Yet another day, yet another morning of being woken up early by my doorbell. I check my phone to see that once again, she’s come exactly at 8. You know, I like sleeping in and I’m not the kind of person who can easily go back to sleep after being woken up. But I guess this is how my life’s going to be for the time being. Thus, I once again engage in my new morning routine of forcing myself out of bed, heading to the door, greeting Blanche, getting my food, and then talking with her for a bit. We don’t usually talk about anything too interesting. Just generic “How are you” like statements and other such things. But today I felt like bringing up Bernie.
“…Weird thing to mention, but are you familiar with a guy named Bernie? He’s a co-worker of mine and I know he’s kind of famous at the clinic.”
She pauses for a few seconds before answering.
“…Oh yes, ‘The Human Punching Bag’… I really dislike that nickname. I know of him, but I don’t really see him often. I have been seeing his wife Holly though, as I’ve been assigned to assist her throughout her pregnancy. They both seem to be happy and healthy all things concerned, and my job requires that it stays that way for them. Is there a reason you brought him up?”
“No reason really.”
This leads to an awkward pause before we give our goodbyes and Blanche leaves. I’m not hungry right now, so I put the food into the fridge before heading back to my room. I have the day off today, and due to being woken up early that gives me more time for productive things. However, I am not a productive human being in the least, so I’m just going to spend this extra time browsing the internet. There’s some interesting discussion on PSDS due to the article that was posted on the main pursuitspecial blog today. It’s about the existence of race and sex segregated residential towers in LOVE.
These towers are referred to in LOVE as “Trauma Victim Residential Towers” and they were first built around 30 years ago. It was stated by the government that the idea was to give people who were so traumatized by sexism/racism fueled abuse their own place where they can live safely. However, there are several problems with that claim. The main one being that a citizen is required to have a high amount of LOVE POINTS in order to be given permission to move into one of these towers.
So, if you’re a citizen of LOVE suffering abuse over your sex/race and you don’t appease the LOVER ideology enough to accumulate the LOVE POINTS required…Well, you’re just gonna have to suck it up.
Ultimately, these “Trauma Victim Residential Towers” would end up being populated entirely by people who abuse others due to sex/race rather than the other way around. Plus, the fact that there are people who are born and raised in these towers is enough to make one question the real purpose of these towers. After all, how can a newborn need a place to feel safe from trauma when they haven’t even been alive enough to form long lasting memories?
The blog post also featured some interesting testimonies from people who were born and raised in these towers. A guy born in one of the race-based towers talked about how everyone was required to take yearly DNA tests in order to make sure no one was lying about their racial genetic makeup, and how these tests had a tendency to change what they considered appropriate year by year. Leading to people who had passed a test prior before being kicked out if they didn’t pass the next year. As one can imagine, this tended to break up families and lovers.
Another girl talked about her life growing up in a female only tower. Turns out, there were also purity tests going on in her tower. You see, the people living in the sex segregated towers do so because they’re obviously not fond of the opposite sex. However, they also live in LOVE, a part of the world that prides itself on its highly advanced sex change surgeries. As you can imagine, this leads to paranoia from members in the sex segregated towers about if someone was always naturally female or became that way via surgery.
If this was back in the old world where sex change surgery was more rudimentary, it’d be much easier to tell. But with LOVE’s advanced surgeries that keep you fertile and change your chromosomes? Suddenly it’s a lot more difficult to tell whose always been female since birth and who wasn’t, especially when the government of LOVE reward LOVE POINTS to those who get said surgery.
This paranoia leads to a lot of witch hunts and violent attacks against others. Which more often than not, just hurt people who never had sex change surgery of any kind. According to a guy on PSDS who grew up in a male only tower, a similar paranoia was also there, with similar consequences. The girl also talked about how couples in sex segregated towers had children. Now in LOVE, it is actually possible for same sex couples to have children on their own accord if they get surgeries like Landica Extensio, wherein a woman is given a penis but otherwise stays female and Perineum Incisus, which you guessed it, is when a man now has a vagina but otherwise remains male. However, LOVERS who live in sex segregated towers tend to hate the opposite sex to the point where even getting such surgeries nauseates them.
So, the sex segregated towers of LOVE have an unusual system wherein habitants of the male only towers donate semen to habitants of the female only towers. Once a female couple is incubated, the medical practitioners of the tower then engage in some mild genetic engineering in order to guarantee that one female baby is born for the female couple and that one male baby is born and sent to the male couple. Not only is it an incredibly convoluted way to have children, but also somewhat controversial even among LOVERS due to the fact that genetic engineering is applied to make sure that both couples get a child. However, the government of LOVE has stated that this is the only circumstance in which they use genetic engineering. So they say, but testimonies from people who’ve been experimented on in “mental health centers” say otherwise.
I thought I spent a good amount of time being absorbed with reading the blog and the forum thread that accompanied it, but once I finished reading it, I saw that it was only 9:20 AM. I decide to go get my food back out of the fridge. Today’s meal is a grilled cheese sandwich with tomato soup and salad. While that’s all heating up, I rummage around my DVD collection to find something interesting to watch. I eventually stumble upon an old anime called Bomba-chan.
Bomba-chan is about a cute Bombardier Beetle girl (because the Japanese have made it their mission to turn anything and everything into cute anime girls) learning how to properly control her spraying defense mechanism with comedy shenanigans aplenty. It was pretty big back in the day and even now people still like to talk about it. Mildred herself tends to refer to Bomba-chan as a “top tier waifu”.
The Bomba-chan fandom has a peculiar history. Although it was an adaptation of a manga made by a guy who had a history of making fart fetish manga, the anime managed to be wholesome enough that it attracted a surprisingly high number of “normal” people who just saw it as a cute show about learning to accept one’s self. These “normal” people would constantly harass fan artists for lewding Bomba-chan even though anyone who did the most basic research on Bomba-chan knew it’s lewd origins. Then the second season aired, which was more blatantly fetishy/lewd than the last, to the point of even having a new loli character introduced. This enraged the “normal” people so much that they decried the show and pretended that they never liked it in the first place. This happened years ago, but it’s still funny to joke about.
I watch about four episodes or so before I decide that maybe I should probably go take a shower and then head outside the apartment for a bit. While I’m in the bathroom, I’m struck with a dilemma; I don’t really know where to go as I tend to only go outside for work and shopping for things I can’t just order online. This is an issue because I’ve been finding myself on a downward trajectory towards becoming a shut-in that neglects personal hygiene, and that’s a fate I’m desperately trying to avoid. But I also have no real place to “hang out” at either, not since high school. Well, I guess I have Marisa’s grave, even if that’s not much.
…I guess I’ll go to Marisa’s grave then.
The abandoned house I buried Marisa at looks as decrepit as ever. I’ve never actually gone inside it despite having a curiosity about it. It’s not even because I think it’d be disrespectful to the people who last lived in it or anything like that…It’s because I’m deeply worried about encountering spiders in there. Not only that, but I’m paranoid at the idea that some random passerby could come across me screaming at the sight of spiders. Look, when I was a kid, my siblings would use my aversion to spiders as an easy way to get me to do what they wanted, and I just can’t afford to let others know this weakness of mine after that.
My mental deliberation of if I should explore the house or not is soon interrupted by a loud voice.
“Hey! You’re that annoying guy from the store!”
I turn to see a small ginger girl pointing at me…Ah yeah, I recognize her.
“Oh, well if it isn’t Mermaid Girl.”
She stops pointing at me and looks confused.
“M-Mermaid Girl!? Where did that come from!?”
“Oh, you don’t like that? How about ‘God’s Lion’?”
Her confusion has now morphed into blustered anger.
“I-I’m not a mermaid or a lion! I’m just Ariel, a regular human girl!”
Okay that’s enough fucking around with her over her name.
“I’m just joking, I know you. You ever got a chance to watch any of the Berserker Man movies?”
She looks at me suspiciously, not knowing if I’m still fucking with her or not. But answers honestly.
“…I came across a streaming website that had them on there, tried watching the first one, but then turned it off 20 minutes in because it was that bad.”
It should be noted that the first kill occurs twenty minutes in the first Berserker Man. There is a chance that she turned off the movie because of its graphic content…If it weren’t for the fact that the first Berserker Man is the least gory out of the whole series.
“…Yeah, nobody likes the first one, it’s pretty mediocre. The kills are lame and the Berserker Man character wasn’t fully thought out yet. That said, it’s still better than the one where he was in space.”
Ariel is now giving me the kind of baffled look that any reasonable person gives when they learn of Berserker Man 7: Beyond the Stars.
“…There was one where he went to space?”
“Yup.”
From what I’ve read, it wasn’t even supposed to be a Berserker Man movie. It was originally just a really shitty sci-fi script about a spaceship crew all dying of a “mysterious illness” that turned out to be someone on the crew betraying and poisoning them. The studio hastily rewrote the script to feature Berserker Man, and this led to the creation of a movie so terrible that even Mildred, someone who loves trashy B-movies, can’t stomach it.
Ariel pipes up with a question.
“…How come you’re okay with talking to me about these movies now?”
“Because I’m not on shift. I didn’t sell you the movies, so even if you did get traumatized by them, it wouldn’t be my problem. By the way, it’s not good manners to get pissy at an employee just trying to follow their boss’ orders.”
“…I only got pissy because you were treating me like a little kid.”
She’s acting much calmer compared to that time at the store. That’s nice.
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you about that beyond ‘tough luck’. You may not be a ‘child’ per say, but you’re still a kid at 14.”
Admittedly, what makes someone an “adult” is a bit more blurry in a time and place where age of consent laws aren’t a thing. Sure, most people find the idea of molesting children to be abhorrent and it’s not uncommon for business and landlords to have regulations regarding people under 18, but that doesn’t change the fact that there will always be sick people in world. It can get to the point where some territories have their own child porn studios to exploit children with.
Since there aren’t any laws against this, no one can really do anything about the sexual exploitation and molestation of children outside of mob justice, and from what I’ve seen from online anecdotes, angry anti-child molesting mobs almost always go after the wrong people, never actually catch perpetrators, turn out to be engaging in the very same behavior they were building a mob over, or a mixture of all three.
It’s unfortunate to say, but actual successful justice against child molesters is few and far between all the failures. But I doubt I could properly explain all this to Ariel, who’s now pouting at the fact that I called her a “kid”. Even though I conceded that she’s not a ‘child’. Of course, that’s still not good enough for her.
“Can you really call me a ‘kid’ when I have pubic hair, and I’ve been getting my period for two years now? In fact, I’m having my period right now!”
…You know, I was expecting her to talk back, I just wasn’t expecting her to be that blunt.
“…Just so you know, an actual adult would know not to bring up those sorts of things around strangers.”
“I don’t agree that we’re strangers. Sure, we don’t really know each other, but we’ve been talking for a bit, and I think it’s okay for me to tell you about personal things. You may be kind of annoying, but I don’t think you’re a bad guy.”
I have no idea what part of interacting with me gave her the impression that I can’t possibly be a bad guy. Sure, I’m so physically weak that even trying to start something with a little girl could end badly for me, but there are many other ways a ‘bad guy’ can hurt someone. Ariel starts to fish something out of her pockets.
“…Besides, even if you are a bad guy, my parents gave me these!”
She pulls out a pair of handcuffs from her shorts.
…Yes handcuffs. The things that police officers would use to take people to jail back in the old world. Nowadays the only people who own those are collectors, kidnappers, and BDSM enthusiasts. I guess the idea her parents have is that she can trick a creep into the handcuffs and then…Leave them to die? Take them to her parents? I find the logic here confusing. I feel like if you’re a parent worried about your kid getting attacked, you should probably just get them a gun, taser, or any kind of weapon really. I dunno, maybe her parents are pacifists.
“See? I’ll be okay if someone tries to hurt me!”
“Ugh, fine. I get it. Look, I’m gonna head off to somewhere else now so uh…You go have fun with your handcuffs.”
I decide to end the conversation and leave the abandoned house. Looking at my phone I can see that it’s 2 PM. I’ve only been out for less than two hours. I feel that if I want to successfully avoid becoming a shut-in, I need to be out of the house for at least three hours. But I don’t know where to go. Thanks to Blanche, grocery shopping isn’t really something I need to do right now. I suppose I could go to the rec center, but the people there tend to get mad if you just loiter around in the lobby, and there’s no way in hell I’m wasting money on a random class or game of basketball. I guess I could just walk around aimlessly, but that doesn’t sit right with me.
Maybe I could try the park? The problem with the park is that it’s not uncommon to find homeless people living there and… I’m not going to say that I dislike all homeless people, however I do find that most homeless people are so far gone mentally that It’s better to avoid them as much as possible. So, I guess I’ll head to the park and if there’s homeless people there I’ll just head home regardless of if I met my goal of being outside for three hours or not. With that in mind, I make my way to the local park.
…However, as I’m heading towards the park, I noticed something. I’m being followed. By Mermaid Girl. I figure that it’s best to treat her as if she doesn’t have malicious intent. For now.
“So, where are you headed too?”
I stop walking and ask her a simple question.
“Oh, I just felt like hanging out with you, so I‘m going wherever you’re going.”
I have no idea where she got the idea that I’m okay with her following me around. This is a misconception I should clear up fast. I’d really rather not start getting a reputation for being overly friendly with young girls.
“I don’t recall giving you permission to hang out with me.”
“…Do I need permission? You’re just walking around and so am I.”
“You’re aware that stalking was considered a crime in the old world, right?”
“I-I’m not stalking you! I’m not planning on following you home or anything like that! I just wanna hang out! What’s wrong with that!?”
“What’s wrong with that is I refuse to get hassled by people over a possible misconception of me being a molester that would be entirely your fault.”
“…How would hanging out with me make people think you’re a molester?”
This response caused me to bury my face in my hands for what was probably no more for a few seconds but felt like minutes. I can still hear her talking.
“…Hey, why are you acting like I said something stupid? How would the two of us hanging out make people think you’re a molester? That’s makes no sense!”
She really doesn’t get it, does she? I’m actually going to have to explain this to her.
“Ugh, God. Okay look… I’ll explain it as simply as possible. I’m an adult, you’re not an adult. Furthermore, we’re not family in any way whatsoever. When people see strange adults hanging around kids like you, they get suspicious of the intentions of said strange adult. Do you understand now?”
She puts her hand to her chin and ponders what I say for a moment.
“…I can see how that can be an issue. But it’s not like you’re approaching me or acting creepy, so I don’t see the issue at all. If someone gets suspicious, we can just explain things to them. And I’m 14! It’s not like I’m a little kid!”
She doesn’t get it. At all.
“You…Are way too optimistic about people. Look, why are you so bent on hanging out with me? Don’t you have scho-wait it’s Saturday… Don’t you have friends from school your own age you can hang out with?”
“I don’t wanna hang out with the kids from school, they’re stupid assholes!”
“Yeah, well, most people are stupid assholes regardless of age.”
This is going nowhere. It seems to be the more I try to get her to stop following me, the more pushy and emboldened she gets. I don’t get why she’s so obsessed with hanging around me of all people. Perhaps it’s just one of those cases of “being in the wrong place at the wrong time” for me.
CLICK
I feel cold metal against my right wrist. The reason I feel cool metal is because there’s a handcuff around said wrist. To my side I see Ariel with a handcuff around her wrist and a smug look on her face.
“Guess you got no choice but to let me hang out with you now.”
I should’ve just stayed home and continued the path to being a shut-in.
Author’s Note: This arc is starting to get a bit spicy. I admit I’m finding myself a bit hesitant with posting the later chapters, given the increasingly pro-censorship world that we live in. But then I realized, if I don’t post the rest of this arc, then the pro-censorship people win. There’s a reason I put up the age verification on the website, and even with that provision, someone’s definitely gonna get pissy at me about the subject matter for this arc.
