I often liked to use the proverb, 'The more things change, the more they stay the same'. It's short, snappy, adequately profound, and served me until this day… but I had a feeling its time in the limelight was slowly but surely coming to an end.

Looking back at the past half year, things have definitely changed in non-insignificant ways. Even if I ignored all the political turmoil I may or may not have sparked, there was still a lot to talk about. I started out with a blank slate, all alone save for a small group of friends I couldn't even remember, in a crazy world that made little sense and filled me with existential dread.

All of that felt like it happened ages ago, probably because we barely had a quiet moment, but I would have to be a bald-faced liar to claim that things remained static.

I've gained two girlfriends and two sisters, meaning I was no longer alone in the world.

My tiny inner circle ballooned into a small crowd of friends, allies, subordinates, and whatever the hell the mini-shoggoth was.

The obviously artificial world and its machine-like inhabitants had their edges sanded off by time and development, and the initial fear and confusion were soon replaced by a sense of familiarity and constant exasperation.

However, while that was already enough to justify discarding the adage, I found it more prudent to only adjust it a little. Let's go with 'Everything changes, yet some things stay the same'. Case in point…

"Where's my snacks?" a certain happy-go-lucky Celestial inquired, tucked under a thick blanket on the sofa in Josh's living room and wearing panda-print pajamas. Her hair was down, and she had a large plastic bowl in her lap, visible even in the room dimly lit by the static snowstorm on the old CRT television. She also looked unusually cute, but let's ignore that part for now.

"That wasabi/ginger flavored thing?" Josh, sitting cross legged on the floor nearby, looked up from the mountain of VHS cassettes in front of him. "I think you threw it somewhere over there," he said while gesturing towards the left of the couch, causing his girlfriend to glance over and shiver.

"Can you get it for me? I'm wet."

That… was a dangerous choice of words, but considering that her hair seemed to be a little damp, she probably meant…

"I told you we should've taken a bath later," the guy grumbled and stood up, revealing that he was also wearing the same panda-print nightwear as his girlfriend. That might've counted as one of those sweet couple-things, but I was about eighty-seven percent sure I'd seen them wearing those before they started going out. So… childhood-friend-thing?

Putting that aside, I couldn't help but notice something he said. Did he just imply that they took a bath together?

"Naaah! We were both sweaty. We needed that."

"Here you go," the guy handed the green bag of chips over to the girl on the couch. Before I could start to wonder what they could've been doing before I came along, he knocked that thought out of my head by casually adding, "Next time, let's do it in your bathroom. Your tub is bigger."

"I like your bathtub. It's a little cramped, but that's what makes it fun."

"Yeah, I get you, but didn't you just scrape your knee while we were moving around?"

"Nothing a quick healing hymn can't fix," Angie answered with an impish smirk and followed it up by sticking out her tongue, which was adorable, but also beside the point.

What was the point then? Well, based on my Mount-Everest-high EQ and my legendary ability to read between the lines, I had to conclude with about ninety-two percent certainty that these two were doing it in the bathroom. Good for them.

"So? What are we gonna watch?"

Angie's eyes skipped over to the pile of cassettes, and Josh let out a shallow groan.

"I have no idea yet. I still didn't have the time to look through all the new stuff we've got."

"Then get to it. Chop-chop!" she instructed, and the guy dramatically rolled his eyes.

"As you command, your majesty," he muttered, much to his girlfriend's amusement, and returned to the heap of obsolete video media.

In the meantime, Angie poured the content of the bag into her bowl, and after a bite or two, she let out a hard-to-read grunt.

"You know, I still can't believe it," she said, causing Josh to look up again.

"You can't believe what?"

"That Squarebuster went out of business!" she clarified while gesturing at the tapes. "Just a few months ago, it was a super-successful place, and then the whole company went bankrupt overnight! How did that even happen?"

"I asked the guy at the counter," Josh mused while inspecting a cassette, and then he moved it from one pile to another. "He said they were in the middle of switching from VHS to DVDs, but then everyone started asking about streaming, and when they said they didn't know what that meant, the company stocks took a nosedive and they had to file for bankruptcy."

"They weren't wrong!" Angie insisted with a huff and animatedly gestured at the VHS player under the TV. "Those disk things already came out of nowhere, but what even is 'streaming', anyway?! I've heard Elly talk about her dad's company doing that to music, but how does that work with movies and TV series?"

"Beats me. Technology sure moves fast." After a shrug, Josh returned to browsing, and noted, "Look at the bright side; because they are going out of business, we got three whole boxes of tapes for chump change."

"True," she nodded between two bites. "We were lucky Agrawain told us about it."

"Yep. I never penned him as a movie buff, but he knows his stuff. The box he had was full of classics."

"He's a good guy," Angie commented, proving that she was a terrible judge of character, and she even doubled down with, "He's friendly, hardworking, helpful… I have no idea why Leo doesn't get along with him."

"I bet they have some history," the guy spoke absent-mindedly, and a few seconds of silence followed, accentuated by the quiet buzzing of the TV and Angie making cracking noises as she devoured her snacks. At last, Josh let out a shallow breath and whispered, "Speaking of him, I wonder what Leo's really up to this time."

The girl on the sofa blinked in surprise and uttered, "Didn't he already explain it the other day?"

"Yeah, but that was what he told us. I'm curious what he'll really do." He paused to shake his head, and added, "I mean, he has a habit of grabbing the spotlight and staying in the center of attention all the time, so I'm sure whatever he's doing in Elysium, it's going to lead to some huge racket with him in the middle, all the while claiming that he didn't mean to turn the world upside-down at all."

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"That's just Leo for you," Angie grinned, first in mirth, and then a little mischievously as she continued with, "Are you jelly?"

"Hell no! That sound like way too much trouble for me," he denied on the spot, but then a beat later amended, "I do feel a bit left out though."

"Can't be helped. He's operating on a much bigger scale than us common folk," the Celestial girl noted with a strange southern accent. Probably a reference of some sort, I surmised, but Josh didn't seem to care, apparently lost in thought.

"That's the thing though. I mean, he told me I was supposed to be this Deus guy, or his reincarnation, or had the potential to… eh? I never fully understood this whole thing, but the point is that this whole thing with the second true whatchamacallit—"

"Archon."

"Yeah, that." Josh snapped his finger and pointed at himself. "How come that he gets to go and have an adventure in a magical world full of not-really-angels instead of me?"

"Wow. You really are jelly!" Angie teased her boyfriend with an ear-to-ear grin, and he let out an indignant huff in return.

"No, I'm not. I just…" After a long pause, he exhaled hard and shook his head. "I mean, nothing's been happening to us lately. Ever since that night at the school, with Lili's brother, it's been one thing after the other. First, it was Robatto, then I was helping Ammy and Mike, and after that, there was the school festival and the tournaments and going to the hot spring resort… There was always something happening, until now."

"To be fair, Leo's kidnapping technically counts as 'something'," Angie pointed out, earning herself a scoff.

"Nah, that happened to him, not to us.'

"And that makes you jelly?"

"Cut it out," the guy frowned, after which he turned solemn," No, I'm just antsy. It's like this… this tension, telling me that shit is about to hit the fan, and I'm a little scared by it, I guess." He paused here, but when Angie remained silent and stared at him attentively, he continued in a heavy tone. "I mean… what if the Celestials do end up discovering that this prophecy thing was referring to me after all? You've heard Leo; they can literally transfer memories into your head, and the only reason he got away was because he's this magical savant or something. What if the same thing happens to me?"

"Nah, no way," the Celestial girl waved her hand dismissively, but she didn't sound especially sure of herself. "If it worked like that, we wouldn't need to keep an eye on Deus candidates designated by the divination department; we could just take an artifact, and then hand it over to every single one of them until we hit the jackpot!"

"It did work like that for Leo though," the guy pointed out, and it took the wind out of Angie's sails.

"Yeah, I guess, but… Honestly, I just don't want to think about the possibility," she admitted a touch sheepishly, but then a second later her eyes lit up and she exclaimed, "Ah, I've got an idea."

"Uh oh. That doesn't bode well…" Josh whispered, and his girlfriend promptly threw one of the sofa cushions at his face.

"Cut it out, you dummy, and listen to me! This might be important!"

"… Okay. I'm listening."

Angie took a deep breath and launched into a rather long and unnecessarily animated explanation.

"So, you remember how there's this Celestial charm hymn I told you about? You know, the one the higher-ups used to send messages by planting a suggestion into the mind of a random person, and they would then deliver it to the recipient? Like that kid I told you about, whose parents I had to find afterwards?

That's not the important part though! Listen! I've learned about this, and while I suck at those hymns, there were also a bunch of tips in the guidebook about how to resist spells like that! I have no idea if that works on the kind of memory-gizmo Leo was talking about, but it should be better than nothing, right?"

It seemed like Josh was about to voice his agreement, but he didn't get the chance.

"Okay, so, listen up, bud! The idea is that these mind-control charms work by clouding your mind, and then implanting a compulsion on top of that, so that you don't actually think about what you're doing, and consider whatever command the caster gave you as your own will. The trick is that, if you manage to break out of the daze, you can use your willpower to suppress and break the mind control!

Of course, this is predicated on the idea that you can recognize that your mind is being clouded, and it's hard because it messes with your logic and rational thought and all that stuff. Are we clear so far? Good! Now, listen, because this is the important part: what you need is a strong emotion to knock you out of your state of bemusement. It works because emotional responses are also dealing with hormones and different brain whatchamacallits and I never really understood the theory, but the point is that you have to focus really, really hard on something that makes you very angry or sad or thrilled, and use that as a foothold to throw off the mind control!"

"So, what you're trying to say…" Josh finally managed to interject and spoke with a soft voice. "… is that if I ever found myself in a similar situation as Leo, I would have to think happy thoughts?"

"Yes! That's the gist of it!"

"In other words, the best way to resist mind control is to, erm, think of… you."

Ouch. That was a pretty damn great line, but unfortunately, poor Josh got cold feet at the very last moment and fumbled it. If he would've said it in a more suave way, I was sure it would've knocked Angie off her feet, but even the botched version got her flushed, with eyes open wide as saucers.

"Ah, that's…" she mumbled, audibly stumped, but then she extended both of her hands towards the guy and began wildly gesticulating.

"W-What?" Josh blurted out, visibly baffled, but it didn't deter her one bit.

"I wanna kiss you, you dunce, but I don't wanna take off the blanket because I'm still wet! Come over here, will you?"

Hearing that explanation, Josh let out a mirthful chuckle and moved over to her side, where Angie promptly grabbed hold of him and didn't let her go for a good minute. As a kisser, she wasn't quite as aggressive as Judy, but she was certainly in the same ballpark, and once their lips parted, both of them were breathing heavily.

"I wasn't too cheesy, was I?" the guy muttered with a sheepish smile, and it caused the Celestial girl to barely stifle a giggle.

"Dummy," she whispered, her face still visibly red despite the poor lighting conditions, "I've been waiting for you to say these kinds of things to me since we were in elementary." For emphasis, she planted a quick peck onto his lips, and the situation seemed like it was about to devolve into full-on cuddling time when she noticed the case in Josh's hand. "What's that?"

"Hm? This?" He showed it to her, revealing one of those cheap plastic VHS jewel cases with a flashy, retro-style cover insert depicting something that looked like an emaciated condor's head. "Just the cassette I had in my hand when you called me over."

"Is that…?" Angie snatched the box out of his hands, and exclaimed, "It's that movie! The one with the silly puppet bird where everyone says it's the size of a battlecruiser!"

"The Enormous Talon," Josh read the title off the case and glanced at his girlfriend after a beat. "Do you want to watch it?"

"Should be good for a laugh!" she declared with a toothy grin and handed the tape back to him.

"What about the rest of them?"

"Just leave them for later! Pop this one in, and then we continue where we left off! I already pre-warmed your spot under the blanket."

Josh didn't argue, and after putting the cassette into the player and pressing the big button on the front, he quickly returned to the sofa and took his spot in his girlfriend's embrace. That was all very wholesome, and normally this would've been the point where I left them alone to cuddle to their heart's content, but then both of them twitched and turned to the TV in unison.

The first sign of something being off was the cheesy eighties synth music, and as the opening credits flashed by, showcasing bodybuilders dressed as pizza delivery boys and plumbers, and frizzy-haired women in various levels of undress, it became very obvious that whatever that 'Enormous Talon' movie was, this wasn't it.

"U-Ummm… Josh? What's that?"

"I… have no idea," the guy mumbled, apparently shocked numb and his eyes still glued to the screen, where a guy credited as 'Neel Volcano' was getting very intimate with a busty woman in her lingerie.

"Is this one of those… erm… adult movies?"

"From where I'm sitting, it sure looks like one," Josh admitted a touch sheepishly.

"I thought Squarebuster didn't have any of those movies."

"Maybe someone accidentally put the wrong cassette into the case before returning it," he theorized, and he finally managed to break out of his stupor and reach for the remote control, just as the foreplay on the screen was over and the adult entertainment thespians got ready for the main act. "So… should I turn it off, or…?"

"I…" Angie stammered for a moment, but then after sneaking another glance at the screen, she answered, "I think it's fine. It should be an interesting experience, and it's not like there's anything wrong with this movie, and… we have the whole house for ourselves until tomorrow morning, so… you know?"

I could practically see that little circular loading icon on the guy's forehead, and once he finally processed what she just said, he let out a nervous chuckle, followed by a deep kiss. Considering the background ambience, it didn't take a genius to figure out where this was heading.

On my end, I pretty much concluded my observations with a mostly flat 'Oh, so it was that kind of event'. Was this just a random coincidence, or our nefarious Narrative went out of its way to exchange those VHS cassettes just to set this scene up? And it if did, what exactly was the end goal? Was there any kind of underlying logic, or was it just eroge-logic fan-service stuff, because this was the easy-going, lovey-dovey part of the theoretical Angie Route?

Those were all questions I needed to ponder, but later. First, I had to give these two some privacy, and then come up with a way to have a leading conversation with the guy where he would admit what happened so that I could tease him about it. Because the more things change, the more my priorities stay the same.