Chapter 66: Cleveland Bob

I FELT PARTICULARLY DISGUSTED when I’d finished at the preacher creature’s house. When the flames died in his torture chamber, the ash dissolved into dust and evaporated into the primordial mass from which he had come. I collected Zhi, Artemisia, and the priestesses into Areola and left, getting back to the hotel before morning. Once there, I locked the doors and entered Areola where the priestesses met me and bathed me in the pool and in the glow of their light.

The victims we had rescued were in various conditions, some having not fully transformed into the automatons the traffickers were trying for and others having gone so far into a different head space that there was nothing we could do for them but purge them of the drugs and return them to the natural world, usually just inside or outside a hospital that could care for them.

Why? Why not care for them in Areola?

Those brought into Areola ceased aging, no longer subject to death. It would have been cruel to keep them trapped in their damaged minds forever. At least in the natural world, they would age and die and be released from their pain. It was the best I could do. I truly wished I could heal their minds, but they were beyond the reach of even The Bob.

On another occasion, Sally, Eun-ha, Julie, and Deedee joined me for dinner in my hotel room. The latter three were contestants in the first season. Sally was my mage. She was just beginning to try working spells, but complained that she was making no progress in Areola.

“You know, everything is just perfect in Areola,” Deedee said. “There are times when it is a relief just to come out into this flawed natural world and have a bite of a steak that was overcooked by an inattentive chef.”

We laughed and all had a taste of the too well-done meat. It was true that we seemed to never have a meal that was lower than our expectations in Areola. And that was true whether the person eating liked rare meat or well-done, spicy or mild. In a way, I was reminded of Aphrodite. I pulled Deedee to me and began to caress and kiss her.

‘Why the juxtaposition of Deedee and Aphrodite?’ you ask. Well, I’d had a dream of Aphrodite the week before our final elimination challenge of the first season. I’d been making love to Deedee and the visage of My Lady Goddess came over her. I knew there was something familiar about Deedee that attracted me to her. She’d been blessed by Aphrodite and shown how to find me. She was my special gift from the goddess.

But as for why I’d been reminded of My Lady, it was related to why she was the most beautiful image of a woman the world had ever seen. Now, if I lined up one hundred men and asked each to describe their vision of the perfect woman, I would get one hundred different descriptions. Oh, the same would happen if I asked a hundred women. Some would be redhead, some blonde, some brunette. Some would be black, white, Asian, Native American, Latina. There would be tall, medium, short, and ridiculous. They would have breast sizes from nearly flat to impossibly huge. The same would be true of their butts. I guarantee you that no two descriptions would be close to the same.

Still, every one of those men would look at Aphrodite and pronounce her perfect, the very image of the most beautiful woman in the world as they would imagine her. I think it had to do less with the goddess herself and more with the image each man would project upon her. She would always be perfect. Of course, Paris had to say Aphrodite was the most beautiful of the goddesses—even without the bribe. She was exactly what he imagined beauty to be.

I’d once asked Sally to look into that aspect of our world and she reported that, as far as she could tell, our world was shaped by the projections of its inhabitants. Essentially, Areola had no fixed shape at all. Each individual found exactly what they considered perfect. And that extended to the food, as well. I agreed with Deedee that there was something refreshing about sampling something that wasn’t perfect occasionally. It certainly heightened our appreciation of that which was.

And all that line of reasoning ended up with a very naked Deedee on her hands and knees on the sofa as I plowed into her hot wet pussy, which I found was just perfect.

“Cleveland,” I said. “This one looks intriguing.”

I looked at the crew and my family and they nodded. They’d presented me with a list in some semblance of order that would let me jet around the world again interviewing the candidates and recording the show.

May Abernathy was the candidate in Cleveland.

It took a couple of weeks to get everything set up, but Doug had a good cover for me. I was a new resident of an incubator office building. It was a concept in which new companies could rent discounted office space that included janitorial and support services. He confided that he’d found a person trying to organize a space and funded him, so I was essentially renting an office for my import/export business from myself.

Nonetheless, May had started a janitorial service and hired a small staff of maids who cleaned four office buildings in the office park and got free office space in our building in return for cleaning ours. I landed in Cleveland and became a desk jockey named ... I’ll just go by Bob for convenience’s sake. Just understand that I didn’t register the business under my name. I was not The Bob in Cleveland. I was just Cleveland Bob. You’ll get used to it.