The project had begun as such a small thing, a simple app to show prospective employers that he could code phone applications, yet early on in development his perfectionism took hold, making the project more and more advanced until what was to be a simple silly overlay on the phone’s camera input was instead something truly amazing. Or at least, so he hoped. Now, it was time to properly test it.

He turned the app on and turned his phone sideways, gazing into the screen. At first, what he saw was what the phone's camera saw. But the image quickly changed, becoming more colorful and simplified until finally it looked like his living room was part of a cartoon.

He moved the phone around, getting different views of various parts of the house. Oddly, the app seemed to be getting faster and faster at it, until it no longer seemed to take any time at all for it to convert the camera feed to a cartoon view, but he was too enraptured in this strange and novel experience to think about what was causing that or to look anywhere but the phone screen.

He finally decided to switch to “front view”. Now, he could see himself, but instead of a boring human, what he saw was a cute cartoon bat. It may have been just a cartoon view, but somehow, it felt so real. He could almost feel his wing, his muzzle, his bare paws on the floor... and that was when he noticed the muzzle on his face. Not on the phone screen, but right at the bottom of his vision.

He dropped the phone in surprise, discovering that what was holding the phone was toon bat wings, not human hands like when he'd started. Beyond those wings, he saw the hallway, which now looked just as cartoonish as in the app.

He felt his body with his new wings, from his muzzle and the ears atop his head, all the way down to his paws. Was he hallucinating? It felt incredibly real, if so. No, somehow he knew this was real.

He looked down at his phone, which was also now a cartoon, then outside. His yard had changed as well, along with a bit of the surrounding area, but everything else was so plain, so... boring!

He looked down at his phone, then picked it up again, this time to publish his new app. The rest of the world needed to be made more interesting and fun, and he didn’t want to do it all alone.