Olivia’s first instinct on waking up, was to pick up her phone and try calling once again; but just like half the night before, all she got was Joshua’s voice mail. “Did I do something to upset him and make him hang up on me?” Fretful, she couldn’t remember anything that she might’ve done which would lead to her being ignored completely. After several deep minutes of thinking, eventually all she could do is just sigh heavily and try to reassure herself that whatever had happened to interrupt their call, it hadn’t been her fault.

Stretching, cat-like, Olivia slowly eased up and gracefully slid out of the bed. “It really is amazing, the difference a few points make,” she whistled admiringly to herself as she practiced several intense splits and stretches without the slightest need for warming up. Sure, she’d spent all her personal points in improving strength as much as she possibly could, but Joshua had purchased a single rank in Agility and Reflexes, and Olivia could tell the difference in her regular morning exercise routine.

“I might have to be his knight, and the first lady of his harem now, but it seems like it’s definitely worth it,” Olivia muttered softly to herself. “If the world’s going to suffer God’s wrath in about eleven months, I’m definitely glad to be able to have this time to prepare in advance,” she assured herself. “Besides, he really doesn’t seem like that bad of a fellow. There’s definitely a lot worse out there!”

Thanks to her mother’s insistence on vigorous exercise, proper food, and medicinal supplements, Olivia knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she’d grown into a young woman of exceptional beauty. She wasn’t an idiot – even if that’s what everyone always assumed about a cheerleader – and she had eyes in her head. She could see the way all the boys in the school stared and ogled at her every day.

“Realistically speaking,” Olivia sighed, “if Joshua hadn’t picked me up as his companion, someone else would have probably ended up choosing me, and who knows what type of depraved psycho they might be!” After all, luck had never been a strong suit for her, or her family. Olivia just couldn’t believe that she’d luck into finding one of the participant’s phones and get to become a member on her own. Sure, she believed that other people would probably be drawn into the beta testing as time went on and the World Renewal Project got closer to its release date – she just didn’t believe that she could’ve ever been lucky enough to get a phone of her own before some other unknown guy out there chose her for their own.

“WRP open,” she whispered softly, stretching one foot up straight above her head and resting it on the ceiling. Definitely, she wasn’t agile enough to move her body that far before the points in agility and reflexes were spent!

“Ting!” A slight ting sound whispered softly in her ear, as a small pop-up appeared in the center of her vision.

Welcome to the World Reclamation Project. User Companion System has been successfully migrated from Eternal Companion v1.0b to Eternal Harem version 1.3a.

“Close message,” Olivia whispered, changing positions. She was now stretching completely backwards, with both hands and feet touching the floor as she stood upright.

“Ting!” As soon as the message closed, another popped up to take its place.

Notification: User Olivia Davis has been migrated from User Joshua Campbell’s Eternal Companion to First Lady of User Joshua Campbell’s Harem.

As First Lady, User Joshua Campbell can not demote, sell, or discard User Olivia Davis, as long as she fulfills her duties faithfully. Such duties currently curtail:

Overseeing, guiding, and administrating general duties of all lower ranking harem members. (0 of 1) Recruitment and training of Concubines. (0 of 4) Overseeing and maintaining the Harem Lord’s physical well being, and sexual desires. {Health: 100 of 100 Sexual State: Calm (0% arousal)} Teaching, training, and proper education of the Harem Lord’s female children. Learning, possessing, and maintaining exemplary skills in the following: Dancing (Erotic and Ceremonial), Singing, Sexual Appeal and Performance, Etiquette, Seduction, Cooking, and Acrobatics. Warning: If User fails to maintain at least one skill from the above list, at levels higher than those of all other members of the harem, then the position of First Lady may be contested, or reassigned. Warning: If User allows six, or more, skills from the above list, to fall lower than those of other members of the harem, then the position of First Lady of the Harem will be permanently removed.

“Shoot.” Olivia’s heart sank the moment she read over the long notification. “I think I was better off under the Eternal Companion system,” she sighed deeply to herself. “I was just worried about what the future might bring, if he ended up choosing several guys to join us, and what my position might be in such a case. How was I supposed to know that he’d already thought about choosing his sister – err, his n’ister,” she corrected herself, “to take the other available spot?”

Some of the required skills might not be so bad, Olivia admitted to herself, after studying them for a few moments. Dancing – even if it was of the erotic variety – wasn’t something she really minded learning. Same with Acrobatics. In many ways, both of those were already closely related to cheerleading – move sexily and perform in front of an audience – so she thought she could adapt to those skill sets fairly quickly.

Seduction… Well, it wasn’t something she’d ever really tried too much of before, but it was fun teasing Joshua for a while last night. As long as the system only expected her to practice it on one guy, she thought she could adapt to it fairly easily. Probably even come to enjoy it, in the end, to be honest!

But singing? Sexual Appeal and Performance? Etiquette? Cooking? None of those was anything which she had the slightest bit of experience in. And she was expected to tend to a man’s health and sexual desires?!!

“Appeal I get,” she sighed. “But performance? How the heck am I supposed to learn that, if I’ve never even been with a man? If I can’t be with one until after prom? Can I spend points to improve it? Even if I can,” she groaned to herself, “it seems like such a waste to do so!”

“But I certainly don’t want to lose my position as First Lady!” Sighing deeply, Olivia read over the last line of the notification once again. “Position permanently removed… That doesn’t sound like it’d be good at all,” she muttered softly to herself. “Particularly if I’m responsible in recruiting and training the concubines. If they have some sort of ranking system, like it seems the harem itself does, then if I get demoted and end up at the bottom of their cast, life will probably end up being hell!”

“I need to choose concubines who aren’t hard to train, don’t have a lot of experience with me, and who won’t torment me to pieces if I do end up losing my position in the future.” Sighing deeply, Olivia sat down cross-legged on the floor and tried hard to concentrate on anybody at all whom she knew that might fall into that position.

“Add first concubine, Natasha Davis,” she finally decided, after a few moments, before quickly following up with, “Add second concubine, Maria Daniels.” No matter what happened, she didn’t think her mother, or Maria, would ever betray her and make her life bad. Besides, deep in her heart, Olivia had been longing for a chance to try and get her mother into the World Renewal Project – it was the only chance she had for a fresh start of a second life.

“Besides,” Olivia smiled brightly to herself, “at least now, I can tell both of you all about what’s actually going on in my life, and what’s going to happen to the world in general in just a few short months!”

Hopping up, like a Jack-in-a-box suddenly unwound, Olivia rushed off downstairs – completely unconcerned about her lack of clothing so early in the morning.

“Ping!”

“Ping!”

“Ping!”

“Yeah… Yeah… I got it.” Rolling over, Joshua slapped his hand down on top of his alarm clock. “Wat time iz it anyway?” Slurring his speech, he groggily forced his eyes to open and tried to focus on making out the letters on his clock. Usually, his mother yelled at him well before he heard the first sound of his alarm.

6:14 AM

The glaring bold letters looking back at him informed him that he still had another half-hour, or so, before his mother would start yelling at him to wake up, and another forty-six minutes before his alarm went off for the first of what was usually many times.

“What the hell?” Groggily, he tried to think of what might have awakened him. “It had to be the system update,” he sleepily assured himself, before thinking, ‘WRP open.’ Almost instantly, multiple notifications windows popped up in front of his eyes, in various shades of blue.

“What the hell?!!” Blinking stupidly, the last remnants of sleep were quickly leaving Joshua as he stared in shock at more than half a dozen pop-up windows which covered almost his whole field of view.

“Successfully upgraded… Yada yada,” Joshua mumbled to himself, as he tried to read and make sense of everything before him. “Migrated to Harem Subsystem… Yada yada… Olivia is appointed as First Lady of the Harem… Nothing really all that unusual with that notification,” he assured himself, closing the first one.

“A notification for a newly appointed concubine? What?!” Sitting upright, Joshua had to reread what he’d just skimmed over once again, for clarification.

Notification: Natasha Davis has been chosen and accepted as your First Concubine. You have been awarded 1 UP and 1CP.

“Who the hell is Natasha Davis?” Straining his brain, Joshua struggled to recall if he’d ever met, or hear of anyone of that name before, but as far as he could tell, it was completely new to him. “The only Davis I know,” he muttered moodily to himself, “is Olivia. Could this Natasha be related to her somehow? And if she is, how the hell did I make her my concubine? WHEN did I make her my concubine? When I was sleeping somehow?!”

The more Joshua tried to make heads and tails out of the situation, the more questions his poor brain had for him over it all. Finally, with nothing else to do about it, he closed that notification window and tried to read the one half hidden behind it.

Notification: Maria Daniels has been chosen and accepted as your Second Concubine. You have been awarded 1 UP and 1CP.

“What the what…” Staring blank eyed at the notification, Joshua couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still dreaming. Two concubines?! And he didn’t know either of them?? “Just what the hell is going on first thing this morning?” Wracking his brain until he thought smoke was going to come wafting out of his ears, Joshua couldn’t decipher what had happened at all.

“It’s got to be related to Olivia somehow,” he guessed, “but I don’t know how! Is this Natasha one of her cousins, or some such? Wait…” Frowning, he tried to recall every single detail of the story she’d told him last night, no matter how small it might be. “Isn’t she the only child of her parents? The only child of either of her grandparents?” Unless his memory was failing, he thought she’d told him that her parents didn’t have any siblings – which is why one grandfather had disowned them, while the other one was passing a fortune down to her when she turned twenty-one.

“If this Natasha is related to her,” Joshua mused, “it’s either got to be her mother, or her grandmother. I don’t think there’s anyone else except for them in her bloodline. And wasn’t Maria the name of her maid?” He asked himself, struggling to remember.

“Joshua! Time to wake up!” Yelling up the steps, it was his mother’s voice which finally brought him out of his thoughts, to look back over at his clock.

6:45

Same as always – his mother was once again right on schedule!

“I’m awake!” Shouting downstairs, Joshua shambled up and started to get ready for the day. There wasn’t anything he could actually do about the notifications he’d received this morning and lying in bed, fretting over them certainly wasn’t getting him anywhere. “The best thing I can do,” he assured himself, “is to hurry up, eat breakfast here so I can skip it at school, and then hunt down Olivia and see what the heck she might know about all this.”

Arriving at school, Joshua was the first off the bus, as he hurried scurried from one end of the school building to the other looking for Olivia. Unfortunately, she was nowhere to be found – not by the lockers where the jocks and cheerleaders normally hang out. Not in the cafeteria, eating breakfast. Not around the back of the school, waiting for him at the laundry room – he didn’t think she’d be there, but he checked anyway, just to be certain. She wasn’t in her classroom, the auditorium, or out on the track or field anywhere.

With only a few minutes to spare before the first bell went off warning students it was almost time for class, Joshua wandered into the library to look for her. At this time of the morning, the place was almost completely empty – even the librarian herself was missing, probably checking her mailbox, and gossiping in the office first thing before class began. The only person around at all was a young, ghostly-white lady. Dressed in gothic black, with long purple hair and neon orange eyeshadow, she was one of the students which everyone knew well and generally avoided like the plague.

“Umm… Morning ‘Becca.” Desperate for any news at all, Joshua gently eased up before her and spoke softly so as to not startle her.

“Huh? Oh… Sorry… Morning.” Looking up from her book, Becca smiled very weakly, before nodding to acknowledge his presence. “Did you need something?” Sounding completely disinterested, she barely paid him any attention before turning back down to look back at the paper in her hands – the comic pages of the newspaper, Joshua noticed.

“Umm… By chance, have you seen Olivia come by this morning? I borrowed one of her notebooks where I missed class the other day,” he lied, “and I need to get it back to her. I just haven’t seen her anywhere in school yet this morning.”

“She hasn’t come,” Becca replied distantly, not even bothering to look up while answering. “I’ve been here for a while,” she assured him, in a blank, toneless voice, “and she hasn’t come through the front entrance, or walked down this hallway this morning. She must not be here today,” she concluded, uncaringly.

“Umm… Thanks anyway.” Sighing deeply, Joshua slowly turned and headed to his classroom. His quest for answers would just have to wait a little longer.