"You know, it's a shame none of us have giantess fetishes," Akane said, setting her new Sizechangeinator down on the table. "This would've been a lot more fun at orgies if we did."

"I don't think we can reasonably call what happens in your bedroom at night an orgy," I said. "That's just business as usual for us these days, and everyone present is in a committed relationship with everyone else present."

"Does that meaningfully make it not-an-orgy?" Akane asked.

"That'd require us to define the essential qualities of an orgy, and frankly I'm not sure that's a good idea," I said. "I looked it up for some weird porn I was writing a year ago, and found a lot of really weird thinkpieces arguing about it with people they've apparently met in their real lives. One of them invoked Marc Jacobs for some reason? I think? But you know what, I get to have kinky tentacle sex every night with a cheerleader who grew up to be a rocket scientist, a transgender foxgirl, and a Power Girl knockers- I mean knockout- I mean knockoff. I actually don't care if anyone else thinks that's an orgy or not. I'm too busy having sex to care."

"Your confidence is an inspiration to us all," Akane said solemnly. "Also I think that you should mention the fact that I stopped being a cheerleader because my boobs got too big, if you're going to describe me as archetypally sexy. Or maybe... no, actually, probably don't say 'Japanese schoolgirl with a tentacle fetish.'"

"You're like 22 and you have a Bachelor's Degree in Aerospace Engineering," I said. "You are by no means a schoolgirl anymore."

"Ooooh, I know," Akane said. "If Nicky gets to be a Power Girl knockoff, then I get to be an off-brand Hitomi Tanaka!"

"Oh, she was a famous porn star in this world too?" I asked.

"I mean, when you look like that, it's an appealing option," Akane said.

"I was thinking more that, in this world, there might not have been an unreasonably busty Japanese porn star named Hitomi Tanaka," I said. "That's a fairly unlikely confluence of events, which only happened because, well, she has to be named something. And on an unrelated note, something funny has occurred to me that I now feel comfortable sharing with you now that you've had my penis inside every orifice where it would fit."

"Ooooh?"

"I have not bothered looking up porn since I came here, because I immediately met you, and you and Nicky were all I needed in my spank bank."

"Awwww, that's actually really sweet," Akane said.

"And as a result, it now occurs to me that Hitomi Tanaka may look different in this world than she did back home," I continued. "Another reason I didn't bother looking up porn since I came here was because the Virtual Machine has infinite storage capacity, and I have abused that to contain a lot of porn scraped from the old world. And so I ask of you, Akane... do you want to find out if she does look different?"

"Maybe in a bit," Akane said. "I know I give the impression that I am, but I am not, in fact, constantly horny. Just frequently horny. I'm a woman in my 20s, and that's normal."

"Fair. Right now... well, I guess you wanna write up a report on what you've learned from this gadget, while it's still fresh?"

"Yep! And after that, I'm gonna email Doctor Wales and see if I can get more stuff to help my development! I wanna get even deeper into transformation stuff, and maybe finally figure out how to turn a person into an actual fox, and not just a person with fox ears and a tail."

"...Do you plan to do anything more practical with that technology? Because I've read accounts of it being used to make people insanely durable, and since transformations can be made permanent..."

"I mean, sure, we can do that after I turn into a bald eagle and pretend I'm Rachel from Animorphs," Akane said.

"Oh, you read Animorphs too?" I asked. "Are you going to make your transformation gadget based on the Escafil Device?"

"I want to, but I don't think that'd really be possible," Akane said. "For one, the math is weird about getting transformations to last for more than about fifteen minutes; usually it's easier to just make it indefinite and then manually end it once you're done. Two, the Escafil Device itself isn't what lets the Animorphs do their Animorphing, y'know? It's a blue box, and after they've been initiated with it once, they forever have in their bones the ability to acquire new morphs and turn into them. It doesn't need to be with them."

"...That's a fair point," I said. "You know, that actually is just... really weird, you know? Usually when there's a gadget that lets you do something in sci-fi, you have to actually, like, have the gadget at least nearby in order to do the thing. But this, well... the Escafil Device instead just... permanently turned them into 'themselves, but with the ability to shapeshift into animals they've touched.'"

"That, and there's also the whole 'you can't morph again if you stay morphed for more than two hours, you're stuck like that forever' deal," Akane said. "And for Animorphs, that's fine! That's a credible threat with, like, zero upsides. But we're not in Animorphs, we're in a world where ray guns that turn you into aluminum exist and being 'unable to transform' would arguably be a bonus, especially if you've already gotten what you wanted out of transformation. And, also, where everyone's gadgets work for different reasons and may not respect the logic of your own gadgets."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"True, yeah, although I wouldn't count on facing enemy demiurges with transformational abilities," I said. "There aren't that many demiurges in this universe-"

"I counted, last week," Akane said. "One hundred and twenty one in the Earth's sphere of influence showed up on my scanner, plus however many are hidden- which should really only be Doctor Skinner and whoever's working for her, right? That's not a tiny number."

"It kind of is," I said. "There were, like, about fifty people in my research fellowship, which is not considered a large collective. Hell, Greater Austin alone had about two hundred demiurges in its city limits, back in a universe where it was merely a hub of the tech industry, not the hub, and only had around two million people living in it. And that's just the demiurges, not counting the vampires and the druids and the thaumaturges and- okay Austin didn't usually have primordials for long, everyone hates primordials and one thaumaturge or another usually ganked them the moment they started making trouble."

"I see, I see," Akane said, nodding.

"Buuuuut, we can talk the demographics of A-510's supernatural population later," I said. "Show me your own scan and the results."

"Alright, well, with the caveat that I'm not a geographer or a demographer- is that a real specialization?"

"Yeah, it is."

"With the caveat that I'm an aerospace engineer who still lacks a lot of soft skills but has exactly enough to identify that this is primarily a question for social sciences... I've drawn up a map of every detectable Demiurge on the planet," Akane said. "Well, mostly on the planet. There's one who lives in a spaceship in Low Earth Orbit, who everyone thinks is just a superscientist who doesn't like having neighbors, but, I did still figure out where they lived before they moved into space, and put that on the map too. And the map is..."

She turned to face the interdimensional scanner I'd built, which I presume she did not actually use for this scan, since it was completed yesterday and she did her scanning-mapping project last week. Instead, I was pretty sure she was using her own Virtual Machine- I'd given her one shortly after we started dating, because she said, at this point, it was pretty evident she trusted me to put anything I wanted anywhere I wanted, and I agreed to give her the full suite of basic implants if she agreed to stop referring to surgery as though it were a sex thing- to load the map onto this new scanner's hologram projector.

"There!" Yep, I was right.

"Alright, let's see..." I said, studying the globe as it spun gently. "Hrm... Okay, so, they seem to be clustered around large population centers in North America- excluding Mexico, so really just Canada and the US- plus Western Europe and, a bit, in East Asia. I've already studied the demographics of demiurges, so instead, I'd like you to tell me what you can gather from this information."

"I think," Akane said, tapping her chin. "...that this is mostly a non-representative random-walk of the global population, which maps somewhat poorly to global population distribution because there's fewer data points than there are recognized countries."

"And what conclusion are you drawing from this?" I asked.

"...That demiurgy is randomly-distributed, on a demographic scale? I remember you saying that it generally correlates with intelligence, and also that you dropped out of college in your second semester, so it's just about raw brainological horsepower and not necessarily about any specialist training, because you didn't have that."

"In point of fact, I did receive that from Doctor Skinner," I said. "No, your conclusion is broadly incorrect, due to the incompleteness of your data. Demiurgy statistically aggregates around the wealthy and educated; back home, almost ninety percent of demiurges came from a technical or academic background. Librarians, teachers, physicians, programmers, engineers... Hell, about one in three had an actual, accredited doctoral degree, whether it be PhD, MD, JD... And that's today. A hundred or so years ago, three in four mad scientists were male, and most of them were white and upper class."

"Huh," Akane said, tapping her chin as she considered the map.

"So, looking at this map, we can see a... still probably non-representative map that loosely sketches the world's bastions of privilege and education. We can see a few people scattered across the less wealthy parts of the world- there's someone in Nigeria, someone in Mumbai- oh, wait, they never renamed it here, so it's Bombay- and someone in Brazil, but there's always a few people who escape the grim economic determinism." I chuckled darkly. "That's how my peers brush off any feelings of responsibility for this; since a few people do manage to escape the confines of poverty, clearly it's possible, and everyone who doesn't simply isn't good enough to do it."

"...Huh," Akane repeated, reaching out a hand and spinning the globe hologram manually. "Of course, there's the question of whether demiurgy is a good thing. I've been enjoying myself, but you... do generally take the stance that being a demiurge sucks, and you've been a solo demiurge before, so... Hrm."

"Being a demiurge is neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but a demiurge does wield great personal power, and that isn't nothing," I said. "A mediocre demiurge who specializes in weapons can vaporize an entire infantry platoon on their own, if they put their mind to it. Sure, actually doing that sucks and is bad for you, but having the option of doing that does give you more choices in the event that, say, an imperialist army is invading your home. Anyhow, I didn't mean to turn this into a lecture about sociopolitics. Just... I don't know. The world is fucked, and we should contribute to fixing it without doing things that will make it worse. Stay low, lend a hand, and listen to other people. We're crazy too, and we don't always know best."

"Will do, boss," Akane said.

"Brat."

"Mhm!"