Capture Target

Say, which shade looks better than you?

They are not identical, they’re obviously different!

Ugh.  Look, this is Naturally Red Rose, Light lipstick.  And this is Pale Pink Peaches, Dark lipstick.  They’re obviously different!  One is a light red, the other is a darkened light pink!

They are too!

Fine!  Look, see, every lipstick from this brand has an alphanumeric code that clearly identifies the color using the standard red green blue shading values.  And if you look at the two codes on these lipstick tubes, you will see that they are --

…Um.

…

So on second thought, nevermind about the lipstick, either is fine!  No, nonono, there’s no need for you to check personally, don’t worry about it!

Afterall, it’s storytime!

---

So!  Year four.

Year four year four year four.

It’s a wild one.  The fourth landmass is only roughly one third the size of any prior year's landmass.  But… there’s a trick to it.

See, initially, you go to the landmass, and it’s inhabited by demons -- think hot incubi and hotter succubi -- in a… how to put it…

Unrefined society?

They have modern conveniences, yes, but they’re not advanced.  They have internal plumbing, thank the goddesses, but it’s all in an older style, or more redundant than it needs to be.  There are three demonic towns on the landmass, and they are, more or less, at peace with one another.

…On the surface, at least.

Once you start diving into it, there’s an almost hilarious level of backstabbing and plots for power.  Some of them are utterly ludicrous.  One court official of one  town is trying to change their entire body to become the long-lost identical twin of a court official from a different town, and then use that to replace their not-a-twin after they murder them.

This is all for power!

…How does it get them power?

Frankly I don’t think even the demons in question know.

It’s like their entire culture is based around being sneaky little backstabbers.  Sure, there are monsters to fight, but the demons are the real enemies.

…Until you get to the Hall of Mirrors, and walk through the large mirror at the very end.

Then the entire landmass changes, with only the Hall of Mirrors being in the same place.

It’s as if the entire landmass has jumped forward a thousand years, and now the three towns have turned into one giant metropolis that’s run by the descendants of those very same demons!

Those descendents are angels!  

Yes.  They somehow became angels.  And if you try to convince them that they used to be demons, they get very, very, very angry.  Very fast.

By looking into -- ugh.  Okay, look.  I know they are direct descendents, and that they’ve engaged in some revisionist history, for several reasons.  The names of important figures are the same.  The location of areas that are culturally significant are the same.  

And, most importantly of all, interacting with the demon towns will change the angelic city.

That’s the big ‘theme’ of the fourth landmass.  Change the past, change the future.  Get stuff from the future to change the past.

…Of course, it then turns out that this is all some kind of -- convoluted -- experiment?  Or plot?  By a group of people in a different version of the fourth landmass.  These people are the pastmen!  

They are also some of the most blatantly evil creatures in the entire Alchemical Corruption series.

I’m not joking, they’re a parody of humanity.  They have no souls, they have no emotions, they have no real thoughts, they just do evil and look like humans.

It’s frankly rather disturbing.  I didn’t like it when I thought this was a game, and I definitely didn’t like it when I met them for real.

This third version of the fourth landmass was rather hard to get to.  You had to align things in the past and the future just so, causing the Hall of Mirrors to grow in length, giving access to two mirrors at the end of the hall.  One will jump you to the other point in time, and one will jump you to the ‘evil fake-human soulless monster’ realm.

Now, here’s the real danger from the fourth landmass.

Depending on which version of the land you’re in, you can get a variety of different effects that are nearly, if not literally, impossible to remove.

The demons can give you curses that dictate your future.  Certain things, depending on the curse, are locked in for your fate.  Reality itself will warp to ensure it happens.  One of the most common ones is ‘you will be raped thrice by your enemies’.

When this was represented by a game, that meant that the next three battles you take that character to, they end up ‘vanishing’ for one timeslot at the end of each fight.

…Because they got temporarily kidnapped.

To be raped.

…Yeah.

If you don’t bring them into any fight, then after six months they get kidnapped from wherever they were, instead!  It doesn’t matter what you do!  Just, boom, goblins or whatever!

But that’s not touching what the angels can do.

The angels can change your past.

And that’s -- that’s dangerous.  Really dangerous.  Because that has knock-on effects.

I’m going to use the most powerful curse they have as an example.  It dictates that, on the first day of the land rush, all the way back in the very first year, you get raped by one of the most potent foes in the game, and in so doing, becoming pregnant with its corrupted spawn.

So, for example, you get fucked pregnant by a Satyr miniboss.  This changes your initial corruption values.  These corruption values get worse after you give birth to it, because newly born Satyr kids first act is to rape their mothers, and then the game goes through every corruption value check you had to make.

And it redoes them for your new corruption values.

I’ve played a game where I had a party of five, perfectly pure women, and one of them got that curse.

The curse then started to play out -- but this had knock-on effects for the other members of the party.  Dual events, where more than one woman were in them, where having one of them fail the check meant both of them failed it.

By the time the changes were done, I had a party of three super-sluts at roughly eighty percent corruption and two broken sluts that were fully corrupted!

I actually copied that save file onto a USB stick because it was hilarious to see.  

And hot.  Really, really hot.

That’s an extreme example, of course.  And the game obviously doesn’t do it perfectly.  It shows flashbacks of ‘critical moments’, and how the choice was changed, with their ‘corruption meter’ on the bottom gradually filling out.

I actually read online about one playthrough that somebody managed, where they had roughly seventy percent of the girls available on their team, all of them perfectly pure, and had them all broken by the knock-on effect of that very same curse.  The probability manipulations they had to do to pull that off would be a novel in its own right.

Now, there’s something that’s actually important to note here.

Only those directly affected by the change are changed at all.

This is not a true past rewrite.

If it was, it would be -- ugh.

No, you know what, I’m sticking with it.

If it was, it would be ugh.

It’s a simulated past change.  Those that are directly affected by it, are changed.  In the game, for instance, this means that the only people that ever get changed are Takeo and the capture target playable girls.  Everybody else stays the same, right down to their memories staying exactly the same; No new ones.  

So if, say, Sumiko got a change that made her a cow herm instead of a cow girl, then she would have a cock, one complete set of memories and one very fragmented set of memories, and everybody else would be asking her why she suddenly has a bull dick.

How to put it… ah, yes, think about it like this.  A very dumb computer is scanning over Sumiko’s history to make the ‘past changes’.

She has a dick, yes, and that is a change.  However, she has never, historically, fucked somebody with a dick.  Or a strapon.  Or ever even dominated somebody.

So the stupid program goes, ‘Oh, Sumiko has a dick’, and then goes, ‘what events in the past are directly changed by that?’ and it finds nothing.  Because she was being fucked by others!  Thus, they fucked her slit, and didn’t get fucked by her cock.

Now if she previously had a cock, and then gained one that was addictive, that would be a different story.  But no matter how obvious things seem in human terms, if that stupid automated program doesn’t see a clear and direct reason for something to have changed, if there's nothing to directly translate, it won’t change a thing.

That's the biggest thing.  It adds as few new events as possible, zero if it can get away with it, only changing things that already happened.

 

This is very, very important to note, and it’s the only way to make any sense of any of this.

By a similar token, the timeline of the demons and angels, and the timeline of everybody else, are entirely separate.  If you buy a weird future-weapon from the angels, then go into the past and kill those that will eventually cause said future-weapon to be made, then you both keep the future weapon and can no longer buy more of them.

And that’s it.

Does that make sense?

No!

Fuck no!

It makes no fucking sense!

But at minimum it avoids some really weird questions that always crop up in time travel.

So -- yeah.  As per usually, the answer in MISSY is ‘what is the stupidest answer the chief god can come up with that immediately solves the problem while giving everyone else a huge headache’.

If there’s one thing, and only one thing that's reliable about the chief god, it’s that he remains absolutely dedicated to his brand of pure moronicy.

At least the pastmen didn't have any big curses.  Thank the goddesses, bleck.

---

Honestly, with all the complicated steps involved, and how we hoped to get both demons and angels on our side for the fight against the Evil God of Chastity and Purity, there’s a massive list of things that can be done to increase how much they like you and how powerful they are.

These almost always come with some form of demerit in return for the boons they grant.

So I did the only rational thing one would do in a situation where they can not easily make spreadsheets on a computer:

I shoved this mess off to the Kings!

With my unfailing knowledge of how Alchemical Corruption Twelve worked, and with how it has yet to be proven wrong in any concrete manner -- or, really, any nearly concrete manner -- the kings of the Kingdom, front and back, could easily work out a massive list of plans, actions, and dates on which to take them.

Oh I had a select few things that I should take part of, for the personal rewards that were handed out, but they all slotted into the two kings' mega-plan.

It was a real work of art.  A min-maxers wet dream.

I mean, not literally, I’m a min-maxer and my wet dreams have people fucking, but, you know.  Figuratively!

I wish I could tell you how perfect it was, but sadly it didn’t end up mattering.  So I won’t waste our time with that.

So, my --

I’m getting to it!  Sheesh!

I have an order and everything.  Relax.

So!  My main goal was to get as many blessings that I was missing, as I could.

I had fifteen out of twenty seven blessings.  Technically I had sixteen blessings, but the one that was full of errors didn’t match up to any god I knew about, so we weren’t counting that one.

I was missing twelve blessings total.

They were for the goddess domains of:  Dominance, rape, addiction, seduction, monsters, mind control, exhibitionism, voyeurism, humiliation, sensation, bondage and technology.

Technology I had in the bag.  I just needed one more cybernetic implant to get [Technosymbiosis], and Sumiko was already working on one.

Similarly, rape, exhibitionism and voyeurism were all amongst the easiest blessings to get.

…In theory.

Rape turned out to be a bit -- tricker, for me, but I’ll get to that later.

Addiction, seduction, monsters and humiliation I all had a pretty good idea for.

Dominance and sensation were going to be tricky.

I had three goals for the fourth year of the land grab.

Get at least eight of the twelve blessings I needed to have a shot at goddess-dom, strengthen my entire team as best we could, and don’t.  Attract.  Attention.

That last one was really important, for all of us.

We had seen what goddesses could do when they were having what amounted to a light spat.  I already had more eyes on me than anyone was comfortable with, and we really didn’t want to add more on top of that.

In fact, in the letter from the Kings, they promised to take care of all the diplomacy and interactions with the Demon cities and the Angel mega-city if I managed to avoid anything that would attract the attention of the divine.

…So guess when I fucked that up.

Yup.  Yeah.

Day one of year four.

That’s when we got the attention of not just any god, but the chief god.

After that, our plans, uh… unraveled.