Wow. Cuddles are also great. She had mostly extrapolated her understanding of this from a small number of huggy fellow students when she was in undergraduate, since she had no other memory of receiving physical affection, but cuddles are as great as she had thought!

"I am skeptical of the generalizability of your study about access to postnatal care," he mumbles. 

"Randomization on the bubble is admittedly not ideal but it was the--"

What. 

"You're my favorite economist," he mumbles. 

What!

"I'm your-- what?"

"I don't really-- know anything-- about it-- I'm kind of dumb, I just like listening to podcasts while I lift weights and you were on Conversations with Taylor and then I listened to all the other podcasts you were on but I couldn't read your papers or anything because they don't make papers in audiobook--"

What!!!

After rejecting several sentences, she lands on, "has it occurred to you that if you listen to economics podcasts for fun you're not dumb?"

"No? You should see my grades."

"Were you waiting outside my door on purpose?!" She intends to sound shocked, but Force of Nature makes her sound mildly accusatory. 

"Well, um, I mean, a little? I wait outside the door for all the contestants, if they want me to, I just-- was particularly excited about getting to see you. I guess."

She has the sneaking suspicion she could have fucked Mr. Not The Duke in her own body......... that is, if she believed that he could possibly be interested in her, which is a huge blocker.

All kinds of interesting personal reflections about her flaws today.

The lights flicker, which Leah knows means "five minutes until showtime." She quickly dresses-- not that that takes long in a bikini-- and then stops in front of the guy. 

"I want to kiss you," she says, willing Force of Nature not to make it sound like an order. 

"We did kind of do things out of order, didn't we."

She kisses him. It is soft and warm and pleasurable, and it makes her want to swoon. She doesn't know how much of this is Sexual Sensitivity and how much of this is just what kissing is like. She guesses she'll never know. 

Then she smiles and says, "Catch you later!"

"Yeah!"

Okay. So. The game. 

The thing is, she kind of joined this game to get a hot body so that men would want to kiss her, which seems thoroughly to have happened. But she also joined the game to win money! Right now she has only $10, which is nothing towards her replication project.

She shouldn't be thinking about this at all.

There are six bimbo boxes in the mental changes round. Fetish doesn't matter at all-- she's happy to have a more varied sex life. Clothing Style and Vocabulary might keep people from taking her seriously, but she does have Force of Nature and Professionally Beautiful on her side there, she might wind up net-positive regardless. Career and Compulsion are inconvenient but... the audience has been kind to her so far, haven't they? It's not impossible they vote for a Career and a Compulsion that are compatible with a tenure-track professor job. She can do porn on the side. Whatever.

Intelligence...

If she draws Intelligence, she loses everything. Intelligence's effects are picked by the producers. She can't count on the audience to save her. 

Fourteen unopened boxes. 7% chance. Does she dare risk it?

...The replication project is the most important thing in her life. She has to. 

She gets up on the stage in a daze, and not the sexy kind. 

"And the collar announces-- that Leah has broken in the new body!" the host says. 

Oh god she was so distracted by the guy's gorgeous smile she had entirely forgotten this part. This doesn't matter, she'd thought. I'm going to drop out as soon as I get done with the physical changes, and anyway what am I going to do, get so excited about having actual breasts that I lose my virginity to a random stranger in the green room?

Oops. 

How about she just melts into a puddle and dies right now. 

"Yes, folks, she had a good one, with an impressive 27 orgasms!"

From very far away she abstractly supposes that they must have figured out how to divide up the long ones. 

"But the collar reports that she still hasn't had anyone in her new vagina! That's right! This body at least is still a virgin! One of you in the audience RIGHT NOW might be the lucky guy!"

Of all the outdated patriarchal--