An Original Sin, continues, part three...

The cat was seated right beneath one of Jupiter's moons. "Ganymede. That cat is—"
The Chronicler: "Like that Really Hot Boy ?
The Anthropologist: "The 'Cup bearer' of Zeus."
The Chronicler: "Also the very symbol of homosexual love for almost a bloody millenium."
(c.f. Shakespeare's As You Like It.)
Pillywiggin: "Would explain why he's so ghey."

" 'Tis a strange name for a cat." The man's brows drew together in a puzzled frown. "And what be yer name, witch?"
The Anthropologist: "Surely he should be chanting the lord's prayer now."

A fake would never be puzzled. The men she created existed for only one purpose: sexual release.
Pillywiggin: "They don't have a jar opening function? Rubbish!"
The Anthropologist: "Or a bulb changing function."
Big L: "It's because real men can't change light bulbs."

"Four-Two-N." His brows almost met. "Fortune?"
She sighed. "No, Four-Two-N."
" 'Tis settled. I'll call ye Fortune."
Why would anyone want a stubborn fake?
Big L: "Why would anyone want a retarded heroine?"

A jagged scar ran from the top of his thigh to within several inches of humanity's salvation.
The Loinfire Club bursts into giggles.
The Balance: "Retarded metaphor..."
The Anthropologist: "The Messiah Cock. That so deserves a new category."
Pillywiggin: "The Jesus Penis!"

For the moment, it didn't matter who he was or where he'd come from. His untainted sperm could bring males back to a dying human race. She blinked away sudden tears.
Me first. Me first. She shoved aside the selfish thought.
The Chronicler feels that this snarks itself.

Where did he think he was going? He couldn't just..."Come back! Millions of women need—"
The Anthropologist: "Damned ellipsis."
Big L: "Still a hyphen."

"Shush, witch." He appeared in the doorway again. "Yer blather will lead our enemies to us."
Pillywiggin: "Since when they have collective enemies?"
Big L: "It's because he's read the blurb and she hasn't."

Frantic, she leaped from the sleeping pad, then rushed to the bureau. She couldn't let him get away. The future of the human race depended on her.
Big L: "There is not enough lesbianism or implied lesbianism in this book."

She didn't need to turn to verify his identity because she could feel him; his gaze was as potent as a trail of fingertips down her spine.
Pillywiggin: "Now she's covered with his gays, pink shirt and..."

How could his mere entrance into the room do this to her, make her feel as though her body belonged to someone else, someone filled with fierce, primitive hunger?
The Chronicler: "Because it makes her think of his entrance into her..."
The Anthropologist: "Or maybe it's because of Satan."

His voice was sandpaper rough...
Pillywiggin: "Medical complication."
Pillywiggin: "Why is she looking for something to wear when she already has a blanket?"Big L: "Spacktard."
The new term is explained.

There is much discussion about people we dislike virulently. The room descends into bitching.
Sordan: "Again our conversation proves worse than the romance novel."
The Anthropologist: "Is this worthy of a new category?"
Lady Miriam: "It all comes under dulling the pain."

For a moment, his stare burned with the green flame of a Norian cantu pit...
The Chronicler: "Does she think this random name-dropping is world building in some way?"

" 'Twas all I could find. The woman cleaning the room across the hall foolishly left the door open while she went elsewhere."
Pillywiggin: "Why is he used to the concept of cleaners?"
Sordan: "I suppose he has servants."
The Balance: "He's bound to be a highland prince."
The Anthropologist: "I've yet to read a romance novel about a lowlander."

Complicated actions and manoeuvering happen. Leith (said real man) and 42N fumble about.
The Balance: "Have they gone to the 20th Century?"
The Anthropologist: "I think they have."

But the part of her that pulsed with need, that cried tears of deprivation, wouldn't let her concentrate...
Pillywiggin: "Tears of deprivation...That's a new way of putting it."
The Anthropologist: "It might not be that literal... We can hope."

Not with an unobstructed view of Leith Campbell's strong buttocks— smooth, hard, silently begging for her to run her hands over them.
The Balance: "He has a silently begging ass. That is so a medical complication."
Sordan: "How long is it taking for him to do this?"
Lady Miriam: "Two paragraphs."

"Yer gaze could draw blood, witch." He straightened and turned to face her.
Pillywiggin: "It's made of knives"
The Balance: "Eveyrthing is made of knives! Cheeks! Looking at people!"
Pillywiggin: "Your looking at people is made of knives."
The Balance: "His gaze is sharp as well."
Pillywiggin: "He has a gaze attack."

"Ye could drain aman dry wi' only yer stare. Verra strong, verra tempting." He scowled. "But 'tis dangerous to lie wi' a witch...
The Anthropologist: "This man has a mental age of nine!"
Sordan: "Yes."

"If I dinna please ye, I might leave yer bed wi'mymanhood a wee shriveled berry. Release me from this enchantment so I may go."
...Wherever he'd been, she'd bet he hadn't been without sex for twenty-eight years...
The Chronicler: "She could always masturbate. Or lesbian sex. I was in a girls school. I know."

"A wee shriveled berry's too good for you. How about an organ transplant? We could take your berry and put it... Oh, never mind."
The Balance explains to the Anthropologist, who is trying to figure out if the heroine has had female genital mutilation performed on her: "He's going to get castrated. She'll be moving the shrivelled berries somewhere else."
The Anthropologist: "If this ends with her castrating him and selling his testicles, is this book a win?"
Sordan: "It's a win for the readers."
The Balance: "But Satan is too ghey to win."

With a horrified squeak, she yanked the cover up to expose the black cat. He peered at her, then yawned. Pulling the cover more tightly around her, she stepped away from the animal.
Pillywiggin: "Why hasn't the world become one giant changing room at this point?"

Leith marvels at what men wear. Because all Highlanders wear kilts and nothing else. All the time. Constantly. And know of nothing else.

Wow! Talk about a meteor-shower smile.
There is pain. And drinking. And cringing.

"Extinct. Men no longer exist. They haven't existed for more than fifty years. Scientists thought they were so successful with their cloning until..."
There is some general pain in the direction of the scientists. It appears that they are suffering from some kind of seizure induced by the scientific ignorance in the book.

"Ohmigod! Get back. You're naked. Everyone will see you." She prayed the window was high enough to cover the obvious.
The Chronicler wonders why her world contains nothing that can be mistaken for men, say butch women with strap-ons and man-bots from a distance.
The Anthropologist: "Clearly the wipe-out disease doesn't work based on genes, well, the book says it does, but never mind that, it actually works like this... It infects you based on your gender identity as opposed to your real physical gender. See, there's a transvestite gene..."

Dozens of emotions whirled in her head as she watched his sun-bathed silhouette. He reminded her of a warrior from some distant past. Some distant past...
Luca: "Funny that..."

This felt like her first visit to Hanus when she was seven years old. She'd hidden her face the entire trip, then screamed like a warren cat when she'd seen the planet's natives.
Pillywiggin: "Why does the future still have cats?"
The Anthropologist: "When you're in a future with only women, you sit around making sex toys and cloning cats."
Sordan: "How many crazy cat ladys do you think there are?"
Big L: "Maybe the sanity gene was wiped out as well. That would explain everything."

"Fear is a shadow lie. Drag it into the light, and it isna so fearsome," he murmured, then turned to face her.
Sordan: "It's phearsome..."
Giggles ensue.

His expression didn't encourage her. In the dim light of the room, his face appeared harsh, dangerous. She could imagine him a warrior, viewing the carnage of battle, with the same expression— amixture of horror, fear, and fierce determination
The Anthropologist: "I've heard quite a few bad compliments... but this is really quite bad. You remind me of a battlefield, I think of the bit where his liver flew out of his torso, which had maggots nibbling in it and there was this other guy who was having his eye pecked out by a raven..."
Lady Miriam: "You look like you're looking at men who've had their stomach slit open and its contents spill all over their armour..."

She sensed, in the dark, hidden places of her mind where frightening truths huddled, that each step took her toward... What? The unknown. Please, please let me look out the window and see something familiar!

She reached the window and stared at the view below. She spoke no words; none were needed. The street was alien, a scene from centuries ago, one she'd seen only on history disks. But one detail riveted her attention. Men. Dozens of men walking on both sides of the street. Men driving four-wheeled vehicles that had disappeared from earth hundreds of years before.

Pillywiggin: "And yet the English language has stopped evolving. They're some six hundred years apart and..."
The Chronicler: "Blame Satan."
The Balance: "He gave them communicators."
The Anthropologist: "She should find someone less maladjusted in the millions of men."

The heart of fear was a cold place...
WHAT?!

no one around to soothe her with promises that this was all a misunderstanding, that everything would be fine in a little while. She grasped the windowsill in an attempt to still her shaking hands.
The sudden warmth of Leith Campbell's body against her back was such a relief she wanted to cry. Not alone.
Pillywiggin: "Now I can more easily break the witches' neck!"
The Balance: "And burn her body."

"Release me, witch," he murmured, then gently raised her head to meet his kiss. She never considered rejecting him...
...Amazing how weird thoughts hit you at the strangest times. She was the first woman in fifty years to kiss a real man.
The Chronicler: "Surely she's kissed girls before."
Big L: "Maybe she repressed them all the memories."
Pillywiggin: "Maybe she's really straight."
Sordan: "Maybe she's really ugly."
Big L: "But Satan says she's hot."
The Balance: "You trust Satan's standards?"
Big L: "We still haven't a description of her."
The Balance: "Not even a hair comment."
Big L: "She could have five arms and a penis for all we know."

A world of sensation blossomed, the rhythmic caress of his hand on her back, the male scent she'd never known— had always known— and the exciting hardness pressed against her thigh.
The Chronicler wonders if the knowledge of male scent is genetic.
Big L: "She has always known... which means she is in fact, a man."
The Anthropologist: "What he should do is write on back of his hand, "She=Witch=Evil" to remind himself so he doesn't randomly snog her constantly.
Sordan: "He could write it on her forehead, then he'll be able to read it."
Pillywiggin: "or breasts."
Big L: "But once you're see the breasts, you won't be able to see anything else."

"I dinna need to do this." He stared at the ceiling and raked his fingers through his hair. "Ye are no witch, so I dinna need to pleasure ye to gain my freedom."
Pillywiggin: "How does he know?
The Balance: "Biological imperative."
The Chronicler is intrigued by this concept of witches as sluts summoning man-whores.

"Just to satisfy my curiosity about how the savage mind works, would you tell me why you decided I wasn't a witch?"
The Anthropologist: "When I realised you were way too sucky to be a witch?"

She'd better watch her insults. A true savage could crack her head like a Coro egg.
The Chronicler: "Do they not have chickens in the future? We've called them chickens for so many bloody years..."
The Anthropologist: "They died out too. Along with the men and the sex doll makers and..."
Lady Miriam: "Why are you making notes for this blasphemy?"
The Anthropologist: "No, I'm making notes for a completely different blasphemy. I'm might be running a Valentine's Cthulhu Game."

This leads into talk of the Irish mafia. From a previous game run by Big L under another assumed name. It's all really quite offensive, so the Chronicler will refrain from quoting.

The Anthropologist: "He's really tall for a highlander, which should make him about four feet. And she should be about seven from all the vitamin supplements they take in the future..."
Luca: "And living in a low gravity environment."
Big L: "We're only on page 27. Onwards!"
The Anthropologist: "It feels so much more!"
Big L: "Well, nothing's really happened. All they've done is stand in a room."
Pillywiggin: "This makes me feel good about how long I drag out scenes for."

Even furious with him, she couldn't control the hopeful pebbling of her nipples.
The Anthropologist: "That's a sentence that requires a sound effect."
Big L: "And that sound effect is..."
Lady Miriam: "Just like levelling up!"

"Wicked Witch of the West?"
Pillywiggin: "I don't look forward to a future that knows nothing of early medieval Scotland and yet mysteriously retains knowledge of the Wizard of Oz."
The Balance: "It's interesting to see what sorts of cultural artefacts remain by 2300 according to this author."
Pillywiggin: "Maybe they remember the Wizard of Oz because of the friends of Dorothy..."
The Anthropologist: "Do you mean the gays?

"Forget it." He'd treated her like a booster rocket— use it; then lose it.
The Anthropologist: "That's a horrible mental image. It's one way of enforcing monogamy, I suppose, but it's a bit drastic solution, really."

"A wee kiss? It felt like all systems were go to me."
Big L: "Keep your man clean or you could contract... imagine all those public health campaigns."

He studied her with narrow-eyed intensity. "Is it that I kissed ye or stopped kissing ye that has ye bleating like a sheep?"
The Anthropologist: "Stupid animal metaphors!"
Sordan: "So far we have him comparing her to pigs and sheep and cooing dove..."
The Chronicler: "So he's into zoophilism!"
Lady Miriam: "Oh God, It's Animal Farm all over again."

Four-Two-N cleared her throat of the rock that seemed lodged there ...
Luca: "It's all that pebbling from earlier."

Fortune (42N) asks "A woman pushing some strange machine hurried past in the hall" the date.

"The date?" Fortune reminded her weakly. The woman laughed.
"He must be damn good if he made you forget the date."
The Anthropologist: "Not really, it's remarkably easy to forget the date."

She glanced back at Fortune. "Today's October tenth, and I've got this whole floor to do, so I better get movin'. Remember, out in fifteen minutes."
Sordan (in pain): "That's my sister's birthday!"
The Chronicler finds that the indominable Mrsgiggles rated a book 3%.
Pillywiggin: "Does that mean monkeys could write a better book?"
The Anthropologist: "It's surprisingly hard to get a monkey to press random keys, you know. They've tried doing that experiment at the London Zoo. They just end up press the key E repeatedly, clog the keys up with their shit and then when they try to press E again it doesn't work..."

"It can't be 2000! When I went to sleep last night it was 2300. There's no such thing as time travel..."
Big L: "It's nice to be reminded."

"...Oh, scientists have played with the idea, but..."
Pillywiggin: "This book really don't like scientists very much, does it?"
The Balance: "This comes from the swathes of America that's suspicious of intellectual learning and Science, no doubt."

His curse was low, graphic, and— she suspected— physically impossible.
The Anthropologist: "How would she know? She knows fuck all about men and fuck all about fucking..."

When he finally opened his eyes and stared at her, she wanted to turn and run from him, from his battle face. She had no doubt this was his battle face— all shadowed planes and hard, gleaming eyes.
The Anthropologist: "He's a mighty morphing robot! Or maybe it's like the vampires in Buffy, where their foreheads grow bumpy, their eyes start glowing and sharp teeth shoot out."

"I saw Clear Lake in the distance. So if this were really the year 2000, which it isn't, then we'd be near the city of Houston in the state of Texas."

There is some talk of Indian princess grandmothers that scatter America, which the heroine is no doubt descended from.
The Anthropologist: "You can't get much more special than being a princess from a tribe which has no royal family."
Big L: "But Sordan is a Micmac princess..."
Big L is given ice cream. And book is passed to Sordan, who reads...

"Texas was part of the United States of America," she clarified in an uncertain whisper. Please let him recognize the name. She didn't want to be trapped in this room with a madman, and she'd have to believe him a madman or else accept a truth that logically could be no truth at all...
Sordan (an American herself): "Only madmen don't know the US?"
The Anthropologist: "They do a lot of geography, but not much history in futureland."

"Jeans. I remember now. One of my history disks. They were called jeans. Men and women wore them in..."
The Anthropologist: "And they're historically associated with gangrape..." (c.f. Lover Eternal, J. R. Ward)

Feeling as though her throat had permanently closed, she could only nod.
The Anthropologist & the Balance: "Medical complications!"

Leith continued to struggle with the jeans. Aside from the fact that they were too tight, he didn't seem to understand how to fasten them.
The Anthropologist: "The highlands had buttons, surely."
The Balance: "He might be from a pre-button era."
Pillywiggin (as a student of Archeology): "No, the middle ages had buttons. It's what they use bone for."

"I need no woman's help." He continued to fumble.
Pillywiggin: "You know, it's quite a delicate operation without underwear on."

Each time her knuckles grazed his stomach, her lower regions clenched in gleeful anticipation.
The Balance: "Medical complications! She's clenching."

"Enough, lass. Between yer shaking hands and these cursed metal teeth, I'm in danger of losing my future bairns."
Big L: "It'd be a great tragedy, castrated by a zip."

She could almost see bits and pieces of his patience breaking away from him like the heat plates during a primitive rocket's reentry into earth's atmosphere.
The Anthropologist: "Eeew!"

"Fine. Leave. I'll stay here." What was she saying? She couldn't let him walk away. He was womankind's salvation, a living sperm bank. She wouldn't lose him.
The Chronicler: "But all the millions out there?!"
Big L: "They're Americans. You can't breed an entire new species out of Americans."

His last bit of patience shot into hyperspace.
The Balance: "Aaaah! Physics, poor, poor Physics!"
The Balance: "Why is he oddly psycic?"
The Anthropologist: "Because he's read the blurb"

Roiling emotion darkened his gaze, pushed her backward with its power. "Ye dinna need to know why. Ye need only know that I willna abandon a helpless woman. I willna leave ye."
She opened her mouth to tell him what he could do with his "helpless woman" label, then closed it.
The Chronicler: "Is there an I am so a feminist category?"
The Anthropologist: "Well, it's very hard to phrase. I am born to be subject by your Patriarchy?"

She blinked at his unexpected question. "I... I was discussing marketing trends with Three-Six-H. Muscular men are out. Potbellies are in. The comfort factor," she explained in response to his blank expression.
What?! exclaims all the females in the room.

Lady Miriam: "Maybe it's so you can fall asleep on them afterwards?"
Big L: "That's what Moobs are for, surely?"

Look at the ostrich, she thought. It stuck its head in the sand to avoid unpleasantness, and it had survived just fine when all those perky birds who poked their inquisitive beaks into everyone's business were extinct...
The Balance: "That's the first non-wacky-space-adjective animal."

The black cat watched with slit-eyed interest, then began to purr...

And so the chapter ends...

Sordan: "I can't read another chapter!"