“I’m asking if this is a real poll,” John put his question into explicit words. Walking up and down in his office, for once in his full suit, his movements were followed by an unhappy little sub that was completely naked and looking forward to her multi-orgasmic blowjob duty. As it was, Eliza had to wait for John to put aside the stapled stack of show notes and the phone stuck between ear and shoulder. “Do you know how high 92% approval is? It’s an absurd number.”

“Absolutely absurd,” the president of the media company agreed. “If I was to task my team to fake a number, I would knock it down by at least 25%.”

John kept looking through the notes and pacing up and down by the wall. He was moving towards the third day of steady media appearances. By a rough estimate, he had spent four of the past forty-eight hours in front of running cameras, another twelve getting ready to appear in front of those cameras and another two getting to the places where those cameras stood. This current endeavour fell into the middle category as he was getting briefed about the structure of a late night show he was to appear on.

John hated that kind of program. Not necessarily because of the contents, that depended entirely on the skill and credibility of the host, but because of the structure. As a guest, he knew the amount of script that went into those late-night episodes, even for the interview sections. The setting itself he found even worse. Sitting on the stage and being bombarded by show lights, having to keep everything within the narrow screen time, it just didn’t work for him. Podcasts remained his favourite way to be interviewed, but they were time consuming.

Thanks to Jack, time was less of an issue for him. While he was out, engaging the media, his double allowed him to keep up on the bureaucratic side of things. His harem also contributed to his success, in more ways than ever before.

Aclysia decided she would support him in the media endeavour. Cautiously, John had agreed and managed to talk Gnome into accompanying the weaponized maid on her interviews. Charismatic and beautiful as Aclysia was, she had even more issues being nice to journalists than she had respecting the members of the political opposition. It would be very dangerous to send her to even minorly hostile papers. John feared she might show a bit too much of either component of her yandere personality. Threatening the reporter with words or blade were not parts of the image he wanted to cultivate. Her swooning about him was welcome, however. Essentially, she was going to fuel a lot of fluff pieces. Harmless, largely uninformative articles that served to make him look nice and relatable.

Undine and Siena had both agreed to try their hands at some media appearances. Particularly, they were going to utilize their music experiences to start composing a few things. They were going to start small, just direct a few eyes towards them, get a few entertainment magazines to pay attention to them and make a few interviews. If that succeeded, they would keep upping the importance of their projects.

Although she refused outright to be interviewed in any fashion, Eliza pledged her support to John’s cause in the form of drawing things for his media office. Most of her previous art had been done by physical means, but she had adapted to the usage of digital tools within the day.

Rave pulled her weight, and then some. She had been to as many interviews as he had and managed to manoeuvre even the most hostile interviews with a relaxed demeanour and charismatic attitude. If she was being treated nicely, she reciprocated; if she wasn’t, her answers were filled with dry sarcasm. All of the hours bantering with him had taught her one or two things about how to dismantle the arguments of people that were trying to be smart with her. It helped that nobody that tried to get her in a linguistic trap was halfway as intelligent as John was.

Salamander, Sylph, Nia, Metra, Scartlett, Beatrice and even Lydia supported them in the background in whatever capacity they could. Some more overt, such as Sylph steadily updating the public towards any new appearances through social media, and some more withdrawn, like Lydia sending John some of her media research. Most of his girls had made themselves available for the media arm of the executive, making their gorgeous faces appear on all kinds of announcements.

All of it culminated in a steady stream of content with both high production value and the occasional little mistake that prevented it from having that almost alien corporate look. The amount of art, music and clips that was produced was actually somewhat insane, in John’s opinion. He had always appreciated Undine’s musical talent, but he had thoroughly underestimated how quickly a good song could travel through social media. Especially when it came along a cover drawn by Eliza, who had spent most of the time not with John over the past months drawing and watching trash TV.

Even knowing all of that, 92% approval after he had revealed two secrets that had to be shocking for a lot of people was beyond stupendous. “Can you tell me how this number came about then?” the Gamer wanted to know, theatrically swinging around the notes. He should have been happy about this, but news that exceeded even the best-case scenario of his plans, in only three days since the release of the message no less, made him more nervous than anything else. If things went bad, he could at least try to iron things out or search for whoever was scheming against him. Everything going along more than perfectly made his paranoia scream that someone was scheming to get his hopes up and then take it all away – like a black swordsman burning down the White House.

“Who the fuck cares about your stupid ass numbers?!” Eliza shouted impatiently. “FUCK M-ur—hnn—hhhnnggghh.”

“What was that?” the president of the media company wanted to know.

“Just my sweet little Eliza forgetting her place,” John said and tightened the grip he had on her throat. Lifting her up with one hand, he pressed the masochist against one of the many bookshelves that covered the office’s walls. The folders within shook from the impact and Eliza’s mouth opened to pant with what little breath she could draw. Her hands wandered down to her pussy, but John glared at her with hard eyes and shook his head. Clenching her fists, the short woman was left to delightfully suffer in silence. “Back to the question,” John continued as if nothing unusual was happening.

From his perspective, there really wasn’t.

“Ehem… yes,” the president cleared his throat and then continued, “it’s an aggregate poll of all the ones taken since the start of the week. Some of them may be individually flawed, but the aggregate is the closest we have to an accurate representation of public opinion. Numbers are likely to change over the course of the week and the month, but for the short-term it should work well enough.”

“Maybe…” John said and handed the show notes to Beatrice. The passive maid was quietly working on the secretary table. Unlike the massive wooden thing John had, Beatrice had one with a translucent glass tabletop and simple metal legs. The entire purpose of it was to leave as much of her, or anyone else on secretary duty, available for his gaze. Employing only members of his harem for such work allowed him to make workplace policies that would have been otherwise extremely inappropriate.

Beatrice read through the pages for him, sending him what he needed to know through their mental connection. Meanwhile, his now empty hand moved to properly hold his phone. He had considered fingering Eliza, but it was more entertaining to watch her pussy drip. He let her take a quick breath, then pushed her back against the shelf with all the force necessary to block her windpipe.

“To be perfectly honest, I don’t put a lot of trust into polls,” he said.

“To be perfectly honest, we don’t either. Polls usually come out biased due to the way the pollsters go about assembling their data. Be that because they loaded the questions, they picked a biased sample of the population or just messed with the results,” the president responded. It was the kind of honest answer he could only get from the top of the totem pole. Normally briefings like this were a job for an organizer or the host. Given John’s importance, ‘normally’ didn’t apply. More often than not, these corporate suits used the opportunity to brief him to actually get to know him. High society was all about who one knew. “An aggregate is usually pretty reliable though. Even if we assume this is way too high a number to be accurate, we can, at the very least, say that the public is more positive towards you than not. Wouldn’t you agree?”

John didn’t answer immediately. His mind was immediately drawn to a story he once heard about a well-meaning dictator. Charismatic and liked by the people, he swore to actually improve things for the people. He gave the orders but a dictator is only as powerful as the people who obey his demands and everyone around him conspired to keep things as they were. A poor population is easier to control, after all, especially if there is a charismatic but naïve guy at the top telling them that things will become better.

Whenever the dictator wanted to see the improvements his regime was making, the people would stick him in a car and drive him out to a city. It was clean, the buildings luxurious and the people happy. All of it was also entirely fake. The houses were empty props, nobody actually lived there, and the enthusiastic people were just actors. Because of ‘security threats’ the dictator was never allowed to walk around and so he only saw the illusion of success.

John didn’t want to fall prey to an illusion. “…Sure,” he answered regardless, just to move the conversation along. “I’ll wait for some additional polls to come out over the coming days before I fully believe anything. That’ll roughly be my answer to the question accompanying that data as well.”

“That works wonderfully for us, Mister President,” the media leader said. “I’d also like to talk to you about the appearance of Undine and Siena during the band break. As I understand, both can hide themselves very well, so perhaps-“

“You should discuss that with them directly,” John interrupted. Not because he was strictly against taking messages for them, but because there was a sudden knock at the door. While Beatrice went there, he moved to finish things in a friendly manner. “I’m certain I already sent you their recently created contact information.”

“You did indeed, but it would take a moment to reach them, I’m sure.” The president didn’t seem to get the obvious signal. “If you wouldn’t mind, Mister President, I’d really like to discuss all of the details with you, personally. It’s guaranteed to be the highest rated show in my organization’s history, if we plan this thoroughly together.”

‘Maybe, but I’m not here to make your program a success,’ John thought. He knew when he was being taken advantage of to increase the fame of an organization. Lending his name to such a cause was cheap, but now he was being asked to provide his brainpower to that end. Since the nice avenue hadn’t worked, John decided to be a bit more direct. “As flattering as that is, I have other things to do.”

He glanced over to the door, which Beatrice now fully opened. An unknown woman with white hair came walking in, wearing a suit that was clearly bought off a shelf and a nervous expression. Upon seeing John choking Eliza, that expression mixed with amusement. Bafflement would have been the usual reaction, but the Gamer had no doubt that his reputation had spread to whoever she was. He didn’t even need Observe to tell him that this woman had a good reason to be there.

“I see,” the president sounded scorned with an intensity only rich businessmen who could leverage their influence to get what they wanted could be, given the lightness of John’s rebuttal. “I hope this won’t reflect negatively on your appearance on my program, Mister President.”

“It’ll be as good as it can be,” John responded simply. “I wish you a good night.” He gave the man a chance to respond, but nothing ever came. After confirming that the call had ended, John mumbled, “Lots of people only have manners when things go their way.” Then he turned towards the white-haired woman. “Sorry for the odd welcome,” he glanced at Eliza and the growing puddle under her dangling legs, “and the mess.” He had no intention of letting go. The lewd expression on the submissive’s face was too delightful.

“No worries, you’re known for stuff like that,” the woman said, pulling at the sleeves of her suit. After clearing her throat, she added, “Hope that didn’t sound respectless or anything, your… presidentness?”

“John will do.” He tried to calm her with his relaxed tone. “Please, have a seat.” With a simple gesture, he pointed at the chair Beatrice had fetched from a corner of the room. Once she sat, he got to business. “So, Observe tells me you’re here as a representative of the remaining small guilds on Fusion’s western border.” Observe also told him that she was chosen because she was the best looking among them and there, apparently, was a rumour going around he was really into white hair. John could not refute that allegation, given the way he had created all of his Artificial Spirits.

“Does it also tell you why I came here?” the woman, named Janna, asked.

“It’s rather vague on that,” John responded truthfully. Observe was, as so often, an imprecise tool. ‘I wonder if there is a hidden dice that rolls how good the intel I get is…’ he thought, while denying an offer of Beatrice to just tell him what had been briefly discussed at the door. That would have taken the fun out of the discussion. Having a talk with a good-looking woman while strangling a masochistic gorgeous one satisfied some base urge. “What exactly can I do for you?”

“So, to put it simply…” she started and looked at him for a little while. John could see the way she was evaluating him. To what end, he wasn’t quite sure. There was no overt sexual interest there. It was the kind of long stare one gave before making an important decision. Then she opened her mouth again.