After the Sunday mass in Kinder, Marjorine comes back home to start the sub-a-thon, as well as the launch of her Patreon. When the stream begins, with her faithful viewers on air:

  “Welcome to the sub-a-thon. Today, the stream begins with my male trans going into labor because of his alien baby!” Marjo announces as she gets all her characters to the hospital.

  The player of the third alien abductee, going by Yortson on Twitch, enters voice chat for the first time. “Do you know your baby’s GAB yet?”

  “Yortson, no! I was busy farming VLS last night with Artabeles, but I didn’t do it nearly as much as he did!”

  Here’s where farming VLS led me: I didn’t get an ultrasound for him, all my characters put on weight to varying degrees, I exhausted their vacation allowances, it’s a miracle that my trans male didn’t have a miscarriage! Marjo looks back on the in-game consequences of what she did with Artabeles. I really wonder whether miscarriage is a thing in this game.

  Her trans male is brought to an operating room where a Caesarean section is performed. which is how trans males bearing alien babies are delivered in this game. And, of course, he’s under general anesthesia.

  “Now that we know that pregnancy lasts nine in-game days, at least for the vanilla ghosts, I wonder when a pregnant ghost can have ultrasound that can reliably determine the baby’s GAB...” Marjo sighs.

  “By day five, but for best results, wait until day six. Speaking of which, one of my friends has a pregnant woman who’s at the hospital to do just that!” Yortson then gets his intersex non-binary alien theft victim to another room.

  “What happened to your characters?” Manolia asks both Artabeles and Marjo.

  “I guess, I should get a liposuction for my characters. But only one at a time because I want one parent available to take care of my adopted toddlers!” Artabeles uses his in-game phone to book a liposuction for his gyan-avspar.

  As the surgery draws to a close, the doctors reveal a little green alien, the size of a human newborn. Crying and making a different crying sound compared to the “vanilla” baby in the maternity ward right next to that room.

  The screen that appears then is the baby’s GAB, along with a prompt to give the newborn a name.

  “Woohoo! A little alien girl! But I don’t have all day to choose a name!” an overjoyed Marjo then receives several suggestions from her chat.

  “Some Middle Persian names might sound alien to you. I mean, you rolled your eyes the first time I even talked about gyan-avspar, as if it was some alien title or profession!”

  “Do you have an example?” Gordon asks Artabeles.

  “Purandokht is one of these names that sound alien to someone unfamiliar with Middle Eastern history. However, it’s the only female name that comes to my mind and matches the description, since Hormizd, Yazdegerd, while alien-sounding Middle Persian names, are male names instead!”

  “Azelma also!” Manolia adds.

  I must be quick, my characters just can’t sit around in the maternity ward! Marjo starts sweating, now that she collected potential baby names. She starts sweating as she feels like her characters can’t linger in the hospital much longer, and reads through the entries of her chat, along with their reactions.

  “I know my baby is alien, it’s tough. I guess, so many names sounded alien, I’ll go with...” Marjo pauses for a few seconds. “Hormizd!”

  I guess Marjo doesn’t realize that Hormizd was an actual shanahshah, she believed that alien babies should have alien names. Yet names can sound alien despite their Terran origins. My fault for believing that Middle Persian names could sound alien to her… Artabeles has one of his characters return home to his two adoptees, while the other is undergoing liposuction. As do a few other characters whose players, yesterday, were farming baby showers until they got their characters fat and diabetic, and are now paying the price in several ways.

  “If you plan on one baby shower, don’t count on me, I am sick of running these parties, especially now that the VLS can only be won once from it, and you must host a perfect one on the first try!”

  “What do baby showers drop now?” Yortson asks. “You make me feel like I missed a golden opportunity…”

  “They now drop toddler tablets, worth only one-thirtieth of a VLS! People were farming VLS to the point their characters had to undergo surgery, or get insulin shots!”

  It’s then that she uses the money she earned from farming said VLS to go around buying a new, much larger lot, and build a new home. And then replace the old furniture, as well as sewing machine, by new, better fixtures. And, of course, buy greenhouses, so that she can have more space to farm whatever crops she likes.

  Yet, she has to build her home in stages based on what her characters need in the here and now. Like they need to eat, or care for little Hormizd…

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  Viewer: Don’t forget about the nanny!

  “Yeah, the nanny should take care of Hormizd while everyone else works on the home!” Gordon lectures her.

  She has her characters spend a while using prefabricated wall sections to build rooms, and then install the essential fixtures so they can live in that unfinished home. This in-game mansion will look like these mansions in the bayou. Because I never left the state, this game gave me a glimpse of things I couldn’t otherwise.

  However, she’s so busy getting her new in-game home built that she waits until Hormizd is crying to get the nanny her viewers asked for. While ensuring that there’s an operational bathroom as well as room for the crib and the changing table.

  And, after dinner, an UFO appears above the unfinished home shaping up to look like one of these Antebellum South haunted plantations upon completion.

  “Am I going to have another character abducted?” Marjo yelps. “What did I do, or fail to do, to deserve this?”

  However, the UFO’s not looking to lock in someone into a tractor beam, but beams an alien down to meet with her male trans. Is it alien law enforcement or CPS going to ask for something of my male trans?

  The alien agent makes a message pop on Marjo’s screen.

  “This is the Xorrak Child Protection Services. It has come to our attention that a baby from our species was born our your world. We offer you the opportunity to either keep the baby or to have it sent back to our world. However, because communications between our worlds are impossible, please be advised that, if you send back the alien baby to our world, there is no possibility of recovering the baby!” a metallic voice sounds on-screen.

  “It’s tough. For a while now, I just played with the hand I was given. I’m keeping Hormizd under my custody!” Marjo announces to her followers.

  Or rather, no possibility of recovering alien babies yet. Maybe, later down the road, we could visit an alien world, and then go to the CPS office to adopt alien babies, with priority being given to player-abandoned babies, just like the vanilla world’s CPS, Gordon thinks about what would happen to alien babies who were sent back home at birth.

  “Yeah, your baby being alien is not an excuse to abandon her! This game gave us a glimpse of what a world would look like if people could get along in DEI, even though a lot of DEI setbacks happened in the real world!” Gordon sermons the streamer.

  “There will be only one baby shower for Hormizd once the home is complete, I won’t host any other one!” Marjorine announces to her followers.

  Speaking of which, she gains followers who kept alien babies, some of whom didn’t even get ransoming attempts made against them at all. However, it makes some of them want to meet with the baby, in hopes of getting future favors with her. And maybe even help them build rooms or greenhouses.

  “Oh I would love to see you design outfits that feel alien...” Yortson tells her.

  “I appreciate y’all’s help, especially those among you who farmed VLS yesterday!” Marjo stops short of telling who farmed VLS yesterday.

  Viewer: How could you tell that someone farmed VLS?

  “VLS farmers tended to be fatter!” Artabeles tells the cold, hard truth.

  “Most players only have their characters eat when they need to!”

  Meanwhile, Artabeles realizes that he’s overdue in getting his new home built, so he buys the largest lot size players can buy for housing, much like Marjo did. Surprisingly, such lots don’t actually cost that much, but are often treated by the game as upscale lots.

  Time to build a mansion worthy of a gyan-avspar! If I’m not mistaken, gyan-avspars tended to live in luxury when in Ctesiphon, that is, at court, and sometimes gyan-avspars could be rewarded with command of a castle or city for meritorious service as a gyan-avspar, he muses as he also starts building his very own Islamic-style mansion, starting with the iwan. And also hiring, in-game, a nanny to take care of Tiffany and his other adoptee.

  Yet, the in-game media descends upon both players’ unfinished mansions, but for very different reasons.

  “What’s going on here?” Marjo screams when she sees journalists descend upon her unfinished mansion.

  “Are alien babies such a rare occurrence in the game that the media wants to have a piece of the action, at least for the time being?” Gordon asks himself, even though he knows that only a handful of players get abducted every in-game night.

  “Yeah, what makes Hormizd so special?” Yortson asks her. “Surely other alien babies were born before yours!”

  “The question is: what gender identities and orientations do the other human parents of alien kids have?” Manolia asks.

  Sigrun enters the voice chat. “Or perhaps it’s more to do with the family, and not the baby! You see, Marjo, to the eyes of the game world, your main’s a famous fashion designer, so even your main’s siblings and partners have some fame, too!”

  Ouch: as with Marjo, I am playing RCG because I could get, in-game, what my real life couldn’t provide. However, I feel like Marjo has all this exciting stuff happening to her, and here I am, harvesting pine for others to build homes, and NPC prefabricated wall manufacturers are buying the production from the Haunted Bazaar, Gordon seems a little let down by his experience of playing the game. I guess, time to resume grinding the parties! Then again, I was told that there was a wave of mass child abandonment last night. Who knows how old they are by now, if there are any left from that whole VLS farming fiasco... and also I was told about how some higher-tier parties require throwing children-exclusive parties to unlock.

  Gordon then checks against the list of abandoned children available for adoption. He realizes that the mass child abandonment left in the wake of the VLS farming also gives him more choices than before the wave. With little fear that he would need to face the court hearing minigame.

  “I guess, I’m a little late to the child-rearing party. Maybe I should try IVF...”

  “IVF? Are you crazy? That’s the most expensive way to get a baby in the game!” Sigrun warns him. “After I was barred from adopting children, I once considered IVF, but IVF really amounts to commercial surrogacy! On top of that, my own baby would have arrived too late for VLS farming!”

  Sigrun then whispers Marjo on Discord, asking for permission to post a link to her guide to IVF in RCG. Sure, post your IVF guide... Marjo sighs before looking at the IVF guide.

  There are two IVF methods in the game : one has the intentional parent donate genetic material of some sort, and the surrogate mother provides the rest, or the intentional parents donate an embryo made with their genetic material, but the surrogate mother doesn’t have any genetic linkage, Gordon reads through the guide and realizes the second method is more expensive, but even the costs of the first one makes him squirm. I’ll probably go the adoption route, for now, despite not having any genetic ownership of the child…

  “I guess, I could show these journalists the baby, along with the haunted mansion under construction!” Marjo reluctantly takes the paparazzi to Hormizd’s room, where the nanny is busy putting up wallpaper while Hormizd is fast asleep.