Erogamer: The main plot

No, not the girl with the magically-stretchy orifices, the main plot. As in, what the fuck happened to the Earth?

1. The Multiuniversal Setting

Ok, so there’s like a trillion universes. And that is an understatement, but bear with me here. A trillion universes, and many of them have wildly different rules of physics, and some of them don’t run on math at all.

There’s like a trillion universes, and in one of them—which we can refer to as “ours”—the probabilistic (yet deterministic) odds of humanity not exterminating itself dropped from 0.0001% to Just Zero.

At which point…

2. The Teeming Gods

Ok so there’s like a trillion gods. (And that’s also an understatement, but, sigh. Our language isn’t great at communicating infinity and fractional-infinity in ways other than math.)

A “god” in this parlance is any of,

  • A magical being from a different-physics universe which controls some universes
  • A superintelligent AI which controls some universes,
  • Literal Olympian Gods which control some universes
  • Entities which can engage in trade with the previous,
  • Etc,
  • Etc.

These entities trade with one another, in complex and surely-too-complicated-for-mortal-ken-to-understand ways, one of which can be read about here and also here. (I’m also not claiming this is the way, and certainly not the only way for these entities to exchange things with one another, just that it’s a way which beings in even genuinely disjoint universes could trade.)

3. Our story

Once “our universe” demonstrably lost the chance of a good future, it was kinda…foreclosed. It was no longer subject to the non-intervention protections that keep these multiuniversal gods from meddling in the affairs of developing universes, and it sorta…went up for auction.

My current speculation is that a human in the universe is randomly selected as its keeper (recall, the “Princess of the Shattered Earths”) and then, depending on the personality and preferences of that human, the gods trade amongst themselves for who buys the universe.

There are many, many gods, and many of them are very strange—but all of these gods engage in trade with one another.

(“Other forces of reality hate anything that ate innocent plants, but they do not have things all their own way.”)

One of these gods, to pick a single point of possibility out of the (sorry) yet again infinitely vast possibility space of all gods—one of those gods is The Erogame.

It is very interested in sex, and also romance, but specifically it is interested in Erogames, couldn’t you tell by the name? And given that our heroine, the sad, virginal, erogaming Cinderella Sheen is the Princess of this Earth, the Erogame makes the purchase (outbidding the fat-shaming god, who loves fat-shaming and was also eyeing this U.)

And now the Erogame is replacing physics and probability with its own friendly, erotic versions of those things.

It also seems like a hair god gets involved at some point, whose values are pretty straightforward.

(“Happy? Sure, whatever. But she will need cooler hair.”)

And it seems like the glitch text is coming from a third god of—I guess I’d call it kindness and hope, or Eudaimonia—which universally occurs whenever something has pushed Cindy beyond a certain threshold of horror/despair/grim-compromise-with-Reality-Classic, and she needs to feel the gentle hand of a benevolent deity.

But Charles Adan may exert a tiny portion of influence over the course of humanity’s epilogue.

He could use that portion of influence to grant himself abilities on par with anything he has seen Cinderella Sheen do. He could set aside some lesser Shadow for himself to rule, as in the books of Amber that he read as a child, or he could travel across stories to join with more of his fellow refugees first. Most lost souls of Earth choose something along those lines, if they are given a chance. There’s nothing wrong with that. It is a perfectly sensible thing to do after the world ends and it is rare to have better choices.

For Charles Adan there is another option.

Across the Cosmic All there are some number of people in situations like Cinderella’s, with powers that can try to summon to them someone like a Charles Adan. For he is very much the type of boyfriend you would try to summon, if you were a girl like her.

And if someone like Charles Adan agrees to answer that summons, that child of Earth is more likely to stay sane, stable, anchored, and not lose what’s left of her humanity.

If people like Charles Adan are willing to forgo being kings themselves and abide within the sovereignties of their princesses, many more people like the Cinderellas Sheen will be able to summon one of the Charleses Adan. The numerical factor in the exchange rate is significant, for reasons he is not now given to understand. It is not a thing that he alone must do, for there are others like him if he refuses, but the duty will come to someone.