The Wrong Side of Town

by Alden Odessa

  With that knowledge at my disposal, I learned that the Southeast corner was literally called The Corner. I’m so sick of saying literally that I literally never want to say it again to myself.

  Each section of this ghetto had distinctive characteristics as to what was found there. Any real business could be found in South Light. That’s where most of the casinos were, and it also had a slightly higher class of a prostitute, if such a thing existed down here. It was also the most well lit. Hence the name.

  The North Night was pretty much empty. A few motels that had closed down, and a scattering of hookers, but mostly it was residential. People lived there, or rather squatted. It was run down and not a lot of transactions happened there. Most of the people who lived there were poor, extremely poor, and it was where most of the independent hookers down here lived. They didn’t shit where they ate, so to speak, so they lived there and went to work in South Light.

  The Corner was similar to The North Night in that it was very, very dark and it was the least populated of the four corners. It was a hangout for junkies and dead bodies. That was pretty much all that was there. There were no businesses and rarely was there ever even a hooker that wandered over there. Unless it was to buy drugs, but hookers down here tried to stay away from drugs as it led to even more bad situations than they had already subjected themselves to.

  The Landing, besides being a popular suicide location, had the most non-casino business. This was a sort of shopping center for the people that lived in The North Night if you could call it that. It had a few motels and a grocery store, and not even a large one. It was actually the first, non-open air market that I had seen. It was the size of a small convenience store and half of it was dedicated to food with the other half dedicated to small household items. It also had a gun counter, ‘cause why not?

  There was very little else of consequence in The Landing, a couple of thrift stores, that were also small, a few tiny casinos which didn’t seem to hold much else than card games and could pretty much be called shacks.

  It appeared to me that The Lower Bottoms was not so much the “bad part of town” so much as it was just the poorest and least populated. I still didn’t know what most of the people in Canny Valley did, but there had to be other industry than just gambling, prostitution and drugs. But then, most of the money would appear to be coming from “tourism” would lead me to believe there really didn’t need to be much else.

  The NPC’s I have interacted with so far have all seemed to have a sense of purpose, they had jobs. They went to work. Some of them even went to jobs that they hated, like the hot blond that worked the counter at Checkpoint. She visibly and audibly hated her job. This to me seems to demonstrate some sort of will, or soul, for lack of a better word. You can’t work a soul crushing job if you don’t have a soul to crush.

  Did they have families? I had seen no children here, which gave me a sense of relief, but that didn’t mean that they didn’t have them. Every woman I had been with so far begged me to ejaculate in them (to put it mildly), so pregnancy didn’t appear to be a thing.

  Every time I start to think I’m getting a grasp on what’s happening I just start asking more questions. My head was starting to hurt again from all the possibilities of this place. What it meant and what it was. So once again, I told myself to shut the fuck up and get back to the task at hand.

  There was a fifth section to The Lower Bottoms called The Gallows. Betty said it was very dangerous as it was almost total darkness and nothing good ever happened there. She said she had tripped over more than one dead body when going from The North Night to The Landing and South Light.

  South Light was the crown jewel in The Lower Bottoms crown, but then that’s not really saying much. It was pretty full with casinos and a few open-air markets. It was just like where I spawned by The Reference, except it was about one-twentieth of the quality and size. There was only one multi-story hotel here, and a few motels. The main hotel, and the central part of the town, was called The Top Light Hotel. It was three stories and had approximately fifty-five rooms.

  It didn’t appear that it was ever full.

  One of the motel’s was completely boarded up.

  If The Reference area of Canny Valley looked like a bigger version of the Las Vegas strip, then this part of town looked like an abandoned street in a ghost town in South Dakota. It was populated, but not a lot. While down there I saw maybe fifty different people, ten of them hookers. The casinos were a quarter of the way full and all of them were single story except for one. It was three stories tall and was the best lit one and the only one that looked like it had any upkeep done to it. It was called the Thrill Seeker Casino. An honest to goodness name for once. Still, it didn’t have many people in it.

  This was just a very quiet, and apparently dangerous part of town. Betty said there were no police down here and that the pimps and casino owners were the law.

  She said when she was down here, before Bruce got her out, there were only six pimps, and three dabbled in gambling and they all dabbled in drugs. In fact the girls were really only there to peddle drugs. You could get a blow job and three lines of cocaine for fifty dollars. The cocaine was significantly more expensive than the blow job.

  She didn’t know how many pimps there were down here now, but she suspected that most of the pimps had moved on, either North or South to greener pastures. There just wasn’t a lot of money to be made in The Lower Bottoms selling sex.

  “Betty, my dear, that’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “There’s money to be made, provided you have the right product.”

  14

  The Plan

  We got back to The Falls Motel, which compared to every other place I had seen in The Lower Bottoms, looked like a palace. Even their best motel down there couldn’t compare.

  I sat them both down and began to go over the plan I had been developing in my head the entire time we had been down there. I had the thought before, but after seeing what it was like, it became even clearer.

  So far as I could tell, the reason there was no money to be made off of women down there was because nobody was offering a good product. I saw the women who had been on the streets and the women who had been strolling through the casinos. They were unkept, dirty; I saw more than one come stain on a hooker’s top down there. Who wants to fuck somebody who’s got some other dudes jizz on them. Hell, one was even fresh jizz!

  They were disgusting. Some of them old, many of them fat. I saw one blowing a man while he was dealing and he was way more interested in dealing.

  Someone approached us more than once. One hooker, who I guessed was fifty-years-old and had more teeth in her pocket than she did in her head, said she’d let me fuck her for ten dollars, or, twenty-five and all three of us could fuck her.

  My prospects here were not looking good.

  Still, I held out hope. There may be some diamonds in the rough, I just had to dig for them. Or rather, Betty could dig for them. This was stage one of my plan. I needed a recruiter, and who better to do that than Betty. She was from here; she spoke the language. I was a fish out of water, but Betty could tell the girl's things they wanted to hear. Not to mention, Betty’s quality of life was significantly higher than it had been two days ago, and she could speak to that.

  She could let them know what a better life they could have as one of my women, versus life on their own.

  I would send Betty and Bogo down there, I didn’t want to send her on her own. I had taken one look at the place and realized it was no place for a woman down there on her own. In fact, it made me feel like I wanted to save all the women down there, but I really couldn’t see it being worth my time to save a woman who was willing to fuck me for ten dollars. My cut on that wouldn’t be shit.

  Speaking of which...

  I told Betty to make them this offer. I would let them get thirty percent of the cut. it wasn’t a great deal for them, seeings as how they were doing all the work, but I would offer both myself and Bogo
as protection and also a clean place to stay and food. I don’t know how I was going to do that yet, but I would.

  They would be safe and I wouldn’t let men get too rough with them. A bit of rough play was to be expected, but never more than they were comfortable with and provided that the customer pay extra for it. From what I had seen, this was a fair offer. I would treat them with decency and fairness. They could leave at any time if it wasn’t working out. They wouldn’t be loosing that much money because I would force them to charge more because they would be becoming a higher class of whore.

  I told her not to use the word whore.

  “We’ve been called much worse,” she said.

  I told her to be very upfront with them, let them know it would be rough starting off, supplies and accommodations would be light; they wouldn’t earn more right away but if they stuck with it, in a short time they would have a much better life. Most importantly, they would still have a life.

  “Tell them whatever it is that they want to hear, just don’t promise something I can’t provide,” I said.

  “Like what,” Betty replied.

  “Like a three-night stay at The Reference.”

  “Got it.”

  “Bogo, are you cool with this? I need you to watch Betty like a hawk, don’t let any one fuck with her.”

  “Bogo cool.”

  “Good.”

  “What are you going to do while we are down there?” Betty asked.

  I let her know I was going to go to the market in The Upper Bottoms. It had probably been a while since the girls down there had had food that wasn’t drawing flies. I would get them a few drinks and some grooming products so they can freshen up. I would need Betty’s help on this once they arrived, helping them get clean and fresh.

  And then I was going to have sex with them.

  I was a little worried about dropping this knowledge on Betty, it had only been a few days but she had really become attached. It could have been all in my head, me thinking she had feelings for me, but it concerned me she would become jealous. To my surprise, she didn’t even flinch at the idea. In fact, she got excited, as if she had just heard a great idea.

  I don’t know if it was a great idea or not, but it was the only way that I would be able to tell if the girls would be worth anything. I had to judge them, audition them so to speak. I had to know what they were good at and what they weren’t. Much like the statistics I saw on the girls when I first arrived. Maybe I could find out what it meant to have “anal” listed as a weakness.

  Part of me was excited, obviously, I would be having sex with a few women today. Isn’t that why I signed up for this game? Isn’t that why I’m here?

  This was a lot more fun when I wasn’t having sex for survival!

  Another part of me, the logical part, the part that had eyes in his head and didn’t think with his dick, saw the options down there. They weren’t fantastic. In fact, most of the ones I saw were disgusting. But I had to get that out of my head and hope that Betty could find the picks of the litter and take those and make something out of them.

  Look at Betty herself. When I first met her I thought: What the fuck am I going to do with her? I wasn’t even the least bit attracted to her and now she had turned into a pretty cute woman. That’s not really saying much and there may be a few things contributing to my thoughts here, but it’s how I felt. In our relationship life cycle, I had gone from: Who would fuck her? To: I could fuck her. To: I look forward to fucking her.

  This is how this happened:

  First, I am familiar with the concept of “work eyes.” It’s a phenomenon that happens when you work closely with someone of the opposite sex. When you first meet them, they aren’t much to look at, and you think you’d never be attracted to them. But low and behold, after working together, in close confines, and seeing each other day after day, you start to think: What would it be like to have sex with this woman? Pretty soon, those thoughts turn into fantasies, and before you know it, you’re doing everything you can to have sex with this person. Was she any cuter than the first time you saw her? No. But it happens to many people, and it’s the reason you see so many inter-office romances.

  This is also something that happens when people are in a perilous situation together. I would say the last few days with Betty qualified as a perilous situation. I certainly felt the peril involved.

  Next is that I could not discount the power Betty’s need had on me. The fact that she looked at me with a devotion that was uncommon. That night I picked her up she was scared, lost, damaged even. She had no place to go, and I had just bought her. I am sure that somewhere it is programmed into her, this loyalty to her owner, or the head of her harem; but I couldn’t get past the thought that it was something more.

  Did she have this kind of devotion to Bruce? Did she display this kind of need to him? I doubt it. Was it the fact I may be the first male that had ever been nice to her? She wasn’t used be being treated kindly, the only thing she had ever been good for was sex. That first night when I had relentlessly rejected her she had felt worthless. Everything she had ever known was now different, and she didn’t know what to do with herself.

  Then later that night after getting to a new hotel and getting cleaned up—how long had it been since she had even taken a bath?—when she woke me up and we had sex there was something in her eyes. She needed to do what we were doing; it was the only thing she knew how to do and without it she was empty inside.

  Were they all going to be this way? Is this how hookers here were programmed? Since I had a watch that showed me my stats, I still had to lean on the theory that this was, in fact, a video game. So Betty was a program, she had certain things, and emotions, that are programmed into her. Is this how all of them were programmed? Was I going to be followed around by a bunch of needy hookers.

  A man only has so much sperm!

  I guess in this game, however, I’m not a man. I’m an avatar of a man who isn’t half of the man this fake one is!

  The final thing about Betty was that, cleaned up, she was cute. What I once thought was a dirty, shit brown head of hair, was locks of long auburn curls. She had a glow about her, a smiley disposition and a good humor. She was a nice woman, and sweet. Kinda hard not to be attracted to that.

  All of this to say, I had grown fond of her, and saw no reason to hurt her feelings. So when I broached the subject of having sex with numerous other women and she was cool with it and showed no sign of jealousy it relieved me.

  This could also be part of her programming, however. Yesterday she was kind of eager to give Bogo a blow job, so maybe that’s just how things were in Canny Valley. Everybody was polyanomous, and everyone had multiple partners. Jealousy just wasn’t a thing.

  I could also just be over thinking this. I am running around a town filled with all sorts of illicit behavior with a mentally handicapped giant and a prostitute. It could just be a game that I am playing and the entire point of it is to build up a harem of women. Doesn’t sound like the type of place where I really have to worry about emotion.

  So I turned my thoughts back to that end goal.

  “Betty, I need you to make me a list. A list of products that the girls will need to make them... look better. Please keep budget in mind.”

  “Sure, I can do that.”

  “You know what the men down here want I’m sure, but I want you to think of things they may want that they are not getting.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But getting a blow job from a girl without some other dude’s sperm on her would be tops on my list.”

  “Noted,” she said and then got up to go to the nightstand and get a piece of paper and pen.

  My thoughts here were simple. Most of the prostitutes down here were independent and not taken care of. The only ones that I saw that were even passible where the ladies in The Thrill Seeker, and they couldn’t even compare to Betty.

  That was the other thing about my recent attraction to Be
tty. She was the best fish in a pond of bottom feeders. Whereas when I first met her, I had just had sex with a woman of fantasy. Not just sex, but mind blowing sex, twice. So Betty looked like table scraps compared to Ronette. But down here, she was top of the food chain.

  What if I could make a few more Betty’s? That was my plan. It wasn’t that the men didn’t want sex down here, they just wanted something that they wanted, and not something they had to settle for.

  I knew I would put a lot of girls, and maybe pimps, out of business, but that wasn’t my concern. My concern was winning. This was a game, and a game can be won.

  So I focused on this, my plan. To have the best of the worst, build my harem that way. I would treat them well and they would grow and become successful as would I. Eventually I could recruit higher priced women.

  Betty and Bogo would go into The Lower Bottoms and recruit, finding the best of the worst, bring them back here and clean them up. I would then take these girls back down into the streets and come up with some way to make them the best option. A customer doesn’t know what they want until they want it. The toothless women I had run into down there were nothing compared to what I would offer.

  I would have the best of The Lower Bottoms. Better to rule in Hell, right?

  15

  Auditions

  Betty and Bogo came back from The Lower Bottoms with three girls hopeful of joining our harem. This was what it was all about and it was step one of the plan I was going to put into effect that would hopefully get me out of this game.

  My trust in the plan went down significantly once I saw the girls. They looked hideous.

  There was Courtney, a brunette, a little on the heavy side. She was about five-foot-five and I estimated that she weighed about one-hundred-seventy pounds. She was young, probably around twenty-three, but the one-seventy would be a hard sell. Pasty white skin that was covered in dirt, cleaned up maybe I could turn her into a Snow White kind of thing.