She doesn’t die that night, or anything similarly dramatic. Her life isn’t a story, thank you very much.

She lingers for months more, and is so, so grateful for each and every day. Each morning she’s happy when she wakes. Each day of life feels like something she’s clawed out of the universe’s grasp.

Even as she continues to wither, there’s a visceral satisfaction in that. In not letting death win. In refusing to let it win. She will fight with everything she has for one more day.

Until, eventually, of course, she loses that fight.

It’s nothing dramatic.

One morning, she just doesn’t wake up.

It’s peaceful, at least.

And then, suddenly, it isn’t.

Something is holding her tight, and whispering to her that she’s safe, and that things are going to be okay.

She had a bad feeling when she went to bed the night before. Her first guess is that she died, and she was wrong when she thought there was nothing after death. She begins to be afraid, then. She doesn’t know what to expect from a strange afterlife entity in a strange fleshy room.

Then, she suddenly realizes that its much more likely that she’s in the hospital hallucinating. Those aren’t tentacles wrapped around her, she’s just strapped to a gurney.

Well, good thing she realized that before she did something embarrassing.

She drifts off to sleep as the strange entity (doctor, she tells herself) gets to work.

When she wakes up, she’s laying by the base of an extraordinarily large mushroom. Larger than most of the trees in her neighborhood, actually. Before she can fully process the fact that it’s a mushroom, she realizes she’s outside. She has no memory of getting outside.

Adrenaline rushes through her and she launches herself to her feet. She’s a dozen feet in the air before she’s entirely aware what’s going on, and nearly starts into panicked windmilling before new instincts come online and she knows just how to move herself to land on her feet. 

She falls from twelve feet in the air, and the landing doesn’t hurt her feet. For some reason, that’s the thing that shocks her out of confused pseudo-panic and into clarity.

She stops.

Stops moving.

Stops breathing.

Stops everything but thinking.

And as soon as she starts actually thinking, rather than panicking, it's immediately clear that she was wrong about that whole doctor thing.

She was sick. Very sick. She was afraid, when she went to bed last night, that she wasn’t going to see the morning. She awoke in a strange place with a strange person performing strange actions on her person

She died. Something grabbed her. Saved her. She thought she knew enough to know that there wasn’t any salvation for her, by the rules of her old universe. She's so glad she was wrong.

She's alive.

Maybe her life is a story. One of the nice ones, where everything turns out okay in the end, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Suddenly, she remembers an old idea from years ago.

She and her parents got into a silly argument, a week before she was diagnosed. A week before her life fell apart. It started out over something that surely couldn’t have been that important, really, given how she can’t even remember it anymore, and ended with her shouting at them about how they had terrible taste in names and really, couldn’t they have chosen something better?

(She has to stop herself from flinching, sometimes, when she thinks about just how embarrassing her fifteen-year-old self was. It’s not like it was her parent’s fault that her name ended up associated with a certain kind of insufferable person years after the fact. She still sometimes has to fend off mortifying memories of that silly little fight while she's trying to fall asleep)

Her mother had defused the fight by earnestly asking if she wanted to have her name changed. In the face of that obvious a reminder of how much her parents loved her, and how well they loved her, kindness always free at hand, her anger had melted away.

She can’t remember what they were arguing over, but she can remember that.

She said it was fine, her father asked if she was sure, and after some hemming and hawing they all agreed to head down to city hall and do it sometime soon. It’s not like it was urgent.

And then she finally learned what had been making her feel so tired for the past few months, and things like that rather fell by the wayside.

Somehow, she ended up deciding to get her name changed after she got better. She mentioned it to her parents, and their faces went still before they plastered smiles over their hurt and told her that sounded like a good idea, and they promised to all go out together and do just that. Once she was better.

Well, she’s better now, isn’t she?

So, Lilian it is.

But. Um. Maybe she should be paying attention to the strange new place she’s found herself in, rather than reminiscing about her family and coming to resolutions?

(Oh no, they’re going to be so sad about her death- no, focus.)

The first and most obvious thing, is, of course, that she’s in some sort of strange fungus forest.

As soon as she glances at the giant fungus she's standing next to, she finds herself understanding that it in particular isn’t a member of one of the dangerous species. Which, of course, means there are dangerous species. And sure enough, as soon as the thought occurs to her, she finds a list of dangerous fungal life she should expect to find in the area scrolling through her mind.

Well. That’s. Disconcerting.

Apparently in addition to the healing and transportation, she got new information uploaded into her head. Normally she’d be put out over the idea of having something mess with her head like that without her permission without even doing anything sexy with it. But. Um. Given the aforementioned list of dangerous things she finds herself rather grateful instead.

And concerned. What with all the danger she is clearly not in Fungus Heaven.

Is she in Fungus Hell?

And then, racing through her mind go all of the creatures she can expect to find out here. All sorts of strange magical beings and animals, most of them interested in having sex with her, only some caring about anything as banal as consent. And some of them will trap her in an endless orgasm, which, while hot, is not actually how she would like to spend her life, thank you very much. Most horrifyingly, parasites of a dozen different kinds, some of which will eat her brain-

Protection! Keep safe!

What.

She can sense something from, of all things, her clothes. A sense of fierce protectiveness accompanied by boundless joyful optimism.

She would normally be rather freaked out about that, but given the day she’s been having so far, she declines the opportunity.

So, rather than panicking, she tries to mentally project a question outward.

What are you?

Clothes! Keep safe! Make strong! Heal with zap! Make spell easy! Make happy!

For some reason this seems… familiar? Like she has a vague, half-present memory of already knowing all of this. Like of course her clothes are a living entity, of course they make her stronger, and let her heal herself with lightning, and protect her from parasites.  Of course they make her spells cheaper to cast, and restore mana when she orgasms (what). And, of course, she has to feed them by having lots and lots of orgasms (also what, but more).

She suddenly has the feeling that "make happy" is serving as something of a euphemism here.

Well, before she opens that particular can of worms, she should try to figure out what other things she half-remembers like that. Can she call them up on purpose?

Well, this seems like a fantasy universe, and her clothing and vague recollections sure just referenced spellcasting. So. Can she do magic?

In response, she gets three very separate senses in which the answer is ‘yes’.

The first and simplest sense is that her body is incredibly altered, and she has magic powers that go along with that. She’s strong, tough, agile, and actually physically enhanced in just about every way a person can be. And then all of that is boosted further by some number of powers laid over her. She’s far, far stronger, faster, and more durable than the physical for of her body her body should let her be. Oh, and she can turn intangible for brief periods of time as well. That’s. Nice.

The second is a sense of power buzzing away deep in her chest. A sense that she can call something out from that place of power, that she can generate something that feels conceptually related to lightning. Sure enough, when she tries to summon a ball of the stuff into her hand she does so. It tingles pleasantly. It’s a solid object, which very much isn’t how lightning works, but it’s very obviously lightning inspired. When she tries to expand her little ball of solid lightning out into a sword, she finds she can. Doing so is accompanied by a slight feeling of exertion, like she’s flexing a new muscle she never knew she had. The lightning tickling along her skin feels good in a way that she is going to examine in depth later, not now. Right now she has things to be doing.

The last sense in which she has magic is that she has some really broad generic spellcasting abilities. She can convert life force to mana in the first place, make magical forcefields and perform other defensive magics, do some pretty generic utility casting, create illusions and constructs, and imbue her creations with lightning. And she has a very fancy wand that makes all her spells more powerful if she does that. That’s. A lot.

She gets the sense that this structured magic is more general in some ways than her lightning powers, but not actually more dextrous. She could channel a bunch of power through her fancy wand to make a very strong lightning spear, but she’d have trouble doing anything too complicated. At least at her current level, anyway. She doesn’t think she could make use structured magic to do something like reshape a weapon while she’s fighting with it. And she certainly couldn’t use it to just grab the individual pieces of a bisected lightning construct and piece them back together again at combat speeds. Not to mention the bit where her structured magic constructs take mana to maintain.

Well, they won’t be completely useless; she can still use her wand to make extra strong lightning constructs if she ever finds she needs that, and not everything is lightning-friendly anyway. What if she wants to make a chair for someone else? And besides, she can use her structured magic for so many other things! Can’t use lightning to find the nearest rabbit, now can she? Or make forcefields. Or make cute little magic birds!

And she’s probably strong enough that a thrown rock would do more damage than any attack spell she could manage at her level of mastery, which neatly explains why she doesn’t have any magic for doing things like that. Or maybe there was only so much help her savior was willing or able to give her?

Also, she has a penis.

Well. Time to just. Resolutely ignore that, for the time being.

(did the being that altered her know that she’d always thought having a penis would be hot- back to ignoring that, please)

No, wait, she should at least take stock of what’s going on with her body before moving on.

The base layer of her clothing is a bodysuit that's tight in a way that would leave precious little of her body to the imagination, if not for the armor overtop. It even has decorative frills! She can feel something on the inside of her new clothes that doesn’t feel like normal clothing, but it’s so much more comfortable that she finds she doesn’t care.

She can’t tell exactly how big her new penis is, since it’s tucked away inside her clothes behind the armor covering her midsection. But she can tell it's hard. Now that she thinks about it, she’s pretty sure it’s been hard the entire time.

Isn’t that the kind of thing you’re supposed to go to the doctor about?

No, that’s only if it’s been longer than four hours. It’s been, like, five minutes? It’s probably just morning wood, she’s heard of that.

In the back of her mind is a vague certainty that no, actually, it’s not that. It’s that she’s just always like this now.

Well, it’s not like it’s uncomfortable or anything. Kind of the opposite really, and with it all tucked away behind her suit’s armor plating it won’t get in the way.

She should probably try talking to her clothes again? Ask it if it knows where there are in any detail, for example.

And. Um. Maybe ask for a little more detail about what exactly the suit means by “make happy”? And not just because she’s pretty sure she’ll find the answers hot!

But before she does that, how about she get rid of this lightning sword she’s made? She’s worried about the glow and the crackling attracting attention. She relaxes a mental muscle, and the sword dissolves into electricity.

She has half a heartbeat to panic when she realizes she’s just electrocuted herself before two things happen at once. First, she remembers what her suit told her about healing her with electricity.

Second, she registers that getting zapped like this feels incredibly good.

Her cock twitches under her clothing, upright and sandwiched between her suddenly deliciously tight clothes and her tummy. She moans involuntarily and has to fight the urge to derail her plans to talk to her suit again in favor of more carnal pursuits.

But no! She will persevere and resist the horny! She has things to do! Questions to ask!

And so, ask questions she does. Starting with the one that seems like it has the greatest chance to suddenly change what all of her other questions should be.

Do you know where we are?

Here! Mushroom! Many mushrooms!

That isn’t the most helpful answer.

Well, moving on from that.

And. Um. Could you tell me a bit more about what “Make Happy” means?

She’s not really expecting a detailed explanation, but hopefully she can get some clarification before-

Make Happy!

Oh no.