[Puzzle TF, Mental Changes (See description for details)]

Inside the puzzle, there were seemingly infinite fragments of Cayla. Each a distinct personality traits or emotion, none of which were strong enough to represent her entirely.

But as James slid and messed with the puzzle, her soul reconnected in different permutations. For a while this continued until finally he seemed to stop messing with the puzzle. Cayla didn't have enough higher function thought to understand this, but just that she seemed unchanging for the moment.

She didn't have much to work with. She knew she was in a puzzle, but not how she got there - it seemed those memories, along with many others, were still disjointed from her main mind.

She knew she couldn't get out. She was stuck, trapped. But this didn't scare her. Nothing did; she couldn't feel fear anymore. She was limited to happiness and arousal and acceptance, dangerous emotions when trapped in a foreign place that messes with your mind.

She worked backwards from what she knew and tried to figure out what had happened. Something must have happened, right? People don't just end up in puzzles on their own. But… there'd be no way for her to end up in a puzzle, no mechanism or secret device that could make her one. Not that she remembered existed, anyway.

By that logic, then, she must have always been a puzzle. Made in a factory, perhaps, or by hand. Something about hands being relevant felt right to her, so she must have been a handcrafted puzzle.

This revelation only increased the few emotions she could feel. It elated her and lifted her up into feeling important. Her purpose was to be solved, and she was one of a kind, unique. There could be no copies in the world just like her.

After a time passed - Cayla couldn't tell how long, her sense of time still missing - her soul shuffled around a bit. She was left feeling much the same as before by the time she felt the changes stop.

Rest followed these periods of chaotic change and flurried reassembling of her spirit. Her memories of other puzzles she had once solved as a human returned, but the puzzle-bound girl couldn't place the human in the memories. After all, she had never been human, by her own recollection. It was simpler to think of them as siblings, other puzzles in the world she must have seen at one point or another. She felt sadness for the first time in a long time, a sudden dawning realization that her Owner was struggling to assemble herself, her purpose dragging slowly to conclusion. Hope and fear and pride returned close to each other in her fragmented view of 'time’, and she could only imagine what would happen when she was solved. Would her Owner continue to fuss with her pieces? Mix her up and solve her again? Would she be left in a box for years, forgotten?

The fragments slowly pulled themselves together as James made painfully slow progress on the puzzle. While more elements of her humanity returned, her own knowledge and memories of being human stayed out of reach. She was clearly more than just a puzzle, that much was clear. But all she was, and seemingly ever had been, was a puzzle. She focused on this mystery for many cycles of rest and change. Through her darkest moments, as her Owner had made mistakes and reset the puzzle to nearly completely unsolved again, to when her emotions came and went, all she had was her understanding that she was a puzzle.

So, she was Puzzle. Puzz, perhaps. She liked that, it felt fun.

Her mind felt at ease for the first time in a long time. She had taken to calling each cycle a “day”, her memories of time giving the word some meaning even if not fully connected to an actual sense of the passage of time. Many of these “days” went by before finally, she felt nearly reassembled. Puzz, the Puzzle Girl. This was comfortable and familiar, but most of all, it was normal to her. She had memories of a girl named Cayla, but they weren't her, because if she was Cayla, how would she have gotten into this puzzle?

The last few tiles slid together, and before Puzz could connect the dots and figure out what had changed in her mind, she spilled out of the frame of the puzzle. She surveyed herself, an attractive fair-skinned girl with an ample bosom on display in rather revealing lingerie. It was the same girl she had memories of, perhaps the girl she was inspired of? Or they were fake memories anyway, to give depth to her fake life? She shook her head, marveling at herself and the scene around her. Being able to look around, a strange concept for a puzzle to take in.

She looked up at her Owner and grinned, not particularly caring that she was kneeling in an office cubicle where anyone could walk by and she her. Being on display was normal for her, as a puzzle.

“Oh, oh my God, Cayla!” James exclaimed in a hushed tone, trying to avoid his co-workers spotting her. He grabbed her tightly in a hug. “I've been so worried, why'd you have to make the puzzle so damn hard to solve?!”

She returned the warm hug, enjoying the sensations she had been starved for while in the puzzle. But she had a confused look on her face. “Cayla? You know I'm not Cayla. I'm Puzz, your puzzle, Owner!”