Friday, Week 2, Joan Hollis's Second Date Part 1

Author’s note: This chapter contains plot spoilers for the Ggnt season, Harem Cruise, involving Eric Stuart. It’s a good branch, and structurally useful as a rare example of a finished season to reference.

Alan woke to find both of Christian’s elbows jammed into uncomfortable places and Joan’s excited face in his view.

“Hi,” Alan said, nodding at the new source of energy. “You look excited.”

Joan’s cybernetic tail was lightly curled in excitement. She looked like she had dressed for Model UN or some other high school presentation, which raised questions about the twenty-five-year-old grad student’s fashion choices that Alan had never thought to ask. “I have a plan for the date,” Joan said.

Christian rolled out of bed, gave Joan a sleepy glare, and left in her bathrobe without stopping at Alan’s shower.

“Rough date?” Joan asked.

“It was a lot,” Alan admitted. “What’s the plan?”

“I want to start with some files I got. Skynet claimed they were real transformations from a completed season.” Joan grinned.

“Oh, that’s helpful.” Alan nodded.

“The problem with a breadth-first search is that there’s no ‘typical’ season of Harem Hotel. There are tropes, but there’s too much volume to make good guesses.” Joan handed Alan a pastry that likely incorporated incomprehensibly transformed meat or dairy from Sky, but it looked like a doughnut.

“How many seasons of this could they even make?” Alan asked.

“They’re supposedly coming up on forty thousand, but that’s a bit hard to believe.” Joan shrugged. “We seem to be rehashing a lot of established ideas, based on what I could get from our co-host.”

“What kind of ideas?” Alan took a bite of the pastry, which was delicious, and let himself get interested.

“Believe it or not, you’re not the first master to enter a season hosted by your mysterious great-aunt. A secret former host has also been used before, on a separate season. I couldn’t get much of a feel for the baseline expectations, but Sky agreed to give me the list of endgame transformations from the Cruise season,” Joan rambled.

“What does it tell you?” Alan asked. After a moment’s thought, he had a more important question. “What did it cost to get it?”

“Ah.” Joan gave a small smile. “I have to embarrass Tess. Tess’s surname came from the master of the Cruise, and not because they’re related. Tess pretended it was her real name to impress Ariadne when they were kids.”

“What’s so good about this Eric guy?” Alan asked, deciding not to pry into how that worked when Ariadne had literally watched Tess being turned from a curse into a baby.

“Actually, it was his first wife, Trinity, that Ariadne worshipped as a ‘noodle.’ I didn’t get the full story, but here’s her file.”

Alan opened the folder to a photograph of a woman. “Wait, is that Alexandria Dario?”

“Sky refused to explain the resemblance.” Joan sighed. “It would make sense if Natalia isn’t the first celebrity to be on this show. Anyway, the important part is that we get to see an endgame. Not our endgame, but the endgame of a season that went well.”

“Huh, that does sound useful.” Alan started to read. “Wait, did she get eliminated?”

“It’s called an Exit Transformation, which overlaps with Elimination.” Joan nodded. “Some kind of housewife set, mixed blessings and mindfucks. The good parts sound really good, actually. She became incapable of being tired or stressed, unable and unwilling to work outside the home, and passionate about keeping her husband from doing domestic chores. I mean, it sounds a bit like a yandere horror story to have a wife like that, but tastes vary.”

“Huh, she also had magic and a phaser.” Alan read on. “Yeah, her transformations are manageable.”

“Yeah, she was lucky.” Joan shuddered and handed Alan another folder, this one for Stephanie Bradford. The photograph showed a woman wearing a gag, and the description was considerably more concerning than Trinity’s list.

“Fuck, she literally lived like that?” Alan tried to process the transformation.

“Yeah.” Joan shook her head. Alan suddenly realized he only saw one Joan, which was weird. “‘Stephanie will never say another lie, or anything at all. She will be unable to speak, write, or even use sign language. Stephanie will be given a permanent panel gag and black rubber panties. Neither may ever be removed. She will not require any food or water to survive.’” Joan read the plain text with a clinical flatness.

“Fuck. How is that even sexy?” Alan closed his eyes and tried to imagine being turned on by it. Nothing in the description interested him.

“Well, the mindfuck and the ‘portal technology’ to experience every sex act in the harem is kind of hot, but it’s way too much,” Joan agreed easily. “That’s probably not the most fucked-up part of this, either.” She handed Alan a third folder, this one for a doppelganger of Stephanie, though without the gag.

“Huh.” Alan looked at the folder and the photograph of Sarah Liu. “What the fuck?”

“Either that’s a married name and Sarah’s a twin, or Sarah looked entirely different and got turned into Stephanie’s twin. Both of those are fucked.” Joan winced. “There are too many files to spend the whole date on this, and it’s depressing, but it’s helped me plan the rest of the date.”

“What do you mean?” Alan could tell Joan wanted to explain. A Crawler, the rest of Joan, emerged from under the bed with more paperwork in her tendrils.

“We’re going to do the most romantic activity I can imagine: writing out the house rules for our polycule!” Both Joans beamed, and it was the Crawler who delivered the line. Alan hoped she was making fun of herself and not sincerely convinced it sounded romantic.

“Um, I don’t get it,” Alan admitted, after Joan had waited too long for a response.

“We need an idea of what we’ll look like after the season’s done, and this gives us a better idea of what to expect. We need rules for what to do in case of mental and emotional transformations, and we need them before tomorrow’s challenge,” Joan explained. “It’s not like I’m going to surge in popularity, so I wanted to get some work done today.”

Alan could respect that.