“Anyways, that’s what happened,” I said once the theater screen went black, the show of our memories over.

While me and Vala might have been cuddled up next to each other like everything that was just shown was no big deal, everybody else in attendance looked at us with varying levels of shock. The only one who didn’t look that surprised was Luca who, instead, was doing a little dance while singing, “I’ve got a sister! I’ve got a sister!” Then the confusion kicked in as she stopped to look at us. “Wait. If I came first… but she looks older than me… which one of us is the big sister?”

“You are. I think. I mean, you’re still older than her even if she looks and acts older.”

“But what if she travels through time and space and stuff and time gets all funny and she lives like a thousand years during the time it only takes us to live a couple of days? Then she’d be older than me!”

“At that point, time stops making sense, so we won’t use that. You still came first, so you’re the big sister.”

“But what if she travels back in time, making her exist at an earlier point in time than me?!”

“If I travel back in time to before dinosaurs existed, that doesn’t make me older than dinosaurs and doesn’t mean that I came first… well… wait. Does it?”

“See?! It’s confusing! How do you determine sibling hierarchy in a universe where time doesn’t make any sense?! Nothing means anything anymore! I want to be a big sister, but how can I be a big sister if there’s no longer any sort of qualifier for what makes me the big sister?! All we have to go off of is our own subjective perception of reality, and we all know how flawed subjective perceptions of reality are!”

“Luca, I think you’ve been spending too much time with your mother.”

“Oi,” Window said. “Our daughter spends a perfectly normal amount of time with me, her mother, thank you very much.”

“Anything longer than a second spent with you is too much.”

Luca crossed her arms over her chest and nodded. “Papa has a point.”

Window looked even more shocked than she did earlier, dramatically leaning backward with her hand over her mouth. “Even my own daughter thinks a second with me is too much?!”

“Even a zeptosecond is too much!”

Everybody but Window, and especially the dog sisters, tilted their heads when they heard Luca say “zeptosecond.”

“That’s too cruel!” Window whined. “Even though I know you’re the daughter of that horrible man over there who constantly wants to bully me, even he wouldn’t say that to me!”

That meant it was time for me to say, “Even a zeptoseco—”

A piece of tape materialized over my mouth as Window glared daggers at me.

“Ehehe, it’s okay, Mama. I’m only joking,” Luca said. “Even spending all of time with you wouldn’t be enough!”

“Well, maybe that’s too much,” Window said. “I love you, but I still need me time for my gacha idol waifus.”

Luca nodded. “I understand completely, Mama.”

I ripped the tape off my mouth and shouted, “That’s not something you should accept so easily! Don’t let your own mother shove you aside for PNGs showing too much cleavage!”

“Papa, you shove me aside for fluff, all my other moms, and plants all the time.”

I felt a dagger pierce my heart. “I—I don’t—but—”

The smile on Luca’s face could not have been any more smug than it was.

She was playing me.

She played both me and her mother.

We were getting bullied by our own daughter.

“Window, she’s too strong,” I said.

“You’re right, somehow,” Window said.

“You could have left off the somehow.”

“Don’t worry about the small details.”

“No, that’s a pretty big detail because of what it implies about my intelligence and capability to be right.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Like throwing you.”

“Shh, shh. It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Our daughter is the true threat right now. We have to eliminate her.”

“I’m cuddling with Vala still, so I might have to leave this job up to you.”

“Tsk… every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in.”

“That trope makes no sense in this context.”

“Don’t worry about the small details.”

“Alright,” I said. “Well, good luck. I like you.”

“Wait,” Window replied, falling into my reversal. “You like me? Why didn’t you say you love me?”

“Don’t worry about the small details.”

“No, that’s a pretty big detail because of what it implies about your love for me.”

“And how does that make you feel?”

“Like stealing your credit card to blow all your money on gacha games.”

Luca raised her hand and asked, “I thought I was gonna get eliminated?”

Me and Window looked at each other, nodded, and then… Window took off after Luca, wiggling her fingers around in a threatening manner to tell Luca that she was going to get tickled to death if she caught her. “Get back here, you bratty informational status daughter!” Window shouted at our giggling, fleeing daughter.

That prompted Vala to tug on my shirt and say, “Drake… we need to make another baby. I want a kid to chase around for five seconds before getting tired and playing more vidya.”

“I’ll give you as many as you want now that my soul can handle it,” I said.

“Dr-Drake… you can’t just—you can’t just say that in front of everybody.” Vala wiggled around and smiled, acting all shy and embarrassed despite being the one to bring it up in the first place while all eyes were on us.

“Oh! Me, too!” Delphi shouted. “I want Master’s baby, too!”

“I call dibs after Delphi,” Cami said while holding up her hand.

Lavi then spoke up and said, “I—if… if everybody else is… then—I… I also—”

“Hmph!” Clawdia interrupted. “It’s—it’s not as if I want to be the mother of your child or anything, but, I suppose if I must, then—I… I… nya… I! I, too, want—!”

Clawdia was next to get interrupted by Claire standing up and bowing to me. “My lord, while I may be but a humble servant, every inch of my body belongs to you. That includes my womb. If you so wish to ravage this body and turn me into nothing more than a breeding factory to produce offspring with, then I will eagerly allow you to use me in such a manner.”

Clawdia and Lavi both stuttered out nonsense while blushing after listening to Claire’s intense offer.

“Nice,” Cami said. “What she said.”

Next up was Chloe. “I—I may be the childhood friend trope, but I won’t lose in this! All—all I ask is for a mating press! I’ve studied hentai as much as I have manga! That’s always the most effective way to impregnate somebody in hentai!”

I was beginning to think that all my wives were a bunch of degenerates, leaving me as the only one truly pure and innocent anymore.

Such a tragedy.

“Sounds fun to me,” Eliza said with a shrug. “If everybody else is getting in on it, then I don’t want left out. Besides, I’ll never get to be a true grandma if I don’t have kids of my own first.” She then wrapped an arm around Valkyria and said, “And I’m sure Val here wants to make a light tank for herself, too! Hah! Get it? Since she’s a medium tank? A baby would be a light tank?” Eliza smacked her lap as she laughed. “Ah… I’ve been waiting to use that one.”

Valkyria, meanwhile, was pure red and could only shyly nod before looking away and covering up her face.

While Clawdia and Lavi were still in the process of recovering, Honey said, “The games I play might not ever show what happens after sex and marriage… so I might not have any experience with raising children… but I would still like to give it a try! I—I just may need to look up some route guides to make sure to set the flags for our child reaching a good end instead of a bad end.”

Then came Mariet. Rather than say anything, Mariet walked up to me and Vala… and then flopped down onto us, laying herself out over both of our laps as if trying to use us as a bed, positioning her head right next to my crotch since she loved to keep it there. “I’m… technically… still alive… for legal reasons… so… you can… breed me… too. But it’s… okay… if you want to wait… so there aren’t… too many kids… all at once. I will… be happy… as long as… you use my head… every day.” And at the end of her speech, she opened up her mouth while facing it toward my crotch, her expectant tongue hanging out waiting for the usual.

But it wasn’t time for the usual, so I poked her tongue back into her mouth.

Finally, we were down to only Clawdia and Lavi. The two were the only ones left who hadn’t offered their bodies to me yet for the sake of having kids with them even though it was already more than obvious that was exactly what they both wanted.

“I—I never thought I would team up with a dog,” Clawdia said, “but… for the sake of our honor… we can’t be beaten!”

“You’ve never sounded cooler than you have now,” Lavi replied.

The two girls nodded at each other and held hands before looking at me and shouting in unison, “We’ll have your babies, too!” Of course, Clawdia included her signature “nya” at the end of it.

I didn’t think it was anything that any of them needed to say since it was pretty obvious that I was going to end up having at least one kid with every single one of them in the first place, but at least now it was official.

“Oh! I’m also interested!” said another feminine voice… and it was a voice that I didn’t recognize at all. “But… how is it done in the first place?”

Before I could turn around to see who the voice came from, seeing as how it came from behind me, I noticed Clawdia fearfully jumped behind Lavi to hide behind her. “What—what are you doing here?!” Clawdia shouted, only barely poking her head out from behind Lavi.

“Ah… I got a letter from Window telling me that if I don’t come over here to make an introduction, then it would probably take forever for things to progress to the point where I get introduced naturally!”

Mariet wiggled around on my lap until she had a good enough look at who was behind me. “Ah… Zoa… hi.”

“Oh! You must be Mariet! It is a pleasure to finally meet you! You as well, Clawdia! It is nice to finally see the faces behind our avatars!”

Between the fact that both Mariet and Clawdia recognized the girl behind me, and the fact that she mentioned talking to them via avatars, and I remembered that Mariet mentioned before how the queens had their own chat group…

I lifted Mariet’s upper half onto Vala so that I could stand up and turn around to get a proper look at who I could only assume was the next queen.

Vala, meanwhile, was more than happy to grope Mariet’s chest.

Standing there was a woman who gave me a similar feeling to Honey in that they both had a sort of feminine, princess-like charm to them… but that was where the similarities ended.

She must have been a fan of blue and pink since it made up her entire appearance. Her high heels, her short dress that ended halfway down her thighs and left most of her breasts on display as well as everything above them, her eyes, her hair—everything. While her hair was blue on the top and back, it was pure pink underneath, and eyes were just as two-toned.

But none of that was what was surprising about her.

What was surprising was the fact that she looked like she had the body of a jellyfish on the top of her head. It was like she was wearing a jellyfish for a hat and her hair was its tentacles.

“Oh! Drake! It is a pleasure to meet you! Clawdia always talks about you in the chat group,” the new queen said.

“I do not!” Clawdia shouted.

The new queen then said, “Ah, I have not yet introduced myself! Please, excuse my poor manners.” She gave me a polite curtsy next. “My name is Zoa, and I am the queen of Obligatory Water Level Land!”

Vala froze when she heard those words. “The—the dreadful, obligatory water level has arrived?!”

“That it has!” Zoa playfully raised each of her hands up to act like a monster before saying, “Scary, right?”

“Terrifying,” I answered in a flat voice, prompting her to giggle a little.

“Also, it is my understanding that I will be skipping the girlfriend phase once you conquer me? I will jump straight to being your wife?”

“I mean, you might as well consider yourself my wife right now.”

“Oh! May I? That does sound rather nice!”

Clawdia came rushing up to us and, for the first time, hugged me of her own will without the influence of catnip. She wrapped her arms around me as tightly as she could before poking her head out from behind me to shout at Zoa, “No way, nya! Me and Mariet had to wait until he beat us to get to be all lovey-dovey with him! You don’t get to skip the process after we had to go through it!”

“But… I got to,” Mariet said.

“But that wasn’t official so it doesn’t count!”

Meanwhile, Zoa tilted her head and asked, “But is that logic not silly? To say that others must suffer and wait in the name of ‘fairness’ when the problem could easily be resolved, sparing future wives from having to go through the same trials? If a train runs over fifty people, should it continue running over the next hundred in the name of fairness rather than stopping it to save their lives?”

“Oh,” Chloe said. “That reminds me… I don’t have to pay back my student loans as long as I stay in this universe, right?”

Vala gave her a thumbs-up. “Right!”

Chloe immediately teared up. “You’re the best, Vala! I feel like I could cry!”

“You’re already crying!”

While Vala took my job over for me, I returned my attention to Zoa. “It wouldn’t be fair to Clawdia and Mariet, plus Window would complain about how we’re ruining plot progression or something, but… if you kidnap me, or if I kidnap you, then we can unofficially spend husband-wife time together before I conquer you.”

Zoa clapped her hands together in front of her. “That is good enough for me! Now then, I—” She stopped.

Slowly, Zoa turned her head toward something that caught her attention.

When I looked where she was looking, all I saw was… a mushroom. A single, lone mushroom sticking from the grass.

I never saw anybody, animal nor human, lunge so desperately at a mushroom before.

Zoa, on the ground in front of the mushroom now, stared at the mushroom with bright, sparkling eyes. “It’s—it’s a penis! Penises grow from the ground on the surface?! I had no idea!”

“… what?” I asked.

“Crap,” Clawdia said. “I forgot about this part of her personality…”

Mariet then said, “Meet… the president… of… the Penis Appreciation and Hunting… Club.”

“Her and Mariet are the only members of it, nya. They tried to invite me, but I refused.”

“Look!” Zoa said, gently pressing a couple of her fingers against the mushroom to show it off to us. “It’s a penis! A splendid one at that! It may be small, but it is still beautiful and perfect in its own way! Ah… I wonder if it would survive outside of the ground. I want to add it to my collection!”

The more she talked about penises, the more I realized her jellyfish crown… kind of looked like the tip of a penis.

Mariet spoke up again to explain, “Zoa… might be… confused… but… her heart… is in the right… place. She has… no idea… what an actual… penis is.”

Zoa looked so incredibly happy with the “penis” she found that I didn’t have it in me to break it to her that the mushroom was, in fact, not a penis.

Instead, I asked, “Why do you love penises so much?”

“Well, I think they are neat!” Zoa replied. “They look cute! And they are fun to touch! Like the sea penises I have found!”

“She’s… talking… about sea… cucumbers,” Mariet explained.

Zoa stood up after giving the mushroom a delicate pat on the top of its length and held her hands over her chest to say, from the bottom of her heart, “Penises are the greatest. I am so thankful that the first person I ever talked to online showed me the way. If it was not for her, I may have never been shown the path of the penis. Now, under her guidance, I have learned just how incredible penises are, and I wish to devote my life to the pursuit of all things penile.”

“Who did you talk to?” I asked, already worried about the answer.

“I have never met her offline, but she goes by the name ‘bigboobspls’ online! Whenever she was not asking me for ideas on how she might be able to make her breasts bigger, she would talk to me about how great penises are! She frequently talked about her lover’s penis, citing it as the greatest one in the world, praising it for how large and sturdy it is!”

I had a gut feeling about what was going on, so I looked behind me… and saw Cami standing there with a look of realization on her face. Then, as soon as she noticed me looking at her, she looked away and failed to whistle.

“Yet, for as much as I admire penises… I have never learned where a man’s penis is. She made it sound as if all men have penises, but,” Zoa paused to look me over. “Where is your penis? I do not see a penis anywhere on your body. Surely, something as incredible as a penis would be in the open for everybody to admire, yes?”

“Zoa,” I said, “you—”

“It’s in… his pants,” Mariet said. “And… it’s huge. It’s… an advanced level… penis. A beginner… might not… be able to handle it.”

Zoa’s eyes grew full of fiery determination, and, the next instant, she was on her knees in front of me trying to pull my pants down. “I want to see it!”

“You can’t just strip me out in the open!” I shouted.

“But it’s a penis! If there truly is a penis in there, then I simply must see it! This may be the most important event of my life! And it needs air! What if it suffocates inside of your pants?! We have to save it!”

I had a soul modified with the power of a reality above our own, and I was pretty strong in general even before that, yet… I was getting overwhelmed by Zoa and she was slowly inching my pants down lower and lower.

Then I remembered something.

Luca was busy with Window elsewhere, so it was fine if I exposed myself, and the woman who wanted to see my penis so badly was basically already my wife, so why not?

I stopped resisting and—

Zoa disappeared.

A dramatic, tired sigh could be heard from next to me after that. “I leave you alone for ten minutes… and you try to raise the rating of the series again,” Window said. “All I told her was to come and make her introduction, not try to strip you.”

“I sense… a disturbance… in the chat group,” Mariet said.

Clawdia finally let go of me to pull her own phone out of nowhere to check on it. “Woah, nya. She’s spamming crying emojis and saying she wants to see Drake’s… y-you know.”

“Don’t… worry. She’s afraid… it might… suffocate. Tell her… I’ll give it… CPR… if that happens. And… if it doesn’t.”

I didn’t like the idea of one of my wives crying, even if she wasn’t officially my wife yet, so I snapped my fingers to make that mushroom she was admiring before appear in my hand. All I had to do then was abuse the laws of reality a bit to make it an immortal mushroom, attached a note to it that said it was from me to Zoa, and then tossed it into Postia who was more than happy to deliver it for me.

“Oh,” Clawdia said, “now she’s talking about how Drake is the best husband ever and saying she’ll admire the… mushroom, he gave her, until the end of time. She said she’ll sleep with it every single night.”

I didn’t think things could get any more absurd than they already were.

Yet, somehow, things felt even more absurd than they were before.

“Psstt,” Cami whispered to Mariet, “can you invite me to that club?”

“My innocence is never going to last at this rate,” I said to nobody in particular.

Of course, Window took that as an opportunity for her to say, “How long are you going to keep acting like you’re some innocent cinnamon bun for?”

“Oh. I could go for a cinnamon bun.”

Eliza jumped up from her seat and grabbed onto Valkyria’s hand. “Alright! Sounds like the two of us have got some baking to do then! I used to make some of the best cinnamon buns around when I was younger. Let’s see if I’ve still got it in me.”

My innocence might have been doomed, but at least I was going to get good food and “CPR” out of it.