Watch a TV show

Deciding to try and win this by playing the damn game, you look at the available Tasks again. Hmm...clearly basketball isn’t a good idea, fitness Tasks like that started this mess. It’s still too early to Go to a bar, though you wonder if that will help when it becomes available. Studying isn’t exactly feminine either, so that really just leaves watching anime or a regular TV show.

You waffle over it for a little while, but decide to just go with something standard. Hopefully, you can find something girly enough to get your original parts back where they came from. Plus, if it worked, this was a Daily Task, so it would be repeatable.

The only issue is...you don’t have a television. You live in a studio apartment with a laptop, bed, desk, mini-kitchen, and bathroom. You’ve got no room for one. That just leaves the computer, but since moving out your parents changed their streaming account’s password and won’t give it to you unless you chip in with them.

Of course, there are other ways to Watch a TV show. In seconds you’re at a pirating site, ready to stream whatever show you want. You scroll through the options, trying to find something girly enough to be of use to you in this endeavor. Then, you find it: some dumb reality show about relationships between people from different countries or whatever. It’s the most stereotypically feminine show you can think of, even if you’re not really interested.

But that isn’t part of the deal, is it? You click on the latest episode, and lay on your bed to watch it. It’s halfway through the forty unending minutes of the program when you realize you may have made a mistake. It’s like there’s some kind of sci-fi distortion field on this stupid show, because it’s physically impossible for you to pay attention to it. You just keep getting bored and thinking about other things.

By the time the credits on the episode roll, you’ve given up any hope of actually caring about what was going on in it. It was a complete and utter waste of time, but you still watched it. Trying to smile, you grab your phone and select that you watched the episode.

Culture 0->0

Intelligence 32-28

Manliness 1->5

You almost can’t believe what you’re reading. Trying to watch that stupid show not only didn’t fix the problem, it made it worse and you’re apparently dumber now. Great. Not only that, the app taunts you with how little you gained from watching it by keeping your Culture at the same value.

Still, you can’t deny you’re at least a little curious as to what those changes did to you, so you strip naked and head into the bathroom. At first, you’re not sure if there is a difference at all, but then you kind of see it: your facial features are a little more typical guy-ish, and your body hair looks a bit darker and thicker. You’re not the type of girl who shaves that often anyway, you haven’t had a significant other who would care either way in years, but you’ve still never looked this hairy.

The weird thing is, it kind of looks good on you. You find yourself wondering what would happen if you increase your Manliness stat even more. Briefly, the image of you as this tall, handsome, manly man appears in your head, and before you banish it, you can’t deny some part of you does yearn to see what that would be like. What that would feel like.

Focusing back on the task at hand, which feels a little harder now that your Intelligence stat has dipped, you try to think where you went wrong. Apparently, what actually happens during the Task is also important. Sure, you chose a girly show, but you also didn’t like it and didn’t really watch it, so that tracked as more Manliness. Since it was a daily task, it also didn’t give you anything new to do. So you look at what else you have, and consider your next move.