Artabeles, on the other hand, is about to face the music. Especially when an investigative journalist comes undercover for two things in-game: accusations that he ran a VLS smuggling ring, and that ring provoked mass abandonment of children.

  “And now it seems like the in-game media wants to portray me as a villain! The real villains were the game world’s regulators!” Artabeles starts arguing. “They took a while to close administrative loopholes!”

  “Yeah, what made the whole VLS fiasco happen was a game bug! But by assigning in-game blame to regulatory incompetence, you start to sound like Adèle!” Sigrun comments on the origins of the VLS farm.

  “What do you mean, I start to sound like Adèle? I never abandoned children myself, only I adopted an infant after Tiffany grew too old for baby showers!”

  “Adèle always seemed to think about what bug fixes mean to the game’s world, from the perspective of the ghosts inhabiting the world! That’s precisely what Adèle mentioned! Also I lost all my attempts at the court hearing minigame to obtain more infants to adopt!”

  “What?” Marjo screams. “How could you lose the court hearing minigame? Other than against Artabeles of course...”

  Already that the in-game media seemed to portray me as being the one with the biggest share of the responsibility for the whole wave of mass child abandonment, Artabeles tries to think about who else has any share of the responsibility over what the debacle.

  “I think Marjo’s fame in RCG’s community made things worse, to the extent that she streamed speed runs of the baby shower. Neither Marjo nor I intended to provoke a wave of mass child abandonment, and several of the serial child abandoners were banned from adopting children for a time!”

  “Yeah, Artabeles is right. Never did I encourage child abandonment!” Marjo defends herself.

  But the heated discussion about their role in the whole child abandonment disaster brought in new followers. A lot of them ask for more context about why so many children were abandoned left and right in the game.

  “Several players took to chain adoption of children, then abandoned them because, for a time, infants were very valuable!” Sigrun explains herself in a Danish accent.

  New subscriber: What made infants so valuable that it was worth chain-adopting infants?

  “I myself ran baby showers over and over, and my past as a child abandoner did me in for chain-adopting infants!”

  A few of the new viewers didn’t understand what chain adoption entails, but some details emerge in the chat about who even engaged in both chain adoption and chain abandonment.

  One common thread emerges: players’ greed (or destitution) and min-maxing. Which gives Gordon a sense of déjà vu.

  I was but a child back then, but this is much like the fallout from the clothing rack exploit of the Sims Online, which was part of what killed that game. Only this exploit had more safeguards against it, namely that it was tied to a situation with a limited time window, there’s a finite yield, and that it had side effects. Diabetes, demand for liposuction skyrockets, Gordon reflects on his early experience of gaming.

  “But why assign blame for an exploit to the person who discovered it? Marjo discovered the trans sleep disorder bug, and wasn’t vilified as I am!” Artabeles asks the viewers.

  “It’s not my fault that people got better at speed running baby showers and spammed them! I only streamed a handful of these, I will raise Hormizd to adulthood to show that I’m not a child abandoner!” Marjo announces.

  “Me too! If Marjo is to raise Hormizd to adulthood, I’ll do the same with Tiffany and Cameron, my adoptees!” Artabeles announces in turn, while buying toddler training items that he then installs inside his mansion.

  Now that I’m stuck with Hormizd, I want to raise her to become what I myself couldn’t. So I need to buy the items used to train toddlers! And have my ghosts take turns caring for her! Marjo finds herself with a crying alien infant in her in-game hands. While her very own haunted mansion is still being built.

  As another room in the mansion is built, she realizes that, because her trans male is AFAB, she can have him breastfeed Hormizd. Which she does, and the baby is still crying.

  Is that it? Is that the only thing in this game GAB affects outside of fertility and sexual identity? Breastfeeding? I guess, I could live with that... Marjo muses while her precious little Hormizd is put on the changing table, in what is to become her bedroom. However, that room has no paint or wallpaper yet.

  And, of course, Marjo gets disturbed much more often by the metallic-sounding cries of her little Hormizd as she seemingly spends ungodly amounts of time juggling between the adults’ needs, Hormizd’s, and the construction of this new mansion from prefabs.

  But then, Artabeles tells her about what she needs to watch out for when raising children in this game, at least for the infant and toddler stages. Beyond the need for a changing table, and all that.

  “Did you babysit toddlers yourself? You make me feel like you did… Or is babysitting toddlers too different in this game vs doing it for real?” Marjo asks the Iranian expat.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Marjo, I feel like you never babysat children, nor had any of your own…”

  “I’m a little young for kids. But I feel like just raising Hormizd to adulthood won’t be enough to clear our names!”

  Sigrun gives me the creeps: even if she could somehow get children any other way, the way she approaches the game would be dangerous to her children in the long run, if the game handles parenting realistically, Gordon muses as he listens to Artabeles and Marjo bicker about parenting. That kind of players for whom characters’ skills must be optimized for some specific endgame purposes and the optimization process begins at birth…

  “As much as adoption means dealing with trauma, in the wake of the wave of mass abandonment, just raising Hormizd, Tiffany or Cameron to adulthood might not be enough to redeem yourselves to the eyes of the player base!” Gordon counters.

  “What else can we do, beyond raising our existing kids to adulthood?” Marjo asks, questioning her ability to manage more ghosts than she currently has on hand.

  “There, I’ll make the first step to the extent my in-game budget allows for it: adopting some of the abandoned infants, probably toddlers by now… I invite you two to adopt some of the babies left behind in this wave!”

  As Gordon goes through the game’s child adoption menu, Marjo does the same, and looks through the adoption menu, with CPS fees being deeply discounted compared to their pre-abandonment levels. Nearly 50% off.

  “Is it me or the devs implemented some dynamic pricing for stuff such as CPS adoption fees?” Marjo gasps when looking at the size of the possible catalog of abandoned children ready and waiting for adoption. “The CPS fees are cheaper for toddlers than they used to!”

  “And it seems like CPS is more… commercial in nature in this game if dynamic pricing is in place!” Gordon comments about this new development.

  Viewer 1: Probably their main source of revenue

  Viewer 2: Is CPS actually a child trafficking ring in this game?

  To her follower’s question about CPS’ involvement in child trafficking in this game, Marjo draws a blank, so she continues with the adoption process. Where each prospective adoptee contains a little bit of background info about the circumstances of their abandonment, and any other concerns for future parents.

  Because my alien baby is AFAB, I want my first adoptee to be AMAB. And there’s a lot of AMAB adoptees to choose from, Marjo muses upon looking in greater depth at the adoptees’ catalog. I guess I could always dye hair later in life, and use contact lenses for eye colors, so I need to worry about skin color. And, of course, predicting their looks later in life isn’t exact.

  “Even if we accepted that this game’s CPS actually dealt with the worst of child abuse or neglect, could you please check if prices for certain items bought outside of the Haunted Bazaar…” Marjo asks her viewers.

  New subscriber: Why only outside of the Haunted Bazaar?

  “The HB is kind of like the stock market. What I was getting at was that stuff bought from NPCs might not have the same prices as they had previously! It might be that the sudden drop in CPS fees, at least for toddlers, isn’t an isolated incident!”

  I don’t expect NPC pricing to be as responsive as the Haunted Bazaar, Sigrun muses, checking prices of items other than CPS fees, since her ban from adoption is still in effect. Then again, I was so busy chasing the higher-tier parties that I forgot about the ones requiring minors! I guess, I have no choice but to try for babies by some other means to access these parties! Then again, I’ll make my future characters cispan for a reason! I can then romance anyone I want, subject to the love interests’ boundaries, as well as retain their fertility! Or cisomni if the game makes the distinction between omni and pan, but I have the feeling the game doesn’t; omni might keep all relationship options open, but still express some sort of non-exclusive preference, whereas pan doesn’t have a preference.

  But, at the same time, it seems like the option to adopt infants is no longer available, so one can only adopt toddlers or older now. Yet, Marjo feels something is amiss before she starts the adoption process.

  “Damn it! I sold my cribs too quickly! I must buy more beds, more potties, more toys, more toddler tablets!” Marjo laments.

  “Me too! If I want to raise my adoptees as my own, to adulthood, I need to buy more of these things I sold off! And I might need to hire a nanny, like my gyan-avspar ancestors, or argbeds did!”

  “Argbed? Gyan-avspar?” Yortson gasps, having never heard about either position. “What exactly are they?”

  “Argbeds were Sassanid Persia’s garrison commanders, and typically lords!” Artabeles answers Yortson’s question, while most of Marjo’s viewers roll their eyes.

  And gyan-avspars could be given an argbed position as a reward for a lifetime of meritorious service to the Shahanshah if an argbed died intestate, or married into it, Artabeles muses as he feels forced to explain what gyan-avspars even are, albeit in a Twitch DM.

  “Keep in mind that you want to get gold on both the play date and the slumber party before your toddler ghosts age out of these parties!” Manolia adds to this cacophony.

  As Marjo orders the equipment she deems necessary to deal with the new adoptees, and even tries to reorganize her in-game mansion’s floor plan to fit in her future adoptees. Especially since she feels like adoption will never be this cheap again.

  Oh boy. The bills are adding up for these adoptees, and, as much as my in-game fame as a fashion designer might soften the blow in a few days’ time, fingers crossed that I don’t need to face the costs of the court hearing minigame, Marjo starts to feel cold sweats as she finally decides to have three adoptees, two AMABs and another AFAB, and pay for all three of them successively. Because the game’s adoption system allows only for one adoption at a time.

  So after that, Marjo keeps building her haunted mansion, when the CPS van arrives on site the following in-game day, with all three adoptees in tow. All pre-named because their last recorded parents were players who abandoned toddlers to farm VLS, and they even keep their last names.

  And same goes for the adoptees of Gordon and especially Artabeles: the former only adopts two, while the latter goes out to adopt four more children, which, like Marjo, brings his household to capacity.

  “Now, Artabeles and I both decided, to make amends for this wave of child abandonment, to fill our households to capacity with toddler adoptees! We’ll raise them all until they reach adulthood!” Marjo enthusiastically makes her statement to the broader RCG community, before listing her adoptees’ names. “Please welcome…”

  Marjo lists her three new adoptees, while Gordon names his before Artabeles could complete the adoption process for his four adoptees.

  Damn it, is this Artabeles the kind of player who gets too much into playing what he called a gyan-avspar? I get it, in Late Antiquity, even low-level nobles, or… argbeds, had families that large, Yortson muses as Artabeles lists the names of his four new adoptees, and install the fixtures for them. These two have a long road ahead to redeem themselves from this VLS farming fiasco.