"Of course not, I'm the erogamer, I have a passive skill that means nobody ever requires me to have clothes, I've told you this." 

"...sorry, you have a what?" 

"Passive skill, because my life has become a magic sex video game for reasons unknown to me." 

"I feel like it was not obvious that this skill applies to magic interdimensional bars instead of just, like, the police."

He drapes himself over Sasha.

He makes a soft happy noise as he's draped over. (Raine looks faintly jealous next to him.) 

"Well. Apparently it does." 

Does Raine want to be draped on? They can be draped on. 

He very cautiously opens his eyes and then looks at Sasha's face. 

"...sex... video game...?"

"My life, for reasons unknown to me and resistant to being poked at, has become analogous to a video game or maybe a tabletop RPG. I have a stat block and ability scores, there are perks I can buy and skills I can level up, there are quests I can take or turn down and rewards for fulfilling those quests and punishments for failing at them, and for some reason this particular video game is themed around sex and romance, so guess what my quests and skills and perks and stats tend to be about." 

"I was promised an explanation! I was explicitly promised an explanation. But I think the Erogame is holding the explanation hostage until we do something extremely sexy."

"...what the heck."

"Good question! I don't know what the heck. And probably won't until we make an extremely hot effort towards finding out." 

Lev has dozens of questions but the one that comes out is:

"...how do you even find enough different sex things for an entire game?"

His eyes are still fixed very very firmly on Sasha's face.

"There are enough sex things for so many games. I personally have a vampires and mind control themed game because that's what I like so those are the perks I picked but I could have gone for superheroes or being a pop star or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or secret arranged marriages or any number of other deeply improbable scenarios." 

"...I am sufficiently confused that I do not know how to frame my confusion into an actual question."

"...sorry, I can back up — one of the things it lets me do is pick the genre of the story I'm in? Like, it's always going to be erotica, but i could have gone for superhero-themed erotica and instead i went for vampires, because I would rather live a vampire erotica plotline than a superhero erotica plotline. Does that help?" 

"...so I'm imagining it as being sort of like Pokemon-- does your world have Pokemon?-- except instead of trying to catch all the monsters you're trying to catch all the sexual partners. And you can reflavor it so you're trying to catch all the superheroes or all the vampires or whatever? That kind of sounds like a terrible thing to have take over your life."

"My world does have Pokémon, yes, but this is not at all like Pokémon. It's more like a, I don't know what you'd know about, maybe a choose your own adventure novel but with video game stats? And I'm the protagonist, and I get to decide what choices I make and which plot threads I follow, and it's going to be about sex but it is fundamentally about the plotline, not about collecting 'em all." 

"I would say 'my guess is that our pop culture mostly matches up' but I'm not sure-- do you know what bitoxiphosphene or Gileadites are--"

"I do not! Gilead is a biblical location but I only know that because of Marlo and I assume a Gileadite is a person who lives there but I don't know what relevance they might have." 

"In my timeline it's the largest church in the world."

Lev briefly explains the fertility crisis and the rise of the Gileadite government. He keeps accidentally glancing down at Sasha's chest and stomach and legs and dick and then wrenching his eyes away.

"Huh!" 

Sasha shares enough of his timeline to establish that it was the same as Raine's as far as any of them can tell, and then the Erogame happened to it and now there are vampires. 

"Not just vampires," Lev says. "Also the anime club that turned out to be a mind control cult. And the library that turned out to mind control anyone that was in it. And the mind-control letter jacket. And the mind-control computer virus. And that guy who mind-controlled you into being slutty and then it turned out that 'you drop as quickly as your panties' was a literal warning and the sluttier you were the easier you were to mind control and the easier you were to mind control the sluttier you were and then Marlo had to rescue you and lock you in your bedroom for two days to detox. There's a lot of mind control. --why did you take Hyperhypnoslut."

"Because it was objectively the most written-specifically-to-appeal-to-me perk on the list? Obviously?" 

(Raine is trying not to laugh.) 

"The vampires have mind-control powers," Lev says. "Obviously. Because why would they not have mind-control powers?"