One month before Jonathan received his W.I.F.E. unit, Jack and his wife Rya Barnes were at the Virtual Beds headquarters.  Having invested a significant chunk of their paychecks from their Deep Games programming job, they were present for the unveiling of the newest product.  It was a queen sized bed with unique features for consenting couples.  This full immersion bed allowed half-immersion when performing the so-called bedroom arts.  This half-immersion mode allowed the user to control their bodies in real-time while using virtual toys and clothing when in the virtual copy of the bed.  After a thorough testing session by the couple, they ordered three.  One for their use, one for their MENSA graduate boss also known as Ellen the Ice Queen, and one for the guy she’d been too shy to talk to when she passed him every day on the way home from college (they of course believe it was likely because he was in high school even though they’re only a few weeks apart in age).  The fact that Jonathan happened to be that guy was pried out of Ellen by the couple when they brought a celebratory sparkling “juice”, otherwise known as champagne, to the office for marking the end of the alpha testing of Survival Instinct.

After arranging for the units to be delivered to the two clueless idiots with a modification making it almost impossible to log into anything besides SI, Jack and Rya went to tampering with the database.  First up was convincing Ellen that her character would make a good template for a Goddess.  Ellen took to it like a fish to water and with no prodding whatsoever set her character up as an itinerant Goddess of Marriage, Home, and Fertility. That’s when things got fun for the couple.  Creating blessings and titles to insert into the holy repertoire of the new religion of Elan and tinkering with them so that Jonathan would receive at least one of them when logging in was easy since Ellen was more interested in fine tuning graphics and AI engines.  Of course, one of Ellen’s duties was to welcome the select few beta players personally.

It shocked Ellen to no end when Jonathan showed up, and she muddled through her speech trying to give a feel of being nothing more than an AI.  She secretly hoped he would choose to be an Elven character because when she wasn’t playing goddess in the game, her character was in the elven territories under a glamour so the locals wouldn’t freak out over the one goddess that could ensure their low birthrates were a thing of the past.

At first the devious couple didn’t see the coding mistake that allowed Jonathan’s male character to receive a female only title, but when he finally logged in and the code forced him to the town they were waiting in, they started a new game.  One of their goals was to eventually get Jonathan and Ellen into the same village and they had hacked the system to create a new tracking spell they targeted on their poor boss.   There was no sense of shame or remorse for the tracking spell because Ellen frequently made their lives many times more difficult when they were at the office and they had already loaded a patched version of the game onto the W.I.F.E. modules they and Ellen owned that gave them administrative access and virtual coding tools.  However, they needed a way to get her attention if she didn’t follow to the village while the unsuspecting Jonathan was getting started.  After a few in-game days, they’d had enough of waiting around and tinkered again with the items and titles they had prepared out of boredom.  It was partly Jonathan’s fault that they did it, rationally speaking, because the racial blend he created made it very easy for them to place him in that old manga stereotype of a “trap”.

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Using the “trap” technique, they couple was going to ensure Jonathan ended up in the same village as Ellen who would be able to lift the title in theory and release him from the curses they bound him with.  Then Ellen found them on their way to another village.  It also turned out she found a bug with the title system due to their meddling.  The Elan titles were permanent but could be upgraded.  Ellen wasted no time creating a hierarchy in the titles were Elan’s Chosen because the title for the high priestess and required a female character and converted automatically to the high priest’s title of Elan’s Servant when her chosen hero was male.  The effect caused an immediate update of Jonathan’s titles and enabled the two blessing spells.  Next she repaired his names and set them using a goddess level ceremony spell. Finally, she had to toss in the new skills for quick change and clothing transformation to remove the cursed female clothing items from the idiot.

This is where we left off with Drake, of course, but Elan is another story.  She is mortified by the behavior of her supposedly mature coders and forced the blessings upon them in the game including requiring the game character to give birth to twins and since they'd enjoy it anyway, a special additional blessing she called "Faithful Bed" requiring bedroom arts to be performed at least once a month or it would slow their health and mana recovery.  When the blessing take effect, Jack and Rya see a notice from their W.I.F.E. unit:

WIFE Unit received Special Instructions from virtual programming terminal.Code validated and accepted.  Modifying maintenance protocols.Enjoy your W.I.F.E. Unit adventures.

While puzzled, but unconcerned they dismiss the notice as normal since Virtual Beds did warn them that updates may be uploaded to the unit periodically.  Virtual Beds on the other hand received a notice indicating that Barnes device has been updated requiring half-immersion monthly with fertility assistance from the nanites. Seeing as the couple was legally married and a pair of excellent programmers, the monitoring technician approved the code change and put a success monitor on their account.  After all, they are in the alpha test group.