The wheels keep spinning

Author’s note: Hi! Shamefullyhere, here asking for YOUR ideas and feedback! This story has been a lot of fun, and the real draw of it is going to be the pedantry. Showing how mixing/adding/deleting letters, changing numbers, or swapping out/adding/deleting words can completely alter their lives and the world around them! Let me know what Biography stats YOU’D like to see altered. If you have words/categories you think might be fun, sexy, or clever, please comment below. I’m also an absolute mega slut for attention and feedback, so let me know what you think about the story, even if you think there’s stuff to be improved (I really do appreciate criticism, as I’m trying to improve my writing)! Without further ado:

***

Hank woke up in his bed, face down in the pillow. His sheets had a couple extra stains in them since the shift occurred but he had been too tired to care when he fell into it. His bathroom trashcan was overfilled with condoms and tampons, a testament to Talia’s apparent presence in his life.

Hank wasn’t a particularly clean man, but compared to his mother, he was practically neurotic. He used to think it would be weird claiming the master bedroom after her ****, but truthfully it never really felt like the same room she’d slept in.

Mom’s room didn’t have a floor, just piles of clothes and food bags. Mom’s room was so much smaller than the master bedroom because of all the boxes and trash bags. She had less than a twin sized bed to sleep on, the rest of the bedspace reserved for laundry piles she wanted less dirty.

Turning over and seeing the discarded lube bottle next to a sweaty towel and condom trashcan next to his nightstand gave him the same feeling as walking into mom’s room. The air was foul and rancid with body odor. For the first time since cleaning out the house, Hank felt like he was back in his mother’s room.

It seemed that these versions of Hank and Talia really didn’t do anything around the house but have sex. They must’ve been extremely depressed as to leave overflowing garbage cans and condom wrappers all over the house. Talia especially. He thought that was quite sad a thought. To be just so beaten down they did the same thing every single day regardless of enjoyment. It was a way of life that was extremely familiar to him, though in an entirely new way now that Talia was stuck in the same boat.

He sunk back into the pillow, all cried out. He didn’t have the strength to live in filth like that again. After a moment, he lifted his face again and realized that it was night time. The room should have been completely dark, yet it was illuminated by the glow from his notebook. The tell-tale sign of a new modification to his life.

Panicked, he swiped the book off the night stand and opened it.

Minimum daily number of minutes spent making out with Talia Lee: 38

Quotas are not optional.

Failure to meet quota: +30 to quota

Failure to attempt to meet quota: Letter Change.

Please draw a Category Card.

“Fuck!” He groaned, kicking the blankets off his body. Checking the alarm clock, he saw that it was three in the morning. He decided not to wake Talia. Even though she had at least gotten some sleep the night before, Hank was far more accustomed to late nights and little rest. She had looked so beat and drained. He didn’t want to wake her just so she could watch the train wreck.

He walked over to the board, stepping quietly past Talia’s door. He felt like he was doing something wrong. Like his mom was about to catch him watching porn. His shaky hand slipped a card off the top of the open cage.

Idiosyncrasies in your relationships
Flip one “M” upside down into a “W”.

His journal suddenly flipped to a peculiar entry. One he hadn’t really noticed before, but certainly rang true.

When Hank and Talia are traveling by car, together—regardless of who is driving or how long the trip is—Talia pulls out her map and keeps it readily accessible to both of them. Hank typically touches it more than Talia, often absentmindedly playing with it, although Talia actually looks at it significantly more than Hank.

This was all true, but phrased very odd and seemed to make a bigger deal of it than it was. It wasn’t exactly accurate to say Talia pulled out her map, as it was literally just Google Maps on her phone. Sure, it was on her phone, and yes it was a map. But it wasn’t really her map, he’d argue. It also failed to mention how Talia inputed the destination into navigation.

But last week was the first time they’d been in a car together in almost three years. Why was this coming up? A single letter began glowing.

M

It was the “m” in “map.” Suddenly the letter flipped upside down.

“Wap?” Hank furrowed his brow, but soon more text appeared in the margins.

Letter selected.
Altering text for proper capitalization.

The entire word began glowing, the ink of the letters “a” and “p” moving around until they formed capital letters.

When Hank and Talia are traveling by car, together—regardless of who is driving or how long the trip is—Talia pulls out her WAP and keeps it readily accessible to both of them. Hank typically touches it more than Talia, often absentmindedly playing with it, although Talia actually looks at it significantly more than Hank.

“Oh shit.” Hank gasped. Talia was not going to be pleased to discover that!

“Oh shit, what?” Talia asked, yawning as she stepped down the hall. Hank jumped, his book falling to the ground and closing.

“God, you scared me.” He clutched his heart. He figured he had to come clean. It was a change in his book, so she wouldn’t be notified, even though it most certainly altered her biography, too.

“What are you doing at the board?” She asked suspiciously.

He pointed to his journal. “Turns out I’m in trouble for missing my quota.” He scratched the back of his neck. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

Her face instantly soured. “The kissing me quota?”

“Yes.” He nodded, embarrassed. “It upped the quota to almost forty minutes.” He could see her eye twitch. Her fists tightened beside her.

Whenever he upset her, Hank always felt like Talia was his mother. Well, less like his mother and more like how a kid was supposed to feel about their mother. He couldn’t help but feel ashamed and stupid.

He’d do anything for her to not be upset with him. Talia was a woman Hank deeply admired. Driven, passionate, always had her shit together. He didn’t like letting her down in a way that was different from how he felt with other friends. Their whole friendship, he always felt like he was usually only a few bad interactions away from completely torching their friendship by accident. As evidenced by her moving away as soon as she found someone more mature and put together.

“The mini game.” He said, snapping his fingers at the idea. “We get special rewards for playing, right? The board can fuck up our lives, maybe we can undo some of it? Or make changes of our own?”

Talia didn’t say anything for a moment. “Fine.” She said flatly, unclenching her fists, though the tension within them seemed to go to someplace within her rather than being released. “Let’s play the mini game.”

“Let’s.” Hank agreed. He could tell her about the map situation later. The rulebook, sat suddenly next to the board, began glowing. Hank went to pick it up, but instead stood upright.

It was 03:30 A.M. and his shift started at 04:00.

He tried reaching for the rulebook again, but felt his feet begin marching toward the hallway on their own. “Oh, fuck!” He flapped his arms about to keep his balance now that his torso and legs were out of sync.

Talia looked afraid, jumping to the side as Hank passed her. “What’s going on?” She demanded. Talia was always much less scared when she knew what something was. She may not have flinched at a gun in her face if she knew the make, model, shooter’s name, and basic physics that made it work.

“I think it’s forcing me to get to work.” He answered, having to call back as he stepped into the master bedroom. His legs took him to the closet, where his arms took over, grabbing his polo and slacks. “Fuck! We’ll do it after I get home.”

***

Talia was seething. She was never good at hiding her emotions. However, she was very good at hiding the depths of her emotions which made it difficult for people to really read her thoughts. They always either underestimated or overestimated. Watching Hank stroll out the door and drive away, Talia chewed her lip. She could see the apology he desperately held back, knowing it would upset her more. Hank always overestimated Talia’s negative moods.

That was going to be quite difficult to do right now.

She knew that she had a part to play in the missed quota. It was her that he had to make out with, after all. In fact, she had gone to bed hoping to avoid it altogether. But that was only natural. She was gay and he was kinda gross.

The quota was his responsibility. But like always with his needs or responsibilities, Hank either forgot or straight up refused to assert himself and communicate them. He always had this infuriating way of waffling around whenever he needed something, circling around what he wanted to ask like a basketball that just wouldn’t fall into the hoop until someone else pushed it in.

Talia wasn’t his mother. It wasn’t her job to nag him to do things to her. If he had to slobber all over her, the least he could do is ask instead of making her go through the humiliation ritual of her asking HIM to **** HER.

And now, because he just couldn’t step up and ask or negotiate, the quota Talia already didn’t want to help out with was drastically increased. Hank was a liability in this game. If Talia had any hope of getting through it, she had to do so without his weight on her back.

All of this was his fault, anyway.

She slinked into the kitchen and opened the fridge, finding it mostly filled with protein shakes. According to the new biographies, Hank and Talia’s diet primarily consisted of protein shakes as they fit in well with their lifestyle of… she didn’t want to think about it. She still couldn’t believe this farce was really happening to her.

Her stomach gurgled and churned. The human body was not designed to live on a mostly liquid diet. She could only imagine what havoc a year drinking for most of her meals did to her stomach, but she definitely did not feel very healthy. She closed the fridge and opened the freezer, actually relieved to have found Eggo waffles, although there were only two left in the box

Hank had left the windows open, filling the house with the smell of rain instead of sweat and cum. It also made the air quite cold, Talia’s nipples poking through the baggy t-shirt she slept in as she waited for the toaster to pop. Her attention went back to the glowing rulebook.

Hank wasted his life on games. Video games, board games, stupid little travel games that he just made up on the fly; for the past week, Talia witnessed him playing games non stop while at home. She had thought this to be somewhat sad and pathetic given how much time he would’ve had to apply to fitness, or job applications, or even dating. But it did make him uniquely qualified to read the rules, which was something she hated about most new board games. Every time a new rule was written, Hank seemed to lock on to its word choice and order.

Talia followed along with his reading the rules outloud with the way he emphasized the words. But whenever she read them herself, she just found herself repeating the words out loud over and over trying to find a meaning that she actually could hold onto. It hadn’t come up, yet, but she knew Hank was already piecing together how certain rules fed into each other and crafting his own theories about what other rules were to reveal themselves. He had advised caution with Talia’s chicken tender gambit, as if he were fully aware that it wouldn’t work, but lacked the assertiveness to actually stop Talia.

Would she have even listened to him? There was no way she was going to… do the thing the card had wanted. Especially not with Hank.

The toaster popped and Talia rushed over, devouring the waffles in seconds. The orange glow in the living room scared her. What new hell was written in the rules? Certainly not a good one. But Talia solved fear with research. She was more scared of not knowing what it was.

So she opened the page and saw the glowing text.

Mini-Games: When a simple majority of players agree to play a mini-game, the table switches into the mini-game phase. The game may not progress until the mini-game is finished. One player draws from the Challenge Deck to reveal the rules for the mini-game and then players compete for PRIZES according to their performance and final placement.

Talia set the rulebook down as the Challenge Deck Cage opened up. She grabbed the first card to see what the challenge was so she could mentally prepare for when Hank got home. The text was printed vertically instead of horizontally this time.

MINI-GAME

King of the Hill

PREP: Retrieve the sex toy hidden in the corner of Hank’s closet and place it on the couch within the next 5 minutes.

GAME DURATION: 4 Hours

OBJECTIVE: Maximize time spent having sex with the toy

LIMITS: 1. No pornography. 2. Only the sex toy from Hank’s closet may be used for any sexual stimulation.

PRIZES:

1st place: Minor Reward

Achieve 4 orgasms: Minor Reward

Achieve 10 orgasms: Reverse 1 Biography Alteration

Time=4hr: Major Reward

“Ten?” Talia cried out indignantly. She was supposed to get ten orgasms in four hours? All whole presumably fighting Hank for the toy? She wasn’t going to swap a toy back and forth! That was disgusting! All of it was disgusting.

The number in the prep section ticked down to 4 minutes and Talia’s heart sunk. The game was starting and Hank wouldn’t be able to skip work to play. Though initially feeling stupid for having started the game without Hank, she soon realized her advantage.

She needed to get ten orgasms to earn that reversal and she couldn’t do that if Hank was around. She could theoretically claim all those prizes. It was only fair, she decided as she rushed to his bedroom. He invoked Spooky Buddies, it was his responsibility to sacrifice himself.

Hurrying, Talia went into Hank’s closet, eyes locking on to a suspicious pile of blankets that she tossed aside. Under them was a thin clear plastic box housing the silicone replica of a woman’s lower torso. The sight of it disgusted Talia. She could understand masturbators and fleshlights to an extent, but this was entirely too much.

The damn thing even weighed so heavy! She struggled to lift the box and carry it to the living room. For her own sake, she was going to assume that the game manifested the toy out of thin air rather than it having been purchased and used by Hank.

The weight and awkward shape of the toy made it difficult to get out of the box, but she managed to drop the jiggly silicone on the couch. With two minutes left. Despite having time before the game started itself, Talia decided it would be best to start as soon as possible that way she was guaranteed the full four hours and wouldn’t be robbed by a one second delay. Besides, she needed all the help she could get with the orgasms.