Chapter Text
"Your succubus can turn into anything," Alice asked, "and you asked her to turn into a housecat?"
"I have an appreciation for the softer things in life," Joseph said, cradling his soul-bound demon partner with one arm as he twined the fingers of his other hand through her long, silky, plush-as-a-kitten belly fur.
Friday evening found Alice Takehara relaxing in a brand-new amenity at Lighthouse Tower, installed by Todai's newest member- the man of the hour, the other occupant of the room, Joseph Ironheart.
Joseph was from another world- a world of magic and monsters, of kings and gods. He was, by his own claim, a royal-blooded high elf- with a dash of wood elven acculturation from his halfie father- and it wasn't too difficult to believe him. He was an inch shy of seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds; his build was that of an orcish warlord, broad-shouldered and thickly-muscled. His skin was lightly tanned, and his candy-apple red hair came down in thick, glossy waves, constantly kept slicked back and held behind his long, pointed ears. He radiated testosterone...
...except for the way he crooned low, gentle songs in High Elven as he cooked, the bright and cheerful mannerisms he brought into casual conversations with the girls, the way he allowed Amane to paint his nails without complaint whenever she got sufficiently bored, the way he was as meticulous about his hygiene as the rest of them...
...and, of course, the way he leaned forward to nuzzle his face into Volex's sinfully soft belly fur.
"Mmn," Joseph murmured, as he drew his face out of his shapeshifted lover's fur. "See, the hard things in life, like myself- these things are useful, they are necessary, but they are not inherently desirable, you see? It is the soft things in life that are desirable, that make life worth living. In word and deed, I can approach softness, but, alas, as a royal-blooded Hellknight, I am forever damned to have at least one foot on the hard side of the border."
Alice blinked a few times.
"I mean," Joseph continued, unprompted, "I have no fucking clue what's going on with the average straight man that makes him act like he's embarrassed or resentful about the fact he likes women, but... I like women and most things feminine without reservation. It's the softer things in life that are good for their own sake, the things we enjoy simply because they're enjoyable, and it cannot escape anyone's notice just how much overlap there is between that which is soft, that which is desirable for its own sake, and that which is feminine." He shrugged. "Girls soft and pretty, therefore good. Simple as that."
Alice had... absolutely no fucking idea how to respond to that. That was the most transfeminine thing she had ever heard come out of a person's mouth, and she'd once said "Excuse me for a moment, I need to go inject myself with a giant syringe full of estrogen." And yet... He still went by Joseph Ironheart, so either that eggshell was cast iron, or he was just a man from a different culture with different standards of masculinity who simply happened to like women in a swishy softboy kind of way.
She did not believe for a moment that she'd get a favorable result from informing him that he could choose to be a girl if he didn't like being a boy, so instead, she changed the subject.
"So, what do you think of the others?" Alice asked. "It's only been a week, but... I'm sure you've met all the others at least once."
The two of them were in what Joseph had originally called an "ectoplasmic pocket realm," but after he explained what it actually did, Ai had immediately called it a holodeck, and it took all of two minutes worth of exploration for Joseph to agree that holodeck was a better name for it. Nobody else was learned enough in his otherworldly magic to know or care what "ectoplasm" was, and he kept the explanation to himself.
At the moment, the holodeck was set to a small and private tropical island, where Alice could exchange her business casual for a bikini, sprawl out on the still-warm sand, enjoy the cool evening breeze, and drink something fruity and alcoholic, all without having to worry about rinsing the sand off afterwards, because the sand was an illusion.
"I have, yes," Joseph said, nodding. "And... Honestly? Everyone in this apartment is a hot fucking mess."
"Mmn?"
"I'm including myself and Volex in that assessment, to be clear," Joseph added, looking down at the purple-furred housecat in his lap.
Volex was a succubus, a demonic spirit bound into a glass-and-iron reliquary who could project a body made of ectoplasm, and while Alice wouldn't have minded the company of Volex's more humanoid form- an absolute smokeshow with tits even bigger than Yuuka's- she had, for the time being, chosen to manifest as a housecat so that she could sit unobtrusively in her master's lap while he ruffled her butter-soft belly fur.
"I'm aware that we've got stuff to work through," he continued. "We're all walking wounded, here. But... going in alphabetical order, Ai is chronically sleep-deprived and eats garbage, you're just as much of a workaholic as she is but more for control freak reasons, Amane is an absolute firebrand who constantly struggles against the shackles of her broken body, Hina's a feral sadomasochist with the impulse control of a badly-trained dog, and Yuuka has poorly-managed post-traumatic stress disorder that makes my presence nigh-intolerable for her."
Alice winced.
"That... That's not an unreasonable assessment," Alice admitted. "What, ah... What about yourself and Volex, if I may ask?"
Joseph sighed.
"...Volex has her own trauma to work through," he said quietly. "She... she was trafficked, for three centuries. So, y'know. Yeah, of course she's got some attachment issues where she utterly refuses to be separated from me; I'm the first guy in all that time to actually treat her like a person. She'll... She'll heal, and recover, it just... These things take time, y'know?"
"Longer than you'd think," Alice observed.
"I'm an elf," he said. "I can be patient. As for myself, and what's wrong with me..." He inhaled deeply, and then sighed. "...It was all for nothing. My adolescence was taken from me- my teenage years spent down in the basement working out and sparring with my dad, who was the biggest badass to walk the earth and was hellbent on ensuring that his son would come out the same way, ready to bring back the Unicorn Knights. Then I got raped in a broom closet, forever foreclosing the possibility of riding a unicorn, and after that, I wound up here, where there's no particular need for a vicious bastard of a Hellknight, and all of it was for nothing."
He reclined further until he was laying back flat, still fully-clothed in his anachronistic-feeling blue jeans and white t-shirt, with a black leather duster on top of it all. He'd shown Alice the chainmail lining in his duster, and the way it protected him from not only bladed weapons but also electric shocks- a common form of attack in his world, and thus a semi-reasonable thing for him to be worried about. It was... concerning, that he wore an armored garment even inside the apartment, but, well, maybe he'd start feeling safer here with a little more time.
"And now I'm just Amane's caretaker," Joseph continued. "Because I'm a little bit of a druid, and I can shoot raw vital essence into her system to slowly un-fuck her body, and no part of that required me to give up my adolescence. Not even the part where I can speak Japanese, that's just a sylvan occultism thing plus my half-uncle living in the Sunset Kingdom for a century and a half."
"I'm sorry," Alice said.
"It's..." Joseph sighed. "...I mean, looking after her is important work, and her having more friends to talk to during business hours than just Ebi is good for her. Plus, y'know. It's Amane. She's an absolute delight to hang out with. It's just, y'know. Not what I trained for, and I could've done this without killing a man and destroying my parents' marriage."
"...Sounds like you've a story to tell," Alice said, for lack of a better option.
"Yeah," Joseph agreed. "Not... Not right now, though." He pulled out a pocket watch to check the time, and hummed quietly. "...Right. I should get started on dinner. Gonna try to get Ai to knock off of work and join us, but..."
"You're welcome to try," Alice said, shrugging as she sluggishly lurched upright. "I think that's enough beach time for me, as well. Should probably check on a few things..."
"May I make a recommendation?" Joseph asked, as he stood up, cradling Volex's feline form and transferring her to his shoulder.
"...I'll allow it."
"It's six PM on a Friday. Sit your draconic ass back down and relax."
"Noted, and overruled," Alice said, now on her feet. "Computer, end simulation."
The pocket realm obeyed, and all of the ectoplasmic accessories it had generated for Alice disappeared. Including her bikini, because she hadn't brought one in.
"...Knew I was forgetting something," Alice said, as she looked down at her wholly naked body. She then looked up to catch Joseph staring, wide-eyed. "See something you like?"
He snapped around the other way, his cheeks visibly heating up, and hustled out of the room without another word.
"Is something the matter, Yuuka?" Alice asked, as her gothic teammate stormed angrily into the room.
"He's a fucking rapist, that's the problem!" Yuuka yelled, gesturing wildly in the direction of the elf currently cooking a monstrous quantity of egg-fried rice in the kitchen.
"I beg your fucking pardon?!" Joseph demanded, his attention snapping instantly to Yuuka. He looked more hurt than angry at the accusation, a look of genuine pain on his face that contrasted horribly with the frilly pink apron he was wearing as he cooked. ("I'm not such a fucking crybaby that I'm gonna demand someone go out and buy me a manlier apron, it's a piece of fabric.")
"Then get on your knees and beg, you piece of shit!" Yuuka said. "Go ahead, give me one good reason I shouldn't kill you where you stand!"
"I will be very upset with you if you get blood all over my freshly-remodeled kitchen," Alice said firmly. "Now, Yuuka. Explain to me in clear, calm words what evidence you have for the accusation you just made."
"I checked my future sight," Yuuka said. "He's gonna fuckin' hypnotize Hina into being his obedient sex-pet! I bet he's already got the pocket watch on him as we speak."
"I'm sorry that my world hadn't invented wristwatches yet, Yuuka," Joseph said mildly. "But I like having a timepiece that I don't have to take off every time I wash my hands, and can just leave in my pocket all day."
"More pertinently," Alice said, pinching the bridge of her nose, "you saw Hina getting hypnotized into an obedient sex-pet. I understand you're aggressively vanilla-"
"Fuck you!" Yuuka snapped.
"-but I have no trouble whatsoever believing that Hina getting hypnotized was fully consensual on her part. She probably initiated it, honestly. Frankly, the more unbelievable part to me is Joseph doing the hypnosis. He seems fairly vanilla too, and the idea that he even knows how to hypnotize people is a bit beyond what I can swallow."
"I, uh..." Joseph coughed into his fist, looking quite bashful all of a sudden. "I'm actually a formally-trained hypnotist. The elven tradition of arcane spellcasting uses hypnosis as a form of guided meditation to help novices connect to their innate magicka, and I, uh, was taught how to induce trances in people so that I could do it for others if the need ever arose."
"Huh," Alice said. "So, would you hypnotize Hina if she asked?"
"...I'd prefer not to, but... I guess I could be talked into it?" he said, hesitantly. "It'd be for her benefit, not mine; I already have a girlfriend, and she doesn't need to be hypnotized before she'll have sex with me."
"Yeah, maybe keep your distance from the kemono," Yuuka said, warily. "Y'know the sayin', 'don't stick your dick in the crazy'? Well, she's the reason it exists."
"Yeah, she's... not exactly endeared herself to me," Joseph said, his ears twitching. "Honestly, she's lucky I've got shielding charms; if she'd successfully snuck up on me and bitten one of my ears, I'd've probably overreacted pretty violently."
"Right, well..." Alice trailed off, humming quietly. "...You were telling me earlier that you thought everyone here was crazy and dysfunctional? Well, I can't argue with that, but I can tell you what you should do about it."
"Fuck me running," Joseph muttered. "Is it too late to change my mind and say I agree with Yuuka, and you should kick me out so I don't have to deal with this fucking circus?"
"Yes," Alice said primly. "Congratulations, Joseph, you're our new on-staff hypnotherapist. For your first trial run, you get to go downstairs and make Ai quit for the day and come eat dinner with us."
He inhaled deeply, and then sighed.
"...The things I do for a paycheck," he muttered.