue made sure to clean extra thorough, she was after all, walking on them all day... or at least when she wasn't sitting around she was walking on them.

Retracting her legs back to normal length, being ever so careful not to let her feet touch the ground, while also leading one leg towards a drawer under the TV. She gripped the drawer handle with her toes and pulled. "Alright, I think I'm getting the hang of this..." She reached into the drawer and pulled out another game controller, judging by its color it was most likely the one that came bundled with the console itself. Plugging in the controller was the hard part. It took almost a minute of fidgeting and adjusting her grip to finally get the the controller plugged in. "Finally! Dang this is weird." She exclaimed and promptly gripped the controller between her toes and pulled back to herself.

"Now let's see what these powers of mine can do." Sue chuckled. Placing the controller in her lap, she then gripped her toes and stretched them to each be about the length of a finger. "Wow this feels so freaky." She proceeded to wiggle her toes and test their dexterity. There was a lot of muscle memory she felt she needed to overcome, but she could definitely feel a sense of gradually gaining more control, though she would've wished her toes act more like fingers and less like tentacles. She quickly brushed off the gripe. 'Anything's better than nothing.'

Eventually, she was able to hold the controller with her feet in a semi-normal way; the two big toes acting in the place of thumbs with the next toes firmly planted on the shoulder buttons. "Guess I should start with a practice round." One loading screen later, she had selected the most basic character and stage to test with. "Alright so... movement." She flicked the left stick fairly easily, almost second nature after a jumping and quick dodging two or three times. "Good, and attacks." She began with a few light attacks on the practice dummy before bringing in some heavy attacks, mix-ups, and combos, though mostly fumbling in the combos by misjudging where the next button is. 'Just gotta build some muscle memory, but it looks like this'll work. I'm ready to hop in online 2v2, it's me and myself versus them. Playing two characters at the same time shouldn't be too hard if I have the second controller focus on parrying incoming damage. I've gone 1v2 plenty of times back in the day so this should be a piece of cake.'

Returning to the online lobby, Sue selected 2v2 unranked mode. Seconds passed during matchmaking, which turned to minutes. During the time, Sue realized the taste of pizza was gradually fading. "Right, gotta keep the taste buds a-moving for maximum flavor town." She wiggled her tongue around the pizza, but in doing so had caused most of the cheese to migrate to one side of the pie. "let's hope I can multitask two characters and pizza at the same time."

Five minutes past, only for the game to display a message reading 'Error: Disconnected due to inactivity.'

"Wha- really? Again? Now I'm sure they're just making the servers worse and worse every year just so we'll be glad when they shut them down." Sue reconnected and queued for 2v2 unranked matchmaking again, this time joining a match within 20 seconds. "Really? I swear, this game..."

The ever so familiar voice of the announcer echoed through the TV's mono speakers. "Select your character!" The voice actor for the announcer clearly not a professional, speaking almost exclusively in suppressed, underconfident "yells" if you could even call them that.

Sue was first to select her characters; an edgy swordfighter for her arms to control, and an 8 foot tall knight in shining armor for her legs to control. At least that's who she chose before seeing who her opponents chose. "Two Reginalds? Seriously? He's already spammy enough with that tommy gun. I know exactly how this is going to play out." She immediately switched her first character to a sort of pirate-looking fellow. "Now we're cooking!"

The match began with the announcer giving a "3, 2, 1..." followed by an unenthusiastic "Go!"

Immediately both Reginalds began to fire their tommy guns, with one of them jumping in quick succession. Sue sighed. "I knew it was going to be this way. What did I say?" She quickly moved her knight in front to begin parrying the bullets, her timing having been trained over the years of playing against hundreds of spamming players. Her pirate stayed back, trying to perform the right button inputs to lay traps and power up her attacks, though her timing for the pirate's attacks was off many times since she was more concerned with getting the parry timing right.

Eventually she was able to time the attacks correctly, allowing her to launch a massive cannonball at both Reginalds. "Hell yeah! Finally." She rushed the pirate in to perform a swift combo that knocked out half of both opponents' health bars. "I got this match in the game." She did not in fact, have this match in the game, for she failed to realize that the parried bullets and damage taken had filled the opponents' super meters to maximum. They quickly broke out of the combo and chained together both of their super moves, resulting in taking out 90% of the pirate's health bar in just a matter of seconds. "What? No! You're not supposed to do that!"

With Sue's pirate at 10% health left, her desperation to keep him alive made her forget about the knight, who was hit with a devastating 12-hit combo. "Crap, I forgot I was playing two characters!" She quickly moved the pirate in to intercept and parry the Reginald's combo, resulting in her pirate getting caught up in the combo and immediately knocked out. Sue immediately shouted profanities before swapping the second controller to her hands. 'Maybe I can still turn this around!' She thought. Though her knight's health bar was now less than half full, she gave it her all.

Unfortunately, by now both of her opponents had switched back to spamming the tommy gun, but from both the left and right sides. Sue couldn't parry attack from both in front of and behind the knight at the same time. It wasn't long before the announcer halfheartedly shouted "The winner is: Reginald! and. Reginald!"

"Reginald's a stupid character anyways, no one plays him." Sue pouted. "Fricking E-tier good for nothing but spamming." She pressed the 'no' button as quickly as the game had asked if she wanted to rematch. Sue regained her composure and let out a sigh. "At least you get more XP from losing a double XP match than from winning a regular match."

Her next few hours were spent gradually forming a play-style around multitasking two characters at once. Match after match, losing most of them at first, but by the end of the play session, half the matches would end up resulting in victory.

It wasn't long into her gaming session though, that she began to notice the pizza was cooling down. Sue sighed. "Guess all good things have to come to an end." She coiled her tongue around the few slices that remained and pulled the large slices into her stretched maw whole, possibly in mimicry of a video she saw the other day about a cone snail eating a fish. After swallowing the remainder of the pizza whole, she gradually began to reshape her mouth and tongue back to regular proportions. 'That's better.' She thought to herself. 'It always feels weird when I stretch out for long periods of time.'

Around midnight is when Sue decided to call it quits on the session, but not before winning just one last round, of course, even if that meant losing multiple rounds until then. Afterwards, satisfied with her victory, she set down both controllers. "Well I didn't reach level 200 tonight, but I can totally do it tomorrow night in like, three rounds tops. Especially if the double XP mode is anything but 2v2 unranked... let alone 2v2 ranked." She retracted her toes to normal length, and proceeded to clean up.

Sue laid down in bed soon after, already in her pajamas she had been wearing all day. She was fairly confident in her ability to control her powers by now. 'Maybe I should try some experimenting in the morning. Re-forming has gradually been getting faster and easier, so I could train some more with that. I wonder how durable I am... I can't recall getting hurt as of recent. Pinches and bumps just cause me to squash and stretch. What if I get cut? Will it hurt? Can that regenerate? Is it even possible to get cut, and could that lead to dismemberment? If so, can I even regenerate from that? I'm scared to try that... I'll just stick to squashing and stretching for now. I can just take things slowly and learn along the way. It's not like I was planning on losing a limb even before I got my powers, so what's to worry about?'

With that, she soon drifted softly to sleep.