It was such a blow for me to hear this! I have been harboring a dangerous monster for as long as I've existed, and it was threatening to overwhelm me so it could take what it needed without my assistance. How, then, does one appease an innate sexual predator? What would it do if it ever took over me? I was terrified of the implications of this and sought from my parents the means I previously used to satiate it. They told me that they didn’t know what I did to keep it submerged, but they said that they would support any harmless measure I took since the alternative would be catastrophic!

Anyway, now that we’re deep in the rabbit-hole, I suppose we should go deeper and segue into a personal experience that perfectly encapsulates the dark and unusual nature of this region. I think I’ll tell you about what happened the night of a premature awakening; but first, I must provide context.

I have two jobs, the primary position is at the Midnight Stop diner just down the mountain from where my family’s castle sits. There I take customer orders and wait tables, and sometimes I help with closing.

My secondary job, and the one that subjects me to the most gossip around here, is my position at the Lounge! The Lounge is an illicit entertainment establishment located in the hidden corridor of unused rooms inside Asylum’s giant public library.

In my world, those rooms are dark, dusty old storage rooms; in the simulation, however, they are the hub of Shadow Asylum’s criminal underworld!

It is run by the simulant named Blade, a complex individual who seems, at first, to be the fun-loving manager for his various entertainment establishments. But, beneath the facade, he’s a ruthless mastermind who has actually partnered with human mafia and Yakuza leaders to gain some influence in the physical world!

I first met Blade when my friends and I were trying to find a missing woman who disappeared at a place and time of day when monsters couldn’t be blamed for it. We had hit a wall in our investigation and could see no way round it, so it came to me that I should enter the simulation to see if Blade had any information regarding the woman’s fate.

I went to the library after school one day, found my way back to the old corridor, strapped a mobile client device to my arm and put on my custom designed AR glasses to boot into the simulation.

The glasses, by the way, are custom because I wanted them to be beautiful as well as functional. I hate the hideous designs of modern AR and VR headsets, so I 3D printed a set of transparent, unobtrusive, organic glasses and overlaid them with printed transparent OLED displays; the result is that I have a visual interface that actually looks good.

But, as any simulant who has ever seen me knows, when I enter the simulation, you don’t see the glasses, you see only me, and the simulated apparel I’ve chosen to wear.

Anyway, when booted in, I met Blade for the first time, but he had no information to give me. He did say, though, that some members of the Chicago mafia had arrived in Asylum on the day of the disappearance. He informed me that they frequented the Lounge with their custom virtual reality headsets; I asked him how they knew about the simulation in the first place and that is when he made me aware of his dealings with criminal elements in my world.

He did an odd thing, however, when he offered me a position at the Lounge as a performer and table server. He said that it may help me get close enough to the human visitors to hear something as to the woman’s condition and/or whereabouts, but I knew better. I knew that he thought I could bring in more currency to the place; being the only human stripper there!

He wanted a freak! He wanted something different, something more captivating than, as he later put it, the “banality of everyday beauty!”

“You're a scary kind of pretty," he said to me. "You know, like a sexy ghost who died of tragic circumstances!”

Thanks to my biological parents, everyone tells me that I am quite beautiful. But I have extraordinary damage and equally unusual physical anomalies, as well. All of it works together to produce a keenly dichotomous effect in people: they don’t know whether to pity me or envy me!

My best friend, Eric, once described me as “Grotesquely Beautiful”. I think he came closer to explaining my unusual physical aesthetic than anyone else ever has.

At any rate, seeing as how my friends and I were at the place where desperate measures had to be taken to find her, I accepted Blade’s offer.

The rest of the story involved creeping out of the house after midnight, walking the long mountain road up into town, disabling the library’s security system, gaining access illegally, finding my way down the pitch dark corridor to the room where the simulant girls prepare themselves, sliding into my form-fitting tactile interface suit, which makes me look nude in the simulation; putting on the glasses and booting in to fulfill my role as an erotic performer/spy.

It turns out that the mafia members who arrived in Asylum to do business with Blade had taken her and was holding her for ransom because her husband used to be in the Chicago mafia. He, eventually, escaped to Asylum to get out of the family, but he never sought the Founder’s protection, which left him vulnerable to reprisal.

The mafia couldn’t just invade Asylum and kill him, however, because the Founder would have removed the whole family from the face of the Earth if they were stupid enough to be so bold! Instead, Blade became their opportunity to gain access to this region, and exact what little vengeance they could without coming under the Founder’s horrifying wrath.

After the woman was rescued through my efforts, my parents found out what I had been doing when they received a call in the middle of the night from the chief of police, and their fury was unbridled when they arrived at the station! I spent the next month confined to my room, recovering from the soul-withering scorching I took from them that night in the chief’s office.

You have to understand that every single night I left the house and walked that road into town, not only was I willfully engaging in illegal activity, I was putting my life in extraordinary danger as well! The monsters that live in these mountains are more cunning and vicious than any of the indigenous wildlife! I may be under the Founder’s protection, but alone, and coming face to face with a starving lupine-shifter, a sadist night-walker, or a freshly consolidated-EM vampire, there’s no chance of me coming out of such encounters alive! And those are just three of the many kinds of ultracryptids that stalk the forests of Asylum!

And, coupled with the fact that I was associating with dangerous mafia members when I should have been at home in bed; my parents had every right to chastise me the way they did and incarcerate me for a month.

After all of this, you can, then, imagine my shock when, after my punishment had concluded, my parents, along with Mrs. Lockwood, the library’s overseer, approached me and told me that they wanted me to continue working at the Lounge! The only stipulations were that I would work two hour shifts on two Saturdays a month, and that I would remain locked in the building at all times until I left with a parent; I was a fresh new twenty one-year-old when I hatched the plan to become a criminal to save that woman, and Blade never had a problem with me disabling the library's security system and entering the building without permission during that month and a half; but everyone else certainly did! So, to say that I was stunned by their insistence that I continue working there falls utterly short of reality!

But, to my parents, and after they explained it to her; to Mrs. Lockwood as well, The Lounge was the opportunity I needed to feed my inner monster and keep it under control, so they formulated this bizarre plan among themselves without my knowledge and came to me insisting that I do it!

I did, however, have to explain to my parents how the simulation worked and how I was able to interact with it so they could keep track of me when I linked in. So, the first night when daddy brought me to the library, he insisted on meeting Blade in person to talk some things over with him; he wanted, as he said, to make sure I was “treated right”.

He unlocked the door with the key that Mrs. Lockwood gave him, tapped in the security code when we entered, then turned around to lock us inside.

I brought an extra mobile client and a pair of size large interface glasses that I had freshly printed out for him a few hours prior, but being that it was his first time interfacing with the simulation, he was quite disoriented for a moment after we linked in. When he adjusted, I took him back to Blade’s office, passing the gathering crowd of simulant patrons and Blade’s bodyguards, which are just as imposing in build and stature as my father is!

When we reached the door, I took him in to introduce him and Blade was shocked, as you might imagine a simulated criminal mastermind to be. He took it in stride, however, when I told him that daddy insisted on meeting him.

Blade was honest with him, telling him that I worked as a pole dancer in the Lounge and as a table server, and that I sometimes gave private performances to special guests. He assured him that I didn’t work for free, but was paid in DACs, both in tips and my regular salary.

Daddy didn’t get the digitally alternating currency system at first, but he was glad that I wasn’t being taken advantage of.

He walked with Blade to the Lounge room after the latter told me to go and get myself ready. I could tell that daddy wasn’t happy with this as it was sorely rubbing against his traditional values; at home, he and mother were somewhat confident in their decision to allow me to do this, but now that he was seeing the Lounge in person, and everything my employment there involved, he was finding it extremely difficult to continue. But, being that I had a specialized need requiring specialized assistance, he managed to push through his reticence.

The room where the Lounge is located is quite large and has actual metal poles supporting the ceiling that I can use to play on. The room itself is empty, dark, silent and dusty. In the simulation, however, it is vibrant, loud and full of activity!

What daddy was seeing was a room full of excited simulant patrons sitting at simulated tables being served by scarcely attired female simulants as pounding music and barely clad girls swinging and playing on the graphically overlaid poles kept them all entertained. Blade told me that he understood my father’s hesitation after he saw where I worked, but that he assured him that I had been employed there for quite some time and that simulants are much less predatory than humans due to the ethics algorithm I programmed to govern the interpersonal protocols of your society.

Yes, there are simulants who are much less influenced by the algorithm; Blade being one of them, but for the most part, even they have scruples.

I had my tactile interface suit on under my clothes, so I entered the prep room where several girls were preparing themselves and then turned to my favorite corner vanity to begin unclothing myself and seeing to my make up.

After a few minutes, daddy walked in with Blade and saw how I looked; the interface suit is black with a lovely electronode texture running throughout it, but, as I've previously explained, in the simulation it is smooth and blends perfectly with my skin tone, the suit renders me in the nude when I’m linked in! Being that it was programmed to be a synthetic epidermis, it’s no wonder the simulation sees it as bare flesh.

Without needing to say, daddy was very disturbed by this, but I gently assured him that I was actually wearing a hyper-advanced catsuit that covered every inch of me from my neck down; he had to remove his glasses momentarily to see that I wasn’t really naked; that what he was seeing was how the simulation interprets the suit, nothing more; (I never told him, however, that the suit enables me to experience tactile sensations within the simulated environment, as I knew that telling him such a thing would have been his last straw; so I left that part out when he asked me about the electronode pattern.)

Anyway, he was relieved when he saw me actually wearing something and told me that he would be back in an hour; that he would be in the main library reading while I performed.

That was a major milestone for me. I understood why he didn’t want to be in the Lounge during my performance, but it was thrilling to me that he and mama were so willing to be open minded about this.

When I looked away as he exited the room, I smiled at the girls who had paused in their preparations to stare at the stranger who just left, and when I told them that that big, strong, handsome man that just came in with Blade was my father they were all in swooning adoration of him, which made me feel really proud!

I did feel for my daddy, though; having to bring his child to a late night strip club to work off a massive surplus of sexual energy just to keep an unholy monster at bay! I was a little embarrassed, though, when he came in and saw me in the nude, but happy that he didn’t make a worse scene of it than he did.

My parents are both conservative, church going people who don’t look upon things like erotic entertainment favorably! And this would certainly prove to be a grueling challenge to their reputation when knowledge of this, inevitably, found its way into the community and spread like wildfire!

But, they knew more than anyone in Asylum what the danger was; that without that unusual outlet being available to me, I would turn into something neither they, myself, nor the community, are prepared to face.

That was the beginning of my employment at the Lounge under the knowledge and concession of my parents. Mom met Blade in the ensuing weeks and didn’t care for him at all, but he and dad talked a lot in his office while I worked and they actually got to know each other quite well; I have such a delightfully complex life!