Daphne Tries Masochist Mode Again (This Time With Alex)!

Daphne

Daphne has gotten one of the harem bunny-daughters to make her a lanyard to hold her official Marcie and Gina Reviews Official Masochist Mode Member badge. She especially likes the stickers of sharks on it. So, lanyard around her neck (and wearing nothing else, as a mermaid should), she bursts into the Hotel library on a mission. Alex is going to help her with another review. “It’s time to review, again!”

Alex, sitting on top of a bookshelf while lazily playing her battle ax, jerks alert. Her permanent goth makeup as sultry as ever, the valkyrie has on a tight black T-shirt and a plaid skirt that reaches mid thigh. When she gets over the mermaid’s startling declaration, she quips, “Didn’t get impressing that bully Gina out of your system yet, dudette?”

“Nope. Maybe, if I do enough of these, Gina will acknowledge me as super cool!”

Alex jumps down, black angel wings unfurling just long enough to slow her fall before disappearing again. Daphne enjoys watching Alex’s skirt flare up, giving the mermaid a peek at her goth valkyrie wife’s not cloaca. Landing on her feet, Alex notes, “Well, if it’s anything like what Scarlet described last time, I am going to need coffee. We doing this at the Lunacoin?”

Oooh, not salty enough black water! Daphne excitedly nods.

“Let’s go then. What are we reviewing, Daph?”

As they walk, Daphne exclaims, “This time it’s Pipe-Weed Dreams, by someone named Zeebop. Our show-runner provided me some notes. It apparently read the story as it was coming out and it has given us some things to consider.”

“It?”

“Sea slugs are hermaphroditic.”

Alex makes a face that conveys some level of confusion. She apparently decides it is better not to ask any more questions, as she responds, “Okay then. Go for it.”

“So, the story is divvied up into a main character storyline and a trail of side characters storylines. They eventually merge at the end. So, we could hop back and forth like the show-runner did at the time, read through the main line first and be surprised by random new characters popping in, or read through the side character stories first. Marcie and Gina mostly just read the main story.”

Daphne enjoys the fresh air and sunshine as Alex thinks. The hoppalong orgy in the orgy section of the park is going strong for mid-morning. The birds sing as they exit the park and approach the Lunacoin. Alex finally answers as she opens the door to the coffee shop, “Well, let’s try that last idea. We don’t want to look like we’re just copying those weirdos, now do we?”

Daphne settles into a big comfy chair at a two-seater table and arranges the stacks of paper, now that they have a reading plan. She gets briefly distracted by Moolisa (the hu-cow barista that works the morning shift) milking herself straight into a milk pitcher to make Alex’s order. Alex gives her a love headbutt as she returns.

“One mermaid special macchiato and a pitcher of chilled seawater for my lovely fish-wife,” she intones as she sits across from Daphne.

Daphne smiles and takes a swig, downing half of the cute, squid ink flavored espresso drink (with just a touch of Moolisa’s milk) in one go. She feels the jitters start to set in. Alex sips her hu-cow milk mocha and the two begin to read.

READING IN PROGRESS (BGM)

Alex begins with a question, “Shall we begin with addressing a general tone issue before we get into the nitty gritty of the story?”

“Tone?”

“On a technical level, the story is well constructed. I love the journaling title conceit for the side stories. This Zeebop character just gave himself a tonal challenge that may have been overly ambitious? Tolkien was trying to make a heroic mythology for the English with The Lord of the Rings and the other works of Middle-Earth. Cyberpunk is pretty much the opposite tone: a gritty, cynical mood where the good guys often only win a Pyrrhic victory at the end. Balance is difficult here, to say the least. I feel like this is more of a cyberpunk story in a Middle-Earth skinsuit than a true blending of the genres.”

“So, you don’t want to just talk about the ‘sexy’ times?” Daphne asks.

“Oh, Daph, we are going to talk about the ‘sexy’ times too. Zeebop has some… interesting tastes.”

“Okay. Our first side character is Quillian Daleman, a lady Beorning (were-bear) crooked cop with a taste for prostitutes. Banging prostitutes, not eating prostitutes. She covers up a double homicide of orc smugglers that had some guns sold from the evidence locker. Then she heads home to find a dwarf prostitute waiting for her.”

Alex notes, “First off, boo, Zeebop! Dwarves have beards, even the ladies! No beard description? For shame. Also, good news: we have a sex scene in our first chapter. Bad news: it’s a rimming scene. Gross.”

“Said prostitute, Lilja Carvedinstone, steals the data off Daleman’s phone. She’s a hacker, I guess? That is a cyberpunk thing, right? Then, she is ordered to brave an exploration into Daleman’s bear cave.”

“Daleman then gets called in for a museum heist. Someone broke into the vault and stole a Morgul-blade. Given the nature of the weapon, that is terrifying. We briefly get to meet driving guy and museum guy.”

“Lilja sets up a fake elf escort, Vanesse, to distract our bear-lady so she can hack into the police network. By fake elf escort, we mean an escort that is a fake elf, not an elf that is a fake escort.”

Alex pipes up, “I can hear our oread-wife grousing about fake tits now. And our elf-wife cringing at basically everything about Vanesse. Anyways, I love the riddles as passwords touch. It would be stupid in real life, but a fun little callback.”

“Callback?” Daphne asks.

“You should read The Hobbit sometime. There is a riddle-off scene in it that is rather amusing and consequential in the story. Back to plot?”

“Daleman and Vanesse have sexy foreplay times that turns into an impromptu interrogation. That’s a little bit rude, isn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t you focus on your partners during sex?”

“True. But Daleman doesn’t seem to be one for romance at the moment. So, orc gangbangers try to kill Daleman at home. They knew enough not to try the heavily booby-trapped door, opting to go through the wall. Lilja warns Daleman, blowing her cover (if Daleman thought of it), and Daleman goes through them like Josie would. When she returns to Vanesse, we don’t get to see how that went, but, after an interlude with the folks paying Daleman under the table, we get the start of a threesome scene with Vanesse, Lilja, and Daleman, so I guess it worked out?”

Daphne rolls her eyes, “Yeah, Vanesse is kind of dumb, isn’t she?”

“Hey, don’t insult my fellow language nerd, Daph. She is naive, sure, and talks like a bimbo, but she’s not dumb.”

“We have a shift in perspective to Brianna Looseleaf, the free-use quadriplegic hobbit hacker, which is not a combination of words I ever thought about assembling. She finds an eel thing on the web that had a survey on hand and she steals both the data and the eel. Then she gets slightly choked and thoroughly face-fucked by Aubert’s prehensile giant plastic penis. Seriously, does Zeebop always fade to black on sex scenes unless they are squick?”

“Seems that way, but, we did miss Daleman fucking Vanesse while drenched in orc gore, so there is some restraint? Want to continue, Daph?”

“Sure. Brianna finds the investigation Daleman first worked and connects it potentially to some war vet chick named Rowana, which must be the main character that we haven’t met in this side character reading fest. She logs out to see Aubert fucking her, so she rolls with it. We spend several more chapters watching Brianna investigate and develop her relationship with Aubert. It’s a sweet story, in a super fucked up way. And some of the sex scenes aren’t gross! Neat!”

Alex smirks, making a face of disgust for a few seconds, “Aubert planning on giving Brianna a clit engagement(?) ring was. Still, our side character groups run into each other. Lilja tracked down Brianna. The beardless dwarf is looking for a bioweapon, maybe?”

“A bioweapon named Bob.”

Alex quips, “A noble and powerful name for a weapon, if I ever heard one.”

Daphne giggles and takes a long sip of cool, refreshing seawater. She then picks up the story, “Our prostitutes go sex toy shopping…”

Alex interrupts, “With another beardless dwarf lady shopkeep. Boo, again.”

“…and we see Daleman track the museum inside job man from a Goblin Rock concert to an altar. We get a were-bear versus two werewolves fight. Quick and brutal.”

“I wonder how well I’d do in Moon City,” Alex muses, fingers twitching through a chord progression real quick.

“Vanesse shows up to Daleman’s with her toy and then back to Brianna. A horde of orc gangsters are heading to main character and Brianna wants to warn her. The ‘they just can’t help being cultist gangsters’ talk was unnecessary and a it feels like Bri has a little Stockholm syndrome going on? She shouldn’t be excusing her abusers like that.”

“They threw you in the trash, Bri. Don’t act like they deserve your pity. Anyways, Vanesse apparently got bruised up when Daleman got a turn wearing the strap-on. The resulting aftercare turned sex scene with Lilja was pretty good but I kind of don’t see the point of the strap-on arc in the story. Is Zeebop just trying to up the smut count with these chapters?”

Daphne picks up the plot, “So the museum guy tells Daleman about the Morgul-blade and how a Goblin in the past figured out how to turn it into a WMD, essentially. When Daleman went to report it to her illicit handlers, they order her to kill the museum guy to keep the museum chasing that rabbit hole. That is shitty of them.”

“Well, museum guy checked Daleman out off-screen, saw that she was being paid off, assumed it was by whoever stole the blade, and **** the issue by showing up to kill her in her apartment. Lilja was there, trying to get access to Daleman’s phone again, and the two of them killed museum guy. The fight scene, described from Lilja’s perspective, was actually pretty good. Daleman disposes the body in the museum’s sewer pipes. That was shitty of her.” Alex smirks at her tasteless joke.

“We have a brief interlude with Bri needing to pee. Gross. And has on a painful sounding clit ring. Also gross. She helps main character fight off the orcs by monitoring the smart house system. That’s neat.”

“Next, Lilja loops Daleman into the hackers’ shenanigans. Oh, and Bob is some kind of Eldritch tentacle horror thing? It came up already during a porn chat room meetup between Lilja and Bri, but she tells Daleman about it. Then, almost romantic dildo sex to establish an alibi.”

“Daleman gets away with ****, then the people paying her off tell her that she gets to be an orc trafficker or they kill Vanesse. Daleman decides to join in with Lilja to maybe avoid it.”

“Next, we have another Bri interlude where she attempts to hack main character’s orc lady? It doesn’t go great. Then, back to the Moon City gang. We are probably missing some deets from the main line as the plan comes together and Daleman sets off. A convenient office pervert allows Daleman to plant a virus into the Black lab’s computer network, with a slightly uncomfortable spanking in a public bathroom scene. The hackers almost finish hacking a dragon before bedlam breaks out; this chapter is really fun. Weaponized porn is a hilarious thing.”

Daphne quips, “And the story correctly identifies that dragons have cloacae!”

“Anyways, Daleman somehow gets out of the dragon’s lair and heads back to town. Driver guy tries to kill her, only to get shredded. Funny enough, Daleman doesn’t know how to drive. She makes it to the folks paying her off on foot, somehow still on time, frames them with stealing the blade, and rips and tears until the job is done. One final sex scene, this one promising future were-bear shaving, and we hit the end of the side story.”

“That’s it? Does Lilja get her eldritch horror sexbud back? Do Daleman and Vanesse get married? Does Brianna ever get free from that clit ring? So many untied threads!”

Alex laughs, “Daph, did you forget? You said the stories merge at the end. It looks like the main story continues. Some, if not all, of the answers should be there. So, other than a need to read the other half of the story, thoughts?”

“Well, Daleman is our primary protagonist in this half and she’s kind of a scumbag. Sure, she hurts some worse scumbags, but she still wouldn’t deserve the happy ending, right?”

“If museum guy didn’t hit first, definitely. Since museum guy did, things are muddier. Now, would it have been better, more heroic, more Tolkienesque, to talk through the conflict? If Daleman gave museum guy a chance to go into hiding and lead the charge against cop briber guy? Yeah. But that wouldn’t fit the cyberpunk tone as much as Zeebop wanted the tale to. Moral ambiguity is the name of the game in that genre.”

“Another point, Bri and Aubert kind of feel superfluous? Did we really need two hackers in the story?”

“They do have a purpose in the story. Brianna is making sure we have a hobbit in the story and hobbits are arguably the most important species in Tolkien’s work. Rivendell is an important location in the trilogy, for that is the elven community where the fellowship formed and set out to go destroy the One Ring. With the other locations being in and around Mordor, it is nice to see a location outside of there so the reader can see the state of the world is in a similar state as Moon City. It was disappointing we did not have a hobbit foot job scene. I figured that a scene like that would have been a shoo-in.”

“Also, maybe I am a little too lesbian vanilla in my smut taste, but I could have done without some of those sex scenes. Zeebop is filthy.”

Alex waggles her eyebrows as she asks, “Wanna see how it goes anyways?”

“Okay. Maybe the Rowana chick is a better hero?”

“Maybe. We’d have to read and find out.”

“Yes please. Can I have another coffee?”

“Our elf wife will be quite cross if you overdose on caffeine, Daph.”

“I just need to burn off the jitters! We could go next door. Give Scarlet a lunchtime threesome?”

With a laugh, Alex pulls Daphne up to her (still weird to her) human feet. The two exit the coffee shop to head over to the spa. They can read the other half next time.