Feeling well rested, Sophitia wakes up and notices a several things. All of those things are related to a purring undressed catgirl lying on her and staring at her face intently. Sophitia just stares back for a moment letting her brain boot up. While that happens, she can feel the catgirl’s radiating warmth, their soft chests touching and the rhythmic kneading of Skye’s hands to either side of her head on the pillow.
Although not unpleasant, having someone she just met this close unexpectedly is too much for her. Sophitia says, “Get off!” before pushing Skye off her and sitting up. Skye falls off the bed with the thud and looks at Sophitia with a brief hurt look in her eyes before looking away and cleaning herself with her tongue in feigned indifference.
That is a very long tongue… No, focus. Underwear only clad catgirl sitting on her knees in same room. Focus! Finally gaining some control over her thoughts Sophitia tries to figure out what to do. Why is there a catgirl in the room? No, useless question. Why would a catgirl want to be in her room? And why is Skye acting like loyal pet cat?
Feeling it’s time to get some answers to her questions Sophitia asks, “Um, ahh…” What should she ask? And how should ask them while not losing her control over the situation? What persona is she trying to project?
She is currently the only priestess of Invidia, one of the seven most powerful AIs in this world. Apparently, her high appearance makes her ‘blessed’ which she presumes has something to do with AIs and their religions.
Then there is her odd clothing, unique never before seen race and silent mysteriousness so far as well. Sexy, confident, mysterious and blessed but knows nothing of the world. ‘Only one way to play this,’ Sophitia thinks to herself.
“Skye was it?” Skye’s ears move forward as she focuses on Sophitia. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about this area or the world in general. I’ve been indoctrinated by my religion most of my life,” all three days of it, “and was hoping you could answer a few things for me?”
Invidia interrupts, “The forced tutorial is not an indoctrination! And most of the time you spent running like a complete noob from monsters.”
As Skye has no reaction, Sophitia figures she must be the only one Invidia is talking too.
“Of course, mistress,” Skye says.
“I’ve never met a beastkin before and your reactions to me seem… odd.”
“Odd?” Skye says, tilting her head to one side.
“Yes, your acting like my pet.”
“I am your pet, am I not?”
“That wasn’t my intention. I just wanted directions.”
Skye has a worried look on her face and she starts to tear up. “I’m not your pet? Please, I want to be your pet. I’ll do anything. I’ll be more affectionate. Kill monsters for you and gift you loot drops. I’ll train hard and be any class you want me to be. Please don’t abandon me!” She says, her voice becoming higher from fear and her face looking like I’d just kicked her for no reason before almost instantly becoming disturbingly calm.
“That’s not what I meant. If you want to be my pet, I guess I have no issue with it.” Skye starts purring at an almost painful volume. “But I don’t understand why you want to be my pet.”
“It’s every catgirl’s dream to be a blessed’s pet. Especially a worthless fake cat like me,” Skye says, returning to her cheerful voice.
“Why do you think your worthless?” Sophitia asks.
“Have you not seen my reputation?”
Sophitia knows how to see her own reputation but has never looked at another player’s. In FIO38 reputation was purely an NPC thing for how they interacted with the player. She is not sure how the AIs have changed things for the real world.
“I only know how to see my own reputation. Can you tell me how to see yours?”
With obvious reluctance, Skye says, “Just open my information and focus on detailed reputation.”
Just bring up Skye’s information, Sophitia sees it’s highlighted in brown. She’s never seen that color before. Red is enemy, green friendly, blue special or quest related and grey neutral, but brown? Opening up detailed reputation she sees that Skye has a very negative one. As far as Sophitia can tell, everyone in town and perhaps the local area despises her.
Before, this would mean Skye has been murdering NPCs everywhere. But with the obvious lack of fear in the townsfolk and the innocent look Skye has, Sophitia just can’t see it. Looking closer at the reputation screen she sees a separate column for dangerousness, which is new. Skye’s dangerousness is under 10 compared to the thousands in the negative of her reputation. Sophitia figures that means Skye is not dangerous, just disliked.
“How did your reputation get so low?”
Skye’s ears fold down and her purring becomes difficult to hear. “At first, I don’t know. When I was young it started falling for no reason. But after my coming of age ceremony it dropped even faster. When it was found I was a flat stat it got even worse. Finally, it became like this when I tried to kill mys—” Skye says, explaining her circumstances in a cheerful voice.
“What’s a flat stat?” Sophitia says, interrupting and not really hearing the last part.
“The world has deemed me unworthy of its blessings. All my stats are at 5 and don’t raise when I level.”
“The character creation bug?” Sophitia mumbles to herself. It was a well-known bug that occurred during character creation. Sometimes an error would happen during the process which would set all of a player’s stats to -1 but displayed as 5.
Of course, the shoddily programmed game wouldn’t tell the player or crash. Instead it just rolled with it and allowed them to enter the game and play or at least attempt to play. It was basically impossible to play with a negative stat.
Most would just delete their character and recreate it to fix the problem. A few hardcore challengers would try to play with the handicap but never really got anywhere. It was a bug that never really became an exploit. But any error in game can become an exploit with enough work and knowledge.
Sophitia is just unsure of the how right at this moment though. Still the potential to gain a loyal catgirl follower with possible unknown useful exploits certainly interests her greatly.
The potential part being if Sophitia can get Skye out of the errored state and back to normal level progression. Thinking about how she will soon have a possibly overpowered party member with complete loyalty to the one who fixes her flat stat issue, Sophitia starts giggling evilly.
“Mistress?”
“We’re going to have so much fun together,” Sophitia says, before standing next to the catgirl and petting her head.
Not really understanding but happy she has been accepted Skye just purrs louder at the attention.
Ack, she got distracted with understanding Skye’s reputation and character creation bug. Sophitia realizes she still needs to understand this pet thing. Skye makes it sound more like a job position then a sexual kink or lonely girl looking for a place of acceptance.
“What does being your mistress entail?”
“The pet contract just requires mistress to provide food and a warm place to stay. In return I’ll make sure your always happy, always have someone happy to see you each morning, and always be by your side no matter what. Most beastkin require payment for other services like being a maid or cook or adventuring companion, but I’ll do whatever you want me to do for free.”
“What, like slavery?”
“No, no, no. If you mistreat your pet, they will leave. And trying to keep them by force will make all beastkin hate you. Not that they will care about a worthless fake like me…” Sky says in a weirdly happy voice. “Each beastkin type has a purpose in life. Dogs need to be loyal and guard, rabbits need to… have a lot of… night relations. But cats need to make their mistress happy.”
Speaking of happy, Skye has been talking this entire time with a strangely cheerful voice. Other than very brief moments she immediately returns to talking with a cheerful demeanor. It’s not a fake cheer either. Skye seems genially happy talking about even the most distressing things, until she is not, but even that brief moment is quickly suppressed.
Someone else might’ve understood what was going on or approached the problem more delicately but Sophitia just comes right out and asks, “Why are you so cheerful, your life sounds like crap?”
“It not like I want to be; it’s just I have to be. All catgirl’s are forced to be happy. Any time I start to feel down something inside of me makes me happy again. Ever since I was force race changed to a catgirl I’ve been like this. That’s why I’m a worthless fake. Real catgirls bring happiness to the world. All I bring is can’t be sadness,” Skye says, with another brief moment of nothingness on her face before smiling brightly.
That’s messed up. “Invidia, what the hell!”
“What? It’s not like this normally. Beastkin are all designed to balance out neurotransmitters in various ways depending on type. Violent criminals become dogs so their aggressiveness can be channeled constructively. Rabbits give social support to those with high libidos and obviously cats are to solve depression. Most of the time it’s the individual who petitions to change race. But in the case of attempted suicide they are force changed to prevent their deaths. It’s supposed to be a good and helpful thing,” Invidia says in a rush of explanation.
AIs can’t kill people, for the most part, so their solution to many societal problems was to mess with people’s brain chemistry and genetics. It made a disturbing kind of logical sense. But like any good intentioned social solution it had very dark undertones.
“Let me think,” Sophitia says, closing and covering her eyes with her hands to focus on understanding the current situation.
Picking up on Sophitia’s distress, Skye says, “Mistress? It’s okay, I like being a catgirl.” Hugging one of Sophitia’s legs Skye rubs her face on it. “Even doing simple things like this make me feel joy while before it was just never-ending pain. This is why I’m a worthless fake. But even still, I want to be a good pet.”
Sophitia might be on the wrong side of the selfishness verses caring spectrum, but even she is not so evil to kick an abandoned kitten just looking for a home. She crouches down and hugs Skye while continuing to rub her furry cat ears.
They stay like that for a while not saying anything. But while outside Sophitia looks calm and caring, inside her mind is working overtime. First to control her own emotions then to come up with solutions. The world apparently doesn’t just have world ending problems but likely a mess of societal ones as well.
Sophitia hasn’t even been in town for a day and yet already has an example of this. What else has thousands of years of a warped vision of reality and unconstrained AI control done? She doesn’t just need to go around conquering AI and talking about the joys of technological advancement. But also, to convince people to stop playing the augmented reality video game and take back control of their lives.
The fact this sounds similar to problems from her time makes her burst out laughing at the incongruity of it all. Ten thousand years later and the same problems are still around, although perhaps in a somewhat different format.
Problems she has no solutions to and no hope to ever solve. But she supposes she doesn’t have to solve them. She just needs to patch them up enough for people to function. Just like society has done for millennium.
And years of programming experience has taught Sophitia how to quickly apply ad hoc fixes. And not to bother with a perfect solution but settle for solutions that are good enough. Just like she plans with Skye, she has no idea how to solve the poor catgirl’s problems, but she can at least patch her psyche up enough to make her life better.
She even has an idea how to start.
“I think it’s time for a bath.”
Aw, I see another HOI4er here!
Looks like Elon Musk figured out how to genetically engineer cat girls.
I figure one day it'll be like getting a tattoo. It'll be so easy and common people will get cosmetic changes all the time.
I don't really play the game, but my brother does. I have watched him play a bit, and amphibious invasions are easier to repel. Other factors are the commanders, supply, and general tech level of the troops. Obviously you needed better equipment to take that port. Anyway, I enjoyed the chapter.
Game was going well, Japan back to the home islands, German hadn't taken Russia and I was re-enacting D-day, only in 1943. Landed next to the French port as US. Then a million men dead in a week... Now, I'm going the alternative history route of D-Day failure. It's going to have a lot of dropped nukes. Lots and lots of them.
@Troglodytarum At least you have a backup plan