Warmup Story Thing For Ness and Vin!

“Applied Synergetics presents MergeStream?” Ness mumbled to himself. “Huh.”

The spam email appeared out of nowhere, and the title intrigued the raccoon. He was looking for a new streaming website to use anyway. And there was something about a Free Gold Membership Trial. Well why not then. He was just about to set up for a Multistream with Vin. He shot the mink a quick message and minutes later they were both signed in.

“Alright, just send me an invite for our MergeStream,” the raccoon typed. “Weird name for a streaming client.”

“Yeah but they couldn’t just use Multistream I bet. Picarto already has that name,” Vin messaged back. “Stream invite is sent.”

The website flickered briefly before Ness’s monitor turned off. Wow, that is an interesting new streaming feature. Turning off the computer must’ve taken lots of coding prowess, Ness thought. So far nothing to be concerned about. The monitor turned on again shortly after that. This time rather than showing a website an odd vortex of numbers and colors replaced the screen. Green and blue letters and numbers swirled hypnotically like a knockoff Matrix screen.

A bolt of electricity struck Ness and pulled backward, as if a hook was caught in his chest. The swirling code surrounded him as the raccoon seemed to swirl along with the numbers. In a flash he was pulled straight through the computer screen.

On the other side of the internet, Vin tapped his fingers on the desk. He’d been waiting for five minutes now for the website to update and still nothing. Maybe his internet was out? Or perhaps it was just a crappy new website that needed some time to get its act together. He sighed and reached to close his browser. But when he clicked the ‘X’ at the top of the screen nothing happened. An error message appeared and said “MergeStream In Progress, Do Not Exit”.

“What? Come on, don’t do that,” Vin mumbled. He clicked again and the same error message appeared. The mink frowned when the screen abruptly turned off. Looked like the website caused his computer to crash. Before he could reach down and restart the monitor flickered to life. What was with the code? And… something was approaching the screen. It looked a little like a raccoon, flying fast at the monitor.

“Wait, I know that raccoon… Ness? Is that you-” he started, before Ness flew out of the screen and hit Vin so hard the mink was knocked off his chair. They tumbled to the floor together, as a flash of bright white light filled the room. Their limbs tangled together in a mishmash of raccoon and mink. Both their faces showed a mixture of surprise and terror, but it seemed both faces were rapidly becoming one single face. The two flailing bodies merged together, surrounded by bolts of electricity. When the lights cleared there was one person laying spread eagle on the floor.

He set a shaky hand on the desk and carefully pulled himself up. It was brown and grey, a weird mix of the two shades of fur color. He looked at the hand with brown eyes behind a pair of squared off glasses. His head was filled with a torrential hurricane of thoughts seemingly coming from two different sources at once. Just what was that anyway? Who was he? A mink. No, a raccoon. Wait, what?

Shaking his head the raccoonmink hybrid looked up at the computer screen. ‘MergeStream Started! Have Fun!’ it said in bright green letters at the top of the webpage. Oh. Well that explained the weird computer magic and literal merging. But directly beneath that was an error message. ‘MergeStream Ended Before Initialization. Fatal Error. Please Contact Applied Synergetics.’ He carefully climbed up into the chair, being gentle with his mink shaped and raccoon striped tail, to close the error message. His hand didn’t seem to respond the way he was used to; apparently having two minds in one body made it hard to decide on single actions.

Once he closed the error box his browser closed entirely. They blinked in unison. “That’s not good,” he said, trying not to focus on the blush in his cheeks. He wasn’t sure which part of him that feeling came from… or if it came from both. This might take a little effort to get fixed. In the meantime they could brainstorm a name. Vess? That might work. And maybe a little more body exploration too; calling for help could wait 15 minutes or so, right?