Swappy Seconds - Part One

Sitting on the couch I kick up my feet, the coffee sloshing around in my mug as I'm forced to drop my phone and clutch at the warm ceramic to keep it from spilling. The warm sun stream in through the open kitchen window, the delightful late morning calling for me outside as I wriggle down into my cozy seat to start my day right.

It had been a bit of a habit recently, the morning task being something I had been doing since hearing about it on deep and long forgotten thread on the Swap Clinic forums. Grabbing my phone I pull open the app, the aging device struggling to play the various flashy animations of the Swap Clinic's application since the latest update.

Suggested swaps and featured traits slowly populate the screen, cropped images of hair or eyes popping up one by one along with either prices or what the person was looking for in exchange for the particular feature. I slowly scroll through them, my lips shifting from side to side in thought as I ponder each one though most are simply out of my price range.

Since losing my job I had been living off of savings, and those don't last forever. Despite this, I had been interested in visiting the Swap Clinic for quite some time. It had been what led me to search for 'Cheap Swap Clinic Tricks' online, the search eventually leading me to a thread from nearly a decade ago back when the Swap Clinic still used a website.

The thread had asked about deals at the Swap Clinic, whether the shop front ever ran sales or clearances and the like. While the thread had mostly responded no, the prices were set by the seller and the Swap Clinic had no say over that, there was one response that caught my eye.

"You could always check the Secret Section"

Back in the days of aging HTML websites many needed to build their own internal search engine rather than merely using some purchased software for that function. The Swap Clinic had been just like this, the software engineers who had been working on the Swap Clinic itself being forced to work overtime in an effort to back a working back end for the website in time for their services launch.

While it had worked, it was not without its faults. Only preset search terms would really show up, each item needing something like a price or trait type to be able to be seen in the search engine. While this normally didn't occur, sometimes through either a glitch or through intentional methods I person could input null values into these fields.

No trait type

No price

No duration

These traits hidden in the Secret Section mostly went unnoticed, their owners simply believing they were not attracting any interest until eventually other pulling their trait from the market forever or putting it back up with corrected information.

There were those however who used the glitch more surreptitiously, either to hide their traits or to steal those that had been placed there for nothing. Having the Swap Clinic hold onto traits for you could be a rather costly endeavor, the nicer the traits the more expensive the 'holding fee' for keeping it out of the hands of other Swappers.

However, some with the right knowledge would simply leave their traits in the Secret Section knowing they wouldn't be charged and could simply find them to take back at a later date.

At the same time there were those rare few who trawled the Secret Section, looking for misplaced traits they could keep for themselves or flip for a profit as well as stealing those supposedly hidden traits before they could be reclaimed by their original owner.

I had fallen into the second category, starting up a so far unsuccessful side-hustle of flipping traits found in the hidden section. Getting there on the app had taken far more trial and error than I had wanted, the refined search engine still using the old back end though with a far more locked down search function.

I copy paste my little brute forced search terms into each field, the app throwing up various red pop-ups over and over as I fuck with the app. Mashing the search button the app flickers and fights me over and over, the screen fluttering and shaking as it shudders with error after error.

I smirk as I watch the search button vanish beneath my thumb, the app suddenly loading a series of 'Null-Field' traits with little pictures next to each. I slowly swipe through the poorly formatted list, the broken search not really having any real rhyme or reason.

My brow furrows however as I spot an image, the extreme distance on the picture making it fairly hard to make out. Tapping at the option on screen I watch as the app freezes for a second, the trait loading on my phone as the first thing to load is the simple button reading

'Purchase - $N/A'

Section by section loads into the profile for the trait, each broken seemingly by design as garbled text rests next to each identifier. "Can't be..." I mutter as I stare at the image of...