Talking about Trash

If John ever created a documentary about the natural habitats of his women, none would cause more head-scratching than Lyndell. How would the public react to knowing that the last Lorylim had turned into a cave-dwelling goth girl?

With belated amusement, most likely.

John stepped into Lyndell’s room. The windowless chamber was, for once, lit with artificial light from the ceiling lamp. The black-painted walls absorbed a fair amount of that light, as did the rest of the grey décor. Lyndell’s preferred colour scheme was as dark as her preferred drink.

The scent of coffee lay heavily in the room. A multitude of bags stood orderly atop the kitchen counter, separated neatly into decaf and natural beans.

Lyndell was usually found either on the floor or in her bed. It was the latter today. The mushroom lady had wrapped herself up in a blanket burrito. All of her that was visible was her face and one arm. The latter was a temporary concession to the book that she had placed on the floor. Lying on her stomach, head peeking over the edge of the bed, the gothic girlfailure of a former genocide goddess was reading in the most comfortable position she could have found.

With Lyndell were two more women, neither an unexpected sight. One was Lucifrena, who had elected to sit against the foot of the bed. As per usual, the dark-skinned woman opted for simple clothes, a deep purple top and plain, fitting jeans. The same book Lyndell was reading lay on her crossed legs. The other was Lorelei, who had joined Lyndell on the bed, sitting with her back against the wall and her thighs supporting her own copy of the book.

“Having a little book club?” John asked.

“Yes.” Lyndell turned the page, then pulled her arm back into her blanket burrito.

John closed the door behind him and approached. It was hardly unusual for him to find Lyndell hanging out with Lucifrena and it was definitely not unusual to see her hanging out with any haremette whatsoever. Lyndell’s room had become a sort of cozy oasis for anyone that wanted to escape the existence of the entire world for a bit.

The Gamer was there for a similar purpose. Two of his bodies were still in Hawaii. Now that the spots for the Guild Halls had been picked, he was enacting their tradition of marking the territory by pinning the respective owner down on the claimed soil. The one still around, the Creator Puppet, was busy moving around the place and fixing little mistakes Eliana had made.

A groan preceded a sigh as John settled on the bed as well. Reading the surface of his soul, Lorelei commented, “You are annoyed with Eliana?”

“I am but I shouldn’t be.” John stretched out his legs. “There’s nothing unreasonable about the mistakes she’s made so far. A promise given too early here, a grant provided to a sophisticated scammer there, missing a small but crucial detail in a litigation, that sort of thing.” The Gamer put a hand on Lorelei’s thigh and immediately everything felt a little better in the world.

Scooting over, Lorelei used his shoulder as an additional support. “Have you told her about these?”

“Not yet.”

“Will you?”

“Not sure. I don’t want to discourage her from doing this just because she makes the same starting mistakes as everyone else. If I tell her about it, she’s going to take it to heart too much, call herself useless, and shut herself into her atelier for three days.”

The assertion was met with agreeing hums. Venting about it had John feel a little bit better and that was all he needed.

Scanning the current page in Lorelei’s book informed him of the general contents of the book. It was a woman’s fantasy romance novel of the smutty kind. A handsome vampire was strutting billionarily through his mansion, being all dark and mysterious and demanding while also respecting boundaries in just the right way.

John had nothing against the genre, he had even read a couple. Much like the male power fantasy harem novels, it was just saturated with low-quality garbage. As a man, John could stand the variety of trash on his side of the dimorphism a bit better. The main character that randomly awoke an utterly overpowered ability or found his hidden talent, who then got everything he wanted through a string of conveniences, was bland but it scratched an itch. The female main characters were usually quite uninspiring and got picked by the local pirate lord to be the bride for seemingly no reason.

In the most boiled down sense, the male power fantasy seemed to be to make good things happen with ease and the female power fantasy seemed to be to have good things happen to them with ease. John found that highly understandable. His goal in life was to make everything his women wanted happen, so it certainly mapped on to his reality. Men and women were complimentary, after all.

Personally, he found poorly written female romances a little bit more annoying to read because they doled out rewards to thoroughly undeserving main characters. At least on the male side, even the most gifted brat still had to do something, even if that something was frustratingly easy.

Alas, he was not the target demographic, so the emotional intricacies involved were lost on him. The divide between the trash heaps at the bottom of both genres wasn’t large anyhow.

“Is the book any good?” he asked. Despite his mental diatribe, he could only make an educated guess about this specific book from the two pages he looked at. The writing style implied that he was about to get a negative answer.

“It’s… alright?” Lucifrena suggested.

“Yeah, it’s alright,” Lyndell echoed. “It follows the usual structure. Plain girl works in a small bookshop. Plain girl finds cursed book. Plain girl is picked up by vampire, who insists on making her his bride. Plain girl is dominated by vampire sexually while taming his savagery socially.”

John hummed, that did sound very much like someone was painting by numbers. “What elevates it to ‘alright’ then? Because it’s not the prose, I can glean that much.”

“It provides a nice core of self-improvement,” Lorelei informed him.

“Y-yeah,” Lucifrena agreed. “The book starts with her being a little depressed and it doesn’t just go away once the vampire is involved. She’s not resisting the gifts and such, but she’s sort of realizing that the cursed book is doing a lot of heavy lifting to get the relationship started and she’s trying to make up for it by being genuinely good for the vampire.”

“If I may add, the vampire also keeps his personality. He’s not just a brooding protector that hangs over her all the time. He’s governing this whole secret society and has headaches because of it,” Lorelei continued.

“He reminds me of you,” Lyndell said.

“Well, that’s hardly a surprise,” John drawled, for once without sarcasm. He very much was a mixture of a male power fantasy protag and the love interest in a female romance novel. Some of it was just the nature of his position, being a super-rich emperor just gave rise to certain character traits, but it also was just who he had to become to get where he was. Between his looks, his wealth and his social intuition, he was catnip to the female half of the humanoid sapient species. Obviously, he had also awoken to an overpowered ability and then used it to rapidly improve his life and change the world.

Having a lot of similarities with archetypical representations of attractiveness was exactly what he was aiming for.

“So, if it’s got all of that going for it, doesn’t that make it better than ‘alright’?” he poked a little more.

“””Eeeehhh,”””” the three very different women produced the same sound in unison.

“It’s not very good at it,” Lyndell said. “It tells too much and shows too little.”

Lucifrena nodded. “Yeah… there’s this whole scene about the main character deciding to help the vampire with his social stuff and it’s just two paragraphs of how that went. Big emotional build-up, then a quick ‘it went poorly’ and then the emotional aftermath. I would like to… uhm… see why that went poorly?”

“If I may also remind of the maid subplot?” Lorelei said, to the harmonious groaning of Lyndell and Lucifrena. In that instant, it was very clear that they had the same voice, they just masked it with starkly different intonations.

“The maid subplot?” John asked. “I usually like those.”

“The mansion has maids,” Lyndell said.

“As is natural.”

“The maids don’t like the main character because she’s stealing their lord.”

“…Yeah, that’s the usual thing that happens in these novels. What’s bad about it?”

Lorelei flipped a couple pages back, to show John a segment where the maids were gossiping amongst themselves while the main character was standing hidden around the corner. “The author keeps throwing in scenes like this, but they never go anywhere,” the seer remarked. “The first couple made sense, setting the base for the hostile environment, but they just keep reiterating how much the maids dislike the main character.”

“And it weirdly never escalates,” Lucifrena added. “They have such… what’s the word…? Vitriol! Vitriol in their language and yet… uhm… they only ever gossip about her. When a maid is in a scene, she just does exactly what she is told. They never sabotage the main character in any way.”

“Sounds like it’s been done to pad the wordcount,” John theorized.

“Could at least take it somewhere…” Lyndell muttered.

“O-or!” the blonde angel spoke loudly, a little bit agitated now. “Scrap it and use the extra words on the main character getting involved in the intrigues of vampire society instead!”

“Whatever those intrigues even are…” Lyndell freed herself of her blanket burrito, revealing herself to only wear one of John’s shirts beneath. “I am not even sure if this is its own universe or set on Earth with a secret society. The world building is beyond flat.”

“That’s bad,” John remarked.

“As flat as Momo…?” Lucifrena joked quietly.

“Oh, that’s the worst!” John laughed and gave the back of the angel’s head a reprimanding poke with his big toe. The blonde turned around and playfully smacked his foot.

Lucifrena put on her best dramatic voice. Shyness introduced a stammer even in that. “You d-dare dirty my golden hair with your stinky toes?”

“I must defend my lady’s honour!” the Gamer declared.

“T-then have at thee!” Lucifrena jumped up. Balancing on one foot, she crossed shins with the Gamer. Their duel was one of nonsense and exaggerated, slow movements. John had to scoot a bit closer to the edge of the bed. “T’is known that Momo is flat as a board!”

“And what issue is this? All boobs are beautiful!” John responded.

“You are the one who took offense at my statement.”

“T’was you who likened her to flat worldbuilding, thus linking her petite chest to poor craftsmanship.”

“Nay, no negative implication was made, for I know that Momo enjoys her unorthodox worldbuilding.”

“In the immortal words of my fairy maid: ‘I enjoy it because it being bad makes it unpredictable. You never know what wild BS the author suddenly summons out of nowhere’.”

“Uhm, uh…” Lucifrena kept up the leg-fencing, even as she scrambled to find a counterpoint. “Much like she enjoys bad worldbuilding, you can enjoy breasts too small to feed a child!”

“Coffee?” Lyndell asked randomly, having since moved to the kitchen.

“A decaf, please,” Lorelei responded.

“Her chest shall grow to nourish our offspring when the time comes!” John continued the playfight.

“You wish to see her lose her flatness? Which one of us disrespects h-her body now?” Lucifrena only got more adorable with every passing second. Though her voice quivered with embarrassment, she kept talking all the same. What a rare blend of shyness and confidence.

“I always love my Momo, no matter what shape she takes!”

“Y-you should! She is cute!”

Their shins crossed one final time. They glared at one another dramatically – and laughed. Their duel ended in a draw. Lucifrena plopped back on the floor. John sat cross-legged next to her head. He gave her head a platonic scratch. Her golden hair was warm and radiant. “It is good to know we agree on this.”

“We agree on much,” Lucifrena stated. Her hand froze as she reached for the book again. “Your… killing of Veridion…”

John’s jaw clenched. Who had told her hardly mattered nor would he have chastised whoever did. What her response was, however, that mattered. “Yes?”

“I must express lamentation about your decision,” Lucifrena said, her choice of words and tone of voice drifting as they always did when she talked about moral issues. John theorized that it manifested from a dissonance between the woman she was in this life and the consolidated wisdom of all her lives combined. “Though I also cannot fault you for it. One ought not to waste time redeeming demons.”

“I can’t exactly claim to have thought that far,” John said.

Lucifrena looked eyes with him, the deep green captivating him with their wisdom and might. “Tell me earnestly, John, had Veridion shown signs of regret, had he demonstrated that there was a chance for him to be more than your adversary, would you have ended him all the same?”

The Gamer considered the hypothetical. What if Veridion had restrained himself from using dirty tricks during the trials? What if Kamehameha had spoken in favour of his old friend still having a spark of good? What if Kael had defended his ally with the fervour of someone about to lose someone important? What if Veridion had, at the very least, behaved remotely excusable during his fight against Nathalia?

“I would still have punished him…”

“As you ought to. The Son did not stay his hand either, casting misplaced souls out of poor vessels, whipping spiritually bankrupt merchants, and advocating for the buying of swords.” Lucifrena placed a hand on his knee, rising a little closer. “Would you have killed him, if there was a spark of good left?”

“…Probably not,” John responded. “I can’t say with certainty. In my order of principles ‘protecting mine’ is a lot higher than giving others second chances.”

“That is a sufficient answer.” Lucifrena dropped back down on her perfect derriere. “You are a good man, John.”

‘Be still, my beating heart!’ John warned himself. He hadn’t even added Layla yet, he would not allow himself to fall for Lucifrena in this short a timeframe. The recent increase in his mental fortitude came through. His pulse slowed, he kept his breathing steady, and he held onto Lucifrena as a friend of the harem.

For now, that was all she was.