Chapter 85 — Y4: Inviting Trouble

Okay… Mhmmm… mhmmmmmm…

… … …ACK!

Since when were you here?!

I know this is your house!

Ugh, look, I was trying one of those -- self-hypnosis recording things.

What?  Don’t give me that look!

I’ve been away from home for months now!  On this side, anyway!  I haven’t been brainwashed once in all that time!

…Oh don’t give me that.  You know that past brainwashing resurging because of my brain slug is different, and don’t try to claim otherwise.

Hrmph.

…It’s not like your interruption matters much.  None of these stupid things seem to work on me.

Ugh -- look!  It’s just -- it’s just words and sounds!  It doesn’t do anything!  Not to me at least.  There’s no magic in there.

…No, I mean literal magic.  Like.  Wands and stuff.

Yes I want somebody with literal magic to brainwash me for fun!  Have I not been clear already?!

…Huh?

… … …

-- I, uh, yeah!  Yeah!  Of course if you want to learn how to -- if you want to get MISSY magic for – that --

…Ehehehehe.  Hehehehe.  Yes.  Yes!  Hehehehehehehe --

No!  Shut up!

We're doing storytime, and then we're doing magic sex 101 afterwards the rest of today, no talking, I need this, storytime now!

So, I mentioned that I didn’t get the blessing that I should have last time, and how that immediately set off alarm bells in my head.

I'd had enough of having the divine mucking in my life, and, frankly, I didn’t really want to respond to Modesty’s invitation at all.  I figured if it was important enough, she’d appear herself.  Maybe send another letter.  Something.  And if she didn't, then whatever, whatever she wanted clearly wasn't important.

Instead, she blocked me from obtaining a blessing I knew I had fulfilled the requirements of.

I didn’t go meet her that day.  Shimizu was still picking herself up, after all, and I wanted a day or two to process my thoughts.  What should I say?  What should I do?  How should I do it?

In the end, I just wanted to know one thing.

I wanted to know how much I could trust her to be honest and forthright with me.

So I figured I’d just -- not mention the missing blessing.  Not mention the blessing I should have gotten, but didn’t.  I’d see if she’d bring it up on her own.  If she didn’t, or if she tried to sneak around the facts, then I’d know that she was, at a minimum, willing to lie to manipulate me for her own ends.

I was easy to underestimate, and I’d had some practice in schooling my facial features when it came to talking with the gods.  So I figured I’d just go and see what happened, learn what I could.

I needed a blessing from her if I wanted to be minted as a goddess.  I needed one from every goddess, and not a single one could be skipped.  So I readied myself and, after spending a few days as Shimizu’s personal cumdump to cheer her up, off I went to the religious district.

Modesty’s church was -- fine?

Rather, uh.  Modest, I suppose.  With some very graphic murals if one knew where to look.  It was a simple matter of showing a priest my invitation, and then I was let into a room with a bookshelf, several paintings, and some stupidly comfy chairs.

I can not begin to tell you how much I want those chairs for myself.

I asked the priests when this was over, and they just grinned!  They didn’t even tell me if it was only for priests or what!

I still want to know their supplier, those chairs are like falling asleep on a cloud of feathers while floating in a haze of comforting fog.  They’re so nice!

-- eh?

Oh, right.

So!  I was sitting in one of the comfiest chairs in two realities, and waited for a bit.  Not for long, just a bit.

Sending messages to the gods is -- easy and difficult, at the same time.  It’s confirmed that every god can hear every intentional prayer sent their way, whether it’s verbalized or not, but… well, there’s a lot of people.  And thus, there’s a lot of prayers.  Prayers that would be more interesting or unique to them would naturally catch their attention, but something like ‘I have a message for you’ wouldn’t really be… ‘audible’, I suppose… over all of the other ones.

So the gods create artificial amplifiers for themselves.  Priests, priestesses and the like all have a ‘louder’ base ‘volume’ for their prayers.  Any individual or group of individuals can be targeted for that, actually, but that’s besides the point.

The point is that this is one of many ways that gods work around not being able to manually observe everything everywhere all the time constantly.  Attention span is still a finite resource, for them.

…And that's why I had to wait like ten minutes for Modesty to show up.  In hindsight, that was her spending ten minutes dropping whatever it was she'd been doing to rush to come meet me after I'd ignored her invitation for a solid month.  But at the time, it felt like she had me cooling my heels.

The Alchemical Corruption series really nailed Modesty.  She's one of the goddesses the various protagonists interact with most across the series, and she's even the narrator for a couple of the games.

She was almost exactly like how I'd expected.  A body that had MISSY-grade sexy curves without being exaggerated, tight black minidress, fishnet stockings, and heels taller than mine.  Long blond hair tied up in buns.

The, uh, the only thing that was different from what I expected was how instead of her usual serene calm, she was wearing a polite smile stretched thin over her being livid.

Livid at me.

"Hello, Lady Elizabeth."  She said after she closed the door.  "It's a pleasure.  If you'd be so kind, I'd like to start by clearing up some misunderstandings.  May I ask why you've waited this long to come speak with me?"

I, being frustrated at her and enjoying her being angry more than I'm entirely proud of, replied with -- I honestly can't remember exactly, but something about 'oh you didn't show up in person, so I figured it wasn't urgent.'

I do remember the way she twitched and stared at me though.  That kind of, um, retail worker dealing with a crazy jerk customer, 'no, bad me, killing people is wrong', talking-yourself-down sort of smiling stare.

Then Modesty clapped her hands together, smiled wider, and said,  "Then allow me to apologize for the miscommunication.  As a matter of fact, with Dignity having sent your sister over from Radianta, I believe that it is now extremely important for us to talk and share notes.  For instance, I need to know how much of your Alchemical Corruption Twelve golden path plan you're still committed to following, and how much you're changing or abandoning."

I panicked.

I panicked really hard.

…The start of the talk went that kind of badly for a while longer, before we both started to calm down.  The anger drained out of Modesty and she just took a seat looking exhausted.  I apologized for snubbing her, and she accepted my apology and said sorry too, for bull rushing me like that.

Then we just chatted for a little while about each other's clothes and makeup.

…To be honest, I still get a nice little buzz of pride when I think about Modesty's compliments.

After that, we were both feeling better, and it was time to talk about divine conspiracy things.

Most of the conversation was Modesty explaining things to me, which was a new sensation, because that was usually what I did in these kinds of talks.  It was a ton of little details and confirming things I'd already suspected, so I'm going to gloss over most of it and focus on the stuff that was either the newest or the most immediately important.

That conversation was the first direct, explicit confirmation that I was deliberately sent here to MISSY as part of a plan.

A plan to not only save the world from the Evil God of Chastity and Virtue, but also, hopefully, to finally overthrow the chief god once and for all.

Out of everyone here in Radianta, Dignity chose and sent me.

Goddesses, it still gives me shivers to think about it.  I'm not an egotistical person, but it's such a rush, you know?

…I mean -- okay yeah I'm really vain about my fashion and sexiness, of course I am, and -- yes skill at sex is being vain about sexiness too, that's -- I mean –

Sh-shut up!  I'm talking about how I was the cool awesome heroine chosen to save the world!

Dignity had secretly contacted Modesty centuries ago, after taking notice of how horrible MISSY was and, well, getting really angry about it.  Modesty and Dignity have been working together ever since.

The Alchemical Corruption game series?  The information for it was provided to Dignity by Modesty, and Dignity made the prototypes for the game series as models for analyzing things and making predictions to help Modesty with nudging and steering the world toward being better.

Modesty knew the full details of my Alchemical Corruption Twelve golden path plan from the beginning.  She'd been the one who'd convinced Bernette to intervene at Kaiser's lake and give me a custom blessing, to help me skip over an especially tedious and time-consuming part of the plan.  And it was actually why she'd declined to give me her rape blessing I should've gotten from Shimizu, because she wasn't sure if I'd been intentionally trying for it then or not; she'd prepared a special blessing for me for my golden path plan rape-breeding double-dip.  One she'd loaded up with all kinds of undocumented features with Dignity's help, that she was going to use the breeding blessing being applied during the same time slot to conceal the unusual nature of.

…There was a lot, what order to put it in…

…Screw it.

There's a ton here, so I'm just going to rapidfire stuff as it pops into my head.

That 28th goddess cult in the Kingdom, and my error blessing?  Modesty was absolutely convinced that they weren't from the same goddess.  She seemed to almost flinch when I described the error blessing, before getting dead serious.  She even said that there had been a lot of cults like that popping up across the world lately, but she insisted that the error blessing was unrelated.  She refused to explain anything about it, and warned me to keep it a secret from anyone I didn't completely trust.

'The best way to keep a secret is to not know it in the first place' was something she told me.

And she believed it, too.  When I brought up the third shard from the third landmass Atlantean bunker, she was interested, but beyond confirming that I knew where it was and that it was safe?  She said that she wasn't sure it was important for her to know, and asked me if I thought it would help us in any way to tell her.

I could think of a few reasons to tell her… but they felt less like reasons that would help her, and more like excuses.  I’d be lying if I said keeping it to myself wasn’t part of my reasoning; this was, after all, my first time meeting her… but even with the benefit of hindsight, I can’t see any critical reason to have shared it with her.

So I said no, Modesty accepted that, and Sumiko being our dairy cow demigoddess stayed my little secret.

When I brought up Argenta and asked if she could be an ally, Modesty got this… odd look.  A mixture of emotional exhaustion, general frustration, and personal distaste.  There were a lot of strong emotions there.

Modesty said that Argenta, as the main person keeping MISSY stable as a reality, was by far the most skilled goddess at manipulating her shard.  So if Modesty let slip that she knew half as much as she did?  Argenta would realize that Modesty is getting help from outside MISSY, from another reality.

And Dignity had insisted on Modesty never telling anyone about Radianta and the help she was getting, for fear of word leaking back to the chief god.  There had already been a big incident with a goddess betraying the rest of them to him, back when there were only five of them...  It happened ages ago -- I’ll share more of the details when they’re relevant.

That was also why Dignity had declined to send any shards over from Radianta, hadn't just stuffed the ballot box to force the numbers on the vote.  Leaving aside how the goddesses were only just now getting close to maybe matching the chief god's shard count?  Dignity didn't want to risk the chief god acquiring more shards than he already had, and especially didn't want to take any chances on the chief god learning about the interference and somehow attacking Radianta.

Modesty also told me… oh, oh yeah!  Yeah, this was the most important part of the conversation.

She warned me about how predictions in the Kingdom were falling apart.  And that it was an intentional move, or at least, it would have been if not for Roberta and Argenta preempting her.

…I really should have realized this earlier, but because the Evil God of Chastity and Purity had divine shards, he could run shard predictions.  With predictions absolutely ruined for the entire Kingdom, it should make fighting him a lot easier in the end.

But it also meant that the Kingdom was going to become a goddess vacation resort.

Remember, the main reason the goddesses didn't interact with the world was because it ruined predictions.

…Aaaaand predictions in the Kingdom were already ruined for decades.

Not to mention how every goddess spends most of their life in what amounts to a virtual reality sandbox, waiting to be tapped as one of chief god's on-call sluts.  They have barely any variety in sex partners!

So an entire continent that they could interact with, without Argenta or anyone complaining at them?

Modesty was confident that the goddesses were collectively going to all but cannonball into the Kingdom to start goofing off.  And knowing what I did of the goddesses as a whole, I had to agree.

It was going to make the rest of the Land Grab chaos.

But the upside was?  Having the goddesses around to talk to and have sex with?

Asides from how much fun that sounded, it also opened a lot of opportunities.

In the end, there was only one thing that I asked Modesty to do for me.

I wanted the goddesses to come down to the Kingdom sooner rather than later, and I asked her if she could make that happen.

I knew and understood why Modesty wasn't telling me everything she knew.  There were a lot of secrets going on here, and some of them made things incredibly complicated.  Secrets were, annoyingly, the name of the game.

That didn’t mean I was happy about it, and having the goddesses come down gave me a chance to make my own investigations.

Now.  Remember why Sumiko couldn't use her shard?

If she used her shard for anything significant, then it would leave a suspicious log in the world shard, noting something strange had happened in the area.  And if there aren't any goddesses around, then any god paying attention to the world shard's logs would realize what's going on and be able to hunt her down.

That issue vanishes if there are over twenty goddesses running back and forth across the continent doing whatever nonsense they want to.

Who cares if the world shard is being interfaced with if there are five deities doing so right next door?

Normally I’d have been more cautious about this, but things were getting tight, and Sumiko was smart.  Very, very smart.

If any one of us could get away with snooping around with a divine shard, investigating the goddesses and the fourth landmass, it was her.