[Stub] “I’m someone trying to change the world.”

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: I had left it to the comments between this and the other route, and the support was overwhelmingly for the other one. I'll remove the [Stub] label if someone else wants to continue this branch and/or if I decide to come back to it.]

It sounded less corny in my mind. I try again as she looks up at me no less fearful an expression. “I’m… well, mostly I’m helping myself get laid, but I’m also helping everyone get hornier. That’s why everything’s different now: you’re not in an alternate dimension, or… whatever, you’re just here now… under my influence.”

Slack-jawed, she lets her eyes drift to the living room where Sophia and Alice somehow remained asleep through all the ruckus just now. “Then… this is all your fault.”

I'm not loving how she puts it, but she’s not wrong. I nod in response.

Her words quiver as she continues, “Then… you really did hurt my family.”

Again, it feels like she jumps along, like I’m missing a step… but am I? Did I really not hurt them? I did shrink one of them… but no, she’s not talking about that. No, she's just assuming they're as conflicted as she is, right? “I-I haven’t hurt anyone, not really! They're not... aware, like you. But they are… going to be more dedicated to me, along with, you know, the rest. Hornier, for sure. But they'll enjoy it, trust me-”

“How are you doing this?”

“If I tell you, you’ll try to stop me.” It wasn’t a question; her hostility remains in every word, even as fear tries to quiet her. I don’t want punishments making things worse for her, so I add, “And you need to stop trying to hurt me or get me into trouble because you’ll end getting punished… not by me! But yeah, trust me.” I look back to the window. “Hell, Ivette sure knows...”

“Ivette…?”

“The albino doctor last night, white hair?”

“That was… a doctor?”

I smirk at that. “She was off-duty last night.” Patricia looks at me, still trembling… until her eyes widen. She holds her head suddenly, freeing her breast as she grunts in pain. Her face screws and twists as if a migraine had just struck her, and I inch closer as worry grows. “Hey, what’s wrong-?”

But my words drift off as Patricia’s pose changes… and a bright, toothy smile slides onto her face. “Phew! That was… weird!”

You’ve got to be kidding me. Now?! “Jane, is that-?”

“You already know it,” Patricia declared in Jane’s too-familiar voice.

No one possessed by a succubus ever expressed pain like that, either. Patricia's uniqueness continues to worry me, but I have to push it aside for now. I mean who knows how long I get Jane this time? “You… okay, okay, so you're here now, but she hasn't done anything else to get a punishment, right?” Realizing I can answer my own question, I fumble to pull the Vita out of my pocket.

“Nope! And don’t worry about my connection time, I should be able to stick around for… as long as I need to!” Oddly limited. “I'm here to report that we finally debugged this Custom Girl!”

I pause, Vita in one hand, as I slowly turn to regard Patricia-Jane. “De... bug?”

“Yeah! We know she's been causing you some distress, not to mention get you thrown in jail, and that's in part because we had some trouble tuning her awareness. It… hmm, to describe it in a way you’d understand, the app was... barely reaching her conscious mind and landing nowhere near her **** mind.” Seems simple enough… which immediately makes me doubt it. “But luckily we zeroed in on the problem and have tuned the suppression to be just right! Don't worry,” she winks, “she'll still be every bit the Patricia you know, so you can stop worrying about us changing her mind… at least until you start paying gems to do so!”

Jane’s charisma shines through awkwardly on Patricia’s face. It dawns on me that I haven’t seen Patricia particularly “happy” yet. It’s… a pretty smile. One I think I’d like to earn. “Oh... hah, wow... yeah, that's... that was causing some serious problems, hah!” I continue to laugh nervously, unsure of why I'm still so... bothered by the fix.

No, that’s a lie: I know what’s bugging me. It’s knowing that I might get her to smile like this again… by **** with the app. It touches something else sitting in my brain, an ugly little question that I need to ask while I have the least-bizarre succubus present.

I know Jane knows what I'm going to ask, but she just smiles and repeats, “Soooo yeah, we'll be patching it in once I'm out of here...” A pause. She forces the smile a bit more. “But... you're going to ask anyways...”

“Well?” I don't bother saying it aloud, but she shakes her head. “So... you don’t?”

“No-no, I'm just saying I'm not going to answer that question unless you say it aloud, that's all!”

Her smile is off-putting, now. Why does she need me to say it when she knows already?! She knew I'd ask before I even did... it just feels, seems too awful to consider, but now that the word's been used... now that the word applies to me, the jarring accusation means I have to know... I have to consider it... and I need a definite answer. “Do you guys get energy from... ****?”

“It depends!”

I hang on her every syllable for long enough that it takes me a few seconds to realize she's not going to be definite. “... on?”

“Well, the motivation for ****, the feelings the victim and **** feel, the remaining humanity in either, and just overall how sexy it might be!”

Hearing her so nonchalantly describe it... well, I regret ever thinking Jane was the "normal" succubus. More, her words... I mean, the implication echoes back to all the thousands of orgasms I’ve caused with Sophia’s video, to all the initial **** of some of my Girls, to… to all the congratulations I’ve gotten, more or less, for a job well-done via the Custom Girls app. “So... you like ****, too...”

“No!” I jump at the sudden exclamation from Jane, who frowns for the first time since she got here. “No no no, you just asked about the energy! You have to… look, you have to be specific, I can’t give you much explanation unless you ask for it in particular or unless I’ve got a reason to.” She gives me a small, almost condescending smile and nod. “Does that make sense?”

“S-Sure.” A succubus having rules is… kind of funny, given everything they’ve done up to now. But it makes sense, right? Until now it’s always sounded like Ginger was Jane’s superior, but who is Ginger’s superior? What rules govern User interaction? Who governs them?

Hopefully not Satan, as Teller's Bible Club would no doubt conclude. Satisfied, she offers a curt, “Good.”

“Alright, so… why don’t you like ****?”

“Oh come on, that’s easy! Consensual sex is way stronger stuff! I mean everyone involved gets into it and enjoying it and... well sometimes too self-conscious to really enjoy it, but still way better than ****! That's part of why we love how you focus so much on making them horny and not just... compliant. Everyone's happy and horny and... well, you know, energetic! We care about pleasure and sexual energy exchanges, not just… pieces going into parts, after all.” Patricia-Jane winks again in an expression I’ll never expect from the host. “I told you at the start: we’re not evil demons here to eat souls or whatever you humans think nowadays. You just said it best: we just want to change the world... for the better!”

The words barely leave me, my wide eyes never leaving hers, “What about… the sex I’ve been having? Is… is it ****?”

Patricia-Jane's smile falters, but only for a moment. “You've been putting out good energy. Sometimes it's less than we'd like... but you've also put a lot of effort into making them enjoy it. At this point, almost all of them are totally into it and the energy has been great!”

“So… I’m a...” She doesn’t answer, and fair enough, it wasn’t a question. My body suddenly slumps against the nearest wall as I lean on it for support. How didn't I key in on this earlier? Maybe I just didn't want to think about it... I think back to wanting a bit of "fight" in Leona, and how that wasn't the same in my head... but what if that's all it ever was? Maybe I just didn't think about it thanks to some kind of god complex, born out of the fact that I literally have a wishing app on my phone to make ladies horny and pliable to my desires...

Whoa, where'd that come from...?

“I wouldn't worry about it too much!”

“But I… I don’t want to…” Am I about to lie to a mind-reading demon? “I want to use the app, but I don’t want to cause…” I can’t even quantify it without getting dizzy. Suffering? Pain? Anguish? Who am I even kidding, watching Sophia squirm was half my motive for turning her into my little slutty prize. I just… went for it. I didn’t even think twice. Why didn’t I think twice? Why did it take the first, fully aware woman to make half-baked observations to jar my own awareness-

I look up at Jane with wide eyes.

My awareness.

Her smile tightens.

“You’re… you’re manipulating me.”

“Well, not the way you’re thinking of it. We did give you the app and gems, though, so that does definitely change who you got to be.”

“What's... what's my awareness... set to?”

“You don't have one. You can't blame...” Jane doesn't finish her sentence, but I can: I don't get to blame them for what I've done.

So... there's no awareness effect on me. Can a succubus lie? Her smile doesn’t change. I don’t ask it. What do I know, then? I know my own awareness until now has been… I don’t know, willfully turned off? Magically turned off? I did like to see Leona put up a fight, I did revel in Sophia’s mild torment, so… why didn’t I connect that very short distance? How didn’t I see it? “I don’t… want to keep blindly doing this.”

“I know you don’t want to. I also know what you're thinking about as a solution... and it's dangerous, and I wouldn't recommend it, but that's only if you'd ask me about it.”

I glance up at her... and the thought does begin to form. At this point, she's reading what I'll eventually think... or maybe I was denying this idea, too unsure, too afraid of its possibilities. But Jane be damned, wouldn't it work? Leona... Ivette... Patricia, or Hell, the whole Matheu clan. No one keeps me in check, no one gives me a chance to second-guess my choices except when they're worried about themselves... but Patricia did. Patricia could.

Patricia would tell me when I’m over the line again… at least until they ruined that, too. “Jane… can we… not ruin Patricia?”

Despite my poorly worded question, Jane already knows my meaning. “Yes, we don't have to apply the patch to her awareness... in fact, we can leave her exactly as she is: an anomaly you can't control, someone basically totally aware and whose awareness you can't censor.” Patricia-Jane crosses her arms and, for the first time since she got here and drops the smile to speak to me in an intense whisper as she steps closer. The sudden intensity catches me off-guard, and I flinch back. “Let’s be clear, then, because I see your struggle, David, and I see how you ignore certain things to think about others.” It’s a slap to the face compared to Jane’s usual delivery; it feels threatening as she approaches. “You feel guilty, but you're also too horny to stop. You want to stop forcing women to have sex with you, but you don't want them to stop having sex with you. You want a conscience to help control you, but you also don't want that conscience to have any real power to stop you... and so, it will fail, which is why you I don't think you should do this.”

It takes the door hitting my back to make me realize my feet kept backing me up and away from the approaching creature; I'm now cornered in the foyer, accused, helpless. “You... can't know that, that hasn't happened-”

“I know you, David,” she coos with a sad smile, “I have known you, and you're never one to listen when a girl tells you... 'no.' Maybe before the app... but not anymore.”

I grit my teeth as anger and embarrassment slide suddenly into my body. Why is she saying this?! It isn't true, right?! I can still… I just lost track of something. I probably lost track because of them, even though she won’t give me an honest answer! So I just... want someone to be the voice of reason, someone I can't just turn off with a button, an alarm with no snooze, a watchdog for her master... someone like that, someone who isn't a succubus egging me on! None of the succubi, not even Jane, have proven capable for that... Hell, Jane basically admitted I've been a **** for awhile now and she never intervened!

No, that’s not even the whole picture: they encouraged ****, didn’t they? They love **** as long as it's horny enough, and if I'm there it's always horny enough. It's just nice that I eventually turn those victims into- Christ on a stick, how did I get here?!