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Just gotta hm hmmm~  Hm hmmm~  Hm hmmm~ it shiiiine~

EEEK!

AH!  You weren’t supposed to be here -- ah nonono shut up you -- um -- hi!

You’re early!

I was just, you know.  Listening to some music.  Dancing.  That’s all.

Nothing you need to worry about!  Nothing interesting!  Or popular!  Or annoyingly popular!

…

Sh-shut up!

I know you didn’t say anything, make your face shut up!  AAAARGH!

Story time!

Now!

---

After the totally essential maid training -- shut up it’s story time now, stop laughing! -- we needed to prepare for me to get sold to a member of the royal family.

This was actually easier than it seemed, due to my sister having the last copy of the Memetic Mistress installed in her brain.  She’d had it ever since she showed up to visit during the festival in the sixth month, and according to Takeo, by now she’d have a firm grip on the rest of my immediate family.

…And, presumably, a few others by now.

If left alone, that would end up being a big problem.  Apparently in, like, three different timelines, the Memetic Mistress managed to take over half of the Kingdom by the end of the third year, which led to some very strange final land grabs.

…Don’t tell Sevens I told you this… I mean, not that you’ll ever meet her, but if you do, don’t tell her… but apparently during one of those?

They actually got to Sevens, and hypnotized her into being a vapid, giggly, horny school girl.

It took her five more loops to break out of it, and ever since, she refuses to let anybody with even a trace of the Memetic Mistress close to her.

I know!  It shouldn’t have been possible, but it was!  Takeo actually drew us a surprisingly skilled image of what she looked like!  The skirt she was wearing was shorter than mine were, and she had more to cover!  Not to mention how her blouse was intentionally tightened to be more of a ‘bikini’ than actual ‘clothing’...

Anyway, the point is that we couldn’t let the Memetic Mistress run wild.  At the same time, I was in the best position to be temporarily sold as a maid-slave, so I couldn’t be the one to stop her.

Which meant I had to trust the other four to take care of it for me.  Takeo, Shimizu, Sumiko and Yuki were all training to use the last month of the year to ambush my family and all of their acquaintances to remove any trace of the Memetic Mistress.  With my blessing, of course.

I’m so thankful that my sister, Lady Jessica Ambrosia, didn’t manage to find a new host for the Memetic Mistress in the time she had away from the school.  If she did, then the Kingdom would probably have been fucked.  She was easy to take care of so long as you knew what to do, but if you let her get loose… yeah.

Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, so they were training very thoroughly.  I even spent some time watching Takeo be Actually Competent with Yuu for a bit!  It’s hard to avoid staring at him when he’s being attractive, so we both, just, uh.  …Didn’t bother resisting.

…What?

He’s hot!

A-anyway.

In between the training, the land grab, and rooting out any lingering hypnotized schoolgirls, we were quite busy until the end of the eleventh month.  It was a productive time, but now, we had to move on.  

Now, it was time for me to get sold!

…What’s with that look?  

It was an important part of the plan!

---

I pretended that I was fully maid-ified by hypnosis just long enough for me to be sent off by my family to my ‘new master’.  After settling into the carriage, at their direction, I saw out of the corner of my eye my entire family getting immediately tackled to the ground by my friends that were hiding just out of sight.

I pretended to not see a thing.

So did the driver!

The driver worked for a member of the Front Nobility, so --

-- eh?

Oh goddesses, I didn’t explain -- okay.  This is actually going to be really important later on, so listen up.

Throughout the entire Alchemical Corruption series, and thus throughout the entire reality of MISSY, every lasting institution either has the god or a goddess backing it… or they have two ‘sides’ to its leadership.

…Mmm, to be clear, this doesn’t just include the various governing powers.  For example, a merchant syndicate, a mage's guild… all of those count.  Those in charge need a way to avoid the plans of the gods.

In The Kingdom, this is much simpler than it is elsewhere.  Since it’s isolated and kept intentionally stable, you just get the royal family and a few syndicates.

But for all of them, this is absolutely essential.

It’s not as bad as it seems, but -- okay.  Look.  Of those that this would include, a lot of them are propped up by external factors.  For example, the schools that run the land grab are controlled by the royal family.  So they don’t need a front and back.

It’s not even that the chief god goes after lasting institutions intentionally, it’s that you can’t be sure he won’t.  He adores having women and men in positions of power to play with.  The form of power doesn’t matter that much; he just likes turning princesses into sluts and giving princes massive harems.

This entire situation only really comes up when it comes to matters of stable inheritance.  If you are in a position of power and you want to hand it to your kid, that’s when things get tricky.

Let’s say, for example, that you are the king of a minor kingdom.  Great!  You have a wife or wives, things are going well… fantastic.

And your first born is a girl.

…As are your next four children.

All women.

Now that’s fine in theory.

But in practice, they will all end up slut-bodies, and they will all end up as loyal wives or girlfriends of local hot heroes.  Because the chief god finds that both hot and hilarious, and has no concept of how damaging it is to long-term civilization without a clear line of succession that has individuals trained in government taking over and not random farm boys that were given swords!

Your kingdom ends with you, an attractive and well-meaning but foolish farmboy-turned-hero takes the throne with your daughter's, or all of your daughters', eager permission, and they utterly fail to realize how important it is to both get taxes and to not upset the nobility with said taxes.

Your kingdom falls the moment the new king loses the interest of the chief god.

So, how do you get around this?  Well, the obvious answer is you have ugly people on the throne.

No, I’m -- I’m not actually kidding, that’s been attempted.  Repeatedly.

The problem is that while that would keep the chief god out of you and your family's business, it won’t stop him from blessing your hot neighbor when he decides to go conquering.

He won’t push somebody to invade you.  But a neighbor that knows how to manipulate him will prop up a fancy warlord and get blessings rained upon them with a divine mandate to remove anybody insufficiently hot currently sitting on a throne.

This dual problem of ‘if you’re hot, you’re stuck in a porn storyline’ and ‘if you’re not, those in porn storylines smash you’ is a problem that occurs with any major institution.  From mercenary companies to merchant families, the chief god's buffoonery cannot be escaped.

The solution that lasting institutes came up with is actually fairly clever.

If you can’t have a hot ruler or a not-hot ruler, how about both?

This… actually works for the core problem of keeping the chief god off everyone's back, because the chief god just doesn’t care so long as he gets his rocks off to what happens.  

The ‘back’ rulers are the ones that actually get things done.  They ensure the laws are working, figure out the overall plans, and help keep things stable.  

The ‘front’ rulers are the face of the organization; they get to prance around in fancy outfits, get overly complicated romantic entanglements that usually involve being kidnapped once or twice, and in general work as eye candy distraction-fodder for the chief god.  They’re a combination of a ceremonial and religious role in ways that can get far too complicated to explain, depending on the nation.

In practice, this… Mmm… let me go back to the prior example to show how it works.

You are the ‘back’ king of the kingdom, with a title of something like ‘vizeer’ or ‘advisor’.  You get all the power and a lot of perks, but your younger brother is the one with the title of ‘king’.

You get to have a nice, peaceful life, away from the insanity of the gods' plots. You just ensure that the taxes are filed and collected, and prevent your brother from doing anything that would actually damage the kingdom.

He’s aware of this agreement, and is more than fine with not needing to do the ‘actual work’.

The whole ‘only daughters that marry to hero farmboys’ thing happens to your brother, who decides to retire early to live with his harem in their countryside villa.

The farmboy hero is now the front king!

And you and your brother politely explained the situation to him.  After showing him the work required to make sure that taxes are done properly, he gladly left it all in your hands.

And thus your kingdom remains stable!

Just slap on a new name from ‘Brother-Kingdom’ to ‘Farmboy-Kingdom’, tell the banks to mint new coins for the new king, and maybe change the flag colors.

This whole situation is something that every long-lasting institution is aware of.  …Outside of those in Atlantis, because the gods can’t peek inside of it without permission.  If you look at the surface of history, there’s tons of war, political intrigue, kidnapping and oddly generous wedding dowries.  But if you track the chief advisors, then you quickly realize that things are actually fairly stable, on the whole.

The entire planet has, without realizing it, teamed up to undermine the chief god's flighty desires.  He gets his storylines, but it’s almost all a huge act, which I find very cathartic.

Now, this system isn’t perfect.  In fact, it’s far from perfect.  There are times when the now-powerful farm boy meets the ‘back’ ruler and just cuts off his head.

This… gets messy when it happens.  

Best case scenario, all the neighboring kingdoms then immediately team up to prevent further expansion because the new king isn’t playing by ‘the rules’.  And then, you know, win the giant war. 

…Yeah, it gets kind of – yeah.

But for most part, the ‘back and front’ system helps keep things stable.

…I was going somewhere with this… right!

So, I was sold to a member of the ‘front’ royalty.  Second Prince Raphael… uh… something something, Masters.

And yes.  His last name was, literally, ‘Masters’.  …He also had like three dozen middle names, but who can be bothered to remember those?

---

When I finally arrived at Raphael Masters’ personal mansion, standing and ready to meet my new master, I had one thought that entered into my head when I finally saw him:

‘Oh no, he’s hot!’

Like, have you ever seen a man that’s just -- almost cartoonishly handsome?  The kind of person that looks almost sculpted, muscled from top to bottom, and looks like he could both bench press a bus and do the dishes?

Yeah.  That was Raphael Masters.

I mean, I knew that he was a front-facing noble, so he kind of had to be hot, but this was almost obscene!  It was like he was being airbrushed, live, as he walked towards me.

Now, in retrospect, that level of ‘sheer hotness’ is almost ridiculous.  I’ve seen lots of hot guys by now, from all sorts of fun angles and positions.  But at the time?

At the time I had to fight back a heady giggle when I saw him smile at me.

…That said, the blush that rose up with it was unstoppable.

I should be clear here.  I’d been a girl for not-quite two full years by now, and I was getting rather used to it.  I’d seen hot guys, ugly guys, okay guys, guys that should have been hot but were just not… Yuu, when she was a he, was hot, and Takeo was supernaturally hot.  I was no stranger to hotness.

But this level of all natural hotness was something I hadn’t experienced before.  He had this sense of -- raw confidence, and walked with an assured gate.  He had a smile that was friendly and showed he was in complete control.

It was the first time I had seen somebody that hit all of my buttons right off the bat.

I knew that he was into something shady.  …I wasn’t sure what, apparently I had never told Takeo in the other timelines, but I knew there was something to find.

But that didn’t change the fact that he was so freaking hot!

It was my first time actively crushing on somebody, and I had no idea how to react to it.

So I focused on my ‘training’ that I did with Shimizu and Yuki, and acted like the perfect slutty maid that I was pretending to be.  I gave a curts that dipped down to show off my cleavage, and held it for the exact right length before straightening.

…He said something, but, uh, I’m not sure what it was.  It was complimentary, but the details escape me.

Because even his voice was hot.

It wasn’t fair!  He was a prince and he could make me melt with a smile!

I wasn’t sure what the content of the conversation was, but I remember him complimenting my tail, and groping one of my breasts as a ‘trial’.  Normally I would have been at least annoyed that he treated me like a piece of meat, but I was just feeling giddy that he was touching me.

To be clear, I knew that I should have been offended.  And that I should have at least acted like he was stepping over a line, even if I would never call him on it.  I was aware of that, consciously, in my head.  Lust doesn’t make the mind stop working.

It just… reorders your priorities a bit.

Or a lot.

So despite knowing the fact that I should be acting differently, despite trying to marshal my will to act differently, I found myself unable to do anything but press myself into his hand.  I wanted him to keep touching me, I wanted him to touch me more, I wanted to get closer to him and I was feeling my pussy twitch at just being in his proximity.

At the very least, he was pleased with his ‘inspection’.  I know, because he sent his manservant out of the room and proceeded to ‘break me in’.

By fucking me against the wall.

It’s around then that I realized something was strange.  Because -- I mean -- 

Okay, don’t misunderstand.  He was good at sex.  He knew how to move his hips, he responded to what I did or said, and he was very observant.  He noticed each time I let loose a little breathless gasp, he saw how I pushed my tits against the wall when I was getting close, and he easily spotted when my body tensed with pleasure.  He played me like a fiddle.

But it was almost -- it was too good, if that makes sense?

It was like he should have been rated at a nine out of ten, but the pleasure I felt was a twelve.

He was actually the most skilled partner I had been with to date.  Sure, I had fucked Shimizu a lot, Yuu and his failed time as a pimp took a while, and Yuki molested me every time she could… but none of that really matches a playboy prince with his harem of maid-sluts.  He had had sex multiple times a day for years, and he actively worked to get better at it, too.

By all accounts, he should have been the best sex that I had ever had.  On a purely technical level, it was.  But ‘skill’, and ‘passion’, aren’t the be-all and end-all when it comes to pleasure.  Just by how well they knew me, at times, Shimizu and Yuki could just barely reach these heights of pleasure.  For only moments, perhaps, but they could.  They knew what I liked and what made me cave, and if they timed it just so, they could make me melt.

It was almost divine when they managed it.

And this prince was, somehow, keeping me at that state of pleasure by the combined powers of ‘being hot’ and ‘base technical skill’, and I knew that that shouldn’t have been enough.

Oh I let him fuck me into a puddle, don’t get me wrong.  The sex was amazing.  But I knew it was ‘too’ good, somehow.  I didn’t have any proof to my suspicion, but it certainly felt right… that there was something going on that was, somehow, elevating him beyond where he should be.

When he introduced me to his small army of fawning maid-sluts, that niggling doubt instantly crystallized into a firm suspicion.