I really liked this story. The main character clearly had a lot of thought put into her - I assume she's at least partially based on yourself. I also like how it gives the impression of a world with all sorts of magic that is only hinted at, leaving me wanting to find out more about this world. The fact that magic is discussed so casually suggests it's commonplace, so I assume it's not just transformation magic that these people encounter in their everyday lives.
If I had one complaint it would be the digressions about the video game Mia was programming - those bits kind of seemed like you just had an idea for a game that you wanted to tell us about, and interrupted the flow of the story a bit. "I just had to properly initialize a variable storing the current transformation" seems more like a response to a bug report than a sentence in a story.
But other than that, it was great! I should read more of your stories (I happened to run into this one because I ended up on your Twitter feed after seeing a reply you'd left on another feed I was reading).
SPOILERS talks a bit about what happens later in the story
SPOILERS talks a bit about what happens later in the story
[...I should document the comment system's spoiler warning feature at some point...]
Yes, Mia is based on myself.
In case you weren't aware, this *is* part of a larger world, with stories by various people: https://itch.io/jam/overtimecats/entries. I'm thinking my story probably takes place relatively late in the timeline, where people are more aware of Cali Co and its transformation abilities; some of the other stories have people who get transformed without really knowing beforehand that would happen.
The programming stuff... I don't know if I did a good job with it, but my intent was to have the bugs Mia was working on reflect what was going on with the magic. In particular, Mia wasn't turning into a cat because the magic thought she was already transformed; the character in the game wasn't getting transformed, because one of the variables storing her transformation state wasn't initialized, making the game think she wasn't transformed. This was a bit clearer in an earlier draft, but I cut it down a bit, partly because I didn't want to take up too much space explaining it, and partly because I didn't want to make it *too* obvious that that's what was happening to Mia. It's possible I went too far the other way and made the connection too un-obvious. (The zombie transformation thing I mention later how it ties into the plot; the premise was mainly me thinking of a game that would have the bug and feature I needed to mention later. That said... I might still make the game at some point.)
SPOILERS talks a bit about what happens later in the story