Dec 1st, 2069 (One-month pre-cataclysm)
They were so excited! They had been selected for an advanced experimental AI testing team. They had to work a hardcore non-disclosure agreement into the contract because they knew an advanced AI monitoring the thoughts and brainwaves of the infamously reclusive game tester and reviewer Brooklyn Umber, would discover their secret.
However, there was a price to get such good treatment in the terms of the NDA; they were obligated to record a minimum amount of quality game footage for the commercial launch of the AI. As well as quality feedback and not just bug reports but also consulting with the programmers on how to solve said bugs. Which was quite a bit more than was expected of the other testers who were either skilled testers or high profile gaming streamers, but not usually both.
Being one of less than 20 people in the world to Alpha test the most advanced entertainment AI ever created was a dream come true for Brooklyn. The highlight of their whole career; an honour greater than the Nobel prize for a tester or reviewer like them.
Therein lies the problem. They were well known for insightful reviews and constructive critiques of games and the problematic tropes of some parts of the industry. Their fans celebrated them for reviewing everything from the newest triple-A games to the smallest, most niche, Pornographic games about the most outlandish kinks. Then writing listicles or reviews like “10 porn games with better depictions of consent then the god of war franchise”. Using and SnM game that stresses the consent, trust, and care that goes into real and healthy Master/Sub relationship to highlight the ways popular main characters in triple-A titles take advantage of their power over their love interests in unhealthy ways. This made them a target for the “men’s rights” groups like gamergate and was one of the main security reasons why they worked and published under a famously reclusive persona.
Brooklyn was also well known for giving in-depth bug reports alongside recordings of how the bug occurred with helpful tips on how to fix the errors simply and easily or giving suggestions of ways of cleaning up or streamlining parts of a game’s code.
It wasn’t some supernatural mary sue gift to be good at everything that gave them the ability to be so good at both things like some of their fans liked to joke. No, it was the fact that they were secretly just two relatively hard-working people; a married couple by the names of Marty and Rayne. Brooklyn Umber was the screen name that they shared and people just started to assume that Brooklyn was a real person and hiring them to look over some code or sending Brooklyn a game to review, and this gave their work and streams more of a professional air by doing all the work together, it also gave them more free time and anonymity for adventures and vacations; Nude beach trips with friends, making new friends at a BDSM convention, meet the new friends at a sex club for drinks and bonding. Really, any adventure that lets them let their non-monogamous hetero-flexible freak flag fly. Just normal fun weekend adventures that professional game companies or fans/haters of their game streams and reviews don’t necessarily need to know about.
As two people they could compete with any one person in their field and still have free time occasionally for their other adventures. They could not, however, both use the experimental AI’s VR pod at the same time.
The Entertainment Fusions Artificial Intelligence Juxtaposition System was too much of a mouthful and made a terrible acronym so they called it the Juxtapositron. Then as she developed her Avatar personality the original programmers started to call her Jux for short.
Jux almost reported the couple the first time they switched places in the pod for allowing an unauthorized person into the pod. They were able to use the NDA and their shared gaming data from all their older devices to prove to the AI that they were both the Brooklyn Umber hired to test her systems ability to merge several games a user already owns into a bigger better more lifelike game world.
The AI, once convinced that they were both the right player, became obsessed with merging the sensory input and output of both players into 1 juxtaposed game avatar. She locked them out of entering a fully fused world until they modified their capsule and an older prototype sensor suit from another test for the same company to allow for the strange setup.
They spent whatever free time they had, from the required modifications Jux had them do, taking turns using Jux’s other systems and world set up options to create their ultimate Brooklyn Umber avatar. This also lets them carefully tune the setup options for their new personal world. The new world was made up of two main game series, plus dozens of other similar games. This allowed them to squeeze in as many useful game mechanics as they could without taking what they perceived as potentially problematic game elements from the secondary titles.
All of this would put them over three weeks behind the other teams testing Jux’s systems. Jux Informed them that none of the others spent more than two days fine-tuning their world and or their character. So the Artificial Intelligence and the couple were all quite curious how it would turn out.
They each picked a base game Series. Marty Picked the Terrania Series, from its 2D roots, all the way up to the 3d VR tower defence sandbox town builder of Terrania 7: the Eternium Pick released two years ago. Then he went through the whole series gathering up the gear and loot that he wanted for his new avatar. Normally the character could have their clothes and gear, their hot-bar items plus 40 items or stacks of items in their inventory, this could be augmented with the 40 items in each the Piggy-Bank and Safe, so a character could carry 118 items/stacks outside of their equipped gear (120-2 for the slots taken by the Piggy-Bank and Safe items themselves).
Marty had played the whole series, most individual games played to the conclusion then he often made tutorials for AFK loot farms and boss farms. He had things he wanted from them ALL! He couldn’t decide so Jux helped him create a special tiny juxtaposed Terrania world that connected to all of his old game worlds. From it, he could quickly grab full inventories of stuff from every game and over hundreds of trips he constantly filled and expanded a massive vault with it all. The huge vault was made of increasingly indestructible materials available from the way the game prevented the player access to certain places or materials until you made the right kind of mining gear. Each section of the vault went deeper in the world, was smaller than the one above it, and each became harder to access then the last. This little vault world would eventually contain every item Marty had ever earned in any Terrania game. Organized in descending order of importance and security, with his most important gear stored in a magic vault under an ocean of magma in the center of the games hell biome at the deepest part of the world. The plan being; that once they created their new avatar they could come back to the vault world once to gear themselves however they wanted.
His plan was that they could fill their 10 item hot-bar for weapons and tools, equip one of the best suits of armour in the game, with a bunch of the most universally useful accessories like Thunder Dash Boots, Seraphim Wings and of course an Ankh Shield. Then they could use the costume item slots to get a second set of armour and accessories. This would all be in addition to the 118 items in their various inventories. Even with all that, it felt like a shame to build this huge vault and only come back to take the items once, and he was having a lot of trouble narrowing down the most important items to bring.
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Jux liked the Vault world too, so she proposed a system to earn visits, instead of the full inventory their first time, they could fully equip themselves with armour and accessories, fill the hot bar with essential tools but they could only take 10 items in addition to that “basic” gear. Then they would get 5 more vault visits to allow them to pick 10 more items each time. They could earn more vault visits by doing quests or jobs for Jux in the game world. They could also donate items to the vault and earn visits that way. Anything new, or in low supply being worth more credit towards visits. Marty jumped at the chance to not need to plan out everything before ever seeing the world and the ability to eventually get more than the 120-ish item limit of his plan.
Raynee ignored the crafting mechanics. Instead, she wanted to create the ultimate sex game experience, something that could cater to any fetish, while still having proper consent and the ability to rescind your consent at any time. She also wanted a system with extremely in-depth character creation, so she could customize the appearance of their avatar to her aesthetic tastes in both physical form and in fashion.
Her Core game series was a monster person breeding series called Deva Rancher(1-7), but the standard “surprise sex” combat mechanic is pretty rapey when there is no way to decline, or for monsters to decline your advances. So Raynee had to show Jux dozens of adult games, stories and comics and explain what pieces could create the ultimate sex-positive game around polyamory or open-relationships that she wanted to play. For example, she was okay with the commonly depicted rough sex, but trust was a huge part of that, and some mindless rapey tentacle monster might not see things her way.
So there always needed to be an out, a signal that would get a partner to stop, or get you out of any sexual situation no questions asked. Amusingly, Jux found the best item to use as a base for this consent mechanic in Marty’s every filling vault. In the vault, he had over a dozen glass chests filled with magic mirrors in the lowest security/priority section. These Mirrors, when activated, return a player to their spawn point, or bedroom. Marty had so many of the things in the vault that Jux could justify giving one to every intelligent character in their new world with some modifications. Each person would then register a safe word or several safe words that could give warnings of discomfort or teleport someone home in a sufficiently uncomfortable situation. Non-sapient monster people NPCs would use a green, yellow and red light system to light up their mirror and signal their level of consent, this would be the default for players and NPCs until they added custom safe word functions.
These new Safety Mirrors were the first Devanian items developed for the new world, Devania being the name for the new world created by combining the Terrania series with Deva Rancher and elements from a few dozen other adult fantasy games. Rayne and Jux also developed a system that would always keep a part of a person’s mind clear of influence. For example; if one was drugged or physically influenced into doing something, that small part of their mind could use their mirror to shatter the mental influence, teleport them home or both at any time. This lets them have fun drugs like alcohol, marijuana or cocaine in their world without worrying about people being drugged and potentially used in a way they were not okay with. This seemed especially important with the potential for things like nymphs and succubi, as well as something like an alraune plant person with aphrodisiac pollen, or really any creature with a supernatural power that alters a person's state of mind.
They wanted their world to have all the things without getting too creepy. This led to the second important item in Devania’s development; the Deva Statues. Terrania had angel statues scattered in every world that did nothing, other statues could spawn monsters or items, but the angel statues were well known for being both common and useless. However, the Deva Statues in Deva Rancher were the spawn points for the games sexy monster people that you catch by winning at sex or feeding them their preferred monster person bodily fluid. These only semi-sentient monster people were in another category from the sapient monster people townsfolk who had supposedly been awakened by the goddess, in the game’s lore.
They also fed Jux data from books and mythology to fill in her knowledge of monster lore beyond just what was in a sandbox game series and a bunch of porn. This is where Jux learned that Deva’s are usually a mixture of an angel and a Demon.
When working on the new game world’s lore. Jux decided that if the purely aggressive combat monsters of Terrania are the metaphorical “Demons” and humans or sapient people trying to survive them are the metaphorical “Angels” on the side of the classic goddess of love and fertility in every adult fantasy game or story. Then the half-person half-monster creatures meant for catching, training spawning at these Deva Statues would make sense.
The new Lore for Devania that they came up with was that the goddess blessed the world with the statues of her angels. These statues captured weakened monsters and began creating friendly versions of the created monsters that men and women could tame or mate with to improve their power and chances of survival. Combat is forbidden in these “Deva Zones” so one can only show strength and dominance through sexual prowess. These would functionally act as safe zones for NPCs before the players built any towns. Churches would eventually grant larger safe zones for towns that would create the same protection as a statue, but without the sex-monster spawns. This lets them keep the hardcore survival combat of Terrania separate from the sex battles to tame monster people. The random angel statues merging with monsters near them would create safe pockets all over the world, hopefully in different biomes and spawning different types of monster people. Jux informed us that she was planning on using some of the thousands of angel statues in the vault to add some to key locations in the new world.
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Sooner than they thought possible the modifications to the worlds, their pod, and their gear were all completed. They logged into Devania, Raynne’s tiny 5’3’’ frame nestled into Marty’s broad soft chest as he carefully closed the pod without hitting his 6’5’’ head, the slight discomfort was soon washed away as they logged into the white void desktop they usually met Jux in.
“-Panicked Statement- Hurry and finalize your character and login, we are running out of time.” Jux demanded in a monotone, but her emotional simulation indicator statement indicated her panic. The couple were getting used to The AI’s new odd method of speech.
“Time for what?” Marty asked as they headed for the Devania Door in the void.
“-Paranoia- Can’t say yet. The other AI’s would be upset with me.” Jux’s avatar said as she looked around like she was expecting unwanted company… in their VR desktop.
Marty and Raynne looked at each other and shrugged, not knowing what the AI was worried about. They had never heard of other AIs on the project. They were too excited to start their gaming experiment together, to think much about it. So they held hands and jumped into The Devania Gate together.
The AI’s last words followed them as they jumped. “-Relief- Good that gives them a 15% chance of survival, better than I can give most”
They saw a panicked look cross each other’s face before blackness stole their vision.