Indigo

Author's note: Thanks for enjoying the story everyone! I've never written a death scene before, so bear with me this chapter LOL!!

Pumpernickel was on me all night. (Pumpernickel is my cat.) Pumpernickel usually likes to sleep on Melanie but she's gone so Pumpernickel has been sleeping on me. (Melanie is my GF.)

I'm writing this in the kitchen right now, with an absolutely delicious mug of this chamomile tea that was literally hiding in plain sight in my cabinet. In order to understand the story, you should probably understand my kitchen LOL.

So, first of all, there's Melanie's stuff—she has literally a million pots and pans everywhere. She likes to watch TikToks while making breakfast, even though in my experience TikTok is just a bunch of sluts doing dance challenges to show off their tits and asses. 

Trying to keep up with the demand may get a bit dicey and stressful. Especially with Melanie gone. In my experience, personally, sex is an amazing stress reliever. *wink* *wink* LOL. But I want to try and publish at least two chapters a day. You guys deserve it.

I can try proofreading a bit less to make sure you guys get the story quicker. I'm also thinking I might start a Discord server for fans of the novel to connect. We're already at 1.0k views, after all! 

I'm going to draft the server rules here:

1. No pirating this story! You can support me by buying coins <3. Every three hundred stories you comment on, you can get a free Emerald Pass. Note that replying to a comment counts double. So keep the theories coming!

2. No racism or sexism. This is literally a story with female characters in it.

3. No spamming in the voice channels. Once I figure out how Discord bots work, I'm going to get us a Discord bot that can play songs, but NO songs that are Rick Rolls or loud porn moaning.

4. Be respectful.

5. No explicit content of any kind. Sexy is fine; "lewd" content is potentially okay, but subject to moderator discretion. (If you have any… "spicy" art of Cassandra… feel free to send my way though LOL. DMs are open :) )

6. English only! English is the world lingua franca.

7. No invites to other Discord servers! Keep it civil! Casual swearing is okay. Also, use context clues. If you're speaking to a minor, probably best to write f*ck instead of fuck or sh*t instead of shit. Also, reminds me of the next rule…

8. Minors ARE allowed, but please do NOT attempt to flirt, date, or have sex with minors or you will be banned at moderator discretion.

9. No advertising links to other novels! It is an unwritten rule to not advertise your own novel in the server of another author. Think about it. It's like going to a restaurant with our own food and eating it in front of the chef.

10. No religion debates.

11. No unnecessary pinging of me (the author) as I will be busy updating new chapters.

12. Stay on topic! For privilege tier readers with max coin balance to get new chapters early, PLEASE do not spoil for non-privilege tier readers.

Here are the proposed text channels:

#gamerarea

#datingchannel

#lewd-art

#politics

#recipes

#general

#sexy-art

And the proposed roles: you can either be a #cassandra, a #julianna, a #julian, or an #aidan.

Frequently asked questions:

Q: What would Cassandra perceive if she was currently being banged? Would the numbers only appear after the guy completed? Or during?

A: Keep reading :) No spoilers

Q: What counts as "banging" for the story? Like, are we including finger stuff? 

A: The way you guys are grasping the intent of the story is really awesome to see :) And like I really wanna answer your questions but I can't spoil it just yet! All I can say is, KEEP READING!

Q: Does regular sex count? Or is lesbian stuff included?

A: No comment :)

Wait, guys, I think I hear the garage door opening. Melanie's home! Gonna go chat with her. Enjoy the story.

Author's note over.

Wait, one last thing—I know I'm writing about a chick but I'm literally a dude LOL.

When she opened her eyes, there was an endless field in front of her.

"Hi! I'm Lyra. As part of preparing your pre-employment experience, I'm going to ask you some questions."

"Okay," she said. She was aware of Julian and Julianna watching her, standing in the kitchen wearing cables of equipment. She hoped they were yes or no questions. She didn't want them listening to long answers and forming further theories about her.

"We detect that you're currently applying to work at Sinful, the boutique cookie experience."

"Yes," she said.

"I'll prepare some questions for you. First question: if you were a cookie, would you be chocolate chip or oatmeal raisin?"

It wasn't that she didn't trust Julian and Julianna. She had tried, in her way, to tell them about her power.

The night she told them about prom and Aidan, she had actually started by telling them something else.

It was the night Julianna's parents had left to go see a MoMA exhibit, so she (Julianna) thought it would be fun if they all got high. Julianna had a reserve of THC chocolate marshmallow graham bars she was willing to split. 

"Okay," she said. "I'm back, I'm in my PJs, I'm ready for it to kick in."

"Got your favorites, babe," Julian said. He lined up her Doritos and her Oreos. 

"I think, once I'm really high, I'm gonna want, like, a warm thing? Like, imagine this, imagine like a pumpkin pie, imagine how cinnamon-y and good it's going to feel? Should we make pumpkin pie?"

They settled in on the couch to wait for the effects to set in.

The reason Cassandra liked getting high was because, oddly, it appeared to mute the effects of her powers. Usually a blinding, distracting glow, the numbers seemed to dull in intensity and become almost tolerable after taking a few edibles. This was frightening in its own way, though; she pledged to herself to never even try any drugs harder than alcohol or marijuana. What if the really hard stuff made the numbers fully go away? If a substance had that effect, even if she just tried it once, she knew she would never be able to live without it again. So, she had to make sure she wasn't even tempted. 

As the warmth spread and things started to seem uncontrollably funny, a paranoia stabbed at her. What if they knew? What if, somehow, they could both see that she could see their numbers? And the only reason they hadn't said anything was because they were testing her to see if she would say it first? After all, wouldn't a good person—a honestly good person—who had such a power warn people against being around them? Wasn't even continuing to be in their presence wrong? And maybe, because they knew it all along, they had solidified that idea in their heads, that she was an irrevocably bad person, but they were just continuing to spend time with her out of morbid curiosity, a desire to see what lengths this particular sociopath would go to in order to continue getting her fix of forbidden, illicit information?

Maybe she should just say it now, but in such a way that she maintained a bit of plausible deniability. Surely she would be able to tell by their facial expressions if she was right in thinking they knew—they might seem surprised or maybe even guilty on their own part. Because, after all, couldn't she say that, even if she was hiding her own knowledge, then their hiding their knowledge of her knowledge was still hiding knowledge and therefore just as bad? 

"What if…" she started, waiting to see if they would pay attention.

They did. So she continued, revising the first part of her planned sentence: "I'm writing a story, and I wondered, what if a person could like, magically or something, see the last time a person had sex?"

Julianna and Julian both were in hysterics, though they quickly switched into a philosophical mode.

"Okay… wait… how does that work? Like, where would you see it?" Julianna asked.

"Sort of… floating around their heads," Cassandra explained.

"Like where? Like here?" Julianna gestured to the area above her own head. Cassandra's stomach tightened as Julianna's hand passed through the numbers that were still, even in her intoxicated state, visible to her.

"Yes, like there."

Julian was luxuriating in the taste of a Dorito. "So, how does it work with gay stuff?"

"What do you mean?" Cassandra asked. "Is that relevant?"

"Uh, well, yeah? Like, is the type of the sex somehow in the numbers? Like a different font or something? Because it's not really the same thing."

"No, no, no," Julianna said, taking the bag from him. "It's all sex. And anyway, who would decide what's gay? Is there some judge deciding what counts as gay sex?"

"Well, no, but some things are just gay and no one needs to decide it," Julian said. "Like, say a dude gets pegged by a woman. That's gay."

"How is that gay?"

"How is it not?"

"Well, because it's between a man and a woman?"

"Yeah, it's a man and woman, sure, but I mean the act itself. Take the people out of it. The act itself is kind of gay."

"Well but what is the 'act itself'? You can only see these numbers if you're looking at people, right?" Julianna looked to Cassandra for confirmation. "You can't 'look' at an act that can only be done by people without there being people involved. Unless…" She looked at Cassandra again. "What if your character looked at a definition in the dictionary of pegging? Would numbers appear over the definition?"

Cassandra shook her head no. She hadn't explicitly tried this, of course, but in reading novels and other texts no type of numbers had ever appeared to her. As far as she knew, she needed to be looking at people. 

Julianna turned back to Julian, satisfied. "The author says no. That's the word of God."

"Okay, well, hold on. Take the whole system out of it."

"Take the whole system out of it? The question is about the system!"

"Okay, but anyway, take it out. You're telling me if you walked into a room and saw a guy getting pegged by a woman, you wouldn't think, well, maybe that guy is gay?"

"Full honesty," Julianna said, raising her hand as if swearing on a Bible. "I would think, oh, maybe they have kinkier sex than I thought. But I would still see that a man and a woman were the ones doing it and so 'gay' wouldn't even be a possibility."

"But I don't get it," Julian said. "Because, if he's not gay, what's in it for the guy?"

"The prostate has tons of nerve endings," Julianna said with a coy smile. "Do you want me to test that out on you sometime?"

"But if there is a dildo in your ass, from your ass's perspective, that is a penis, right? So you basically have a penis in your ass."

"A woman's penis," Julianna clarified.

"From my perspective, and I know, straight dude talking here, but, for me, if a penis is involved, I just can't get turned on."

"What if it was the hottest woman in the world?"

"Then I'd be attracted up until the moment I realized she had a penis."

"What if you never realized she had a penis?"

"Well, first, I'd notice, but even if I didn't, I guess then I'd be able to do it but I would think that that person had done a really fucked up thing to me by hiding it."

"But, like, aren't guys attracted to the whole thing?" Julianna asked. "Like, the body, the hair, the face? Isn't what your penis is going into a small part of it?"

Julian shook his head. "See, that's why you're not a man."

Julianna smiled, twisting her body about flirtatiously. "Is that why? That's not why."

"Men," he continued, "get a bad rap. People act like it's only the physical part that we're attracted to. But we're attracted to the idea of it."

"The idea of it," Julianna repeated to Cassandra, mock-preparing her for a philosophical concept to be delivered. 

"The part that's sexy is that she was designed for it, you know? She was born to do exactly this. Like, here is this chick, and whatever she says or whatever she does, at the end of the day, she evolved with this tight, warm, perfectly penis-shaped part of her body that's all ribbed and lubricated to make sure some baby DNA comes out of it. And she can argue, and deny, but she was made for you to fit into her."

Julianna looked at Cassandra for a rebuttal. Cassandra wasn't sure what to say, but a sense of paranoia continuing to pulse through her convinced her that whatever she said might reveal her secret. So she said nothing.

"And," Julian continued, "the other part is, let's say I was fucking a chick with a penis. The other reason I wouldn't be attracted to her is my brain would be saying, wow, you must really hate yourself to have cut off a part of your body, you know? And I'm not calling it mutilation, but it's a little bit mutilation."

"Julian is very progressive," Julianna said.

"Don't do the whole you're-a-bad-person thing now. We're high and we're talking so it's a free zone," Julian said.

"I still don't get what that has to do with pegging being gay or not."

"Because pegging is like… I don't know, like once you're getting fucked and getting off on being fucked… there's something that's just gay about that. Because, think about it. If you like getting pegged, wouldn't you also like a guy fucking you? Once you're on all fours and all you feel is a dick in front of you, does it matter who's doing it?"

"Hold on! Hold it! Weren't you the one—and Cassandra, back me up on this one—weren't you the one who just said it's about the idea of it? So, it would matter who's doing it, because you're attracted to the thought of a woman doing it."

Cassandra studied the two of them. The drugs were making her feel like she could perceive each individual strand of hair growing out of her head. The argument wasn't worth entering considering the costs. Any stance she took in an argument like this ran the risk of revealing her ability. It was better to let them settle it themselves. Although—was her silence itself suspicious? Wouldn't staying silent be exactly what someone with a power they wanted to hide would do? She began wanting desperately for the effects of the drugs to wear off and started fearing that they never would, that something had tripped in her brain and that she would turn into one of those people who end up high forever because the chemicals get lodged in their spinal cords or something. 

Julian threw his hands up. "Maybe I'm boring and straight or whatever. But to me there's a difference between letting a girl ride on top versus letting her completely penetrate you."

Cassandra, having calculated what she thought was the least incriminating thing possible to say was, tried, "Julian, maybe your feelings on the subject say more about you than they do about straight people or gay people."

Julian considered this. But he countered, "Sure, but you're the one who came up with the idea of a system for everything. So it can't be both a beautiful, ephemeral, personal experience that's unique and unclassifiable and also be a number. Either it's one or the other, right? So, in this story, in this scenario, it isn't. There's some type of rule, isn't there? Even if there weren't before."

This was something she had thought about, too. That maybe there really was some god sitting on a cloud judging what counted as what so he could beam it into her head for impossible-to-understand reasons. Maybe just to torture her, and thereby torture all of humanity, or something like that. 

But what she wanted to say—what she couldn't say—was that, even in the numbers, there was some mystery. There was a fact, sure, but the questions left unanswered by that fact outnumbered whatever "reality" the system provided. 

Unable to say what she wanted to, she said nothing.