A Biological Discovery

People sometimes find their answers in the most unexpected places. Alexander Fleming stumbling across a patch of blue mold in an old culture dish and giving the world penicillin was one such case. Spencer Silver failing to invent a super-strength adhesive and accidentally creating the Post-it note was another.

A discovery like that is called serendipity — the word for a momentous find or invention born of nothing but pure accident.

And I, at that very moment, had made a discovery of a similar kind.

Stacked against penicillin and Post-it notes, of course, mine was a pitifully shabby little find. The kind that would never become an invention. The kind that would fade away as nothing more than a small personal epiphany.

But to me, nothing in the world was more precious.

Because this was the discovery that was going to drag me out of that godforsaken male-character hell.

"...Oh."

I breathed the word in awe at the documentary sitting in front of me.

This was sometime after I'd finished my first commission, when I'd been digging through the ocean of the internet for quite a while. I'd been thrashing around in there, desperate to find ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a rope that would pull me to salvation. I'd wandered Hitobi and Paxiv hunting for differences from my original world, and I'd even tried analyzing the relative numbers of male illustrations versus female ones.

I'd taken some serious psychological damage in the process... but if I wanted to draw what I actually wanted to draw, there was no other way.

After dozens of fruitless minutes of that, I was drifting through the internet just to fill the emptiness — when, by the purest accident, I ran into the messiah who would save me.

A documentary whose title alone was so aggressively stupid it looped all the way back around to fascinating. The video put groups of men and women in front of a wide variety of porn.

Then it analyzed and recorded their arousal through the brainwaves they produced while watching. Which parts got them off. How sharply that split along lines of taste. What differences showed up by sex. And so on.

The results were genuinely startling.

The men's group only got aroused by porn that matched their own preferences. The women, on the other hand, showed a measurable arousal response no matter what they were shown. Man-on-woman, man-on-man, woman-on-woman — all of it.

That didn't mean women had no preference-based differences in arousal, of course. But it was enough to tell me their spectrum was wider.

By the time I'd watched that far, I had goosebumps.

This video was sitting there in the real world, handing me evidence for a hypothesis I'd been ranting about as pure brain-rot speculation. Even if the chastity norms between men and women had been flipped in this world, from a neuroscience standpoint a woman was still clearly a different animal from a man.

The spectrum of arousal a woman could feel was broader than a man's. And women had less of an aversion to same-sex material than men did.

This was usable. This was data.

"Thank you, God..."

I could feel salvation from here. It was like the ever-so-refreshing Lord Nyarlathotep was extending a gentle tentacle my way. Like a sliver of shade being laid over an ant toiling away under a blazing sun. Ah, how merciful. This was the little gift He had bestowed upon me — the one and only rope that would get me out of this shitty male-character hell.

I muttered it almost like I was going to cry. They were tears of gratitude.

Well — I'd still have to draw them if I wanted anything to sell. But not having to draw only male characters was already an astonishing leap forward. It meant I could mix men and women the way I had in that two-shot I'd done for the last commission.

Women had less of an aversion to same-sex material to begin with, so I figured the customers would understand. As long as I drew the situation hot enough, they'd soak themselves down below even without a massive visual punch.

Good.

"Time to go change the listing."

Having decided to shift my direction a little, I went straight to Paxiv. I was going to tweak the notice I'd pinned to the main screen of my account tab. Change that, and I could filter out the freaks with the really exotic appetites before they even got to me, the way I hadn't last time. Surely nobody would put in a commission request without at least reading the notice.

I typed out the most important point first, then the one that actually mattered.

That second line was the whole point. The reason I'd gone diving through the contaminated abyss that was Paxiv to gather material in the first place — the reason I'd picked that somewhat forced grotesquerie angle just to protect my own sanity — all of it had been a means to one end: I did not want to draw stark-naked men. Taking gay-art requests on top of that would have been a contradiction in terms.

"Now that I've found another way, I don't have to draw the brutal stuff anymore..."

I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠muttered that to myself as I put up the rest — that I'd be holding back on the really hardcore material from here on, and that I'd prefer to take the milder requests. For all the grim stuff I'd been dabbling in, my own tastes were perfectly ordinary. I was more of a "normal man and woman having sex" person than a "dismember and take someone apart" person. I watched hardcore things now and then, sure... but that much was nothing.

Anyway, that was how I rewrote the notice. Honestly, not much had changed. From now on I'd only take two-shots. Those two-shots had to be a man and a woman. And I'd be holding back on anything too hardcore.

It was just a handful of unremarkable lines. But those lines were going to do a lot of work going forward. Anyone commissioning me would check the notice first. The ones who needed to be filtered out would get filtered out.

Satisfied with what I'd written, I queued up a game of League — and that was when it happened.

"Ah, fuck! Ezreal, you son of a bitch, stop placing those goddamn forward ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wards!"

I spent a moment, as always, despising the brain-dead decision-making of those deadweight bitches on my team.

Ding!

An alert suddenly went off on the phone sitting on my desk. I picked it up without much thought and checked — a text from LegalizeRape.

It hadn't even been an hour since I'd edited the thing and she'd already seen it. What a dedicated little fapper.

I'd lost the game anyway. I wrote back.

"What?"

Pffft.

A snort of laughter burst out of me. So that was why she'd sounded so careful. She'd actually thought I might have put the notice up because of her.

Picturing her sitting awkwardly on the other side of the screen, perched on a chair and quietly freaking out, was somehow adorable. Come to think of it, hers had been on the harder side too. Reverse rape was not exactly a mild preference. She'd clearly known that.

Hers was nothing, honestly. You should've seen those other bastards...

They still flickered at the edges of my memory. The guy who wanted two men whipping their dicks out for a sword fight. The ones who wanted a trumpet — or a vuvuzela, or whatever the fuck that wind instrument was — jammed into a sphincter and blown. Compared to the demons living in that particular abyss, LegalizeRape's tastes were downright wholesome. The kind that could reasonably get into heaven. King Yama himself would bang his gavel tap-tap-tap and go, "This much is fine."

And I'd drawn this kind of thing plenty of times before, so it wasn't even that hard.

Then a certain expectation suddenly took shape, and I asked her.

There had to be a reason she was spending her time asking me. If she'd been worried her request would get filtered out, it was fair to read that as meaning she was planning to put one in again.

And sure enough, she wrote back.

I fired the reply off and a grin bloomed across my face. She liked my art enough to want to buy again. There was no universe in which that was a bad thing. And people like that tended to keep coming back, too. Looking at porn that had been conjured up out of your own head was a whole different flavor of pleasure.

"Hell yeah. Recurring income already."

Ahh, recurring income. What a sweet pair of words. Jesus and Lord Nyarlathotep alike would absolutely shout hallelujah if they heard them.

Money is a creature that leaks out of you just for breathing. Even taking a shit and flushing the toilet costs money. In a situation like that, having cash arrive at regular intervals was nothing short of a ray of light.

"And the last commission piece is getting a good reception, too."

I'd uploaded the drawing from this last job to Paxiv, and the response had been pretty solid. Which meant I was finally starting to cruise. If I just kept this up, I'd be fine.

"That said... money's still the problem."

I got up from the chair and dove onto the mattress.

Flump.

The soft give of the bed seized my body in a messy, indiscriminate grab, taking control of me one piece at a time. The human body is a strange thing — when one system loses its range of motion, another one amps up and starts working overtime. In the same way, with control of my body handed over to the bed, my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠brain clocked in and started churning through idle thoughts.

It's still not enough...

I'd made fifty thousand won this time, but fifty thousand won was all it was. Factor in rent, the water bill, tuition — I still had a long, long way to go. And it wasn't as if fifty thousand won showed up whenever I wanted it, either.

I'd left commissions permanently open, but that didn't mean requests came in all the time. The one putting in the request wasn't me, it was the customer, which meant all I could do was wait. There had been stretches where a commission request didn't come in for close to a month.

Ah... a month?

A whole month. Back then I'd had some money saved up, so it had been fine — but a month in my current situation was enough time for me to wither up and get found as a dead body, for fuck's sake.

My hands and feet started trembling. A chill ran a finger down my spine. That was the smell of death.

No! Please, anybody, just put in a request!

I was in the middle of praying to some unknown god, seized by a sudden terror of dying, when—

Ding!

As if the prayer had actually gone through, a cheerful alert rang from the phone I'd left above my head. I shot a hand up, snatched it, and pulled down the notification bar.

Amazingly enough, an actual commission request had come in.