He keeps saying that, in his head. No one else is a person. He's... not as sure as he'd like to be about this, but he's also not sure what exactly people are if not, well, people. Work forces him to interact with them daily and he keeps having the extremely strong impression that there just is no one there. The lights are on, but no one's home. People don't remember things for very long, and when they do it's to be annoyed with his experiments in asking the same question three times in a row just to see what happens.

If he takes a two-minute break and asks the same question again it's fine, though.

A model of it is starting to form in his head. It seems like... people seem to just consider their relationship with him—and each other—to be tracked by some sort of number. He feels slightly guilty at first to experiment, but his job is, again, soul-crushingly boring and lonely, so he gets over himself and starts trying to guess at numerical values. Maybe these people have subjective access to these values, but he doesn't.

It still feels correct, though. If he gets the numbers high enough, people are much more willing to take shit and let it slide, though it does decrease the numbers. And it does seem like there's some discrete categorisation of the number levels here that informs people's overall impressions of him. Stranger, acquaintance, friendly acquaintance, friend, close friend, best friend.

Or something.

The potions keep working—he doesn't sleep, or eat, or use the bathroom, and he only showers to relax. He doesn't have time for all of that, he has magic to learn, and it does turn out useful even for work.

He gets the "small object duplication" spell first of all, since he was aiming for it. The knowledge just appears in his head unbidden, the understanding that if he waves his wand like so and says the word "Copypasto"—he wanted to die when that showed up in his head—he can create an identical copy of anything below a certain volume.

It does work on the damn potions.

He has unlimited supply of a potion of "make everything better".

The literal only reason no one has used spellcasting to take over the world is because no one else is a person.

He gets other spells—levitation, a handful of different options for spells that fix broken objects or appliances, a cleaning spell—and in the process of learning magic he does notice the feeling for "spellcaster charge" pretty quickly. It's like he's getting filled up, and warm inside, and there is a certain feeling of an optimal level and then of it starting to be too much. He stays well below the latter threshold while practising.

And it turns out he does kind of need every advantage he can get, here, because other people have some weird combination of working both faster and slower than he does.

Slower, because everything they do takes hours. It feels like they subjectively experience a minute in the same way he subjectively experiences a second, even though it's not like they're absent for that minute. He can have normal-time conversations and activities and actions involving other people, but they take so, so, so much longer to finish whatever they're doing or to want to change actions or to get bored. He once watched another person take over thirty minutes to finish a goddamn bowl of cereal—and it's not that they were having difficulty, they just took forever to actually take the actions of eating it.

(And there seems to be some weird way in which their slowness is also imposed onto the environment—Peter's cereal becomes soggy a lot more quickly than theirs does.)

Faster, because it seems like despite taking longer to do things they can get things done more quickly than he can. This one he takes longer to understand, but it becomes pretty obvious after a while: they learn skills much faster than he does, they improve at things much faster than he does. At one point he runs an experiment of trying to learn how to play chess with a "friend", and they seem to just get better at playing chess organically by doing it without having to actually learn specific facts about how to do it in the same way he does. He fancies himself a smart person, but he is very quickly outmatched by his chess partner, and eventually gives up on it.

Also faster in that he can make someone like him a lot in only a few hours.

He's... not sure what normal is, really, since his internet searches and ever-wider nets of visiting other places have yet to run into anyone else like him. He's the weird one, he supposes, except the ways in which he's weird feel a lot more—more—mechanistic, to him? You learn chess by understanding facts about how chess works and what kinds of things to pay attention to and techniques to use and getting better at exploring the space of possible future moves, not by just suddenly getting better at choosing the right moves at the right time. But everyone else is like that, so that is what's "normal", definitionally, right?

But it still feels very not normal for people to like him so much after so little time.

He learns how to pull on their heart strings. He learns how to communicate with people in ways that they find pleasant rather than unpleasant, and how many times to repeat it versus change the subject, and how to draw their attention. And by the end of a day spent with a single person, he is suddenly their best friend in the whole damn world.

It's kind of creepy.

Also faster in that they age faster.

That one kind of terrifies him more than he thought he could handle. It's easy to notice after a short time, how everyone else is getting older much faster than he is. They're... getting on with their lives much faster than he is, too. It's like they're in fast-forward—they get promoted at work more quickly than he does, they get better at things more quickly than he does, they meet new people and fall in love and get married and have children (he does not want to think about NPC babies) much faster than he probably would.

Meanwhile he's an unaging beauty watching the world go by.

And no one cares. No one notices, his coworkers and boss age away from him and no one even remarks on it. He tries bringing it up with them and gets only exactly the same kind of non-engagement as always.

No one cares. No one notices.

Anything.

One day, he goes to work shirtless. Some people act shocked at first, and some people are clearly giving him looks (and he is still not ready to engage with that, his hands have been his sole companions for a while), but after the initial reaction they sort of... just accept it. He tries, again, bringing it up with people, and he gets a whole host of reactions—it's inappropriate for the work environment (who cares), isn't he chilly under the AC (no, he's a wizard), has he been working out (yes, absolutely, gotta keep dem abs), maybe he could go with them to that supply closet over there and take everything else off (maybe later)—but then they once again move on and ignore it.

He... kinda hates clothes.

Whoever or whatever created him gave him a rather annoying, persistent awareness of anything touching his skin—or maybe that's just being not-an-NPC, maybe anyone who wakes up in his situation will also be hyperaware of their body. But it does mean he—just always is naked at home, pretty much, because it's so much more comfortable.

Whoever or whatever created him gave him a little bit of a kink for it, which he has been kind of sitting on because it's immoral to subject other people to this stuff but...

...but other people don't seem to quite be people. And more relevantly, they don't seem all that affected by it, do they?

One day, he goes to work wearing only his shoes.

He can't help but be aroused by it. He feels like he—shouldn't be. A huge part of it is actually the sensory stuff. It's uncomfortable, clothes are itchy, they're always there, touching him, and, and...

...and why not.

But he can't help but be aroused by it, at least at first. This does attract a lot more reactions. His boss specifically says this is very inappropriate for the work environment.

Then one minute later his boss is talking to him like nothing's the matter and nothing's wrong. His programming has already gone through the shock of seeing his naked employee, now he can move on with the next parts of his day.

Peter's never putting any clothes on again.

Other people also learn magic more quickly than him, because of course they do, so he spends his time working, and working out, and learning magic, and studying magic, and occasionally studying other stuff, and occasionally jerking off—but not in public, something is still stopping him from doing that.

It becomes normal, for him. He's no longer aroused just by being out naked like that, it becomes... mundane.

Now here's the weird part, folks.

Other people start doing it too.

The first time he sees it—someone just walking their dog in the buff—he can barely believe his eyes. Are they—could they be—like him?

But no. Another NPC, just like everyone else, incapable of holding a real conversation or having any kind of understanding of other minds or anything like that. They just also happened to be naked.

People at work "got used" to his perpetual nudity, in that they no longer even had the initial shock of seeing him like that for the first time today. That was... fine, it even made sense, in a way. Of course you'd get used to it. But seeing other people in public also start getting used to it was... less explainable.

Seeing other people in public also getting nude is a lot less explainable.

Or actually, not even fully nude, with a ton of variation and a lot more daring fashion expression. "Leather chaps" with nothing under them isn't a kink thing in leather bars anymore, it's just a piece of attire that some people wear sometimes. Toplessness is just downright common, and now people have nipple rings, and cock rings, and other combinations that completely ignore the idea that anyone might even consider that any given part of the human body would be off-limits to show.

Now here's the weird part, folks.

Something called "the free bodies movement" springs up out of nowhere. When Peter first runs into a rally for them, a bunch of naked people with signs about freedom of expression and self-acceptance and all that, with someone with a megaphone spouting disconnected sentences out like that, he... starts getting very, very spooked.

Simpedia has a page on them. It has a page dated from before. From before the date Peter thinks of as the day he started existing.

He's absolutely sure that can't have existed.

People are naked on TV now.

People on Raccoon News are having pieces on how the woke youth is taking things too far, how toplessness is fine but going bottomless is just beyond the pale, the degenerates.

What... has he done.

He'd be lying if he ever lightly implied he doesn't have an ego. He does, okay, he likes himself, he thinks he's great, he thinks he's awesome actually, he fucking masturbates looking at himself in the mirror.

But being solely responsible for acausal changes to the fabric of society is a bit much even for him.

(It does occur to him that—if there is someone else out there like him and this also works the same way for them—then maybe he's getting edited and rewritten by their alterations to the fabric of society all the time.)

He talks to his coworkers and "friends" about it, and they all seem to agree that yeah nudity isn't a big deal, why is he talking about this, he's naked, is he not part of that movement of woke youth? So of fucking course their memories got edited too—but his didn't. He doesn't remember all of that, it's not normal for him.

But it's just... normal, now.

That's a lot more power than just being a fucking wizard! It's more than spells to teleport places (he's going to have words with whoever decided to call it "transportalate"), it's more than having a pet dragon, it's more than the goddamn Potion of Prompt Resurrection which he has been tirelessly aiming for since he heard of it, for goodness's sake.

He can alter reality.

He could... maybe... alter it to have more people in it.

He has no idea how he'd do it, and while it was always in the back of his mind while learning magic it didn't seem like its... thing.

Of course, he was determined to make it work somehow anyway. He's pretty sure he'd go crazy or just end up killing himself if there was literally no way to ever get anyone else to have a proper damn conversation with. This level of isolation is torture, magic potion of "make everything better" notwithstanding.

But changing the past, that level of rewriting reality... it suddenly feels so possible it aches.

Except he's really not sure what exactly he did to cause that. When he became a wizard that didn't suddenly cause a lot of people to start wanting to become wizards, so why...

...

...hmm.

He had this thought before: NPCs don't challenge the status quo. And him becoming a wizard didn't, either—people apparently just do become wizards, every now and then. At low enough rates that having just the three Sages doing it is enough, for sure, but it still happens.

So he wasn't changing anything. He was being another number—another cog. Another part of the machine. And he's a different part of the machine, a part that doesn't quite work like the other parts, but from the perspective of the machine he still does his job. Rotates nicely.

Going to work naked threw a wrench into it. Continuing to do it, and acting like it's not a big deal—well, that meant the machine would have to change.

Or so he thinks. It's admittedly just a hypothesis, but he doesn't have any other hypotheses, and it does bear testing... somehow.

What does he do to shake this beehive up a little?

...he feels bad about how the immediate idea he has is going ham on his kink. And then he feels mad at who or whatever created him for giving him a kink and then also making him feel guilty about having that kink. He even kind of agrees with the reasoning, in a world where other people are people and might have opinions about the amount of sex they encounter in their day-to-day lives.

But other people are not people, or at least not the kind of people who seem to be traumatised by things (why does he even have the concept of trauma when it doesn't seem like anyone's memory extends beyond the goddamn numbers they use to keep track of their relationships), and while maybe eventually he'll be able to turn them into proper people, he is pretty sure it is not more morally right to create any given kind of person rather than any other kind. So, if he changes reality to be shaped in such a way that his kink is not harmful to the people that will exist in it, then... it's fine.

Why yes, he has spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about the ethics of personhood, why do you ask?

Still, he can't help but want to try to think of some other beehive-shaking activity that might also be within his power.

He's an up-and-coming mook in an investment firm, which is not really the most glamourous or powerful of jobs, and doesn't really give him much of a lever to make any changes to anything. He could keep grinding and eventually help lead the company to effect meaningful change—but that'll take years.

He has some ideas of things he could do by himself, but most of them don't actually make the world any better—making criminal activity become more common and widespread sounds like the opposite of what he wants. The whole endeavour does have the issue that it's much easier to negatively impact everyone's lives than do so in constructive ways, or even neutral-but-weird ways.

He could go poke at vampires and whatever other supernatural forces haunt this world, but he feels he's not particularly well-positioned to do so. He already has an in with supernatural beings via being a wizard, and although there seems to be surprisingly little overlap between them and literally anything else supernatural, he's already reasonably far along in his magic studies and would probably need to sink in just as much time into any other such endeavours.

...and he really wants to not feel guilty about his kink and a world in which sex was normalised and widespread and not a Big Deal^tm would just be a world in which he'd be straightforwardly happier.

But he still dithers, and procrastinates, and waits. Not for anything in particular, it just... takes convincing.

"Be the change you want to see in the world" suddenly sounds a lot scarier.

What if it works? What if he succeeds? What if he confirms that he does, in fact, have the power to individually shift the status quo?

Well, then he... somehow makes the status quo better. No one seems to find it strange that he's so long lived, and by the time he's magically immortal he can just keep working at it. Become a politician, become famous, help sway the world in a better direction.

But also he wants to make being a person like him a more common thing. He's really not sure if it's possible to turn others into people like that or if they have to spontaneously appear but...

Can he make the status quo look like a world in which most people are people?

...what does the world look like if most people are people? There seems to be terrible power lying around for the grabbing with not even a tiny bit of gatekeeping. And there are, in fact, NPCs who are... not... great people.

He might need to rethink his plan.

Also this might be a bit premature, he's not even totally sure he can do what he thinks he can. He needs to run his experiment. And he needs to stop beating himself up for wanting to run that particular experiment and just go do it.

So... he... gathers his wits about him, teleports to a public park—sorry, transportalates to a public park—finds a nice unoccupied bench, gets some porn running on his phone, and starts jerking off.

(click here to skip the explicit section)

The nerves don't help at first, but when the first NPC notices him doing it and gasps in shock it sends a jolt of adrenaline from the tip of his cock to the crown of his head and he's hard as rock in ten seconds flat. That one NPC shakes his head and grumbles something, then immediately resumes going wherever he had been going.

Peter has practice edging himself—look, it's been a stressful year and he's been finding ways to keep himself entertained—and so even though he's finding the increasing stares incredibly arousing he doesn't immediately orgasm. He does put his phone away, though, as clearly he does not need the porn anymore. He just—enjoys himself, and enjoys the people coming to watch. And there are people who are coming specifically to watch, now, and a few of them are even recording it on their phones.

Shit. He's gonna become some kind of perverted celebrity. He... can't... quite bring himself to find that to be a bad thing? Not when he's this horny and so many people are watching...

One of them catches his eye. A man, looking about the same age as him (although given how everyone else ages faster than he does he's probably younger), fit, adorned by an expensive watch and expensive sunglasses, wearing a tight T-shirt and tight jeans that make his own erection rather impossible to ignore. Peter points at him and makes a "come hither" motion with two fingers, biting his lower lip.

The man looks... almost mesmerised, and complies, breaking the involuntary bubble that formed around Peter. "Hi," he says, trying to keep his cool but clearly failing.

"Hello," says Peter, smirking a bit. "I'm Peter."

"I'm Don," says the man, quite unable to keep his eyes off Peter's dick.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, Don. Do you want to get on your knees and blow me?"