Leila Electric
A Shard-Strike Universe Story
Written by HarmonyMotion
Edited by Au Goose
Shard-Strike Universe created by Au Goose
Special thanks to The Penguin!
Prologue
"And to you, the graduating class of 2018, I say, 'the future is yours!' Let's make it a bright one!"
A barrage of golden tassled black graduation caps flew into the air.
Daniel pushed his way through the swarm to meet Leila stepping down from the raised stage. They fell together into a tight hug.
"Congrats Leila!"
"Thanks, Danya!"
"And even bigger congrats on your internship at Gurglr! That's serious stuff! Machine learning, AI... your computer stuff is gonna put me out of a job!"
"Aww, I doubt it! I don't even know what I'm doing! I'm just going there to have free lunch!"
"Oh come on, Leila. You know you earned the position!"
"Nom nom nom!"
"Well, I know you'll do great things, even if you won't admit it."
Daniel's words were certainly prophetic, but not in the way he expected...
Four months at Gurglr and Leila wasn't enjoying her free meals so much any more. They provided breakfast, lunch, dinner, and oh-so-many snacks. But she wasn't partaking in it freely. No, it was out of necessity.
The machine learning project they had her on was huge! Only now they were short-handed, having just had their budget cut from lack of results. The real visionaries were being diverted to more lucrative endeavors and a skeleton crew of junior hires like Leila were left to pick up the pieces.
Leila felt like she did nothing but live at the office. 9:00 AM in, 11:00 PM out, three meals a day, unlimited snacking. Her previously short, slim body had steadily been packing on weight, but the increases were so gradual, her stress so high, that she barely noticed. Until one day, she looked at an old photo of herself while standing in front of a mirror.
She dropped her phone in shock.
What was supposed to be the dream job, a golden opportunity to work for a prestigious company, was wearing her down. She hardly got to spend any time with Daniel anymore. Meanwhile, he was so supportive of her. She didn't want to mention how much trouble she was having at work... lest he think less of her.
Another long night in the office. She nibbled on a stick of cheese from the company's always-stocked refrigerator. She kicked off a fresh sequence of simulations for the AI to play and experiment with. Hopefully the most recent round of bugs had been ironed out. Hopefully they wouldn't have to painstakingly go back and discard hundreds of millions of faulty knowledge nodes from their servers. Hopefully they'd have something to show for it all in the morning.
A software alarm tripped. She got the page immediately. Shit. One of the servers was down. She was supposed to be strictly software side, but after the cuts...
Leila sighed and headed toward the racks. She hated the place. Hundreds of machines, each with twenty-odd cables coming out of them, simultaneously too cold in order to keep the computers from overheating, yet too hot when standing in between them in the aisles...
And the noise! The humming was absolutely deafening! She couldn't even think in there! It was like being entombed in a hot, sweaty beehive.
She headed toward the server stack indicated on her phone display. Somewhere in that pile of scalable silicon a hard drive needed to be replaced. It was always such a pain to even locate the correct one.
But Leila wouldn't have to locate anything this evening. The very first shard strike took care of that...
Chapter 1
At first, Leila thought it was some aberrant electrical short. An arc of electricity, far larger than she'd ever seen, bolted from a server to the one opposite, crackling, smoking, sizzling. Before she even had time to process the event or panic about it, things got... weird.
Slender, half-opaque pink-white crystals burst through the ceiling, smashing into entire racks of servers, splintering upon impact. Leila screamed and instinctively ducked. Peeking out from under her arms, she saw the wreckage of shattered motherboards and burning cables. The night sky, visible through the gaps in the ceiling, glowed a strange, pastel pink.
More jagged crystals thundered around the Gurglr office, sending sparkling exotic shrapnel flying through the walls, continuing to bombard the dark office space. They ripped through desks, computers, paraphernalia,...and several people working late. Where the glassy fragments landed, they burst into flame, igniting the entire building with a strangely translucent fire. With fires breaking out on every floor and seemingly every room there was no way to escape.
Leila wanted to scream as the cataclysmic event unfolded around her. Bolts of electricity from the short-circuiting microchips pelted her skin. Her insides felt simultaneously icy and hot; an extremely uncomfortable, unfamiliar sensation... yet she felt no pain. All Leila could do was stare wide-eyed in horror and uncertainty as jagged lightning pierced her.
"What is happening?" she wailed in terror, feeling even more strange as the bolts continued to caress her, burning pin-prick holes into her clothes while leaving her skin unharmed.
Flooded with weirdly colored electricity, burning and shivering, Leila's body began to change. Eyes wide open, she watched as the room seemed to shrink before her. Within moments, she was eye level with the top of racks that she'd required a stepladder to reach! She could feel the cold blast of the thundering air conditioning rustling her lovely brunette locks.
Leila looked down from her new vantage point. She was so tall! And as luck would have it, she retained her god-given blessed proportions that she'd been so proud of. If anything, they seemed amplified! The long, slender legs making up so much of her previously short frame still accounted for a generous portion of her height, but now her calves were thrusting out from the bottom of her ragged skirt. It looked like her best feature had gotten better.
But they weren't merely long anymore; oh no, they were so much more now. Sleek. Fit. Smooth. Sexy.
Even amidst the flames, she was overcome by the need to see her legs! Twisting her hands into the hips of her skirt, she tore the smoldering garment in half with a single eager jerk, the ash-rotted fabric coming apart with a violent ripping sound. The vista that met her hungry gaze was... dreamy. Her thighs packed on dense, tight flesh, subtly rippling with feminine muscle. They were perfectly smooth and looked absolutely impenetrable, as if carved out of marble, then polished to a beautiful shine. Her calves were even longer than her upper legs, sporting sleek, elliptical muscle.
Leila had always felt self conscious about her knees, but her tan skin had tightened around them beautifully, excessive wrinkles and saggy flesh gone. In fact, there was absolutely nothing that sagged about her anymore.
She hadn't been packing much in the trunk department, but she definitely needed a butt worthy of her sexy stems now. A quick twist at the waist, and she saw that was exactly what the electric make-over had on the schedule next. Her derriere began to expand, tastefully large spheres crowning the perfect majesty of her ridiculously long legs. Leila reached down to grab her porcelain cheeks, marveling how absolutely smooth they felt, how high they rested, and how lusciously firm they were as she squeezed them.