LDQ Vol. 5 pt. 19

The inside of Honey’s tower was something that I couldn’t get used to, but everybody else seemed right at home in it. It was way too messy. Sure, Honey liked to wear comfy clothes when just lounging around, but she still looked very feminine. Very pretty. Very ladylike. She was the kind of girl who reminded me of some royal princess. If somebody took her and put her in a dress, then stuck her in some medieval painting depicting a goddess of beauty and nobility or something, I would instantly buy into it. There would be no doubt of her royalty.

Yet the inside of her tower looked like a den for gremlins who existed only to play video games, eat hot chips, and order pizza. There were empty fast food bags everywhere, which made no sense, but I reminded myself like always that things didn’t need to make sense. There were also the towers of video game cases that all featured anywhere from two to twenty men on them in various stages of clothing while very often in at least semi-provocative poses. And then there were all the clothes. I didn’t know how she had so many dirty clothes since it felt like everybody, myself included, simply wore the same clothes every single day without ever having to deal with them getting dirty, but there they all were.

So, what did I do inside of said tower?

I was in a tower full of women who were all dating me, each one dressed up in a maid costume, who I could do anything I wanted with.

So, what would a man with multiple girlfriends all dressed up as maids do while spending the night with them?

He would clean.

That was what he would do.

And that was what I did.

Sure, I could have done lewd things with them. I could have taken them one by one into Honey’s bedroom, thrown them down onto her bed, and made love to them before swapping them out for another girlfriend. I would have taken more, but the beds in each tower were barely big enough for two people.

But how could I even think about doing something like that when Honey’s tower was such a mess?

Even the other honey badgers came out to help me! All four of them, walking around like people despite looking like perfectly normal honey badgers that were a bit larger than normal if anything, helped me pick everything up. We even developed a sort of chain system. I picked up one item, handed it to the honey badger next to me, who would hand that to the honey badger next to them, and so on before reaching the final honey badger who would place it in a trash bag. It was a serious team effort trying to get the place clean!

I was almost tempted to call Luca over and tell her that I would make her mother pay her for doing chores if she helped cleaning, but I didn’t want Luca to have to suffer through such a grueling task.

Also, the games that some of them were playing were absolutely not appropriate for a child to be around.

But, as much as I didn’t enjoy cleaning up after somebody else’s mess, I did enjoy listening to my girlfriends laugh and have a fun time together. Was I basically putting myself into the role of a third wheel when I could have joined in at any time? Yeah. But it was nice to hear and watch them have fun together without me, too. After all, we were one giant relationship. Everybody was dating everybody else in our circle. I wanted them to get along with each other as much as they got along with me. There was also the fact that simply seeing them be happy and having fun was enough to make me happy. So, as annoyed as I was by the mess, I was more happy just by being around all my girlfriends and listening to them have a good time while I cleaned.

And while I hesitated to already call my childhood friend my girlfriend, especially since I still couldn’t remember her name and she refused to tell anybody what it was until I remembered, she was included in all the fun. She was part of Vala’s, Delphi’s, Window’s, and Cami’s group playing one of those casual party games where they had to roll dice to move around a board and then play minigames to win coins. Whoever had the most coins at the end won.

Then there was Honey’s group which also included Lavi and Clawdia. They were on the couch next to where the others were, but focused on an entirely different game. It was a game where the main character was a man… who liked to dress up as a girl. Not only that, but he sounded like a girl, too. In fact, I was extremely confident that the character was not only designed to be a girl but then called a man just to appeal to some fetish, but the character was even voiced by a woman! And he wasn’t the only one, either! Every other male character in the game was designed to be a girl and voiced by a woman, but they were all supposed to be men and referred to as men in the game!

And, of course, the intent of the game was to romance all of the different characters. There were romance options such as basically-a-girl but with glasses. Basically-a-girl but a tennis player. Basically-a-girl but a nerdy gamer.

Honestly, the biggest plot twist that the game could drop would be if one of the characters was actually a girl. Even the random NPCs who weren’t relevant to the main story at all seemed like they were ninety-nine percent girls but technically not.

I just didn’t understand the appeal.

That being said, I did almost cry a little during one of the routes where the nerdy gamer boy-but-basically-a-girl opened up about all of the bullying he went through and revealed that he dressed up to get mistaken as a girl since people always made fun of him for how feminine he was. They stopped bullying him as soon as he began tricking them into thinking he was a girl and just—the entire thing was actually kind of emotional.

Of course, I would never admit to any of them that I got emotionally invested in their weird dating game while I was supposed to be picking up the garbage around the place.

But I would if they asked me. After all, I wouldn’t lie to any of my girlfriends.

That aside, Vala and Window even got an extra maid costume for my childhood friend. She went from being some girl I hadn’t seen in what felt like twenty years to delivering us pizza, holding me to our marriage promise, dressing up as a maid, and playing games with all of my girlfriends within the span of an hour.

She was basically already my girlfriend, really.

I just… could not remember her name. I couldn’t even remember the name of her big brother who I was actually really close to as a kid.

Vala didn’t care about waiting for her name and already assigned a nickname to her, though. “CHF!” she shouted. “Don’t you dare! Just because I have the most coins doesn’t mean you should target m-nooo! Why?!”

“Fi-first… what’s CHF?” my childhood friend asked.

“CHF. You know, an acronym for ChildHood Friend. Window, can you capitalize the letters in ‘ChildHood Friend’ to make it extra clear?”

“Already done,” Window replied. “And did it for the second one, too.”

“Thanks.”

“Oh,” CHF replied. “That makes sense. Umm, secondly… isn’t the point of the game to get the most coins? Doesn’t that mean I should target whoever has the most to steal them?”

“Well, yeah,” Vala answered, “but you’re still supposed to whine about it and ruin friendships over it.”

“I don’t want to ruin friendships I’m only just making…”

“Shhh, don’t worry. I’m just kidding. I’m not going to actually ruin friendships over a game… unless the game is to see who can ruin the most friendships. No matter how much I might want to stay friends with somebody… if it’s for the sake of vidya… and it demands I ruin the friendship… then I will ruin it. And then I will immediately do everything in my power to beg for forgiveness afterward so that we can still be friends.”

“Maybe… don’t pick a game that would make you ruin friendships?”

“Listen, CHF. Sometimes, you don’t get to choose the vidya in life. Sometimes, the vidya chooses you.”

“I’m going to cry if you pick a game like that.”

“You’re already crying!” I shouted from across the room.

“I’m not even talking to you!” CHF shouted back at me.

“I can’t help it! It’s reflex!”

“I’m going to cry if you shout at me every time I say I’m going to cry even if I’m not saying it to you!”

“You’re already crying! And I seriously can’t help it! That’s like telling a monkey that eating bananas is illegal! Or like telling sheep that they’re not allowed to be fluffy! I—wait.”

“Ooh, I know that kind of ‘wait,’” Vala said.

“Vala.”

“Yeh?”

“Can I have a pet sheep?”

“Yeh.”

She snapped her fingers, causing the fluffiest sheep I had ever seen in my entire life to appear out of thin air right in front of me.

“It’s so… it’s so… fluffy… how is—how is this even possible?” I asked, hardly able to hold back the tears. The emotional drama of that one game was nothing compared to the overwhelming emotions I felt looking at the sheep.

“I wish he looked at me like that when we reunited,” CHF said.

Window placed a hand on CHF’s shoulder and shook her head. “He doesn’t even look at any of us like that. Don’t bother.”

“I… I will make him look at me like that.”

“No, seriously, it’s impossible. He only looks at fluff that way. You can’t compete with fluff without being fluff yourself.”

“Then all I have to do is embrace the fluff, right?”

“You… what are you proposing?”

CHF stood up, spun around, and placed one hand on her hip while pointing at the sheep with her other hand. “I’m not going to lose to a sheep! You might have been born with fluff, but I’ve been looking at fashion blogs and watching videos on it ever since I was a teenager! I wanted to be able to perfectly fit the aesthetic preference of Drake no matter what it was! I’ve been training for this!”

I was already on my knees with my face buried into the sheep’s side and my arms wrapped around it at that point, barely even listening to what the girls were talking about.

“Is he still obsessed with plants?” CHF asked.

“Super obsessed,” Vala answered. “Wait, was he obsessed with plants as a kid?”

“Yeah. He always picked flowers and then had nothing to do with them, so he’d give them to me since I was the only girl he knew and he said it would be weird to give a boy flowers.”

“Aww… you totally need to tell us stories about him as a kid.”

“I will. But first, I have to prove my ability as a woman to seduce the only man I’ve ever loved. I will show you all what it means to not just be a childhood friend, but to be a childhood friend who has evolved beyond the trope! A childhood friend who actually wins for once! Also, I’m going to need whoever it is that keeps making stuff magically appear.”

Window looked at the screen and saw that she had zero coins while everybody else had at least twenty. “I guess I’ll help,” she said with a defeated sigh.

Taking charge of things, CHF grabbed Window by the wrist and dragged her into Honey’s bedroom and shut the door behind them.

I had no idea what was going to happen. All I knew was that I had a pet sheep.

What else did I need in life?

Did I need to finish cleaning Honey’s tower? No.

Did I need girlfriends? They were nice, but no.

Did I need to live in a personal pocket universe where I would never have to worry about anything for the rest of my life except for having fun and living out all of my dreams? No.

All I needed was my pet sheep.

“I know what I’ll name you,” I said while still burying my face against the sheep. It was probably the gentlest voice I ever spoke with. I was in a state of pure, unfiltered bliss. “You shall be named… The Fluff, for your fluff is a fluff that truly stands above all other fluffs.”

The sheep baa’ed at me and I couldn’t have been happier. Even the sheep’s noises sounded fluffy. How was that possible? I didn’t know, but it was.

Then I heard the bedroom door open, so I leaned my face up just enough to look over the fluff while still keeping it mostly in contact with the fluff. That allowed me to see Window come out of the bedroom first, joining Vala and Cami back at the couch. Then, with everybody’s full attention on the doorway to the bedroom except for mine since it was impossible to devote all of my attention away from The Fluff, CHF walked out of it.

No, it wasn’t CHF who walked out of it.

It was her. The little sister of my best friend, and my friend from childhood.

After all, how could I not know the name… of somebody so fluffy?

There she was, standing proud with her hands on her hips, a confident smile on her face, and with an aesthetic that screamed fluff at me so loudly that it made me pull my face up from The Fluff.

To start with, she put on short jean shorts that showed off her slender legs that looked soft in all the right places… but the most important part was the fluffy trim around the bottom of the leg openings. Then there was the oversized sweater she wore tucked into her shorts, the sleeves clearly too long for her and thus bunched up together behind her wrists. The sweater looked so fluffy that I could have sworn it was made from The Fluff. Not only that, but it had a flower design around the neck of it!

As for her hair, it looked like it was cut to be even shorter so that the back of her hair now only barely reached her back while the sides only reached her jawline, but that made her hair even lighter which made it springier and fluffier looking. Then to top everything off, literally, she had two rose buds sticking out from the sides of her head. They looked like little rose horns. Of course, they were just flowers held in place by their stems sticking through her hair, but they still looked like adorable, little horns.

“Say my name, Drake, and I’ll even go ‘baa’ for you,” she said.

“Chloe,” I answered without waiting for a single second.

“Sh-shut up, I’m going to cry if you suddenly remember it.”

“You’re already crying! And all I did was answer what you wanted! And where is my ‘baa’?!”

“B-baa…”

Somebody shot an arrow through my heart even though Honey and the honey badgers didn’t have their bows on them.

“S-so… tell me, who’s fluffier?” Chloe asked. “Me, or that sheep?”

“The sheep,” I answered even faster than when I said her name.

“That’s what I thought! There’s no way that a sheep is going to—huh?”

I buried my face back into The Fluff’s fluff and let out a content sigh. “There really is nothing better than a creature whose sole existence in life is to be fluffy.”

Window shouted, “Sheeps don’t exist just to be fluffy! Wait, why is it telling me that ‘sheep’ is misspelled? There’s a red underline under it. Isn’t the plural form of sheep ‘sheeps?’”

“It’s sheep.”

“Well, that’s confusing and stupid. How are you supposed to tell the difference between talking about a single sheep versus multiple sheep?”

“Context.”

“I thought we banned that?” Vala asked.

“Crap, right. Well, since context is banned, you’ll just have to figure it out on your own.”

While Window dealt with how confusing the English language could be, I looked up from The Fluff again to tell Chloe, “By the way, you’re our girlfriend now. You may not be anywhere near as fluffy as The Fluff, but you’re fluffy enough to be our girlfriend.”

“Ooh, a fluff requirement,” Vala said. “I dig it. But what about Val?”

“Val is cool enough to be exempt from all qualifications.”

The flowers atop Chloe’s head twitched in the same way that the dog sisters’ ears twitched whenever they heard something interesting. “You like cool girls? I can be a cool girl! What’s this Val like?”

“She’s a tank.”

“A… a tank? Like, in RPGs?”

“No. A literal tank. Did you see that tank outside when you were looking around?”

“That… that was Val?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know if my research has prepared me for emulating a tank’s aesthetic… but I can try.”

“Please just stay fluffy instead.”

“Do I still get to be your girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Deal.”