they were watching a youtube video about about an oil refinery fire when they got a DM from a friend of a friend asking "you're good with cmake, right?"
they hadn't talked to her much before, but this was the perfect nerdsnipe at just the right time
"i wouldn't say i'm good at it, but i can give it a shot"
she sent them a link to a repository called magical.git on someone else's gitea instance and a series of increasingly confusing screenshots of cmake errors
not able to figure it out over chat, they downloaded the code and try to build it themselves
there was no readme in the folder and the CMakeLists files seemed to be have been committed in the middle of a change between versions and weren't that good to begin with
browser tabs quickly filled their pair of mismatched monitors as time flew by and they fixed the poorly-documented code enough to get it to build
they shouted triumphantly at the monitor when cmake finally generated a valid Makefile and their heart pounded as they typed make -j8
the code compiled quickly but successfully and they finally ran the mystery program they'd spent the past couple hours trying to build: ./magical --help
a text-based interface appeared, ignoring their request for information about command line options
the sparse ncurses screen in their terminal asked a question: Transform? and offered a single button that simply said Transform.
they looked at the screen for a moment and hit enter.
the instant they did, they lost all feeling in their fingers as a wave of what looked like pixels spread up their arms and over their body, transforming their clothing and their body, starting from fingerless gloves on their hands
as they tried to get their bearings, their phone and computer lit up with message requests on every platform they use from an account named kyu.b
"good news: i got it working" they hastily messaged her, phone still buzzing
"bad news: it did something really strange and i don't have time to explain what i did"
FIN.