A Conversation About Stories

The fire was still burning when Penny and Kevin came to consciousness together. True to its name, the dreamweaver had dropped them into the scenario Penny had crafted without reason or explanation. Waking, they were surprised to learn that extended not just to the time leading up to the dream’s arrival, but to its exit as well.

The last thing Penny remembered was depositing 200 of her 881 GP at the shop, while Kevin’s mind went hazy around when he started to flip through the chapters of a superhero themed season of the show. At some point after that, they’d found themselves inhabiting twenty-something year old bodies as they spurned retracing footsteps in favor of forging a new path.

Now, some time after they returned to Kevin’s room in the hotel, Penny drew her head up and discovered that they’d been returned to the Master bedroom. Both were still naked, her body pressed full length to Kevin’s side with her head resting his shoulder.

Neither showed any sign of the sweat that had coated their bodies in the dream, nor the stickiness she associated with sex. Any lingering fuzziness in her head quickly dissipated and left none of the buzz of the drinks they’d shared, but the warmth that lingered within her suggested that the sex they’d had was—somehow—very real.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed one strange artifact: the champagne-colored dress she’d worn in the dream was folded neatly over the back of a chair not far from the massive master bed, a stark reminder of the blurred line between dream and reality.

A soft sound from Kevin drew Penny’s attention back to the man she was snuggled up against, and she tilted her head enough to look at his face. He smiled back at her, and a few moments passed in companionable silence, before she pushed herself up to let her lips press to his.

The kiss wasn’t deep, or urgent. It lacked the heat of their earlier exchange, but as it lingered—as she felt his stubble against her face, the way his arm tightened around her bare shoulders to pull her in—Penny couldn’t help but let out a softly musical moan. She broke the kiss a minute later, let out a happy sigh, and pulled back to snuggle in close against his chest.

They rested together for a few moments longer, neither willing to move, until Penny’s drifting thoughts happened onto a trailing loose end from earlier in the day. “Hey, earlier, when we were talking, you said something that we didn’t get to finish. Something about sirens luring sailors.” When the look on Kevin’s face showed recognition, the prompted, “Tell me more about that?”

He hesitated for a few moments. “It’s not a fully fleshed out theory yet, just something that occurred to me as I was thinking about what Kyle told me. He—Kyle—is,” Kevin paused there for a moment as he struggled for the right word, “he’s the class trainer for my class, Favored Soul, but I think he’s a lot more than that too.”

Penny shifted slightly, watching Kevin’s face. “What do you mean?”

“So… I’ll need you to bear with me for a minute, there’s some context you’re missing and this will only make sense if I give it. I’ll try to be brief.”

Kevin looked a little flushed, which caused Penny to laugh quietly. “You’re cute. You’ve got a naked woman pressed up against you and that’s fine, but the minute you start talking about your hobbies you get embarrassed.”

He shrugged. “Laying here with you feels natural. Talking to beautiful women about D&D, by contrast, makes me feel like a bad nerd stereotype from an 80s movie.”

Penny snickered but didn’t interrupt, so Kevin continued, “Anyway, the system that Favored Soul comes from is one of the older editions of Dungeons and Dragons. There are a couple different classes in that edition that wield divine power, but most of them do that second-hand. Clerics and Paladins, for example, are granted their powers in through specific prayers and rituals offered to whichever god or gods they follow. Favored Souls work a bit differently. Instead of prayers or anything, they just channel divine power that comes from within.”

A blonde eyebrow arched as Penny asked, “So, what, instead of getting power from gods, they’re gods themselves?”

Kevin’s left hand remained wrapped around Penny’s shoulders, while his right lifted up to wiggle in a gesture of equivocation. “Kinda. A little. D&D was always a little squirrelly about the process for actually becoming a god. The path was there, though, with the implication that Favored Souls started with one foot on it.”

“Alright, so if Kyle is supposed to guide you further along the path, you think that—what, he’s a god?” Penny didn’t wait long enough for Kevin to answer the question before adding, “And even if he is, what do you think any of this means for us? Lily might as well be a god as far as most of us are concerned, right?”

Kevin grimaced. “Maybe. Here’s where the theory gets a little less thought out. You make a good point about Lily, because really, what even is a god? I still don’t know all of what Hwa could do before she was brought here, but it’s more than me. Hazel has some kind of connection to the land that defies human description, and Tess and Abby can both turn into seals. I think the point here is that ‘god’ isn’t so much an absolute set of criteria as it is a useful descriptor. Shorthand, to make telling a story easier.”

He paused there, his brown eyes intent when they met Penny’s bright blue ones. “And I think the story is the point.” When she cocked an eyebrow in response, he went on, “I think that what Kyle told me was a hint about what Lily set out to do. You—all of you—were brought here not because of any connection we shared before the season started, but because you all have myths associated with you. Pre-existing stories that Lily can leverage to try to shove you down a neatly packaged path.”

“But I don’t think most of us fit. I mean, Stheno does, and maybe Hwa—” Penny’s expression darkened as she hit a conversational speed bump, but she waved off Kevin before he could derail the conversation by asking about it. “Later. What you said earlier, though? About how all of us wanted something different, doesn’t that run counter to what you’re saying?”

He shook his head. “No, I still think that’s deliberate. I think that what Kyle was trying to hint at was that all of you have your own myths, but Lily intends to start new ones, with me at the center. I’m not sure exactly what kind of being Kyle is, but he’s powerful enough to shape the world, to shape stories into reality. Lily is doing the same thing, and I think that the only way I can do anything to take control is to try my hand at the same thing.”

Penny was silent for long enough that Kevin started to worry that he’d lost her—either because the conversation had gotten too weird, or because the path he offered was too radical. Just as he lifted his head to look at her, she spoke up in a quiet voice that drifted hauntingly through the low warm light of the Master suite, “So you’re saying you’d need to become a god. At least a small one.”

Kevin’s head dropped again and he stared at the canopy of the enormously oversized bed as he sighed. “If you want to be explicit about it, I’m saying that I think they’re already in the process of making me into a minor god and that I need to start acting like one.”

Once more, Penny was quiet, but this time it lasted only a few moments. She moved, then, finally pushing herself up off of her position snuggled against Kevin’s chest, but didn’t go far.

Instead, she pulled herself upright to sit cross-legged at an angle that let her watch the DM’s face. Her arms moved behind her to rest on the covers as she leaned on them, the pose lifting and displaying her heavy breasts without even a hint of shame. Kevin’s eyes were pulled in by their inexorable gravity, and he could feel the electric undercurrent of arousal that Performer raised dancing beneath the surface of Penny’s skin when his attention on her lingered.

It was mild, with just one observer present, but Kevin was slightly surprised when he pushed his House Rule senses further and discovered a hint of something more—a constant low- level thrum that left her constantly aware of some degree of attention from the show’s invisible audience. He couldn’t tell if she was consciously aware of it, and his mind ran a few laps as he tried to calculate how much influence it would have had on her behavior since that first day before pushing that aside as something to examine later.

Kevin shook his head and forced his eyes up to Penny’s face, where she’d watched him check out her tits with a slight smirk that did not look at all displeased. He coughed, and she let out a warm, gentle laugh in response before finally asking, “What, in your mind, does that mean? Acting like a god, that is.”

Kevin’s smile faded a little. “That’s an easy question to answer in broad strokes, a much harder one when we get to the specifics—and it’s going to mean we have to touch on a couple of sensitive topics. Are you up for it?”

She let herself take the time to give the question the consideration it deserved before giving an answer. “I don’t think I have any choice. I—there’s a part of me that’s trying to leave what happened with Hwa in the past. Even if I try to pretend it isn’t any more real than the memories Lily gave us, though, that doesn’t stop my thoughts from drifting back towards it. Every time they do, it’s like I’m caught in a whirlpool and I have to put effort into not letting myself sink into it.”

As Penny went quiet and her eyes drifted off into the distance, Kevin pulled himself up into a sitting position. Before he could respond, she continued, “I’m worried, Kevin. I never thought about women that way—sexually—before. I know performers—actors and singers, at least—have a reputation for being gay, and it wasn’t like I didn’t have plenty of friends who were some flavor or variety of queer, but I’m straight. I was straight. Then Hwa gave me something, dosed me somehow, and two days later I’m madder about that than I am about the fact that we spent twelve hours going down on each other like there was a prize for the winner.”

Kevin snorted. “There was. Hwa got a new transformation in the dungeon that turns every sexual encounter she has into a contest.”

The revelation was enough to briefly pull Penny from her thoughts. She turned her head to shoot him a level look and asked, “Seriously?” His grimace was all the confirmation she needed, and she lifted her head to stare up at the canopy as she stated simply, “That’s ridiculous. This whole place is ridiculous, and that’s part of what makes it so dangerous. If you’d told me two weeks ago that I’d be drugged into having marathon sex with a woman—well, actually, I probably would’ve called you a creep and tried to pepper spray you, but it would’ve kept me up that night. It actually happened here, and I think I’m more worried about the idea that it might have turned me permanently bi than that a million, bajillion people watched me get date raped by a sexy evil fox lady.”

Kevin leaned forward so he could reach a hand out to squeeze Penny’s knee. “I know. Not—not most of the details, but I know that this place is wearing at you. It’s designed to, the whole point of Harem Hotel is that it takes women and turns them into versions of themselves that are designed to fit some kind of fantasy, either for the audience or for me, or for some combination of both. It wears at you and subjects you to things no sane person should have to endure, and one of the most insidious parts of it is that it works hard to change you and convince you that whatever version of you that comes out the other side is still okay because you can remember the through line of yourself the whole way.”

Kevin squeezed Penny’s knee again, and this time found that it was surprisingly easy to focus on her face. “To answer your question, what happened with you and Hwa is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. This place is trying to turn you into new myths—new takes on old legends, mixed with new tropes and ideas from the modern world. Kumiho in legend are usually evil man-eaters who will trick and devour passersby, and sirens are beautiful women who lure sailors to crash into the rocks. This place saw those two, asked what happened when you got caught in each other’s orbit, and decided that what happened to you two nights ago was the result.”

Penny returned Kevin’s gaze, and while her eyes were hard to make out in the dim firelight as the evening sun slowly fled, there was no mistaking the haunted worry she wore. He stopped there, gave her knee another soft squeeze, and added, “We don’t have to finish talking about this now. I should’ve known that would still be affecting you.”

Penny sighed and shook her head. “No. It’s—I’m not going to say it isn’t weighing on me, because it is, but—I’m surprised to even say it myself, I feel more okay with what happened than I think I should. I think I’m madder that I let Hwa trick me like that than I am that I had sex with a woman.”

Kevin removed his hand and shifted back so he could lean back against some pillows. “There’s something about this place, about Harem Hotel, that’s probably at fault. It’s subtle—more subtle than a lot of the effects have been, at least—but it’s probably been active since the moment we all arrived here, making us accept and go along with everything more easily. I—that kind of thing is why I think I need to start taking an active, deliberate hand in things, because if I don’t I think we’ll all just wind up going along with whatever happens without any control at all.”

“Except for Lily’s,” Penny commented dryly.

“Except for Lily’s.”

Penny’s eyes closed as she took a deep, slow, deliberate breath. The singer held it for a long moment, then let it out in an equally slow and deliberate exhale, before opening her eyes, looking at Kevin, and commanding, “Tell me what you think you need to do, in as much specific detail as you can. It sounds crazy, but given everything else that’s happened, I’d rather have you take control than leave things to fate—or the audience.”

Kevin met Penny’s gaze for long enough to see the determination in her eyes, then nodded. “When Lily gave me House Rule, the description said that it—actually, here,” he lifted his hand and pulled up his character sheet to pull the description of House Rule up for her.

Favored Soul (Class Ability) - House Rule - DM Path

(Passive) Your senses extend into the realm of magic and divinity, allowing you to directly perceive the forces acting upon your environment. (2) You can see the written descriptions of any rules in effect by focusing on them.

(Active) Make one modification or change to the rules of an effect, as long as that change has been performed before at least once in Harem Hotel history. (2) Certain rules will have keywords that you can change from a preselected list.

Penny spent a few moments reading through it again, then nodded, and Kevin continued, “The things it says it can do, well—it can do them, but what I’ve learned is that all of the written descriptions of everything here are… they’re attempts to put labels on things that don’t fit words that cleanly. There’s so much more going on beneath the surface that it’s frankly dizzying. I’m only just now starting to learn to see under the surface, and while that makes me afraid to mess things up, the more I see the more convinced I am that inaction is as bad as action here.”

He paused, took a deep breath of his own, then looked back at Penny. “What I want to do—what I think I need to do—is talk to each of you and figure out what shape we want our relationship to take. Experienced tried to tell us that you were a one-weekend stand that hooked up with me and broke my heart when we didn’t see each other again. You and I rejected that, not we need to figure out what takes its place.” A lopsided grin managed to make its way onto Kevin’s face, and a moment later he asked sweetly, “Hey, Penny—do you wanna be my girlfriend?”