Meanwhile At the Bunker

While Cammy, Felix, Noah and Vizrokoth left through the portal to the wedding, Paisley assembled the rest of the harem.

"It is frustrating your dear master won't be here," Paisley said. "However, this is a great opportunity for you to learn how to be part of a real harem. As it is, you've either been trapped from the master, faded into the background, or used the rules of the season to avoid a difficult topic. Speaking of the last one..."

Paisley waved her hand, and Janessa fell from the ceiling to join the group. "You're part of the harem too Janessa, despite what you may think. After all, you've seen the consequences of elimination, surely you don't want that fate to befall you next?"

The angel had apparently been doing meditation, which meant she arrived sitting, and completely naked because of the ban on clothing around her altar. "Really? You just had to grab me, and couldn't wait for me to wrap up?"

"Well you didn't have to abuse the rules around Felix, yet you did so anyway," Paisley countered. "Besides, as an assistant principal, you should know all about the need for discipline that can feel humiliating for the student on the receiving end of it."

The angel just glared, unable to respond. Paisley took it as a chance to move on. "Now onto business that everyone else is here and ready. First off, Hailey, dear."

Paisley turned to look, and Hailey stared back the way soldiers did after a long, exhausting war. "As an apology for the administrative error, and my colleague who kept you hopping from place to place, have 3000 BP. Otherwise, you get the day off, as you've shown a great connection to the master, and gave yourself a treatment that should ensure your loyalty to him."

Hailey = +3000 BP

After the BP was deposited, Hailey left the room to go to the gun range. Paisley wasn't worried about giving the girl special privileges, because Hailey was a contestant that willingly bound herself to the master without anyone forcing her to. From the acting host's point of view, this particular contestant was on track to join the harem properly.

"See what you can get if you play the game?" Paisley asked the group. "By contrast, most of you aren't in that place yet. I understand why Nox and Jamina aren't, although the latter insisting on the need to train Felix for a hypothetical future isn't helping here. Castelilise meanwhile..."

As much as Paisley hated to admit it, Castelilise was another contestant who didn't need the activities the acting host had in mind for that day. The nereid had already given herself a role in Felix's harem, and established it with him, face to face. There was no ambiguity about having a free use relationship with the master, or in becoming the harem’s main source of sexual relief, given Castelilise’s increasingly sexual relationship with Janessa.

"... is free to go," Paisley finished. "You've established yourself quite well with both the master, given that you have graduated, and another contestant. Come see me for the BP challenge today, but otherwise, you can go."

In response, the nereid happily dove underwater in her canal, and swam away. It left Paisley with just three contestants, whom she decided needed a very specific lesson. "All three of you, even those with good reasons, have not been the best with the master. Jamina didn't even gain any VP last night, not even attempting new sexual things, despite that she only has two more dates, if that, to get to 100 VP. Janessa meanwhile is extremely far behind, and could fall even further behind if she has another disastrous date like her one. As for Nox... well, you may seem to have a high score, as shown here."

Paisley paused to pull up a hologram with the current VP scores on it.

VP Amounts:

Graduated:

Cammy = 106 VP

Noah = 100 VP

Castelilise = 100 VP

Contestants:

Hailey = 90 VP

Jamina Lightbringer = 50 VP

Nox = 80 VP

Janessa Smith = 30 VP

"However, most of that was from Z, not you, if not practically all of it. While I have been sympathetic to your position, Nox, I'm afraid you will still need to participate in the lesson we will have today. To get things started, let me give you all a quick montage of my prior work so you know who you're dealing with..."

Hailey, denied the relief of Felix's cum, settled on the next best thing: Gunfire. Overwhelming gunfire of the type that should've blown her eardrums out. Despite the repeated evidence that her latest transformation protected her eardrums just fine on their own, she still put in ear protection. It was part of a ritual, the headphones blocking out the outside world while so Hailey could focus on one of the only bits of escape available to her, in this place without video games, anime, video essays on YouTube, or countless other bits of entertainment. All that remained was taking various guns, and firing away.

As Hailey blasted through the hours, the shooting range kept score. It had every dopamine boosting trick, such as flashy high score numbers that erupted in the air when she beat her time, pleasing sound effects whenever she landed a bullseye, and a hologram showing the equivalent of a lootbox opening whenever she got a new high score that would give her new guns to play with. All of these tricks were everything gaming, and casinos for that matter, had learned to keep someone playing. They were also the kind of distraction that let her brain slowly process, as best as her fragile human mind could, her experiences outside the bunker.

The demon's lesson to her was blindly obvious. Harem Hotel, as bad as it was, in the scheme of things, insignificant from an ethical perspective. She lived in a multiverse full of beings, and sometimes just people who happened to be mad scientists, that destroyed worlds. Some ate them because they were an eldritch being, some destroyed them as part of an experiment, and sometimes it was just because the elites of that world were too selfish to save it. All together, the crime of kidnapping some people and transforming them for the amusement of a mass audience was terrible, but also ultimately meaningless. And that fact, while one that Hailey could maybe have admitted intellectually when she considered the horrific things that happened every day in her world to massive numbers of people, still troubled her. It made everything that happened to her meaningless.

"It's not meaningless," A divine voice emanated from a source Hailey could not detect. "It just has a purpose you weren't able to accept. Until now anyway."

Hailey stopped what she was doing, and whipped around looking for the source of the voice. She got out the 8 gauge, which was low on ammunition, but was the closest thing she had to something that could maybe deal with threats like the ones that surrounded her at the moment.

"There's no point looking for me child, for I have no body," The divine voice said. "I lost it killing the same type of creature you killed yourself."

"... who are you?" Hailey asked, holding a gun out in front of herself for comfort more than security. "How did you get here?"

"Dear, I'm the producer of your season," The voice sounded amused. "I don't normally reveal myself to contestants, but I've had reasons to do so multiple times now, and only one of them was because of a transformation done to a contestant. You on the other hand... you killed something that kills gods. I would know, I watched one kill other gods right in front of me."

"Again, who are you?" Hailey asked. "If you're the producer, then why you couldn't prevent me from going on that excursion in the first place? You have immense power, how could you let an administrative error do that?"

Hailey should've been terrified to speak against this being, given she knew how powerful producers were. But... it was just too much. Maybe on some level she wanted the producer to just mess with her head to make it all better. Or maybe wanted to feel the producer's wrath to just exit this fucked up reality where she couldn't even do anything with Felix before he once again got taken away from her, because of yet more Harem Hotel bullshit.

"Two reasons," The voice continued. "The first is that resolving an error which lands you in another season is extremely difficult to fix, even for a being of my considerable power. Before I explain the second reason, I want you to keep in mind something. You, willingly, embraced a therapy treatment that involved drinking Felix's cum, or the cum of others as a pale substitute. I know Harem Hotel changed the way you viewed such sexual things, but not that much. Why do did you really sign up for that, and so quickly?"

"Because staring at something that rips reality to shreds broke my brain," Hailey said, shaking with rage. "Because learning that a world's most spoiled members will decide, from perceiving their power to be under threat, throw everyone else under the bus in the face of a mad scientist who sent super plagues. Because I learned that I'd be willing to kill people who did something like that, right in front of an innocent woman, and not feel bad about it. And because learning that everyone I know could die because a being that eats realities could brainwash a bunch of people on my planet to help the being do it. So yeah, I'm willing to drink a guy's cum if it means all of that feels a bit less bad. Now why the fuck was it okay for me to be exposed to any of that?"

"Once, long ago, I was a god of music, along with sometimes some other arts, and every once in awhile, I acted as a god of oratory," The voice replied, in a tone far that sounded oddly... nostalgic. "I was part of a pantheon full of deities far more powerful, and more important, than I was. Then a creature much like the one you fought showed up, and slaughtered the rest of the pantheon. Whether they tried fighting it as a group, or one by one, they could not stop the entity. Didn't matter if they were a god of war, the sky, love, nature, it didn't matter, they all fell."

"But you beat it, didn't you?" Hailey asked, already looking to poke holes in this story.

"Yes, although I didn't have the gun you did," The voice continued. "The thing I realized is that none of the other deities could hurt this invading creature because it had no body, or even mind, that could be hurt. So I tricked it into possessing my body, and then destroyed it by killing my own body. The only things I severed from it were my mind, my divine nature... and my voice."

"Why would it fall for such a trick?" Hailey asked. "Why couldn't it just leave your body when you destroyed it?"

"It was far too arrogant to suspect I could trick it like that," The voice said. "That, and it needed to possess a body in order to replace the deities it had murdered. The being you fought had successfully killed one or more deities, and used that to usurp that world's faiths. It did that because it was part of a process that allowed it to eat that reality. Perhaps it was smarter than the one that attacked my world and didn't fall for such tricks as easily."

"So you won," Hailey said. "You get traumatized by that? Need therapy?"

"No, I went mad," The voice warped in a way that terrified Hailey, and reminded her of the type of being she was talking to. "I became the primary deity of my world. The problem with that was I didn't really have the ability to be a monotheistic god. It wasn't a matter of power, but rather a matter of overwhelming responsibility. The urge for uniqueness, and artistic endeavor was ill suited for one who needed to take care of many, many more worshipers, most of whom were grieving the loss of far more capable gods."

A concession of weakness was not something Hailey expected to hear from a being like this, much less from a Harem Hotel producer. How could a being of such power have any humility?

"That overwhelming responsibility, when combined with my lack of a body, warped my sense of self," The voice's voice became downright mournful. "I tormented followers who didn't deserve it because I gave them an order that made no sense, or worse, was just something to amuse me. When I realized what I had done, and what I was becoming, I gathered together the most important, high ranking priests of the entire world to explain myself... except I couldn't. I told them a lie about how I had been driven mad by killing the entity, and that I would have to spend time away from the world. In truth..."

While Hailey couldn't see it, given she was talking to a disembodied voice, she could sense this being gathering itself. Did the Voice realize they were being watched by millions of people? Or in this case, even just listened to? Maybe being so powerful meant one didn't have to care about things like embarrassment, but even so, why share all of this with Harem Hotel's audience as well?

"... I cut a deal with Harem Hotel," The voice said. "I would be a producer, helping perpetuate the whole thing, if in return they protected my world for... awhile. I told my followers I'd be gone making a new body, and that's true, but the other thing I'm doing is, slowly, making a new pantheon. It's a process that takes place over geologic timescales,

"Why did you really join Harem Hotel?" Hailey asked. "Heck, why are you telling me all this right now? You know the audience can hear us, right?"

"Oh I know," The voice went back to a sort of amusement. "I can read your thoughts after all. My world doesn't see Harem Hotel, and by the time they do, they'll be ready for the truth. Which was that I needed a vacation from divinity until I could handle it. I also needed the opportunity to torment small groups of sapient beings, over and over again. I could exhaust all my perverted whims, and go back to doing artistic things, rather than trying to fill a role I was not ready for. I've done horrific things as a producer, but I console myself with knowing that it only affects a very, very small number of people in the scheme of things, and that if I do it right, most of them will enjoy it."

All of the rage Hailey felt came roaring back. This being was essentially treating her, and everyone else on the show, as a way to relieve its stress. A vacation from the responsibilities of being a god people prayed to, one that would take so long that the continents on their world would be different by the time they got back from it. It also meant they would inflict an immense amount of suffering over the course of their time as a Harem Hotel producer, and they knew it. That was the point, so as to preserve other people from their whims.

"I should hurt you," Hailey's glare lost some strength from having no one to glare at. "But I can't. I should punish you for how selfish you are, but I also can't, anymore than I can punish a tornado for destroying a town full of innocents. What I don't understand is how any of that justifies leaving me out of the bunker for so long, and exposing me to everything. Was it just to show that Harem Hotel isn't that bad in the scheme of things?"

"Yes," The voice answered without a hint of shame. "Harem Hotel is escapist entertainment. What a lot of people don't understand is that's often the most important thing there is. Reality is crushing if too much of it is taken in at once. So your life isn't meaningless, nor did what happen to you in the Hotel before this. I'll leave you to your own escapism, but make sure you talk to the demon when she gets back. She has a lot to teach you about punishment..."

Nox was terrified by the montage presented by Paisley. It showed scenes from dozens of separate seasons of the host applying punishments, whether it be breast expansion applied through a magical riding crop, or a choker that punished a contestant whenever they said nasty things about the master. Through it all, the goblin didn't see what she could do to please Paisley, given Felix wasn't available, and so was in no position to repair her relationship with him until he was. What in the world were they going to do as a training exercise until he came back?

"As I hope I've demonstrated, I have every ability to punish you as your demonic host has," Paisley said. "More than that, you have all seen, upfront, the consequences of doing poorly in Harem Hotel. I understand that neither Nox or Jamina have been in a position to change that, but Janessa..."

Paisley let the word hang in the air as she glared at the angel. "... you have no excuse. You weren't under the thumb of an oni, or a horny teacher. The only entity you have to answer to as an angel encourages you to be naked in its presence and for you to have sex with the master. So I must ask, why are you doing this? Why does it seem like all you do lately is play with the nereid, train with weapons you have no use for, or cry while watching TV?"

Janessa looked up, and just glared at Paisley for several seconds before answering. "I've been kidnapped from my reality, turned into an angel for a perverse faith, had my fundamental sense of self violated, and then have been told repeatedly, sometimes on accident, that I deserve it. So forgive me if I'm not in the mood for seducing someone less than half my age who hates my guts almost as much as a man who raped his mother and bankrupted his family in court."

"I won't, but I do accept your explanation," Paisley looked unimpressed by Janessa's outburst. "Lets go to more willing contestants. Jamina and Nox, given how little time you have left, how do you plan to recover?"

Jamina was the first to answer, and with great confidence. "I will use both my body and my mind to make him a master worth serving. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but I plan to do things soon that will give me lots of VP, as they will be unique activities. I'll be sure to check with Castelilise to make sure they are all things Felix enjoys, of course."

The reminder that the high elf could theoretically bypass Felix's consent without penalty brought a scowl to Paisley's face before she went to the next contestant. "Nox, how about you? What's your plan?"

Nox took a deep breath before responding. "On my next date, whenever that is, we'll explore my memories in the mirror room, so I understand this incident which helped land us all here, and then... I'll let Felix do whatever he pleases. I certainly won't mind, given the kind of things my body enjoys now..."