I am feeling the afterglow very hard as Jessica drags me to my feet. I follow her without much thinking about where she's taking me, but it's not far: The bathroom. I guess she wants me to wash up? "Cleaning is easy…"

She interrupts me with a kiss, followed by a word, "Not this kind sweetness; come on."

I put up no resistance at all until I see what she has in mind: The mirror. It fills me with dread… but the dread is largely overwhelmed by the residual pleasure. I still voice an objection, "I know what I look like…."

"Intellectually you know, yes. But acceptance is missing, and you've been getting worse very quickly. We need to deal with this now."

This is the president's suite. That mirror takes up an entire wall, much like you might find at a dance studio. It shows everything, unmercifully. I close my eyes like a petulant child.  Jessica, however, has a solution.

She tickles my body's neck.

I didn't know I was ticklish. But it seems I am. And as soon as I open them, I lock eyes with my body. That face. I hate that face. It looks like a working girl advertising. Big, puffy lips. A tiny nose. Long, dark lashes.

Jessica breaks my chain of thought, "You’re beautiful, sweetness. Look into your eyes and say, 'I'm beautiful.'"

"She looks like a streetwalker."

"Not she. And you didn't choose this, but you can make the most of it. You’re beautiful, sweetness. Look into your eyes and say, 'I'm beautiful.'"

I can't do that. It hurts. "Noone will ever take her as anything more than eye candy, a trophy to be taken."

"Not her. You are far more, and can change their perceptions with your actions. You’re beautiful, sweetness. Look into your eyes and say, 'I'm beautiful.'"

I whisper, "I'm beautiful."  This hurts.

"Again."

I manage… close to a normal speaking voice, "I'm  beautiful." Why is she making me do this?

"Again."

"I'm beautiful."  I'm crying. Why am I crying?

"Again."

"I'M BEAUTIFUL." And… I finally feel it. I break down sobbing, collapsing to the floor, and Jessica, still as nude as I am, sits down and rocks me in her arms.  "You’re OK sweetness, you're OK, you're past the worst of it."

My voice cracks, "There’s more?"

She chuckles, "There’s always more. You're not wrong that the world will have certain expectations based on your appearance, and will try to force you to conform to them. You're going to need a strong sense of self to fight that tide, and that starts by accepting what happened. You didn’t choose it, it’s not fair, and you will never replace what you lost. This is you now. No, you're not the same you of yesterday, or last week, or last month. But whatever happened, happens or will happen, you're still you."

I laugh through the tears, "Where’d you learn to do that? I can't imagine it's in any psychology handbook."

She looks a bit wistful, "I first did it for an old army buddy who had taken a hit from napalm in a fight. He was horribly scarred and what he had left could barely be called a face."

He? "So you're bi?"

She shakes her head, "Not at all. I gave a precious gift to a dear friend who was in dire straits. It cost me a lot. An act of love to be sure, but there was no lust from my side.  It worked - quite well, he eventually landed a bride and is living a life of leisure with three kids over in Idaho on military disability. Frank's not rich but Uncle Sam didn't leave him out to dry; he gets by well enough. Spends a lot of time fishing. He called me just a week ago to reminisce." She pauses, "You were a lot more fun to help. Not gonna lie."

Wait… "Does that mean we're one and done?"

She hums for a bit, considering, "Only if you want to be. I'm between girlfriends at the moment, and you hit most the checkboxes for being worth the time to give it a go."

"Most?"

"You’re completely broke with no job. But that’s a recent development you'll be able to fix soon enough, and you have extenuating circumstances. Giant, soft, extenuating circumstances.  Four of them." She wiggles her eyebrows.

I laugh at that, "Learn to count," and slap MY rear, causing a visible shockwave to traverse from one side to the other, then jiggle for a little while.

"Right, six," she laughs too. "You ready to get cleaned up and dressed? I'd like your take on tonight's meeting. Watch and listen during, tell me your thoughts after."

"Sounds like a plan," I say as I magic away the evidence of our tryst, including cleaning the bed.

Jessica shakes her head, "That is SO handy."

As we leave the Bungalow, Jessica stops at the statue’s "entrance" and says, "You didn’t show me what's in there."

"I haven't gone inside. It looks suspiciously like me, and the imagery is just so…"

"I get it. But you mentioned that about the only thing missing is a library, right?"

"Yes…" I'm not quite sure where she's going with this.

"Well, if this facility is a seed of civilization, then the most important thing for the rebirth…"

"Is information. Seriously? What kind of sick mind would put the entrance to a library inside a giant statue's slit?"

"I'll check. I'm really curious why it looks so much like you.  Can't imagine you were known whenever this place went in."

"I wasn't born yet, much less looked like this."

The last thing I hear from Jessica before she disappears into the giant open clam? "Which suggests you were modeled after the statue."

That gives me pause. Did that eldritch entity know about this place, and that I'd find it, and pick this form just to mess with me? If it had that much foreknowledge, how could it have possibly lost the bet?

As I muse, Jessica calls out, "Microfiche readers, I think. They don't look quite right, but there's four of them. Looks like the Microfiche itself is in quadruplicate too, and some kind of metal. A full technical library of the day in each mammary. The 'milk' of civilization."

She pushes the curtains aside as she comes back out, "The presentation leaves something to be desired, but if you want a good education that's several decades out of date, it looks as though all the information you need is packed in there."

"Whoever thought this place up had to have been tripping. It's patently absurd."

Jessica agrees with me, "Oh yes, it’s insane, but it does make a twisted sort of sense. Assuming Engineering also had all the tools," I nod, and she continues, "Then this bunker is intended to Jumpstart humanity after a nuclear war."

"Very altruistic… unless of course the folks planning it planned to be present themselves."

"Well, with the number my grandmother mentioned, these could easily host a bunch of governors or something.  So… yeah."

"And somebody's still answering the phones, so this is an active project. Well, anything more for down here?"

Jessica considers, "Yes. I should take pictures of those monitors so I can better identify where the cameras are installed."

We head back over to Security, I turn on all the monitors, and Jessica pulls out her phone… it has a bubble gum pink case, but who am I to judge?

She frowns after the first photo.

"What’s up?" I inquire as I look over her shoulder.

"There’s these big black bars on my pictures. Some kind of weird anti spy tech?"

I laugh, "Not deliberately. It's a side effect of how old tube TV's worked. They only actually light up one pixel at a time, although they take a bit to fade after the electron beam moves on. Your eyes don't care due to how they work, but the camera on your phone works faster than the screen does using similar principles. We can fix that with exposure settings.  Allow me…."

She hands me her phone, and I go into the advanced settings in her camera app. I slow down the shutter speed and reduce the aperture, playing with the settings until I get a good picture, then hand it back.

"There you go. You'll need to be careful about holding still while you take pictures - these settings make it a lot more sensitive to movement - but that should get full screen pictures. You'll want to reset it for normal when you're done."

As she's taking pictures of all the above ground views, I spot the lower end of the lift on camera: looks like it's in the farm somewhere.

When she's done, "And… how do I reset this?"

That one is simple enough that I point her through the menus rather than doing it for her. That concludes our current business down here, so we head back up to the surface, bypassing the sealed door with Invisibility and two Dimension Hop spells, then get up the pipe with Spider Climb.