[Vol. 3 pt. 9]
“So, what do I have to do?” I asked Thera after meeting her in-game. Rather than meet her in the dungeon like usual, though, she wanted to meet in one of the game’s endgame hubs.
The hub—a crystalline city in the center of a scorching desert—was once full of players who just reached endgame content. But now? It was all but absolutely abandoned by now. All those endgame players who thought it was so cool to reach the city realized that it didn’t really offer anything that the early cities didn’t. There were a few quest givers and NPCs who could be talked to for special endgame gear, but that was all outdated after a few updates.
As much as I appreciated the developers for creating such a perverse world where I could have sex with whoever I want as practically whatever I want, I had to admit that some of their game design choices were pretty questionable. Basically every single endgame area was abandoned, only in use by newer players only just reaching those areas. And of course, when those new players realized that there was no point in hanging around because nobody else was, they went back to the starting cities with everybody else.
Yet, it was where Thera wanted to meet, and I kind of appreciated her for it. The Crystal City of Analatia was one of the most beautiful zones in the game. Surrounded by a harsh desert devoid of life, the crystalline city stood tall at the desert’s heart. There was no official lighthouse, but the city’s central spire reflected enough light to make it look as if it was shining from a zone away.
And at night, which I really wanted to see again because being there for Thera during the day reminded me of it, the city revealed its true beauty. That was when all the crystals of the city absorbed the moon’s light to shine with what felt like a trillion different colors that changed depending on how you looked at the crystals.
“Damn it,” I said.
“What are we sentencing to Hell today, darling?” Thera asked as she sat across from me at the bench in front of the central spire.
“I was thinking about how beautiful this place gets at night and I’m pissed off that the devs never gave people a reason to stick around here. Why would they design a place this incredible and then not use it?”
“Well, it may have something to do with the lead story designer being replaced and throwing out the former’s plans to self-insert his own preferred endgame area.”
“Wait, that happened?”
“Indeed. Two patches ago. The former designer had plans to expand on this area, hence why so many locations in the desert are unfinished with clear intentions of being fleshed out later. From what I recall reading when the forum was full of drama regarding the replacement, the new designer had bad blood with the old, and so he has basically thrown out all of her plans to implement his own. That is why Prisio offers everything that this hub does and more.”
“Seriously? Damn it. That explains so much.”
Prisio was the game’s other endgame hub and it was far more generic in every single way imaginable. It was just another fantasy kingdom with a king giving us orders to prepare against some grand generically-evil threat that wished to destroy the world. And the zone surrounding it, which was added in a new patch, felt uninspired and rushed as if they were trying to get it out as quickly as possible or decided to make some extreme changes at the last minute.
Now that I knew about the developer situation, it made a lot more sense.
“Anyways, how’s your plan been going? You were pretending to be me and working your way up in her guild, right?” I asked, getting to the point.
“Indeed. It has been going rather well, if I may say so myself,” Thera said. “She asks you—me, out every week. Usually only once, but sometimes she may ask upwards of three times. I firmly believe that she is desperate to, as the kids used to say, ‘chase clout.’ You are more popular than she is and she yearns for the life of being in a relationship with a content creator even bigger than her, most likely to boost her own career. She knows that you would gain nothing from being with her while she would potentially see a massive benefit from being with you. She would gain access to your male audience, earn the jealousy of your female audience—all she cares about is how others will view her. Of course, this is not to say that she does not have a genuine interest in you.”
“How so?”
“Well, it is clear that she finds you attractive, and I can tell that the arousal she is full of when speaking with me is genuine. She is not simply trying to seduce me. Believing that I am you is enough to make her enter a state of heat. A rather intense state of it. In other words, she wants to sleep with you as much as she wants to take advantage of you.”
“That’d be hot if she wasn’t a bitch.”
“Never change, darling. I knew you were going to say those exact words before I even finished my sentence.”
“You know me so well. I guess that means we’re perfect for each other and that we should get married and have some kids already. Sound good?”
“Does it sound good? Absolutely. But will such a thing happen anytime soon? Unfortunately, no.”
“You know, there’s nothing stopping you from turning that ‘unfortunately, no,’ into a, ‘fortunately, yes.’”
“There is. Myself.”
“Have you considered stopping yourself from stopping yourself?”
“Many times. Unfortunately for us both, myself has never succeeded in stopping myself.”
“Here, let me try and help. Hey, Thera. Stop yourself from stopping yourself.”
“Hmm.”
“Did it work?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Dang. Was worth a try. Anyways, back to the plan. So, she’s thirsty for me—you. What else?”
“Because of her, as you would call it, ‘thirst’ for me, she is willing to do anything for me. That is why my alt has been promoted to second-in-command within her guild, much to the dismay of all the men in it who are wondering who I am and why I surpassed them.”
“Do they think you’re me?”
“No. She has kept my ‘identity’ secret from them. They have no idea who I am, nor who I am supposed to be, hence why they are so furious about it. Several of the men, who are apparently moderators for her chat in her streams, have quit already after long rants about how they regretted ever giving her the absurd amount of money that they did.”
“So, in other words, you’re cucking all of her simps.”
“Did you know that the word ‘simp’ is offensive? I never even heard of it until this happened. Most of these people even ban the word and never allow their simps—ah, I mean, ‘supporters,’ to be called it. But yes, that is what I am doing.”
“Part of me feels a tiny bit bad because this could be seen as you damaging her income, but… maybe I’m mean, but I can’t feel bad about you destroying the hopes of guys who were probably spending unhealthy amounts of money on her. If anything, they probably needed the wakeup call that nothing was going to happen with them just because they gave her money.”
“I wish that was the case. Unfortunately, everybody who has left for this reason has stated that they already had other women who they moderated for and that they would be treated better by them.”
“So, they basically just changed which woman they’d be throwing money at.”
“Indeed.”
I sighed and leaned back far enough to look up at the top of the central spire. “Simping. Simping never changes.”
“Apparently not. By the way, darling.”
“Yeah?”
Thera leaned in over the table, placing her hands underneath her chin as she smiled at me. “I admire you. Not only do I admire you, but I appreciate you and everything about you. I can genuinely say that there is no other man I would ever want to be this close to.”
Not blushing from that was impossible. “Wh-where’d that come from?”
“From my heart.”
“I mean—”
“I know. What I mean is that I have spent time around countless men. I play multiplayer video games, after all. But to be more precise, after seeing all of the men lusting after our target and seeing how they talk about her… how they devote their lives to her only to jump to another woman as soon as they are told no, it is repulsive. You have never once expressed any of the traits I find so abhorrent. That is why I appreciate you.”
“I’m really nothing special for not being an obsessive simp. Most random guys you see in real life are probably just like me.”
“I disagree.”
“What makes me so different then?”
“You’re special to me. They’re not.”
“You seriously know how to make me feel like an embarrassed schoolgirl talking to her first crush.”
“Like you said, I know you, darling. I can make you react however I want you to react. Whether I wish to fluster you, arouse you, enrage you, or anything else—if I want you to feel a certain way, I know exactly how to make you feel it.”
“Arouse me, huh? How would you do that?”
“By not giving you an answer to tease you. Congratulations. You are now more aroused.”
“Damn it. You’re too good at this.”
“I know.”
“A-anyways, we keep getting sidetracked. Back to the plan.”
“How hurtful. I wish to spend time with you by praising you and teasing you, yet you keep on changing the subject.”
“Look at it this way. The sooner we finish talking about the plan, the sooner we can focus on what’s really important. AKA flirting with each other.”
“Oh, I see. That is a rather intelligent way of looking at things. Very well.”
“So, the plan. What’s left?”
“I need your permission before doing anything else.”
“Oh boy.”
“One, I will start with convincing her that she needs nobody but me. I will convince her to destroy her own guild by disbanding it and cutting ties with all of her sway-dough worshippers.”
“With their what worshippers?”
“Sway-dough worshippers.”
“Spell what you’re trying to say.”
“P-s-e-u-d-o.”
“Pseudo. Pronounced soo-dow.”
“Only weak men pronounce it with such a lack of heart. Pseudo is clearly pronounced sway-dough.”
“How… what even made you think it was pronounced that in the first place?”
“How it is spelled, of course.”
“But—if you swapped the E and the U in it, I could maybe see how you’d pronounce it that way. But they’re not swapped. It’s soo-dow. Not sway-dough. Soo-dow. Soo-dow.”
“No. Sway-dough.”
“Thera.”
“Yes, darling?”
“You were perfect. The entire time I’ve known you, you have never been anything but perfect… until two minutes ago. I can no longer call you perfect.”
“Then I suppose I am only pseudo-perfect now.”
“Soo-dow! Soo-dow!”
“Sway-dough.”
I planted my face into my hands and cried. Not actually cried, but I mentally cried.
The perfect Thera who I knew… who was always so intelligent, didn’t know how to properly pronounce sway—soo-dow. Pseudo.
What else was a lie? The universe? Reality? Were we all in a simulation?
I didn’t know, but none of those could possibly be worse than her mispronouncing pseudo. That was the kind of sin that made me wish Hell existed for sinners like her.
“Anyways,” I said, stopping the act of being upset, “the plan. No more getting sidetracked. You’re making her cut ties with all of her… all of her would-be worshippers.”
“Precisely,” Thera said, leaning back now with a teasing smile still on her face. “She will believe that she needs me and me alone. Then, once she has nobody else within this game and believes that we will become an official couple… I will delete my alt. Or rather, first, I intend on making plans with her. A date. I will propose that we go on an in-game date with the implication being that I will confess to her then, and that we will enter an official, and more importantly, public relationship. At the time of the date… I will delete my alt and leave her wondering what happened. I expect that she will be furious and come to the dungeon afterwards. That is when she will see you pampering Akorya and treating her like the most deserving princess in the world, wrapping things up with a kiss. She will have no idea who Akorya is, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she sees you, the real Damian, with another woman. And when she asks about what is happening, you will let her know that you have no idea who she even is. That is when I will send her a message from a different alt to tell her that I couldn’t believe she fell for it, and that her nose job looks horrible.”
“That’s…”
“Horrible, I know.”
“And this is only a four on the scale from one to ten in fucked up ways to get revenge for Akorya?”
“I would downgrade it to a three at this point.”
I sighed and leaned back once again to think it over.
The idea wasn’t bad. If anything, it was a great idea. A great idea that might make me feel horrible, though, even if it was revenge against Akorya’s bully.
Was fucking with somebody to that degree really worth it? That kind of thing could leave a serious impact on somebody…
And maybe it was the kind of impact that she’d need. For a woman of her status who could get any man she wanted only to be led on and then rejected—to find out that she was being trolled the entire time?
More importantly, if I felt bad about it, all I’d have to do is go back and look at the clips of her mocking Akorya and sending her viewers after her and then I wouldn’t feel bad about it anymore.
“Well, darling? Do you consent to this plan?” Thera asked me.
“Yeah,” I answered. “We’re going to put her in her place. But, I have one thing I’d change about it.”
“Oh?”
“Well, maybe it’s not a change, but it’s a specific way I thought of doing something you mentioned me doing. I thought of another way to make her even more jealous when she finds me and Akorya.”
“Interesting. Mind sharing what that is, or will I have to see it myself?”
“You’ll see it yourself, but I will say it’s part of treating Akorya right and making her feel like the most beautiful girl in the world. Anyways, is that everything about the plan?”
“It is, in fact, everything.”
“So, now we can focus on flirting.”
“That we can.”
“Will you let me fuck you if I pretend that you’re right about it being sway-dough instead of soo-dow?”
“No.”
“Dang.”