A New Day

I wake up the next morning more refreshed than I had felt in weeks. Not only was the weight of anxiety about losing my job and my right to reside in this country lifted from my shoulders, but I feel imbued with a new energy, something I hadn’t felt since I first joined college. A sense of purpose.

I’m no longer here in this school to pathetically limp my way from paycheque to paycheque, with my only hope and ambition being for my life not to get even worse.

Now, I’ve got something to work towards. That goal may be evil and selfish, but goals are all we have to give our life meaning, so I’ll take it.

Funny how in order to give your life that meaning, you need just the right balance of power. Too little and you can’t do anything, you’re stuck at the bottom of the food chain, so busy with survival that you can’t afford to live. But too much power and it all becomes pointless. If the app had let me change everyone instantly with no limits, I would’ve been very happy for a few days, and completely unsatisfied for the rest of my life. A god bored with his own creation.

If God is real, that’s probably what turned him away from the whole Creation thing.

Struggles define us to an extent, but you need to give everyone a fighting chance. Make sure each person can have the bare minimums of a decent life so they can find a worthy struggle to dedicate themself to.

Maybe I can use my powers to make the world more like that. More just, more equal, while making sure we don’t end up in an dystopic utopia of indolence in the process.

You know, after I’m done with the much more pressing goal of getting my dick wet and corrupting an entire school into my very own sexual heaven.

After all, when I’m done with this, I’ll need a new goal, a new struggle.

+15 BS. 25 remaining.

Ah! There’s my daily allowance. Looks like they’re rounding up, which I certainly won’t complain about. The fact that I received them right after I woke up makes it a bit tough to know what exactly the app considers a new day. Did I get them at midnight, but am only feeling them now because I was asleep at that time? Was it at dawn? Or is it related to me sleeping, and if so how does it interact with naps and sleepless nights?

It’d be a useful thing to learn about. I’ve got my morning off tomorrow, so I might stay up a bit later than usual tonight to test it out.

New profile added: Saint Gregory Boarding School.

The… school has a profile? I open the app while preparing my coffee and see that the Profiles tab has been split into two sections: People and Groups, with the latter only containing the school itself. I click on it and an explanation window pops up:

Congratulations! One of your implanted beliefs has spread through more than 10% of a social group. You may now monitor its progress, as well as that of any ulterior ones, directly from the group’s dedicated page. As you increase your influence over it, more features and information may become available. Certain Store items may also only be used on groups.

Further beliefs you implement will only appear on the social group’s profile when they have also spread through at least 10% of its members. Before then, they will appear on the profiles of the specific people that have been affected by it. After the 10% mark has been cleared, the belief will only display on the group’s profile and the profile of the person initially convinced, to avoid everyone’s page becoming annoyingly long. Clicking on a partially spread belief from a group profile will display a list of all affected people.

After dismissing it, the new profile appears:

Saint Gregory Boarding School

Population: 246

Traits: Disproportionately female, remote, high income, young (…)

Beliefs:

• It is good, natural and important for someone to threaten students' and teachers' virtue in the school, as doing so will increase their compliance and make them more likely to stay at the school.
  • Source: Ellen DeJong
  • Spread: 26%

Clicking on the Spread button reveals a list of names. Interestingly, only names I actually know are revealed, the rest are simply displayed as “???”, but it seems like even those question marks can be infected, as some of them have a check mark on the left. Computer Science is an optional class that less than half of the students here take, so I only teach about 60 of the roughly 200 girls in the school, and I don’t know many names outside of those 60.

As I keep going, I notice something interesting. Out of the four groups that I have a class with, the one I taught yesterday afternoon is much more convinced than the other three. There are still a few holdouts that haven’t been converted yet, but the differences is night and day nonetheless. A quick count shows that out of the fifteen students in the class, twelve now hold the belief that threatening their virtue is a good thing. Including Rachel, Isabel… and Ivy.

I might actually be able to have some fun while I wait for my BS to replenish.

The difference between them and the rest of the school can’t be a coincidence. It has to be related to them being in my class for two hours yesterday. The question is, was it caused of physical proximity to me, physical proximity to my phone, and therefore the app, or was it because they were hearing my voice, the voice that created that rule?

I look at the three that haven’t been affected yet. Ophelia, Cyndi and Sandra.

Ophelia sits in the back and never seems to listen to what I say, so either theory could explain why she wasn’t converted. She’s a really strange girl too. She’s constantly ignoring the uniform rules, but the clothes she wears instead are actually fairly boring. She dyed her hair, but only to a slightly darker shade of her natural colour. She got a tattoo, but it’s just a tiny “O” fairly high up her arm. It’s like she rejects conformity out of principle, but she doesn’t really have a strong enough sense of identity to know what to replace conformity with.

Cyndi was also sitting in the back and also wasn’t listening. And yes, it’s spelled with the Y and the I backwards. Short for Cynthia, apparently. From what I gathered, she’s the daughter of an absentee father and his sugar baby, and it shows. She’s constantly talking about her issues with the boys in the nearby town and she seems to see the idea of getting a job or having a good education as secondary to that of securing a generous... “patron”.

Sandra might be the key to this puzzle though. She’s usually a fairly diligent student, although not a particularly bright one, but she was out sick last week and decided to sit a few seats away from the others in case she might still be contagious, which might be the kindest thing I’ve seen a girl in this school ever do.

So if she was further away than usual, but was still listening as usual, that would suggest that physical proximity is what matters.

And that gives me an idea.

See, this group is actually my main one, since it’s the class for the students that picked more STEM-oriented options, so instead of seeing them a couple times a week, I have them nearly every day, including today at 11.

I know Sandra can’t come to this particular class because of a timetable conflict, so if I can get close enough to Cyndi and Ophelia for a bit before our class together, I might be able to push them over the edge and have my fun.

I log onto our online platform to check their schedule. I’m not supposed to have access to it for privacy reasons, but the person in charge of our web systems needed some help setting some things up and I’ve had access to the backend ever since. IT people really are hard to find around here. She was technically hired as a community manager and then told to take care of “the internet things”, the poor girl.

Aha! Looks like Cyndi and Ophelia both have an English class in their first period, in about 30 minutes. I get along quite well with Julian, the English teacher, so she’ll probably let me in if I find a good pretext.

I finish my coffee, have a quick shower, and get dressed for a long, but hopefully rewarding day.