"...I wonder what happens if you try to blackmail the Erogame."

"So on the one hand every idea you've had so far has been brilliant and I should listen to you, but on the other hand I would really rather not have an adversarial relationship with the entities that may or may not have total control of our reality?" He says this very fast and at an uncharacteristically high pitch.

"...that's fair. Maybe we should keep it in our back pockets in case something really important happens."

"Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense." It's not that he's not down to rage against the heavens, if that ever turns out to be the thing that needs doing, but so far things have been pretty chill for how insane they've been and he'd like to keep it that way.

". . . Now I'm curious what blackmail material you're thinking of."

"Well, if I were trying to blackmail the Erogame, I would buy a plane ticket to Iceland, block your emails and your phone number, and never speak to you again. But you have better options, you can just commit to-- no, you don't want to commit to celibacy, people kink on that-- you want to commit to masturbating once a day to softcore porn with extremely vanilla fantasies. --Although there's an obvious failure mode."

"I can think of a couple different failure modes if I tried that, none of them pleasant." Let's not think about the possibility of Aarons getting fed up with his weird game stuff and never speaking to him again, for blackmail or otherwise, that sounds awful.

"What were you thinking of? I was thinking of you getting raped or, I don't know, forcibly turned into a girl or something."

"Getting raped a bunch, yeah. Or the game just says 'okay, fine, you lose' and I don't get to cure death and scarcity and stuff. Or they rewind the simulation that is our universe and rerun it over and over with different tweaks until I do what they want."

"...Probably you don't have to worry about getting raped unless you get off on it."

"People get off on that? Of course people get off on that. Rule 34 is real."

This conversation got kind of depressing, didn't it. He takes refuge in his phone for a moment, updating the posted orgy location. Did Asher RSVP yet?

He did!

"People get off on all kinds of things. Rape isn't even a weird one."

"It sounds like a really unpleasant thing to be into, but maybe that's the typical mind fallacy and the people who are into it are fine with being into it." Shrug. "On a related note, I'm going to deputize Asher to help keep order tonight."

Hey Asher! I hope you're as excited for tonight as I am (and less nervous).

"I think most of the people who are into it only like it in imagination," Lev says, "and not in real life. I was just guessing that probably the Erogame could fuck with your brain so that rape is not traumatizing, if you'd be into it. --Honestly it's a common enough kink that it might do that anyway, if you get your PRV high enough."

Sure thing! Haven't been to an orgy in years.

Bruce reads the Erogamer's Mind description again and says, "I'm not actually sure it didn't already fuck with my brain on that axis, it says I could find it 'anything from a recoverable trauma to a Tuesday afternoon'. I'll take 'things I'd rather not test empirically' for 300, Alex."

To Asher:

Can I ask you to help out with the job of making sure everyone is behaving acceptably and throwing out anyone who doesn't understand that consent is still important at an orgy? It would be nice if the game gave me magical immunity to inviting douchebags but it hasn't said as much.

I'd think the Erogame would handle that but sure!

"...............I am so curious about how that works."

"I'm curious too, I didn't feel anything change when the game started but maybe if I was better at introspection I would have." He reads off the full Erogamer's Mind description.

If the game does handle that, so much the better, but it explicitly told me it was handling STD risk and didn't say anything about screening people so I don't want to rely on that entirely.

"It's probably a terrible idea to have someone rape you and see what happens."

"Yeah, if I thought you were going to do that I would be super jumpy around everyone you could plausibly have picked and most people you couldn't."

"I guess one thing I can say," and he addresses this about 90% to Lev and 10% to the ceiling, "is that if there is a rapist at the orgy, better that they go after me than someone who doesn't have that protection. Hypothetically speaking."

"...you're doomed."

"I am probably pretty doomed, yeah. I guess we'll see how doomed doomed is?" He's not sure if the absence of pink pop-ups is reassuring or ominous.

"...nope that's dramatic irony you are SUPER DOOMED. Fuck."

"I kind of miss living in a universe where reality would just go on being reality regardless of my expectations about it. Speaking of which, what are some other things I should do to raise my ERO?" Maybe if he changes the subject there will be less DOOM.