by Alden Odessa
“Drugs?”
“Yes, apparently it’s gotten worse down here and the girls are turning to drugs to cope.”
Honestly, it sounded like my world.
“Girls didn’t use to touch the stuff, but now I guess it’s the only thing they can get for payment. They trade sex for drugs and a warm room. It didn’t look like the place they had been squatting even had a roof, certainly no glass in the windows. It gets cold in The Lower Bottoms, especially when there’s no electricity turned on.”
It’s something I hadn’t thought about. With all the glitz and glamor of where I spawned at, I never stopped to think about the NPC’s having to do something as menial as paying the electric bill. “So they were just shacking up with whoever could provide warmth.”
“Or drugs to make them feel warm.”
“Put a pin in that for future recruitment.”
“Done.”
“So Courtney was the only clean one?”
“Clean?”
“Drug free?”
“Well, I’m not saying that she is drug free, I didn’t ask, but she seemed that way. At least tonight.”
“Okay, go on.”
“I told her what we were offering, and she was interested. She had been thinking about joining a harem anyway and we happened to come along at the right time. She actually seemed pretty excited about it. I told her we could at least give her a warm night and food. It seemed like she hadn’t eaten in a while.”
“She did seem much more loosened up after eating.”
“Well, she looks like the kind of girl that would be,” Betty said in a very matter-of-fact way without really calling Courtney fat.
“True,” I replied.
“So she was an easy recruitment,” Betty continued. “Stephanie I found by shear chance after Bogo and I struck out for the next hour. She was just sitting on a park bench.”
“Why were you in a park?”
“It was the only place to set down.”
Something then dawned on me to ask: “Also, The North Night has parks?”
She chuckled. “It does. Surprising I know. Bogo and I both commented on it. Maybe The Lower Bottoms used to be a nicer place?”
“Possibly,” I said, sort of confused by this new information. “So, Stephanie was there?”
“I don’t know where she came from, but we were sitting on the bench when we heard her voice. She said she would blow Bogo for forty bucks, fifty if I wanted to watch. thirty if I wanted to join in.”
“Did you?” I said, shocked and a little concerned.
“No. You didn’t send us with any money.”
Shit. I have to give them money? I didn’t realize this. It’s something I would have to remember in the future. “Sorry,” I said.
“It’s fine. I know Bogo has some money, so if he was really that interested he could have paid for it. But he knew he had a job to do.”
I forgot Bogo had money. “He seems to be working out.”
“He’s very loyal to you, Buster. As am I.”
I don’t know what I had done to make these people so loyal to me, but whatever I was doing I had better keep it up, as things would get worse before they got better. “Thank you,” I replied simply.
“We gave her the business plan, and she asked if she would be paid for her time tonight if she said no to our offer and I didn’t know what to say, but Bogo said yes.”
“Because he has money and is loyal.”
“Yes.”
“Other than that I really know little about her and sadly I know even less about April.”
Ah yes, April, the one I wanted to know about the most. “Why is that?”
“We found her in the Gallows, crying.”
“What?”
“Yes. She was right at the crossroads of the four corners, directly beneath The Landmark Bridge, pretty much dead center of The Lower Bottoms,” she said, and then waited to see if I would comment. I didn’t. “She was naked and alone. She was sitting in the middle of the darkness, curled up. Had of she not been crying we would have never found her.”
“Isn’t the gallows dangerous?”
“Very. There is practically no light and there’s a lot of rough stuff that happens there. That part in particular is like a combination of all the bad things of The Lower Bottoms and none of it good.”
“There’s good?”
“Well, better than the bad, I guess.”
“Go on.”
“I started to approach her and Bogo held me back. He then went to her. She heard him coming and looked up. She screamed at him, in fear, and scrambled away, but didn’t get up. She stumbled and then laid on the ground, crying all the more.”
“Was she hurt? Bleeding?”
“I approached her after Bogo had scared her. He was saddened by this. I don’t know if he was hurt that he was scary, or just that he had scared her. Either way, I think he knew it would be best if he stayed away from her.”
“He’s a sweet guy.”
“That he is. I went to her and tried to calm her down best I could. I told her I wasn’t going to hurt her, that we would not hurt her. She looked up and asked for help. It’s all she said, ‘help me’. I told her she could join us. I told her about you and that you would treat her kindly and not hurt her. She seemed afraid.”
“And still does.”
“Yes, but I don’t know what happened to her. Courtney said there were clothes, although not nice ones, back at the place she was staying, so we got some and then headed back, we felt we had been down there long enough and we had enough girls to get started.”
“How big are the groups you’ve been in in the past?”
“As small as two and as big as fifty.”
Fifty fucking prostitutes! Holy shit! “What’s common?”
“I don’t really know.”
“All right, then what happened?”
“And then we came back here. Courtney and Stephanie talked to each other, and to me. They asked about you and I told them all that I knew, which was mostly just about how I had been treated. Bogo also said that you were a good guy.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Don’t mention it. The two girls seemed intrigued to get started, and it seemed like the biggest thing to Courtney was being taken care of. I have a feeling that she had become filled with worry. She certainly didn’t like to wake up and find out that all of her roommates had ran off to get high someplace. Girls stick together down there, it’s the only way to stay alive. They kind of form their own groups.”
“Their own harems.”
“Yes, that. But these two were alone. Stephanie said she had just left her owner and had run to The Lower Bottoms to hide out from him. Apparently he was pretty rough and worked mostly the coast. But she liked her job, she just didn’t like her boss. She thought that The Lower Bottoms would be a good place to hide out and learn to go on her own.”
“So why did she join us?”
“She got robbed within a few hours of being here and had to let hustlers jerk off on her for five bucks a load.”
“What?”
“They mostly play dice in the alleys. They don’t have enough money for even a ten dollar blow job, so we call them Beaters. She said she would take anything she could get, sometimes it was only one or two dollars, but she would sit there and let them masturbate on her.”
“Seriously?” I asked in amazement.
“A girl’s got to eat. Once the word got around that a cute redhead was letting guys jerk off on her boobs for a couple bucks she became popular.”
“That’s no way to live.”
“You do what you can to survive down here. It wasn’t long before that was all she was doing and she hated it. She got really bored with it. You can probably tell she’s a little energetic. So kneeling down and letting a man come on you gets boring pretty quick.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“She had retreated to the park with what money she had saved up and wa
s trying to figure a way out of her present situation when we showed up.”
“Good timing on our part.”
“It was!”
I guess this would explain why Stephanie had been such an excitable lay and so ready to have sex. It seemed like she hadn’t done it in a while.
“April is still a little bit of a mystery,” Betty continued. “She didn’t speak much on the way back, but she stayed close to Bogo. She’s afraid. It worried me about bringing her back and I was even more worried about the way she reacted during the audition.”
Betty looked down at her feet. She shuffled one foot, afraid to look me in the eyes. “I’m sorry I brought her. I know I did bad by doing that.”
“Nonsense. Betty you did a great job. April will be fine, let me worry about her for the moment. I have to gain her trust and explain to her what is expected.”
“What will you do if she cannot perform?”
“Then I’ll find another job for her.”
Betty looked up at me with a surprised look on her face, and a look of genuine awe. “You really aren’t like the others are you?”
“I hope not.” Out of the corner of my eye I saw a +3T pop up. Apparently I wasn’t being downgraded there for my earlier thoughts. Maybe I can win the game with only trust, who knows? But if screwing frightened women, whether or not they wanted to, was how you won the game, then I might as well go ahead and zero myself out!
I was going to beat this, and I was going to do it my way.
18
On the Prowl
I entered The Falls Hotel bar area for the first time and no one was more surprised than I was that I hadn’t been to the bar since I had got here.
It was almost exactly what I had expected. Just like the lobby had the shabby chic appeal of an old western movie, the bar was similar. Rustic and ruin. This is pretty much how I would sum up all of The Upper and The Lower Bottoms. I haven’t spent as much time in the lower, but I am assuming it’s worse than this.
I was growing accustomed to it and I was forgetting all about what life had been like two days ago in the slick part of Canny Valley, this was my reality now, this part of town. It would be for the foreseeable future unless my harem went off like gangbusters. I guess there was always hope.
Hope is a terrible strategy.
I had limited options for tonight, extremely limited considering my girls didn’t even have clothes. They were all sitting upstairs in the room buck-ass naked. Even April. I was sitting her out tonight until I figured out what to do with her. Right now her one job would be to acclimate to her surroundings. I told Betty to encourage her to interact with the girls. She did not seem averse to having sex with Stephanie during our little tryst so I hope that she can be comfortable with the girls. She can work her way up to me, but that needs to happen sooner rather than later.
I’m not in the position to feed, clothe, and house a woman who is not serving a purpose and earning. There I go again, treating my women as commodities. Wasn’t that the point?
It was, but as I had already told myself, I will win the game my own way. I’m not changing the game, I’m just making the game play by my rules.
I have no idea if this is a good idea or not.
So if I can’t get April to work I will have to find another job for her to do. Another purpose to serve. I am sure, as this challenge continues, that there will be other needs I have. Someone to run errands, someone to clean, someone to go grocery shopping. I’m not going to turn her back out to the streets.
An opportunity will present itself.
I walk up to the bar and am not greeted as promptly as I had been at The Reference. I use the opportunity to check my menu.
My menu does not appear to other people, it just looks like I’m staring off into the distance. So there’s no concern of other NPC’s seeing me looking at it, thus exposing me as a fraud and zeroing me out.
One thing about traveling all the way down here was what it did for my map. My map filled out as I went somewhere, or by something. As soon as I did, the location would appear on my map. The game wanted me to explore and learn about the city. If I was going to win the game, I would have to run the whole city, so it made sense that the game would do this. Dick move though. It would be easier if I knew where to go without having to figure it out myself. Wish I had a cheat code or something. I’m curious if such a thing even exists.
There were no other events in my menu. No new missions. Just the same ol’ same ol’. The only thing that had changed was my harem tab. It had added all three girls. I noticed that there were stats on each of them, which I found fascinating.
COURTNEY:
Face: 5
Breasts: 6
Butt: 3
Sex: 3
Courtney didn’t rate too terribly high. Mostly I think this had to do with her physical appearance. The game really gave her a knock for being overweight. I looked below that at her strengths:
STRENGTHS: Oral
WEAKNESSES: Vaginal
Now here was a curiosity, was this my assessment or was it the games? Were these baked in stats, so to speak? I feel that all of these items were accurate. She gave a hell of a blow job, but the sex wasn’t that much to speak of. Honestly, if I stuck my dick in a glass of water, I probably would have gotten more out of it. She was however plenty active. She was into it; she wasn’t a dead lay by any stretch of the imagination.
STEPHANIE:
Face: 7
Breasts: 5
Butt: 5
Sex: 7
STRENGTHS: Vaginal. Aggressiveness. Pillow Talk. Personality.
WEAKNESSES: Oral
Once again. Accurate by my perspective.
APRIL:
NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.
Huh? What the fuck did that mean. If this was going by my assessment, then I could at least give her a ranking on her body, but she had nothing available. She was a blank slate. Something was weird about this April situation and I needed to get to the bottom of it sooner rather than later.
Holy shit, I just noticed that Betty had statistics.
BETTY:
Face: 5
Breasts: 1
Butt: 5
Sex: 3
STRENGTHS: Personality.
WEAKNESSES: Oral. Vaginal. Anal. Pillow Talk.
Ouch. The game was not kind to Betty. I would rate her higher, but that could be the “work eyes effect” I thought about earlier. She was sweet, and I had grown fond of her. But the game, it felt other wise.
Earlier I had thought Betty would be my best bet at making money after going down to The Lower Bottoms, but what I have learned is that, even the bad one’s could be turned into a something. Those pumpkins could be turned into carriages, so to speak. Now, It appeared as though Betty and Bogo picked the best girls down there, at least of the ones that weren’t currently working South Light.
When they had walked into our room tonight, I thought for sure I was screwed. I wouldn’t fuck a one of them if I saw them on the street. But cleaned up, fresh. I certainly didn’t mind it.
In fact, Stephanie was a hell of a lay, as relayed through her stats. She was going to be a moneymaker for me. Still, she wasn’t anything like they had a few blocks North. They weren’t the show stoppers at the main spawning point that’s for sure. I wondered how she rated compared to the coast since that’s where she was originally at? Was she average, or was she considered low rent up there? Hard telling, but I have a feeling I will find out before I get the hell out of Canny Valley.
“Whaddaya need?” I heard from in front of me and could see a man standing on the other side of my translucent menu screen and it pulled my attention from my HUD. I closed it out and addressed the man.
“Whiskey. Up.” He didn’t say a word, he didn’t smile, he just turned around. Presumably to make my drink.
The bar was busy. In fact, it was busier than The Reference had been. I don’t know if that had something to do with the time of night or if it was because
of something else.
There is no way of me knowing who here was an NPC and who was a player. I assumed that they had to operate under the same rules as I did. They couldn’t promote that they came from another plane of existence.
Betty mentioned nothing about “tourists” down here, in fact she made a point of mentioning that they were locals, but I had no idea really what that meant. What was their purpose? How did they serve the game other than as scenery? I had interacted with a few. Some store owners and a few women on the street in The Lower Bottoms, they were full-fledged people, or at least that’s how they seemed.
I thought back to that man on the street, the one who lit my smoke. Was he a player? NPC?
Stop.
Stop asking questions. Play the fucking game. Do your damn job.
The bartender who was a tall man of no distinct features other than an ugly face and a fat gut, coarsely sat the drink on the bar. I saw two dollars evaporate out of my account. Not a bad deal. I took the drink in one gulp and realized why it was two dollars. Fucking thing burned all the way down. I actually felt it hit my gut and then try to work its way out the front with a flamethrower.
Honestly, it was exactly what I needed to derail my train of thought.
“Another?” the ugly bartender asked.
“Yeah,” I said, “and an extinguisher.”
He didn’t smile at my comment, in fact he had no expression at all. He pulled up the bottle and poured the gut rot in my glass. Didn’t bother giving me a new glass or cleaning my old one. Just poured it directly in.
I waited on this one before drinking it down. Gave my stomach a chance to settle the last one. I looked at the snarly and unhappy drink pourer. “Can I ask you a question?”
“As long as you don’t mind the answer.”
“What’s the company situation like in here?”
