Back in the real world—the one where Alyssa lived—Tara was watching Kat and Alyssa's video, the video they had originally planned to post on the Internet, where they demonstrated their (by this world's standards) unique skill. As she watched, she was having trouble containing her excitement. She wanted to just skip to the part where they showed how they did it, because she couldn't wait to try it herself. After all it had to be the most amazing thing ever. But she resisted the temptation, knowing the video wasn't terribly long, certainly not one bit boring, and she'd be doing it herself (or at least trying) soon enough, and so she kept watching, her eyes glued to the screen.

"Again, you've never seen anything at all like this before, so you probably have no idea what I'm talking about," said Alyssa in the video.

Tara laughed to herself. She certainly hadn't, until today that is. She certainly wouldn't have any idea what she was talking about if she hadn't seen it herself. But she knew what to expect as she kept watching, wanting to see it again.

"Oh and I swear we aren't using any kind of special effects or anything, this is all unedited. Not that you'll believe me, but..."

"Oh, I think I will," Tara said to herself.

"Well, just keep trying to do it yourself until you get it, we'll explain how. Seriously, keep trying it, you'll be glad you did. I got it in only a couple days, and I wasn't even trying that hard."

A couple days? Tara had been afraid she wouldn't be able to learn it instantly, but at least a couple days was nothing compared to how long some skills take to learn. And if Alyssa wasn't trying that hard, she clearly wasn't as excited as Tara was. She'd probably learn it much faster.

"Here I go!" said Kat in the video, as if it was nothing for her—which, indeed, it was. But what followed was far from nothing, as Kat's entire body was sucked into a laptop, through nothing more than a simple touch and her own will. And the way it changed colors as if to match her style—it really was clear that the laptop now was Kat, and didn't just contain her. Tara wondered what things would look like if she was inhabiting them—she figured it would probably just match however she was feeling at the moment, the same way she chose the style of clothing she wore. For some reason she loved when her outfit matched the way she felt; in fact, she'd thought before of how great it would be if it could just change by itself to fit her mood.

Tara continued watching.

"Now she's become the laptop. The laptop is her body now, but she still has her human mind and everything. But since she's a laptop, she can also use all its processing power and memory, and all the other stuff it has. And that goes both ways: since this laptop has a human mind and personality controlling it now, it isn't just a dumb machine anymore."

Huh...that's really cool, Tara thought to herself.

"Okay, look through the thousands of disorganized photos I have and find the one of me holding a cute little puppy in front of the fountain at the park...actually I took a few; find the one where the puppy is looking at me."

I wonder where this is going, she thought. Alyssa said Kat's human mind was combined with the laptop's processor, so could she look at each picture herself as fast as the computer could load them?

"Found it!"

Yes, she could, she quickly found out.

"Now change it so I'm sitting down on the edge of the fountain, and the puppy is sitting on top of my head. Oh, and make it night time."

That'll take forever, thought Tara.

But she was in disbelief—though, as far as unbelievable things went, that was nothing—as the photo changed precisely to fit that description. Did they already have that modified version prepared?

Then she realized how it worked. If Kat was the computer, she could save her thoughts directly to the hard drive, and display them right on the screen. Tara had always loved making art, though she was never a fan of the long, indirect process required to turn her thoughts into images. But this was about as easy as it could get. She was ecstatic.

"Really, this'll change how you do everything. I seriously can't imagine how people in your world live without it. It's so useful."

I'm sure!

"Oh, and it's not just electronics. You can imprint on pretty much anything you want. How about telling them about some of the things you've been?"

As Tara continued watching, her excitement only grew. She couldn't wait to try existing as different things, just to feel what it was like and what she could do.

"Oh, Kat, tell them about when you became the air. Now that was cool."

No way, really? Yes, really, Tara realized, as she watched Kat's body evaporate into nothing. It was as if she had vanished, except Tara knew she was air, and air was invisible. She was even more amazed when she saw that Kat could become visible, and saw what she could do in her vaporous state. According to the video it took her a lot of practice before she could do that, but would she be able to do it herself? She hoped so.

Tara kept watching in amazement as Kat and Alyssa continued their demonstration. She really wanted to learn this imprinting thing; it seemed like the coolest thing ever and it was so strange that almost nobody had even heard of it. Well, other than those myths she read about on the Internet that, for everyone else, there was no reason to believe were true. As the stories went, there were people in some ancient tribes who were known to be able to do incredible things that no one would believe were possible if they didn't see it themselves. One part in particular seemed very relevant: with the proper knowledge, one could apparently "enter and possess any object they desire, inhabiting it as their body and feeling it in their soul." This would grant the practitioner total control and awareness over the object in question.

The technique was most often practiced by religious leaders, who treated it as a tool to facilitate a deeper understanding of the world around them, rather than using it for any practical purpose. But while a few of the stories obviously survived, any information about how they actually did it was lost to the ages. For some reason, this knowledge was never written down, always kept a closely-guarded secret among those who were lucky enough to have it, a secret which unfortunately never got out. She had a strong feeling there were still people guarding the secret for whatever reason, considering it was still something anyone could apparently learn to do and Alyssa couldn't have been the first in modern times. Either way, the secrecy probably wouldn't last much longer, thankfully.

"So I'm sure the question on your mind is, how do I do this myself?" the video said.

Yep, thought Tara.

"Well, more likely 'how are they making those amazing special effects?'"

Nope.

As soon as they finished describing how it was done, Tara paused the video, wanting to try herself right away. She decided to relax on the couch and try imprinting on it, as the video suggested. She didn't think she'd be able to relax considering how excited she was at the moment, but thankfully, she didn't have any problem. It was the first step of the very thing she was excited about, after all. She couldn't let her excitement get in the way of that.

Tara focused her attention inward, concentrating on everything that made up the essence of her self. As the video instructed, she tried to feel it moving down into the couch. She couldn't feel anything at first, and while she eventually did, it still felt like she was just imagining it.

But she wasn't going to give up. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to do this herself, to know what it's like and know that she'll eventually be able to do it any time she wants, with anything she wants. She focused on the feeling of her essence moving into the couch for a good five minutes—she was pretty sure she got that part down—when eventually, Tara felt an unfamiliar sensation. It felt like the surface of the couch was starting to give way, as if it was gradually turning into the surface of a liquid. At this point, she was so focused on the feeling of inner movement that it didn't even occur to her what was obviously happening. It just felt like a strange sensation, one she should best ignore, lest it distract her from her goal.

But she soon couldn't ignore it. While her head wasn't entirely under yet, it felt like her entire body was being submerged inside of something that, to her knowledge, wasn't even a liquid, as much as it felt like one. Though as more of her body became submerged, it didn't feel like that part of her body was surrounded by liquid. Instead, it felt like the part didn't even exist at all; rather she felt the couch there, as if the couch was her body.

As soon as this thought occurred to her, she gasped, realizing what it undoubtedly meant. Tara tried to look at her legs to see if they looked as they felt. And sure enough they did—that is, she couldn't see her legs at all, as her entire body, and by now more than half of her head, was submerged in the couch as if it the couch was made of liquid. It was even rippling like a liquid, and at this point, most of the couch had turned a deep blue color, with sparkles and a pattern of light blue stars across it, just like the dress she had been wearing.

Then, everything went dark as her entire face was submerged. It looked like she had her eyes closed, but she couldn't open them because she couldn't even feel her face. Up until this point she had instinctively been holding her breath as one would when going underwater, but now she didn't feel the need to breathe, or even the possibility of trying to. The feeling of that, along with her entire body, was lost, and all of her body she could feel was the shape of the couch. She wasn't even sure she could call herself human at the moment. She was a couch; she just happened to have a human mind.

Oh my god I did it!!!! she thought. Remembering how Kat and Alyssa were able to make their face appear on the objects they were inhabiting, she imagined what her face felt like, and then imagined having that feeling on the back of one of her cushions. Suddenly she could see, and feel her face again.

"This is...amazing!!!" she said. "I actually did it!" She wished she had thought to turn on a camera before so she could see herself, because she didn't see how she could grab one at this point even if it was within her reach. Couches didn't have arms...well, they did, but those arms were something else entirely that just happened to have the same name. Just for fun, she tried reaching one of her human arms out—like what she did with her face, she imagined the sensation of having an arm, then moved that sensation onto her current body—and to her surprise, her arm actually appeared, only it was made of the same fabric as the couch and had the same (altered) appearance. But it wasn't like she could actually reach her phone or a camera from there...or could she? She tried to reach farther, and actually managed to reach quite some distance, across the entire room. Her arm was quite flexible, she noticed; she could stretch it all the way to the other side of the house and bend it anywhere she pleased, forming all kinds of loops and curves. It felt weird, but it was fun. Except without eyes on her hand, something that was too difficult to imagine for her to even try at the moment, she wouldn't be able to find what she was looking for other than by feeling around and miraculously finding it.

Tara immediately retracted the arm to a more reasonable length as she remembered something. She had a smart TV with a camera on it, and she could see the remote on the table right in front of her. That camera was at the perfect angle for her to see herself. She grabbed the remote and pressed the power button. Pressing buttons took a lot of effort with fingers that were the material of couch cushions, but she was able to navigate to the menu and open the camera app. The camera was designed mainly for video calls, as it's not usually practical to take pictures with a TV, but it was still possible for those occasions where it would actually come in handy—like right now, not that the manufacturers could possibly have anticipated this as a situation where it would be useful.

Tara couldn't help but smile as she looked at the view on the TV screen. There was no doubt about it; she had definitely done it—she could clearly see the couch, with her face and everything, and it had a much more beautiful pattern than the boring beige it normally was. She pushed the button to take a picture so she could send it to Kat and Alyssa. This was, however, the first time she had ever seriously used the camera feature, so she had no idea how she'd actually get the picture onto her computer. She knew you could plug a flash drive into the TV to display pictures and videos from it, so perhaps that was how you got pictures off the TV as well. But she'd never seen the option to do so.

Except, Tara realized, why did she need to know how to tell the TV to do it? After all, if she was the TV, she could just do it herself. And now that she knew what imprinting felt like, it was clear to her that she could call on that feeling to do it again, super easy, whenever she wanted, a realization that only made her more excited. But as she thought about leaving the couch and entering the TV, her excitement quickly turned to panic. She didn't know how to exit the couch! They hadn't mentioned that in their video, at least not the part she had watched. Surely she wouldn't be stuck there forever...right?

If Tara was calm and thinking normally, she probably would have figured it out on her own right then. But she was too much in a panic to think clearly. All she could think to do was email Kat or Alyssa—she wished she had gotten their phone number so she wouldn't have to wait for a reply—and ask them what to do. But this brought her right back to where she was before—while the TV had an email app, she didn't know the information she needed to put in to set it up, and she couldn't send the email with her phone because it was in the other room where she couldn't see. Stretchable and flexible as the arm she formed was, without eyes there she couldn't see where she was reaching.

But she made her eyes appear on the couch before—would it really be that hard to make them appear on the part that happened to be her hand? She figured it was worth a try. Making her face vanish from the couch, she remembered what it felt like to make it appear, but did so on her hand instead—and just like that, she could see from a different angle.

It definitely felt weird having her face on her hand. The part of her body she felt herself looking from felt like her hand, but at the same time it felt like her face. And being at the end of an appendage that flexible and controllable was fun; it felt like she was flying around the room. Wheeeeeee!!! she thought, forgetting her panic momentarily, as she quickly waved her hand around, "flying" all over the place. If anyone was watching, it would have been somewhat embarrassing. Not that that would likely be the first thing on anyone's mind if they witnessed the situation.

Finding her phone, she quickly grabbed it and brought it back to her, then moved her face back to the couch cushion. She pushed the button to turn it on...only to find she couldn't operate the touch screen with her hand made of fabric. She thought about grabbing the landline phone, which had physical buttons, and calling directory assistance for Alyssa's number, or even going through the phone book, though she might have thrown that out as soon as she got it. But then she got the idea to retract her fabric arm back into the couch, and reach out with her normal human arm. Without thinking, she was able to do this easily...and from there, she had absolutely no problem extending that process to the rest of her body. She was free.

"Whew!" she said to herself. She was glad that was over with. Imprinting was fun, but not if she was stuck that way! She had to make sure her new friends didn't forget to mention exiting to anyone else; that was scary and she'd rather no one else have to worry they'd be stuck as an inanimate object forever—or worse, actually be stuck as one forever, if they didn't end up figuring it out like she did. She thought of what might have happened if that had happened to her. Would she eventually starve to death? Could she even starve to death as a couch? Her human body was...well, she had no idea where it went when she imprinted, and couches didn't eat. Of course, couches couldn't see, talk, or think either, nor could they grow limbs.

Then she thought of another scary possibility. The actual process of imprinting seemed to need nothing more than a certain state of mind in order to begin. What if someone who had never heard of imprinting somehow did it by accident, and suddenly found themselves existing as some random object instead of a human? They'd have a hard time figuring out how to free themselves if they didn't even know what happened! That probably wasn't too likely, considering otherwise it probably would have happened in a place where it would draw attention at some point, but there could always be people trying to suppress it, so who knows.

But what was she doing thinking about hypothetical scenarios like this? She had just discovered an incredible ability she never knew she had, with which she could do so much, and she was itching to see what else she could do! To start, she figured she might as well do the next thing she planned on doing—copying the picture to the flash drive, the special way. As far as the surely-limitless possibilities of imprinting went, that had to be among the most mundane, but hey, it beat trying to figure it out through trial and error or looking it up in the manual. There was already a flash drive plugged into the TV, as she had watched a movie from it recently (illegally downloaded—don't tell anyone!), so all she had to do was touch the TV, focus on entering and becoming it just like she did with the couch...and just like that, she was inside the TV! Or more accurately, she was the TV. "Wow, that was easy," she said. "...hey, cool!" she added when she realized her voice was coming from the speakers. She could see, too, she noticed—except she didn't have depth perception, and she couldn't move her eyes to look in a different direction. It looked to her like she was seeing her couch (now back to its normal color) through a digital camera, and for a good reason, because she was.

Tara noticed a vivid image in her mind of a cartoon, which she had previously seen on the TV before imprinting on it. She felt like the image was entering her mind from an external source, and she knew she was displaying it on her screen as it came in, just like anyone would feel something they're doing with a part of their body. While she could display anything else she wanted, displaying the cartoon was what she instinctually did without thinking, as she was literally programmed to do that.

Hmm, I wonder, she thought. With minimal effort, she suddenly found herself no longer inhabiting the TV itself, but rather in the body of the main character, a cute pink-haired girl in what looked like a white, helmetless space suit. "No way!" she said, duplicating the character's voice perfectly. Her body felt weird; the proportions weren't at all what she was used to. Which wasn't a surprise, cartoons were rarely realistic when it came to human proportions.

Tara looked at the world around her. She was in a spaceship, with a silver and pink interior. Clearly this show took place in the distant future. Everything around her, even her own body, didn't look like the real world at all; she was obviously in a cartoon, something she never imagined she'd ever see in person. Looking down, Tara noticed her reflection in the metallic floor. "Whoa, cool!" she said, as she noticed she looked like a mix between the character she was inhabiting, and a cartoon version of herself.

Just then the room filled with red light, as an alarm blared. Tara immediately put her hands over her ears. "AHHH, WHAT DO I DO???" she shouted over the alarm, hoping someone else was there who knew what to do, though she didn't see any place where anyone could possibly be. She was surprised that she didn't know; she wasn't familiar with this show but she figured the main character would know how her own ship worked. Was this not actually her ship?

Suddenly, Tara felt the room shake, and she saw lasers through the window. Was she under attack? Instinctively she knew she was in no real danger, that if she died as a cartoon character she wouldn't actually die. But she was still scared, in the same way one would feel if they were engrossed in a scary movie. Tara ran to the bridge of the ship, but was perplexed by the complicated controls. How was she supposed to fire back or even move? Why didn't she know what this character, obviously the ship's pilot, was clearly supposed to know? She was the character, right? But she didn't even know her own name! Well, she knew her name was Tara, but she didn't know the name of who she currently was.

Tara considered leaving the cartoon universe right then and there, but she thought she'd try to figure out how to destroy the aliens just for fun. She looked at a pink display which appeared to control the ship's targeting. There were three skull and crossbones icons, clearly indicating enemies. She touched one of them, and...nothing happened. Guess it wasn't a touch screen. She thought that might have been the case; it wasn't easy to tell given the low-detail appearance everything had. There were arrow buttons next to the display, so she tried using those to select a target, but it just switched to displaying other things, including what looked like a map of an area of space, a list of names of people to call (and judging by the names, several aliens as well), and a readout of damaged systems, which wasn't as bad as she had thought it would be. Either the ship was extremely durable, or just that going by the rules of cartoons, the protagonist was always supposed to win.

"Wait a sec!" she said, excitedly. "I know what I can do!" Tara placed her hand on the control panel and imprinted on the ship. Imprinting felt so much easier for her in the cartoon world, probably because she was already technically imprinted on the TV, as far as she could tell. The ship was just another thing "inside" the TV, she figured.

Being a spaceship felt amazing. She had an incredible feeling of freedom of movement, and she felt like she could go incredibly fast. She could see through cameras all around her, so it felt like she was looking in every direction at once. When she saw the alien spaceships firing at her, it took nothing more than a thought to instantly lock on to all three at once, and fire a barrage of lasers. She had such perfect control over the ship that she could avoid every shot from the enemies, who were done for in no time.

Proud of herself, she returned to her cartoon-human form, rising out of the floor of the spaceship. Just then she heard a phone ringing sound. She ran to the control panel, but like before, couldn't figure out how to answer the call. She briefly considered imprinting again, but then she got another idea. She was a cartoon character, wasn't she? Might as well have some fun with the relaxed physics.

Tara reached into her pocket, looking for the ship's manual. She immediately found it and pulled it out of her pocket, holding it above her head in triumph. The book was as big as her oversized cartoon head, way too big to have fit in her pocket if this were the real world. It was incredibly thick as well, but by rapidly flipping through the pages with nothing more than the intention of stopping on the one she needed, she easily found the page that, in comically-large text, detailed how to answer a call. "Press the flashing green button on the communications panel." Throwing the book behind her, never actually hearing it land, she looked at the control panel. She didn't know what part of it was the communications panel, but she only saw one flashing green button, so she pushed it. "Hello?" she said, as a video feed of an alien appeared on the screen.

"We're sorry for attacking you! We just...we misfired, yeah that's it! Heh..."

"Reeeeeally?" Tara said sarcastically.

"Yes! Now if we pay for the damage we caused, will you show us how your ship works? We've never seen a ship do that before!"

"Hmm, I think I'll let the real me try and explain," she said with a grin, and just like that, she was the TV again, sitting on the TV stand.

"That was so much fun!" Tara said to no one through the speakers. "I can't believe it! I've got to do that again sometime!"

Now that her body was the TV again, Tara couldn't help but notice that she had an incredibly vivid photographic memory of the events that had just unfolded, and not only that, but for some reason it was in third-person. Her visual memory of the events looked just like what one would see if they had been watching it on TV. It didn't take long for Tara to realize that this memory of hers was actually a video temporarily saved in the TV's built-in DVR, ready to replay in case someone were to rewind it. Or to save as a recording, which Tara made sure to do right away. She'd have to send that to Kat and Alyssa. About to leave the TV and return to being human again, she suddenly remembered why she imprinted on the TV in the first place. She copied the picture to the flash drive as she planned, and while she was at it she copied the recording she just saved as well.

There was one more thing she wanted to try before she returned to her normal human form, not that she would likely stay in that form for long. Tara moved her essence out of the TV, but through the USB port. Now she was the flash drive. If someone else had been watching, they would have seen the TV change color from deep blue to its normal black, and at the same time the flash drive change from its normal red to the same deep blue. Someone watching extra carefully would have also seen the logo change—not only did its color change from white to a sparkly cyan, but the text slightly changed as well, going from the potentially-misleading brand name "Terabyte®" to the more meaningful (at the moment at least) "Tarabyte✨".

The first thing Tara noticed was the weird sensation of the position she was in. Most of her body was hanging several dozen times her height above the floor, and she was supported only by a small extremity, secured to the TV by nothing more than internal friction. If she were in her human body this would have been incredibly scary, but hard to believe as it still was for her, her body was a USB flash drive of all things at the moment. Since she knew her permanent body was safe somewhere—she still didn't know where, but she knew it was safe—the sensation of being suspended over what looked to her like a massive abyss was more an exciting thrill than actual fear. This thrill was of course diminished by her lighter weight, however, a characteristic which completely eliminated the possibility of falling out.

The next thing she noticed was that, to her surprise, she didn't have the vivid memory she thought she would of the picture and the video she saved, nor of any of the other files she remembered being on the drive, like she did when she was the TV. Had she done something wrong and erased or fried the drive? No, she realized; she definitely had data on her. But the most concrete idea she could get of the data was an incredibly-lengthy sequence of "ons" and "offs"—1's and 0's—hundreds of millions of them that, incredibly, she could remember perfectly, though she had no idea what they meant, beyond her understanding that they could somehow be turned into the files she already knew were stored on the drive. Not wanting to accidentally change any of the data, which would surely break something, Tara returned to her human form right then, her body re-forming on the floor as it appeared from a tiny, nonexistent hole in the device, which she immediately pulled out of the TV and brought to her computer.

Upon sitting down at her computer, Tara noticed that Kat and Alyssa's video was still paused where she had left it, almost at the end but not quite. In her excitement over successfully performing the technique shown in the video, she had forgotten she didn't watch the whole thing. After plugging in the flash drive, the one that was her not one minute ago, and making sure the files were there, she clicked Play and watched the rest of the video.

"So yeah, that's about all we really have to say," said Kat in the video. "Can you think of anything else, Alyssa?"

"Let me think...oh! Show them the other things you can do!"

Other things? Tara was intrigued.

"Oh yeah, like changing my body and my clothes, right?"

That sounded interesting.

Tara watched their demonstration, in awe once again at what Kat was able to do. Certainly imprinting was the best of what she'd seen, at least as far as the many fun and useful things that could be done with it, but changing her outfit however she wanted, creating it through nothing more than concentration was something she definitely wished she could do. She'd have to ask Kat how exactly she does it. She hoped Alyssa figured it out since the video was made as well, both for Alyssa's sake and because it would be promising for her. And what did Kat mean when she mentioned changing her body? She hadn't seen anything like that in the video, besides the imprinting stuff anyway. That was another thing she'd have to ask.

Maybe she could meet them somewhere, she thought. Then she and Alyssa could practice together!

Tara opened her email program and began typing an email to Alyssa to that effect, deciding against attaching the files she got from the TV in favor of showing them when they met. After finishing and re-reading her message, she clicked Send, eagerly awaiting her response.