The Erosance Awards
A piece that drew raves from the second it dropped. Earned bonus points as the first award-winner to prove that even ordinary stylish outfits can be twisted into pure erotica.
You could argue this is just the usual parasitic bio-armor people slap on a monster. Except it isn't a parasite — she's simply wearing it, and can strip it off whenever she wants. That earned it the top score in the biological category.
[Female characters in pure bikini swimsuits.jpg]
[Roughly 35 different swimsuit designs.jpg]
Unlike everyone else, they brought nothing but swimsuits. Their pitch: sexy outfits equal high-exposure swimsuits, and even if they lose it doesn't matter — the fundamentals are swimsuits. That line hit hard enough to lock in the award.
[Female character draped in an extremely complex coat — thick, oversized, hanging to the ankles, combat boots, black stockings, looking fully buttoned up top to bottom.jpg]
Looking at that alone, you'd wonder where the hell the "erotic" even is.
[Detailed schematic — coat half-shrugged to the forearms, and the hangers inside the coat reconfigure the entire silhouette around her neck and shoulders.jpg]
[Female character wearing nothing under the coat — what looked like a full top-and-bottom outfit was actually suspended in midair by internal hooks and a neck strap.jpg]
All of that is a single outfit. What everyone assumed was standard cyberpunk techwear turned out to be a full-on flasher coat. The bonus points weren't for the eroticism itself — they were for the designer's deranged, unhinged perversion.
Highest fidelity of the entire contest. No empty praise needed — zoom in and the details only get denser.
Host of the whole thing, and the first one to drop those broken reverse-bunny shots — automatic win. For the record, Icarus didn't pick this himself. We did. Yeah.
Plenty of Special Award recipients beyond those, too — people whose timing was just a hair off, or whose entries were a little too subtle, but still solid work.
Prizes were all covered by the sponsorship haul, and anything short got filled in with resources or Gold.
Anyway — seriously, everyone killed it.
For a while, the gallery's atmosphere — soured by backstabbing and open war between clans — managed to stay genuinely friendly, if only briefly.
And the moment the Ero-Renaissance contest wrapped, one question settled into every user's head…
[Monkey scratching its stitched-up head.jpg]
No, for real though?
I can't buy any of this stuff. I can't even receive it.
None of it hits the trade market, so if you want one you have to physically go to that commander's base.
[Trade market menu with "CLOTHES MARKET" scrawled over it in MS Paint.jpg]
Yeah.
Admin bastards are dead to the world, I swear.
That was the question: So where do you actually get the outfits?
And the problem, as every gallery post and comment made painfully clear, was that unless you went in person to a commander's base and collected them yourself, there was simply no way to obtain them.
Gold and resources didn't matter. You still couldn't get your hands on anything. Users who just wanted to dress their own characters in something filthy were having full-blown meltdowns.
But those meltdowns didn't last long.
The reason being…
Our glorious admins — who, by their own admission, had been watching the whole thing unfold — rolled out a genuinely excellent response: they just went ahead and opened a clothes market inside the Trade Market.
Of course, the real reason they moved so fast was that recent hoarding had completely dried up Trade Market volume, and the value of Gold was freefalling by the day. This was their attempt to do something about it…
But either way, player-to-player costume and skin trading was now live. I and countless other users heaped praise on the admins, then naturally drifted over to knock on the clothes market's door.
Right after that raucous Erosance contest wrapped up in spectacular fashion, I learned three new things.
First up: the temporary clan that had been founded purely for the Erosance.
"Commander, that temporary clan nearby—"
"Vermouth's, right? He was the clan leader?"
"Yes. Now that the contest is over, everyone's saying they're heading back to normal and dissolving the clan."
"That so… is that so…"
They'd been a strange bunch from the start — swarming in just to run a single contest. And the second it ended, they actually dissolved the clan and left.
Hearing that he'd kept his word like a real man, I nodded and gave him genuine credit.
"Can't believe they actually dissolved the clan."
"In more ways than one, he was a man of principle."
"You're telling me."
And that assessment of mine was immediately followed by—
"Oh, right, Commander — before Vermouth left, he sent us something."
"Sent us something? What is it?"
