"So....everything is back to normal?"
"Yep. Dollmaker had slipped a virus into PicUp via his ex-girlfriend's account that was set to go off if he got arrested. It essentially uploaded an invisible mnemonic visual over every picture and video that got infected with it, triggering anytime someone looked at it. Once viewed, it used a digital version of Bimbette's aura to warp the world around you as well as feed into the same tricks social media uses to keep you engaged so it could reinforce its changes."
Too advanced and too clever for Brandon to do alone.
"It didn't seem to have any direction, so changes were individualized to the victim and after a certain level of infection no longer needed to use a phone as a vector. I'm assuming the turning girls into Doll thing was something extra slipped in to enslave everyone. Minerva did most of the heavy lifting to diagnose it though before I was able to actually fix what he did."
Jen nodded her head, wincing as the light headache reminded her not to do that and take it easy. Chloe said it was a side-effect of having to undo everything that had happened to them and should be gone in a few hours. "That's... great. So what you're saying is that if someone was still experiencing something not normal..." It wasn't the only side-effect that Jennifer was feeling right now, but it wasn't something she really wanted to concentrate on until the ibuprofen kicked in and she just wanted to make sure her friend hadn't missed anything.
Chloe's silence at that wasn't exactly very reassuring. "Well... the problem with altering reality on the level and scale that just happened isn't so much the fixing. Reality is more elastic than people give it credit for in both directions and you can mess with it, but it also wants to almost always return to its original form. Any serious changes someone wants to make would require constant reinforcement, to the point that even if I somehow missed someone who had been turned into a Doll, now that they're completely disconnected from the virus they'll slowly return back to their original state as they were in Realspace."
Jen's head was starting to hurt worse, the tired heroine realizing she just wanted to hear an explanation at this point as Chloe rambled on. "-and Brandon almost certainly didn't actually make the nuts and bolts of the virus, Technovile's lab probably has an AGI that took over at some point and made some adjustments since he only had a surface level understanding of what he was working with. Throw in a possible AI mucking about and it adds all sorts of-"
"Chloe."
"Err... yes?"
"We were talking about how everything should be back to normal but..."
"Oh, well sometimes when things get changed they end up becoming the new normal."
"..."
"Sorry. So when you make changes to reality it likes to snap back into place, like a rubber band. It's generally why you avoid doing it outside of a lab setting where you can monitor and adjust . The thing is when you introduce stuff to the real world sometimes... it's fine with it? That's the best explanation to the phenomenon that I've been able to come up with. Something gets edited into a different form and the underpinnings of reality seem to like it so it adjusts around it or adjusts itself to something new but similar. It's why this tech is super dangerous."
"Super dangerous and also somehow within your wheelhouse of expertise?" Jen meant it as a joke, but the silence on the other side of the line was deafening as she could almost visualize the stone-faced grimace. Chloe didn't always like to open up about her past, even to Jen but... she'd let it go until her friend was ready. "As for liking it... I have to say I am very much liking it."
"Wait, what? Hold on, if I can get you into the lab we can give you a once over and fix anything that I missed. I'm so sorry Jen I thought-"
"Fix? Oh hell no. My new costume is miles more my style than my old one."
"Just the costume? I was worried..."
Jen chuckled at that, one hand testing and weighing what Chloe was probably worried about but... she'll find out later along with everyone else after they've all had some rest to recover from today and maybe she'd convince her friend to leave them alone.
"Chloe, you're a perfectionist. I don't know how it works but I know if you say everything is back to normal, then it is, and everyone is safe and probably happy with anything that's new normal alright? Hell you even scrubbed the media of everything that had happened."
"Well, I'd have to really push to deal with real memories but once you undo the editing parts of reality it removes the super corrupted stuff like all the PicUp pictures and-"
"Chloe. You're my friend and I love you, but shut up and take the win. I already sent out a notification that unless some city wide bullshit is happening, everyone is to take the day off and recover, and that means you too alright? I'll talk to you tomorrow. We'll figure out hidden labs and rogue AI another time... plus we need to go shopping at some point."