Mona Reads Some Messages

Mona

Tegan stomps away, presumably to plan her date tonight. Tessa exits the Hotel looking for a Tina lesson. Andromeda heads back upstairs. That leaves Caoimhe, Gaia, and Craig downstairs with her.

“Sooooo, what’s up?”

Caoimhe goes first. She hands Mona a letter, held closed with a blue wax seal. A pretty tree is stamped in it. “Message delivered, as I have been requested.”

“What? Who? Why?”

The sometimes drow teases, but at least answers, “A letter. Winter. A price for some help with a thing.” Mona can’t help but stare at Caoimhe’s butt as she sashays upstairs. That leaves two.

“I need XP. A lot of it,” Craig demands.

“Ask politely. That’s an order,” Mona responds.

Craig grits his teeth, but complies, “May you please buy me some training so I can start digging myself out of this hole, ma’am?”

Mona presents her thumb, “Let me scry you. That’s an order.”

Craig presents his forehead. Mona presses her thumb into it. She reads his species abilities. Okay. Craig would get +1 and advantage on athletics training, which is good; he’d get the same if he did stealth training, but do I want him sneaky? I don’t want him working on intimidation; he should be afraid of me, not the other way ‘round. Potential double advantage on perception would be good and benign. Single advantage on survival?

“Uhm, Mona, any way I could earn some BP,” Gaia asks, interrupting Mona’s musings, “I kind of spent all of mine on our date last night?”

That’s an idea. “May I please scry you, Gaia?”

Craig looks like he is about to object, but thinks better of it. Mona scries Gaia, looking for synergies. They both have that advantage for athletics and survival thing going for them. And Gaia is in a form that gets her bonus strength, so she will do better at athletics now than she would otherwise. Let’s assign a minor quest, then. I’ll let her pick which to train.

“Okay, Gaia, feel like supervising Craig for me? I’ll pay for both of you to go do some training and, hopefully, it you can keep him on good behavior, you’ll get paid!”

Gaia’s Week 1 Quest – Supervise Craig in training exercises until Craig achieves Level 1

Reward: 1d12 BP per partial success Craig training exercise, 2d12 BP per full success Craig training exercise

Gaia shrugs, “Sure, Mona.”

“Great! Craig, you are to follow Gaia’s orders as if I gave them while she is working on her quest. Understand? Gaia, athletics or survival? I think one of those two would be best.”

“C’mon, Craig! We’re gonna go take a walk in the woods!”

Gaia loops an arm around Craig’s and starts pulling him upstairs. Craig growls, but complies. Mona pays the fee for both of them.

Mona: -40 BP (Training Sessions)

Mona remembers to schedule her daily workout before she walks over there. Josie responds with a confirmation time in the afternoon. Then, she opens the weird letter. The text therein is also weird. It looks like it’s written in Viking?

She fires off a text to Andromeda as she walks upstairs. “Can you read Viking?”

Andromeda texts back, “I can read Gnomish? It uses Giant runic script. Might be that?”

Mona climbs the stairs, finds Andromeda in the library, reading some kind of tentacle monster book from a pile of tentacle monster books. Hawt! They talk about the letter. Andromeda recognizes the script but the language is beyond her. So, the arcanist android gives her a list of potential languages: Giant, Goblin, Orc, and Primordial (whatever that means). Being told that none of the other harem folk know any of those languages, she guess she needs to bug the staff. Her first thought was to find Winter in the dorms, only to find out that the maid is very good at hiding from Bella (who both is a really cute bunny-girl and can’t read the letter!); Bella starts rattling off her sisters that could read any of those languages and Mona stops her when she gets to Ophelia; thanking the buxom bunny-girl for her help, Mona keeps going up to the Suite.

The snarky maid is busy watching the penguin season while sewing sheets back up from this morning’s excitement. Ooooh, that super cute femboi Ashley’s season is doing fan-mail! I should write to him! I wonder... Mona stands there, drooling about all of the sexy things she could do to Ashley.

“Oh, hey, Mona,” the blue-skinned maid greets, pausing the episode, “shouldn’t you be dealing with harem stuff? You have a delivery on the table there. The Queen waited until you left for the meeting to deliver it.”

“Ooooh, mail. Is it from that sexy Mr. Cooper? And can you read this?” Mona hands her the letter she got from Kevin. Then, the human girl leans over to open her letter. And it was as Mona predicted.

Dear Mona,

First things first: the protein powder arrived safely and has been stored somewhere responsible. I'm choosing not to think too hard about what "responsible" means in this context.

Mona pauses, confused. She asks, “Ophelia, is there something weird about the snack powder?”

“No, just the standard Wulf Den Labs protein shake. Wulf Den Labs: The official workout supplement company of the Harem Hotel: Woo the Girl, Save the World season. It’s perfectly normal.”

Mona’s actually feeling a little hungry, so she pours some of her water into today’s shakey bottle and gives it a good mixing. She takes a sip. It tastes like... nothing.

“What flavor is it?”

When Ophelia starts to giggle, Mona rolls her eyes and keeps reading, sipping the protein shake all the while.

Now. The paragraph you were allocated. I'm going to address it briefly and then we're moving on, because I think you'd respect that more than if I either ignored it or made a whole thing of it. You're funny, you're clearly not shy, and I'm genuinely flattered by the watermelon logistics even if I have no idea how that would work physically. The Command+++ question made me laugh out loud. The answer is that it probably could do the former, I don’t know about the latter, but the fact that you thought to ask suggests a level of lateral thinking that will serve you well as a Mistress. As for the sexy body question — you're running a harem. You have a Host. Whatever you want for yourself, you can probably ask for it directly without having to route it through me. Ask Tyalangan. She seems like she'd be delighted to help.

Okay. Moving on.

I don’t remember saying anything about Tyalangan. “How’d Andy figure out that Tyalangan is my Host?”

“From what I can tell from the man I have never met, Uncle Andy is a smart fellow. Also, Arabella probably filled him in on what’s been going on. Kind of how The Queen let you know about him.”

“Uncle Andy?”

“I get that it’s weird because I am way older than him right now, but The Queen would want me to think of him as one of those friend of the family uncles. Get back to reading as I deal with this machine translated nonsense.”

Machine translated nonsense? Mona suppresses that thought so she can continue to read.

I want to say something about what happened on the first date, because I think it's the most important thing in your letter and you buried it under a lot of other words, which I understand.

He hurt you. That was not part of the deal, it was not something you deserved, and it was not a reflection of how the rest of this is going to go. I know it probably didn't feel that way in the moment, or after. First nights are disorienting even when they go well, and when they go badly they have a way of making you feel like the whole thing was a mistake. It wasn't. One bad date is data, not a verdict.

On the question of whether Tyalangan took it too far with the punishment: I can't tell you for certain from here, but I'd trust her instincts. The fact that he was scared the next morning might feel uncomfortable, but scared is sometimes the appropriate outcome.

Mona groans, “Oh, he really saw all of that. Or something. So embarrassing. ‘One bad date is data’ is something to consider.”

“Again, Uncle Andy is a smart guy.”

“Do you think that Tyalangan didn’t take it too far, Ophie?”

“Oh, The Queen did not take it far enough.”

Mona sits on that for a moment, then continues with the letter.

The contestant who hates you: that's going to happen. It happened to me too, earlier than I'd like to admit. Some people arrive with the decision already made. You can't fix that by being nicer or trying harder. What you can do is make sure the rest of the group sees you clearly, so that her version of you doesn't become the default. Show up consistently. Be honest. Let them see you make mistakes and recover from them. That matters more than a perfect first impression.

The eco-terrorist babysitter is a sentence I need you to know I read three times. I don't have specific advice there because I've never encountered anything quite like it, but the fact that she seems nice despite the Hoover Dam situation is probably a good sign. People contain multitudes. Start from where she actually is, not where she's been.

Mona pauses long enough to think about some implications. Gaia was a pretty good date last night. And she seems to be nice and helpful this morning. Maybe, if I show how well I am getting along with her, Tegan will see it and we can be friends again?

Here is the most useful thing I can tell you about navigating the game, and I'm going to say it plainly because I think you'll hear it better that way than wrapped in advice-language: the goal isn't to be good at the game. The goal is to be good to the people in it. With Tyalangan at the helm, I believe the game will reward the second thing eventually, but more importantly, the second thing is worth doing regardless of whether the game rewards it. You talked to an eliminated contestant and understood what it meant. That instinct is right. Follow it.

You're going to be okay, Mona. The first night was bad and you're still here writing letters and asking questions, which means you're doing better than you think.

Write again when you need to. That's what the support group is for. As a Mistress, you’re part of us.

Andy Cooper

Master, The HH — Current Season

Masters Support Group — Founding Member

“You really think I’m going to be okay, Ophie?”

“You think The Queen would tolerate you if you were guaranteed to fail?”

That is less comforting than you’d think, Ophelia.

P.S. The diet seems like a Tyalangan thing. I'd ask her what it's for before you resent it too much. In my experience Hosts don't assign weird constraints without a reason, even if they don't explain it upfront.

Mona pauses on that. I mean, I wasn’t like super complaining about it. Josie explained it well enough. I just want to skip the hard work, is all. I guess it would be worth asking.

P.P.S. Ophelia sounds like she's worth getting to know. Surly is often a sign of competence. In my experience the enthusiastic ones are more likely to accidentally start a fire.

Speaking of the surly maid, she ends up laughing and wheezing, “Oh, that poor dumbass sibling of mine. You want the gist of it or the actual translation?”

Mona stretches. “Actual translation.”

“Excuse the poor grammar. Winter literally ran this though an Internet Aquan translation bot and not a good one either. Probably the first one Winter found that put it in the right alphabet. It’s rough.”

Ophelia writes out the translation, word for word, misspelling for misspelling. It certainly looks rough when Mona reads it:

To Mistrez Mona,

Thiz leter iz to formaly ask thi yah konw, kinda right to hav actuali kinda sexy intercurz wif Kevin. ME wish to feal him fil my asz with hiz cweamy godnez. With yur permision, ME wish to totaly ofer my serviciez during hiz date thiz weak for dat purpoz. It shud be literaly uh, most actualy funn for u to watch.

Regardz,

Winter

The fuck? “Winter realizes that Kevin is very, very gay. Or straight when she is Caoimhe, I guess?”

“I’m sure my sibling heard him say that by now.”

I’m missing something. “Can I speak to Winter about this? I need to know why Winter thinks I would be okay with Winter trying to sleep with Kevin.” Seriously, why can’t I use pronouns to talk about Winter? Wait Why can’t I use pronouns to think about Winter?

“I can let my sibling know. Winter will need your written permission for this either way, but it looks like my sibling wants to keep it a surprise. For now, you about ready for lunch? I can get it ready or you can head downstairs and eat with your harem?”

Resolving to hunt down Tyalangan sometime today to ask some pointed questions, Mona opts to eat up here. She wants to write to Ashley. Maybe the penguin-horny Host will approve of me and him having some fun?