Capture Target

Hm hm hm~  This is perfect~  Finally completed my collection!

Oh!  See this shade?  Now if I put it with the rest of my heels of the same style -- there!

We get the rainbow!

Isn’t it great?

I’ve got a similar setup for my makeup and some of my favorite lingerie, but my shoes are my real passion.  I mean, when you can only wear heels over a certain height, that starts to lock you into certain styles, you know?  Typically into the style of ‘stripper wear’.

So if you’re stuck wearing stripper shoes, you might as well make a joke out of it, yeah?

…W-well, okay, you do -- kind of -- have a point.

So, um, well -- it, uh, look, it’s not a waste of money, everybody has their own hobbies, you know?

So it’s just a fun hobby!

…

Yes okay yeah I wear them all regularly okay moving on storytime! 

---

So!  After I -- uh -- kinda lost myself to my Takeo-brainwashing for a bit, well --

…I’m not answering that.

So, after losing myself to the brainwashing for a bit --

No!

I said I’m not answering that!

…Put the spray bottle away.

Put it away -- are those ice cubes in it?!  It’s already cold as it is!

No!  Fine!  Fine!

I fucked him for two whole time slots!  So, like, six or seven hours!

Are you happy?!

…You don’t have to be so obviously happy… tch…

Look, I get brainwashed -- like -- all the time, but brainwashed to love Takeo?!

Argh!  It drives me crazy!

Thankfully, as I was saying, Shimizu came looking for me and interrupted us.  She shoved me out of Takeo's study, locked the door, and spent a while inside talking with him about him raping me.  

…?  No, it wasn't her yelling at him about  -- oh, right, rape.  Um, ah, ah, wait, no, you’re right, this needs a bit more explanation.

So.

MISSY is fucked up.

Therefore, avoiding bad-sex things is basically impossible.

Therefore, there’s no point in getting angry about them.

Therefore, matters of ‘consent’ are a lot more -- tricky.

…What do you mean that’s not enough?!  Ugh!  Fine!

Okay.  Taking a few steps back -- if one were to look at it from a normal perspective, I was, in essence, not in my right mind.  Therefore, Takeo having sex with me was Not Okay.

To complicate matters, we all knew I was not in my right mind, and I snuck into his room anyway.  Specifically to circumvent protective measures that I had already agreed to.  This was also Not Okay.

Neither of those things makes the other ‘okay’ and both are, when one is looking at it from a sane perspective, very much not okay.

But MISSY, as I've said before, was… pretty much literally designed around the chief god's rape kink, as the core of it.  

Modesty's efforts for helping everyone go beyond the psychological tweaks she made.  Her and her priests do a lot of social work and legal reform campaigning, to help shape MISSY's societies and cultures to, well, be able to handle how a solid majority of the populace in MISSY inevitably experiences some kind of rape, molestation, brainwashing, or otherwise nonconsentual or dubiously consensual sexual experience in their life.

For Takeo and I?  We could avoid things like that if we took proper measures, sure.  If we decided to not do anything risky,  stayed far away from each other, and lived like hermits.

But that would mean not trying to stop the Evil God of Chastity and Purity.  

Also it would just be miserable.

It's -- I do a lot to emphasize how bad things are, so I know this is kinda sorta going back on that.  Just, really, in this case?  

Takeo and I both had, and still have, things that compromise consent.  Him for others' consent, and me for others' and also my own consent.  And, as people, we make mistakes.

In any other reality, a lot of what we do to each other would be borderline unforgivable… and maybe if MISSY ever becomes sane, we can discuss how to move on from it then.  But for now?

The best we could do is offer an apology when it did, try to not repeat it, and move on even when we inevitably do it all over again.

---

The discussion Shimizu had with Takeo lasted a while, and when she was done, a very annoyed dog-girl Takeo came back out of his study.  Takeo and I exchanged apologies, and then Shimizu walked me back to my own house.   

Then Shimizu started talking to me about ‘boundaries’ and ‘not sneaking into Takeo’s room’ and ‘you hate him, I know you hate him’, things like that.

This…

…This did not work.

Her threatening to hold her cock back from me if I caved again?

That worked.

That worked really, really well, actually…

What?  L-look, her cock was addictive!  

I was just brainwashed to think Takeo was perfect in every way and that I was destined to marry him.  His cock isn’t addictive!  Just his personality!  And face!  And presence!  And fucking brainwashing aaaargh!

Moving!  On!

We were all still dealing with the revelation that the fourth landmass was an Unreality Hive.  Which is… really, really bad.  I’m sure you know about when one was discovered in the north pole, right?  Yeah.

This was worse.

And, unfortunately, I didn’t have any time to deal with it.  Or even really process it.  Because it was time for the gods to start getting much, much more active.

---

So.  Here’s the problem:  The Butterfly Effect.  

Ever since that final battle in year three?

Predictions were fucked.

The gods just didn't realize yet.  

The simulation predictions of gods?  They're reliant on having accurate data.  And normally, you can get everything you need from just pinging the world's records for all the relevant data.  Missing things here and there, even important things, can be glossed over with sheer weight of data.  This goes double when, like we had been doing since the start of the third year, we had consciously been acting like our conversations hidden by Atlantean Alloy had never happened.  The simulations still predicted us accurately enough, day to day.

However, this only works to an extent.  Important events can be ignored, occasionally, but not constantly.  There’s a tipping point where it goes from ‘predictable’ to ‘not that, very much not that’ very quickly, and that tipping point had already been crossed.

Remember when Argenta and Roberta had that fight at the end of year three's big battle?  Well, that little bit of divine intervention meant every single person who saw that fight can no longer be accurately predicted.

Argenta and Roberta are very much opposed to each other, so the full ‘data’ of what they did never got shared and collected; thus, predictions for hundreds of people were now flawed.  

If they'd erased our memories and that had been the end of it.  Things would've wobbled a little, but the predictions still would've stayed good enough.  

Except somebody rigged it so our memories would come back.  We didn’t have them for two weeks, the time where divergences would have been the most obvious -- this meant, initially, predictions were still working fine.  And when our memories came back, the two kings and Big Bull used the Atlantean Alloy bunker to conceal how they gathered up everyone who saw the goddesses, and told them to keep it a secret.  

While not a perfect solution, this meant prediction divergences were further delayed.

But ‘delayed’ doesn’t mean ‘removed’; they were happening, and they were slowly ramping up.  Hundreds of people had seen two goddesses clashing.  That's the sort of thing that makes you act differently, and them acting differently means the people they interact with act differently in turn.  

And that's ignoring how the Kingdom's policy decisions were only becoming more and more dictated by information that was concealed from the world shard by Atlantean Alloy!  Decisions that affected the entire continent!  

By the end of the fourth year, the continent would be useless for predictions.  The divine shards would need to build their predictive algorithms back up by scratch, which would easily take decades.  Divergences from one person would spread to another, and then to another and another and another, leading to an utter lack of ability to predict what even a child would do in a given situation.  Even if the full truth of the secrets we knew came out into the open and sent to the world shard, so it could record and process everything -- which wasn’t going to happen anytime soon -- none of the gods would be able to make accurate predictions for at least a generation.

Things were going to get really weird.

At the start of the fourth year, predictions were still mostly working, but errors were cropping up -- and those that were paying attention, noticed.

Not to mention that Jessica showing up put a massive wrench in things…

So the goddesses that noticed, and cared, decided to get more information from what they could tell was the center of the divergences.  

They decided to talk to me.

---

So, here’s an important question:

When a mortal annoys a god, what stops them from kidnapping them, sexually breaking and brainwashing them, getting whatever information or action they want, then returning them as if nothing had happened?

Unfortunately, the answer is nothing other than morals, or failing that, divine politics.

But at least those work.  Most of the time.  For the goddesses.

See, most of the goddesses don’t have it in them to be really cruel to people.  Seduce and brainwash them with pleasure, sure.  Torture them until they’re broken, nope.  There have been a few villains across the Alchemical Corruption series who wanted to become a goddess purely to have near complete power over mortals, but even putting aside all the other problems and threats, none of those characters have ever been shameless enough to actually stick the landing when they actually meet the chief god.   

Out of the twenty seven, Roberta is the only one that's obviously crazy enough to do something like this.  If any of the others are the sort of person who would, then either they need to be really desperate to resort to it, or they're good at hiding it.  Modesty cares enough about people that I can kind of sort of not really see it, with her?  Argenta too, though for her it's her deeply caring about MISSY as a world, as a reality.   

…Then there’s the chief god, but let’s just -- not talk about him for this.

Now, when morals fail, politics prevail!  …Hopefully.

There are… well, there are three gods that consistently interfere with mortals for reasons beyond kinky whim.  Argenta, Modesty, and Roberta.  Roberta has precisely zero friends and the chief god really doesn't count, but Argenta and Modesty both have their friend circles and cliques.  Argenta is generally closest to the other original five goddesses, while Modesty is either friends or at least on decent terms with most everyone, with a few big exceptions.  

None of those three get along with each very well.  And, honestly, there's a lot of shoving matches among the goddesses in general.

Remember when Argenta came to talk to me the first time?  That was to directly counter another god's interference, back when I had sex with Kaiser at his lake.  She did that in part to ruin predictions regarding me, to push back on her own predictions being ruined by the Kaiser's lake intervention, because she's infamously touchy about her fellow goddesses making messes just for sex games.  It’s one of the running jokes in the Alchemical Corruption series of games.  That’s an example of divine politics at work.

And divine politics saved my ass right here too.  

See, shortly after I had been banished from Takeo’s -- everything, I went to my bedroom to find Argenta.  Sitting in my bedroom like she owned the place.  Again.

She was -- more polite, that time, versus her being fairly brusque the first time.  I suspect that she'd realized we would be interacting more often from then on out, so she'd decided for a softer tact.  

Which, frankly, worried me more than if she acted the same as before.

And despite that, it was still clearly an interrogation.

Not a discussion, an interrogation, and while I doubted she would go to extreme measures… I wasn't anywhere near confident enough of that to try just, refusing to answer anything.  And she absolutely had to know the kind of pressure she was putting on me. 

Not that, you know, I was going to try refusing to answer when I didn't need to.  Her questions were probing and risky, but not outright life-threatening.  She didn't seem to know we all remembered her fight with Roberta, and she had no idea I was from outside MISSY and Jessica's sister.  She was focused on interrogating me on Jessica, the fourth landmass, and reality bugs.

I was sweating but okay, until she said that she knows that my friends and I have been talking under Atlantean Alloy, and 'politely asked' for details on what we'd been talking about.

I clammed up in sheer terror, and that only made her more intent.  She quickly shifted from 'polite' over to 'agitated', and from there to 'angry'.  She was insistent that she needs to 'fix the world', and that I needed to tell her everything I knew that would help.

The claim wasn’t without merit, given her history in the games, but… look, she'd ambushed me in my bedroom, she was squeezing me like a squeaky toy for answers, and if she decided to do something to me then I was completely helpless.  I was scared, alright?

Thankfully… and I know how weird this is going to sound, but thankfully… that's about when Roberta showed up.

She just -- appeared, in my room.  And demanded that Argenta ‘silence yourself, for I have a question of utmost import'.  I'm still not sure if she chose to ease off or was just shocked, but she did quiet down as Roberta turned to me.

Roberta asked me if I was aiming to be minted as a goddess.

It’s not like the requirements for it were unknown, they just weren't spoken about in public -- because most wouldn’t dare try to get a full twenty seven blessings that increase one's corruption and sexual depravity.

Argenta just -- paused.  And stared at the two of us, as I just nodded my head.

And then Roberta… uh, was her usual crazy chief-god-obsessed self.  

She kept saying things like, “As another one seeing the blessing of our lord…” and “You disloyal fiend Argenta, I shall not let you corrupt this pure one with your heathen ways!”

After Argenta started yelling back, I snuck out of my own bedroom.  When I closed the room behind me, the sound of their argument cut off like I pressed a mute button.

I was almost out the door to go get some air and maybe fish for some alleyway sex, when Zaylee came to present a letter to me.  

A letter from Modesty.

Asking me to show up at her temple, when I had some free time, to 'discuss affairs'.

…Yeah, at that point, I was done with all that god nonsense.  I needed to focus on something else.

…So I went right back to Shimizu, to assert my right to fuck Takeo!