✨ Mystery Box RESULT ✨

[Oedipus Simple]

|Uncommon Trait|

Jordan’s brain caught up approximately half a second before Chloe’s mouth did.

"Complex? I think you’ll find it’s quite simple," Chloe read, her voice slowing down as her eyes moved across the text. "The societal taboo regarding consanguineous relationships has been recalibrated to a neutral-to-positive baseline."

She stopped.

Jordan watched her lips move silently as she reread the sentence, then reread it again, and he understood with the cold clarity of a man watching his own car roll into a lake that there was no version of this conversation that ended well.

"Ah, shit," he said, mostly to himself.

Chloe set the card down very carefully, the way you’d set down a live grenade you’d just discovered you were holding. She looked at him. Her natural dark eyes, no contacts, wide in a way he’d only seen a handful of times.

"Jordan."

"I know."

"What does consanguineous mean?"

"You know what it means."

"I want you to say it."

"It means related. By blood." He dragged a hand down his face.

For a long moment neither of them said anything. Somewhere in the building a pipe knocked. His refrigerator hummed. The bunny ears sat on the counter next to the cursed card like the two items were about to start a conversation Jordan wasn’t ready to hear.

Then Chloe made a sound.

It started as a hiss of air through her nose, and Jordan braced for her to be disgusted, to grab her keys and leave, to file this under things that made her regret every choice that led her to his kitchen.

Instead the sound cracked open into something else entirely, and she doubled over the counter, one hand slapping the quartz, laughing so hard no actual noise came out for the first three seconds.

"Oh my god," she wheezed. "Oh my god. Your magic phone is a pervert."

"This is not funny."

"It’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me." She wiped her eyes, still bent over the counter. "You spent weeks agonizing about how to tell me your relationship-tracking dating app is manipulating your love life, and then it rolls you a random incest buff like it’s a stat increase. Ha! Neutral-to-positive baseline."

"Chloe."

"All genetic degradation factors from inbreeding are permanently nullified," she read off the card again, having grabbed it back, and this set her off worse. "It thought about the babies! It optimized for the babies!"

Jordan leaned back against the counter and let her have it, because there was genuinely nothing else to do, and also because the sight of Chloe Kim, who kept her whole life behind glass, laughing until she couldn’t breathe in his kitchen, did something to his chest that no amount of System notifications could measure.

The thing was, he could read the rest of the description. He’d read it the second the card landed, the way you read the entire bad text message before you’ve decided how to feel about it.

Passive Attraction generation with all registered family members is significantly amplified for both platonic and romantic routes.

He had no registered family members. That part didn’t matter. What mattered was that the trait was now installed, permanent, sitting in his stat sheet next to Tune Up and Alluring Whisper and the tumbleweed thing, and there was no uninstall button.

"Can you get rid of it?" Chloe had recovered enough to ask real questions, though her voice still shook.

"I don’t think so. Traits are permanent. That’s kind of the whole thing about them." He pulled out his phone and checked, thumbing through the trait menu, and there it was, glowing gold like all the rest. No delete option. No return-to-sender. "Yeah. It’s stuck."

"So you just have a passive incest bonus now."

"For the rest of my life, apparently."

Chloe pressed her knuckles to her mouth, and Jordan could see her fighting another laugh and losing.

"You know what’s actually messed up," he said, because if he was going down he was taking the observation with him, "is that it’s not even the weirdest thing the System’s done. It gave me the ability to make more baby batter than physically possible. It handed me a bunny suit designed for immaculate conception. At a certain point I stopped being surprised and started being impressed by the commitment."

"Baby batter."

"I panicked. The clinical term is worse."

"The clinical term is worse than baby batter?"

"Ceaseless Discharge. Direct quote from the System. Not the one from the video game, it specified, which somehow makes it more embarrassing."

That did it. Chloe slid down the front of the cabinets until she was sitting on his kitchen floor, laughing with her whole body, her pink sweater riding up at the hip, her hair coming loose from where it had already half fallen during their kiss. Jordan looked down at her and felt the last of the fear about telling her the truth drain out of him, because whatever he’d been afraid of, this wasn’t it. This was better than anything he’d rehearsed.

He crouched down in front of her.

"You good?"

"No." She hiccuped. "I found out my boyfriend has a magic dating simulator, an accidental incest trait, and infinite se-"

"Don’t finish that."

"Infinite se-"

He kissed her to shut her up, which worked for about four seconds before she was smiling too hard to kiss properly, and then they were just breathing against each other on his kitchen floor at nine forty at night, the cursed card and the pregnancy bunny suit sitting on the counter above them like the two least helpful chaperones in the world.

"Mm." She pulled back an inch. Her eyes had gone from laughing to something warmer, darker at the edges. "Okay. Serious question."

"Uh oh."

"The bunny suit." She said it slow. "The one that makes the wearer feel really good. You said wearing it alone just does the charm and arousal thing. No baby feature unless we..."