At midnight, with Mai at level 2 and thus the moderator's condition for not deleting me satisfied, I intended to go home, smoke a j or two, and sleep soundly. I could get back to my regular schedule and forget about the moderator and the moderator's perverse games.
How naive I was.
When I opened the door to leave Mai's dorm room, I found my way blocked by a sweaty Henry. He had apparently sprinted there, and was out of breath, bent over, hands on knees.
"Mai," he said through wheezes. "Mai, are you okay?"
Mai got up to see what was going on, so I swung the door wide open. Henry managed to stand upright and step in.
"Why wouldn't I be?" she said.
Henry pointed at me. His movement was loose; he'd had a deal to drink. "You let this pervert in your dorm room. I had to check on you, but my phone died." From his pocket, he pulled out a phone and demonstrated that its screen stayed black when he pressed the button. Then it slipped out of his hands onto the rug.
Henry's drunk pretense for visiting Mai's dorm late at night fooled no one. The mere idea that we were together here made it impossible for him to calm down. His jealousy over an ex commanded that degree of power over him.
For a moment, Mai just stared at him, and then I saw her have an idea. The way Mai's thinking showed clearly on her face had always endeared her to me, even back when I was her TA. It lit up whenever she figured something out, and then she would smirk and move to act.
"Hey," she said to me. "Make me a new challenge card. A spicy one."
So I did.
> Challenge: Throw your pajamas and shirt across the room, climb into my lap for two minutes. Estimated rewards: 30xp. Minimum rewards: 2xp.
This time, she had none of the mixed feelings I saw in her during the first challenge. She kicked her pants off, tossed her shirt over her shoulder, and sat in my lap on the floor without breaking eye contact with Henry. "I'm very safe," she said to him. "So why don't you head on home to Eva?"
Henry's fists clenched, and his arms began to shake, which set me ill at ease. Drunk, stupid, and angry were not the ingredients of a stable situation.
Eva shouting out in the hall interrupted the vicious stare down between Henry and Mai. She shouted Henry's name and asked where he'd gone.
After she arrived at the open door and took in the scene, she grabbed Henry's ear. He winced when she pulled it. "Why am I finding you in her room?" she said, then turned to Mai. "And can't you dress decent?"
"It's my room."
The winning move for Henry, here, if one could be said to exist, was to apologize to Eva and go home. But that's not what he did.
He fell to his knees.
He started to cry.
He said, "Mai, come back to me."
Was this the power of just 10% hotter? The air pressure in the room seemed to drop. I didn't dare interrupt the silence. The first one to do so was Mai, who started laughing.
Eva fell into a seated position on the rug and looked at me. "Hey, are you still recruiting for your world-domination harem?"
Carefully, after making sure Henry was not looking in my direction, I nodded.
Eva put her hand on Henry's shoulder. "We're done. Go home alone."
Henry sat upright slowly, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Fortunately, he seemed more deflated than poised to lash out. I didn't think I'd ever witnessed such thorough humiliation before in my life.
He wiped his tears and got up to leave, but before he did, his phone rang. The same phone whose battery, moments earlier, was dead. All four of us looked at it in confusion. The caller id read, _Moderator_.
Henry answered. "Who is this? How did you find my... Oh..."
My own phone beeped with a forum message, also from the moderator. It read, _I realized you'd probably quit participating after tonight, so I've created a new incentive.
Henry flipped his phone shut. "So that's what's been going on," he said.
Mai and I exchanged concerned expressions. How had the moderator conveyed everything to him so quickly? He must have had special ways unavailable to us.
"The race is on," Henry continued, looking directly at me now. "Don't think I'll forget tonight when I run the world and you just live in it." Then he left.
We now had an opponent. The moderator had invited Henry to play too, the same game, vying for domination of the same world. To ignore the game now meant to forfeit the world to Henry, whom I suspected was the vindictive type.
While Mai got herself dressed, I caught Eva up on the situation. For some reason she didn't struggle with the philosophical part of learning she lived in a simulation the way Mai and I had, or the way anyone well-adjusted might be expected to. She was simply down to play against Henry, whatever that meant. When I pulled out the stack of cards, one featured Eva's portrait already.
Mai returned and read her challenge card. "Why did I get so little? It estimated 30xp. I even went over the prescribed time because we got distracted."
I took it from her. It read:
> Complete. Exp gained: min(reluctance (0.1) * pleasure (.3) * time (183), 2) = 5.49
"You weren't reluctant enough," I said. "Seems like you don't get points unless there's inhibition to overcome. What was different between that time and the first?"
"I'm not sure. I just wanted to make Henry mad and didn't think about much else."
I checked my own card. It now read, _Aiden, Level 3, [2.47/8] xp_, meaning I'd received a copy of all the xp Mai earned. And in the info box:
> Powers: Arousal control, perfect exposition.
_Perfect exposition_, I assumed, was why I was able to explain the state of things to Eva so easily.
Eva held up Mai's card. "You're level 3 now. Do you get a new power?"
Mai pretended not to hear Eva. A long-simmering antagonism lingered between them, one that, if solvable at all, would take time.
I checked the manual for the options. "Okay Mai, your choices are--"
"Don't tell me," Mai said. "Let's think big picture first. What's Henry going to do? What's our strategy? I am not going to live under that man's harem dictatorship."
Eva snickered. "Now that I've left him, there's no one he can start with. We've got time."
"I think you should hear the choices, Mai," I said. "One of the options is _100% faster_. They're escalating fast."
"Let me see." She snatched the manual. "No, this says, _100% faster while naked_."
"Yeah, there was that second part, but--"
"And my other option is _100% stronger while aroused and wet_." She stared blankly at me. She knew I was only the messenger, but her indignation needed a target.
In the end, we agreed to take a pause for a few days and think on our own. On Eva's assurance, we weren't worried about Henry's rate of progress.
Over the weekend I read about historical cases of local insurrections within empires and nation states, to see if we could start small. Say, conquer a city first, then a state, and so on. But I found that almost always, the empire sends its military before internal rebellion spreads. Which I supposed I could have guessed that. A civilization is an organism, and an infection anywhere triggers an immune response from the whole body.
I met up with Mai at the end of her track practice to see what she'd come up with.
It was the last race of their practice, before the field lights cut out. The girl who ran alongside and then passed Mai on their final lap seemed too fast to believe, even accounting for the fact that she presumably had trained in the sport for years. Once Mai stepped off the track, I approached the chain link fence and called out to her.
"What is it?" she said, approaching the fence.
"That girl, is she always so fast?"
