Ironmouse's Big Transformation! Chaos, Chaos, and a Little Heart-Pounding
The popular VShojo VTuber Ironmouse wakes up one morning to find her body has transformed into a boy's. The pink and purple fluffy hair and demon horns are there, but everything else is different. Panic! But she's not the only one. Zentreya becomes a boy too, and a certain pathetic slug-like manager becomes a girl. The entire VShojo office is in chaos, and the fans absolutely cannot find out.
As if that weren't enough, everyone's feelings of love get scrambled. Rivals suddenly seem attractive,
Ironmouse's Big Transformation! Chaos, Chaos, and a Little Heart-Pounding - The Devil Who Woke Up as Me
――Her throat hurt.
The moment she woke up, Ironmouse grimaced at the discomfort. A strange heaviness clung to the back of her throat, as if she'd spent the entire previous day screaming.
(...A cold? I have a stream today, though.)
Glendale, Los Angeles. The second floor of a fifteen-year-old apartment building—her 1LDK was quietly filled with morning light, same as always. Outside the window, the familiar convenience store sign. The muffled sounds of her neighbor. Nothing had changed. Just another ordinary morning.
...That's what she thought, for only a few seconds.
She sat up in bed. Her large, violet-tinted eyes slowly widened. Through her colored contacts, her vision hazily caught sight of her own hands.
"...Aren't my hands, like, huge?"
Her just-woken voice was lower than expected.
No—not just lower. Her usual high-pitched, high-energy voice sounded like it belonged to someone else entirely.
Her heart began pounding unpleasantly deep in her chest.
"What, what is this... huh?"
She practically rolled out of bed and rushed to the full-length mirror. Her feet pressed into her favorite pink rug. She pushed back her bed-mussed, fluffy pink-and-purple long hair, held her breath, and peered into the mirror.
The person reflected there was not her.
No—there were traces of her. The fluffy hair, the demon-horn head accessory, the violet eyes—those were definitely Ironmouse's. And yet, the jawline, the line of her neck, the width of her shoulders—everything was decisively different.
...It was a boy.
And looking closer, the demon horns on her head were no longer an accessory. Even when she parted her hair, the horns appeared to grow directly from her skull. What should have been her symbol now looked like nothing more than a mark of deformity, sending a chill down her spine.
"Nooooooo!?"
Her scream echoed through the quiet morning room.
She frantically pressed both hands against the mirror's surface, trying to steady her breathing. But her fingertips, her wrists, her forearms—all of it was clearly thicker-boned. A man's body.
"What the hell is happening...!?"
Her eyes fearfully traveled down her own body.
With trembling fingers, she lifted the hem of her loose pink pajamas. ...And immediately looked away. She didn't need to see it—she could physically feel that what "should have been there" was gone.
――No, to be precise, something else was there instead.
"No way..."
She lost even the energy to scream and slumped to the floor, her back to the mirror. Her body wasn't her body.
Her voice—the thing she'd been more confident in than anyone else in the world—her appearance—both had been swapped overnight.
"Why... why me...?"
Her voice trembled, and tears welled up unbidden.
Ironmouse was normally endlessly cheerful. High-energy, self-deprecating, able to make tens of thousands of people on the other side of the screen laugh. She liked that version of herself.
But she was actually lonely, and she struggled with the alone time after streams ended. There were nights, in rooms where no one could see her like now, when she couldn't hold onto her true self.
Even so, as long as she had this body, this voice, and these demon horns, she could be Ironmouse.
And yet.
"What am I supposed to do...?"
She roughly wiped away her overflowing tears and lifted her head.
At that moment, her smartphone buzzed briefly on the desk. The screen showed a notification from VShojo's shared calendar. She had a regular stream scheduled for this afternoon.
"...Ah."
Reality pulled her back.
――Work.
VShojo was a major VTuber agency based in Los Angeles. In just a few years since its founding in 2020, it had grown into one of the largest agencies in the English-speaking world. Its policy of prioritizing talent freedom had been well received. The headquarters building in Burbank was nicknamed "Vox Tower." The third floor was the management floor, and the fourth floor housed soundproof studios.
And Ironmouse was one of its flagship members. Ten thousand concurrent viewers was nothing special. Her streams were always eagerly awaited by thousands of viewers.
"I can't just take a day off. ...I'm Ironmouse, after all."
She told herself this in a trembling voice and stood up.
...At that point, she still thought this was only her own problem.
――Then began an hour straight out of a nightmare.
Entering her streaming room, Ironmouse first covered the mirrors with thick cloth. The full-length mirror, the hand mirror on her desk, the vanity mirror—every mirror in sight, she hid them all.
"I won't look. I said I won't look, so I won't..."
Next, she booted up her streaming equipment. The room dyed purple and pink by LED lights. Two desktop PCs hummed to life, and the walls were lined with shelves packed with figures. In the center of it all, she prepared to start her stream as usual.
――The problem was her voice.
"Voice changer, voice changer..."
She launched "VoxShift," the voice changer software custom-developed by VShojo. High performance with 0.02-second latency. Normally used for fine-tuning character voice creation.
She loaded her usual settings file. Tested the mic.
"Ahh, ahh, can everyone hear me?"
The voice that came back to her ears was somewhat higher-pitched, but far from her former perfect voice. A masculine core remained in the low end. More than anything, the moment she slipped into her natural voice, the outline of a man's voice leaked through immediately.
"Why, come on! Settings, settings...!"
She frantically fiddled with the pitch and formant, trying to get her voice as close to her own as possible. Sweat trickled down her temple.
――Would this be okay?
"I have to do this. If I take a break now, it'll only look more suspicious."
With that, she started the stream.
But reality was merciless.
The moment the stream began, the comment section started buzzing. And not with the usual "Classic Mouse" or "Cute as always."
"Wait, is your voice cooler now?"
"Is your voice different today?"
"Did the person inside change?"
"N-no it's not! My voice has always been cool, right!?"
She threw a smile at the other side of the screen.
But her heart felt like it was about to burst.
(Did the person inside change? Stop, stop, stop...!)
Her fingertips went cold, and her hands trembled slightly on the keyboard. Every time the comments scrolled by, it felt like countless eyes were probing her from beyond the screen.
"Your voice is low today?"
"Kinda cool www"
"Gonna start calling you Mouse-kun"
"Ahaha, what's that! I-is it really that low? Is it weird...?"
Her panic even made her speech patterns slip. But being the consummate entertainer she was, she desperately tried to play off the voice discrepancy as a "bit" and get laughs.
"Actually, this morning I chanted a spell to get a demonically sexy voice! It'll go back to normal soon... probably!"
"What is that www"
"Today's Mouse is kinda cool"
"Is the person inside okay?"
...The person inside.
That single phrase clawed at her chest again.
The cold sweat wouldn't stop. Still, she kept forcing a smile. When she sang, her high notes nearly cracked. Long tones that were normally effortless wouldn't come out right today.
She suddenly became aware of the demon horns on her head, heavy with real physical presence. Her ears rang.
(Please, someone. Help me.)
She screamed it in her heart, over and over.
――The stream ended.
The after-echo of her earphones lingered deep in her ears. She collapsed onto her desk and couldn't move for a while.
"...I'm exhausted."
All the strength drained from her body. Even reaching for the water bottle at her feet felt heavy.
She wanted to talk to someone. No—more than talking, she wanted to fix this body right now.
On the desk, her phone lit up with a notification.
"Call request from Name-san"
Her manager, known as "Name-san." The reliable manager who had been with her ever since she joined VShojo.
She hesitated.
What would they think of her voice change? No—where would she even begin explaining the situation?
"...Hello?"
The small voice that came out was still low.
――But the voice that answered from the other end made her doubt her own ears.
"Mouse!? Something terrible is happening...!"
It was a woman's voice.
And not just any woman's voice—a beautiful, soft, calm one.
"Huh? Name-san...?"
"Yes, it's me. It's me..."
...Me?
Mouse was confused. Name-san was supposed to be a thirty-three-year-old male manager who self-deprecatingly called himself a "trash-tier slug man."
"W-wait. What's with your voice...?"
"Well... I woke up this morning, and I'd become a woman..."
"WHAT!?"
Mouse's voice cracked.
"It's true. I still can't believe it myself. Mouse, what about you? You're... okay, right?"
The words of concern pierced her chest instead.
"I'm also... my voice is weird too. No, not just my voice—my body too... into a man's."
Silence.
She could sense Name-san holding their breath on the other end of the line.
"...I see. So it wasn't just you after all."
"Name-san, there are others...?"
"Yes. Zentreya's been having a rough time since this morning too. And I haven't confirmed it yet, but probably the other members as well."
Her head spun.
Zentreya too. The other members too.
"What... why would something like this..."
"I don't know. I really don't. That's why we're going to sort out the situation at HQ. Mouse, don't push yourself. The top priority is making sure no one finds out."
"Okay..."
Tears welled up.
She was happy. She wasn't alone.
This voice, this body—it wasn't an abnormality unique to her. Her friends were caught up in the same absurdity.
...What an inappropriate sense of relief.
"Please be really careful today. Especially with social media after your stream—don't read what those kinds of people are posting."
"...Okay. Thank you. You too, Name-san."
The call ended.
Silence returned to the room.
She slowly rose from her chair and stood before the cloth-covered mirror.
(I don't want to look.)
Even so, she had to know. Who she was now.
With her fingertips, she slowly pulled the cloth down.
"...It's me."
She murmured in a low voice.
Standing there was a small, delicate boy with long pink-and-purple hair tied in a half-up style. Her height of 152 centimeters hadn't changed, but the line of her shoulders, the shape of her hands—everything was different. Only her violet-tinted eyes remained as they'd always been.
...And the small demon horns on her head.
"These, at least, stayed the same."
She wore an expression somewhere between crying and laughing.
――This isn't like me. None of this is like me.
"I'll change back. I'll definitely change back."
That was her small resolution.
――Several hours later.
Ironmouse found herself casually scrolling through the comments on her stream archive and social media reactions.
"I knew I shouldn't have looked."
Her voice caught in her throat.
"Mouse, did your voice change...?"
"Did the person inside get thinner in the video too?"
"No, honestly, this is kind of cool"
Among them was a post from an account that stood out sharply.
――Mirror Man.
"[Good news] Theory: something's happening at VShojo. Ironmouse's voice is clearly different. Multiple reports coming in. This could get interesting soon."
A cold chill ran down her spine.
Mirror Man. A gossip streamer who made his living hunting for the "people behind" VTubers. Always wearing a deep hood, with thin, sharp eyes peeking out from under light-brown short hair that glinted eerily depending on the light. A man who earned views by riling up his audience and exposing VTubers' real identities.
He had a large following. He was also connected to a malicious community called the Diggers, who treated identity-hunting as a hobby.
"This guy... he caught on way too fast."
She gripped her phone tightly.
Her heart pounded like a warning bell.
This wasn't something she could handle alone.
This was going to become a massive incident involving all of VShojo.
She looked
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