Content warning: slutshaming, gambling with weird stakes, abuse.

The other day I got this massager from Chris. I hadn't planned on using it so soon, but…
Well, it's time to unpack the device and read its manual. Who am I kidding, no one reads manuals. Okay, looking at the thing itself, there appear to be two modes: battery and live. Battery probably means, that power is taken from a battery, whereas live… is live? That doesn't really explain anything on its own, but let's think about it for a moment. In this world, everything is powered by Momentum, so "live" would then mean, that it's directly powered by Momentum – it probably has a small reactor inside to do that. This would also coincide with the slogan "feels like a riding duel on your clit", as well, you could watch a riding duel while pointing that thing towards your clit and have fun that way if card games on their own are not fun enough for you. Is there any person in this world, who does not enjoy a good card game on its own? Maybe. I don't know.
Since there are no riding duels in my vicinity – or at least I don't know of any, even if some website out there probably has some ad claiming otherwise – I'll try out the battery mode. There's an intensity slider for that, which ranges from Clear Mind to Burning Soul, but I have no idea, how many settings there are between. The slider seems to slide very smoothly with little to no clicks to indicate whether or not something changed. Not quite user-friendly if you do it like that, but perhaps this means there are just so many settings in between, that you barely notice the difference from one to the next. If so, then Chris must really have put a lot of work into this thing.
As Yusei used to live around here, I was kinda hoping something from him would remain, though of course most things, such as the D-Wheels, some furniture and of course their clothes were not here. I did manage to find some old newspaper with articles mentioning Yuseis victory in the WRPG however. His riding suit is so tight, you can clearly see the bulge indicating the size of his junk… warrior. I start with the lowest setting first, which is already quite intensive. So this is what it feels like, when you're performing an Accel Synchro. I tune myself to the vibrations of the device and Synchro Summon my juices onto the blanket. Perhaps it's time to clean up before Zora notices.

That night I had a very good rest. Perhaps because of what I did before, or perhaps because the meeting starts at ten and we don't have to work earlier, leaving us much more time to actually sleep. Chris only wakes me just in time for the aforementioned meeting, but to be fair, she also left me with plenty of time to get ready as well.
"I see you've set it to 'fairly mild'. Was it pleasant?" When the hell did she check that? Wait, how did she even enter? Normally, she'd honk outside.
"It worked as intended." I can feel how my blush is giving her a better review than I myself could. Using it was one thing, but talking about using it with someone you share a work relationship with… there were better topics to discuss, such as politics and the like, even if I more or less promised her my reviews in exchange for the device. But now that I am already thinking about politics, another question pops into my head. "What is Emily Goodwin like? Does anyone here know her?"
"Well, given your reaction towards Ryouko, I'd say you two would be natural enemies." Oh god, please not another evil princess type. "Though I guess, if you were to ask me for a way to differentiate between the two… Ryouko is less serious." I wonder, whether that short hesitation was a positive one – indicating, that she is not quite sure, how much worse she is – or a negative one – meaning, she just wanted to phrase this as nicely as possible without worrying me further. But I guess I'll have to find that out myself. "Either way, Emily is a really nasty one." That warning should have went without saying. "You should watch your tongue, when you're close to her. You're not Yuri after all."
I've come to envy Yuri's powers once again. Hopefully she uses them this time at least. If not for herself, than at least for our sake. I'd really hate it, if something went wrong and she could have fixed it, but decided not to for no reason whatsoever.
And now I should calm down. As of yet, Yuri did not do anything wrong today. There is a chance, that she might, but there is also the chance, that she saves our asses and I will give her the benefit of the doubt and not make further assumptions until she does.

We arrive at Goodwin Manor and are greeted by her maid, a woman in her forties with grey hair. Unlike Yuri, her outfit seems appropriate for the kind of work she was doing. On the other hand, Yuri's outfit seems more appropriate for this day and age, the times of ankles being considered lewd is long gone by now. If I had to rate them, I'd probably prefer the latter and I tell myself I'd make that decision regardless of whether or not she controlled me right now. But does she? I don't smell any lilies, so it may be fine.
"The lady is already awaiting you." Yusei enters first, followed by some other men, followed by Ryouko, some other women, Kazuko and Hyona, Chris, myself and… Yuri? "Not you!" Yuri is the only one to be held up. Again, that discrimination as if she was subhuman, from a maid no less. "We already have enough staff in the building, and we can't have someone like you set a bad example for them in those unsightly clothes."
"Ufufu." Yuri merely laughs at such a hurtful statement. She really has a strong heart, hasn't she? "I will gladly take them off for you. Though I'd prefer someone of my own age." Okay, that may have been somewhat inappropriate. No wait, it's Yuri, she clearly means it in a way, that can only be inappropriate.
"Such insolence! Do you know no shame?" The maid's voice appears to be growing louder and louder with each line of dialogue.
"Ara ara, and here I thought your pay to already be as shameless as things can get," Yuri returns in a very teasing way.
"That joke's on you. I don't get paid for I am indebted to my mistress with my life!" The maid was very determined, as if her honour was on the line.
"Is that your kink or are you so old that actual slavery was still legal when you made that deal?" That jab was too much for the maid and she passes out from thinking about it.
"For the record, slavery is legal." Yusei walks up to Yuri. "As I understand it, you're currently in a lot of debt, aren't you? You should do your best to keep out of trouble before it worsens." What the fuck? Since when is slavery legal again? And did Yusei just threaten to fire Yuri? I guess, she could be causing him trouble right now, but I'm not quite sure, whether we'll resolve this situation without her. "Now come along and keep quiet."

We meet Emily in a very fancily decorated living room with a fireplace burning real wood. A butler was just bringing her some tea to let her calm down, it appears something has upset her. "That Kobayakawa bitch, complaining about me using anime cards," she mumbles before taking a sip, "does she not know that I make the rules of this game?"
"Milady, it appears you have guests," the butler informs her.
"What? Then where's Hilda?" She looks around in search for someone before spotting Yuri. "You! Has no one informed you about the dress code? How dare you be clothed so inappropriately in front of me?"
"Pardon my rudeness, ojou-sama, but I am a child of this century." No, no, there is no rudeness to pardon, that line was delivered for its rudeness alone. Yuri, what are you doing? Especially after that whole shebang just earlier at the gate.
"I thought as much. Kids these days rarely know their manners, especially plebs." She sighs. "Ah, how far society has fallen." Emily herself was of course dressed in the Victorianest of dresses. At least Yuri didn't comment on that as well. Or on her over the top blonde drills. Or on her height or age, drawing attention to Emily's supposed ability to suck on her boobs while standing.
"Speaking about society falling," I interrupt them before the topic can get out of hand while also shaking that image out of my mind, "we still have a reactor, which if it were to over-spin could cause dramatic results."
"Indeed," Yusei helped me out. "While we've managed to stabilize it by connecting it to other cities, we already notice similar trends to those in the past."
Ryouko pulls out a barely labeled graph. It had labels, mind you, but Emily would probably not be able to read them from that distance. "As we can see, just two years after Yusei released Fortune, the increase in people Synchro Summoning was enough to raise the threat of a disaster to pre-Fortune levels."
"And what about that is my problem?"
"We believe this to be an inherent risk of the planetary gear. No matter, how safe we make the reactor, it can never be completely safe," Yusei explained, discrediting the happy end of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's. "We can hardly expect the reactor to hold a decade if trends continue as they are, let alone two centuries."
"We need to make Synchro Summoning less frequent, and I think we can do that by making it less popular." Thus I advertise my proposal of alternative Summoning methods. I take what I know from the other Yu-Gi-Oh! animes and apply it here. After all, the thing that made 5D's good as an anime was not Synchro Summoning or card games on motorcycles – it was the intriguing plot that no other series had afterwards. Even if we introduced cards from the relative future, it would still be the world of 5D's that I love.
"Are you insane? Do you know how much people love buying Stardust merch from us? They're begging for us to print an actual card, putting its price at over a billion yen if I were to do that." She let out a laugh, that would best fit a villainous princess in anime. "But of course, I won't sell it for less than 100 billion."

This was serious business. If the price of Stardust Dragon were to fall, Emily might print it to capitalize on it before it diminished completely. At that point, Yusei would no longer have the advantage of owning a Signer dragon.
"You there, show them the exit," she says to Yuri. Yuri does nothing of the sort. "Did I stutter?"
"The more important question is, what makes you believe I would follow your orders." Yuri still made no gesture pointing us towards the exit, instead provoking Emily with questioning facial expressions. Yusei does not seem to be a fan of them either, but he lets her do as she pleases. Fighting women with women, I guess.
"You're a maid, are you not? Your lady commands you to do it!" Emily shouts while waving her arms around.
"You are not my lady," Yuri declared strongly.
"It's treason, then." Emily clapped her hands twice and the butler fetched her her duel disk and deck. "You shall duel me and if I win, you will swear your loyalty until death."
"Making high demands, aren't you?" This situation was completely out of control. Emily, the quasi-noble, challenged Yuri, a maid in costume only, to a duel over her honour. In medieval times, this would end deadly. "Fine, but if I win, you will lick the shoes of everyone else in this mansion, including your own maids, and then you will implement Sakura's suggestion at once."
"What the fuck, Yuri?" I shout. "She's a child, can't you think of something more appropriate?"
"Don't worry about winning," Emily says as the duel disk shuffles her deck. "For you see, it is impossible for me to lose." She draws five cards and reveals them to be the five pieces of Exodia.
"Ah, so this is the game we're playing." Yuri smirks. "You're trying to burn me to death with three copies of Sparks and two Hinotama."
A faint lily smell fills the room. I quickly move to cover my nose, but Chris has a better idea: a face mask. Thankfully, I too carry those around all the time thanks to recent events, so I quickly put mine on as well. I wonder, why I didn't think about that earlier. The face mask does not completely protect me – my vision is still a bit blurry – but I can at least still see the five pieces of Exodia. Interestingly enough, most men and some women were unaffected as well, judging from their eyes, which didn't look hypnotized to me. I wonder, what's special about the rest, but we have a more serious issue at hand.
"Well, that's too sad, for you see, I hold the five pieces of Exodia!" Yuri pulls out five cards of her deck, which very likely weren't the pieces of Exodia. For one, I can't imagine Yuri actually playing that card – it's very male after all – and also I can make out one of these cards to be a trap despite my blurry vision.
"Stop that at once, whatever you're doing!" Emily's butler shouts. Of course, since neither he nor any of the other men were affected, her bluff could not work in front of an audience, that she hasn't bribed or which as in our case depends on her success.

"Silence!" Emily admits defeat and kneels down in front of her butler.
At the last second, Yuri throws her a handkerchief – not her own, I think she stole it from one of the maids earlier. "On second thought, you may use that instead of your tongue. But make sure to polish them nicely." Am I glad, that she remembers my words even if Emily ignored them. I wonder if she would have made her actually use her tongue like she almost wanted me to.
Emily's staff was bound to her orders and no one would allow themselves to object to her orders. So when Yuri's command was reflected in them, there was just no way of not humiliating her.
In the meantime Yuri takes away her duel disk and has a look at her deck. "Just as I expected. She 'confused' sorting and shuffling." She tosses the duel disk and deck into the fireplace and it explodes spectacularly like an oversized Samsung battery. And despite that, Yuri, who stood right next to it when it happened, is unscathed by it.
There are just so many mysterious things about Yuri, I can barely believe they fit into one person. Still, there's one question, that piques my interest more than any other at this moment. "What's it with you and feet?"
"Hmm?"
Oh come on, don't pretend you didn't hear me or don't know how to answer. "What's it with you and feet?" I ask again, so that she can't escape my question. "Or shoes or whatever that fetish of yours is in the end."
"Oh, that…" For some reason, Yuri fidgets around instead of giving me a proper response. She's fallen silent except for the sound of her adjusting her dress.
Ryouko throws me to the ground as she rushes past me to hug her or something. I won't be seeing much else from this scene, as the hit was strong enough for me to…

I wake up, but rather than being transported to a hospital or something, I'm in the office, with a pillow on my desk. At least it was a normal white pillow, I don't know how I would have reacted if it was Ryouko's Yuri dakimakura.
"What happened?"
"Nothing, thankfully." Chris informs me, that Ryouko was quick enough to keep Yuri from "going down a dangerous path", and that Emily accepted my proposition. "We did everything as quickly as we could and then gave Yuri some sleep. At that point it looked like you were going to wake up, so Emily's butler drugged you too for good measure. I'm still not sure, what his reasoning was, but here we are."
"I'm not quite sure, if I understand, but how did any of this result from Yuri's foot fetish?"
Chris lets out a huge sigh. "You understand nothing. It's not a fetish, a large number of feet have left a deep imprint on her psyche." That's what I'd call a fetish, but okay, let's go with Chris' wording then. "Anyway, if you're up, she should also be up soon."
We head over to the social room next to the kitchen, where Yuri has been spread over a couch in a manner that appears rather uncomfortable. Ryouko is there too and some tall guy is standing in the corner, busy with looking cool.
"Okay, that's it. I have to kiss her now!" Ryouko decides as if that cliché was to work in real life.
"Don't." Ryouko freezes. The man from the corner has a very deep and menacing voice and could probably be a cop in another world. Yep, that's my headcanon now, he knows what Ryouko is up to and is prepared to turn her in for sexual assault.
Yuri wakes up, producing perhaps the cutest grunt I have ever heard in my entire life. "What's with all the fuzz?"
Ryouko and Chris both sigh in relief, then look angrily at me. As if I had done anything wrong here. Meanwhile Yuri looks at her own hand, noticing, that it is still slightly shaking, but she clenches it to a fist with determination. "I'm fine now, you don't have to keep me company."
"But…" Of course, Ryouko would try to interject something.
"Hush, hush, don't you have any jobs?"

And thus I am back again in my office with Chris.
"Sooo… about those feet…"
"Have you already made your feelings clear to Yusei?" Chris asks in a serious tone. "If you continue this train of thought, you might want to, before it's too late."
"I wouldn't be using your massager if I did." Or maybe I would? Perhaps if Yusei didn't reciprocate my feelings. Not knowing whether he does or not is a kind of torture in its own right, but at the same time it gives me the safety of not being declined a relationship yet.
I honestly don't know, what to do at this point. Do I tell Yusei my feelings? Do I not? How exactly should I even confess at this point, it's not like he knows me for the time I know him and I don't really have anything to impress him yet. Perhaps I should wait, also with the feet thing.
I sigh. Knowing the feet thing could have saved me from a lot of potential trouble with Yuri, though. "Is it really that bad?"
"Not even Yuri knows how bad it really is." Now that is a unique take, if I've ever seen one. "From time to time she's like that, though." Like what? Come on Chris, don't talk in riddles to me. "Just be nice to her, will you?"
Fine. I'll be nice. Whatever. Would still like to know what to watch out for, but guess I'll have to make do without that kind of information.

There is some information, that I can pick up on my own however. That thing about slavery being legal, for instance.
Yuri came from a place, where it was illegal, same as I. The way Yusei phrased it, it might not have been that old a law anyway. Most of the others probably didn't know about it either.
A quick online search reveals the origin of this peculiar law sooner than I would liked. It was established in 2027, and allows people to purchase those, who owe them more than they can reasonably be expected to pay back over the course of their lifetime. The actual text of the law lists a few more limitations, including conditions, that lead to termination, such as the owner not being able to afford for their slave's living expenses or the slave somehow managing to pay back their debt adjusted for inflation. The latter is of course impossible without a slave trade, which is illegal on paper, but legal through this loophole. Though technically, the slave in question does have to agree to that trade, but I doubt that makes a difference in the long run.
My economics degree was useful for once, in that I had to acquire a certain set of skills on my road towards it, that helped me parse this text. I doubt Yuri would understand any of it unless it's explained by secondary literature, which seems to be doing a very awful job at this. It's as if capitalists in this world have noticed, that wage labour is no longer profitable, and therefore turned towards earlier modes of production.
I quickly recall Hilda's words. "I am indebted to my mistress with my life," that's what she said. From the wording of this news article, this could easily be the condition she is referring to. The only question, that remains, is why Emily would want such an arrangement.

As the rest of the week passes by, half of the time at work is occupied thinking about this law, and also how I can prevent myself from falling into it. I doubt, that Yusei wants to make me his slave, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Though I'd not be that sorry if he meant slave in a different context.
The other half I can spend thinking about Yusei himself. Specifically, ways through which I might attract his attention. I'm currently using old news articles with his photo as masturbation material even though AV sites surely must exist in this world. That is really no basis to start a relationship on.
The problem here is, that Yusei barely acknowledges my existence at this point, whereas I very much idolize him beyond limits. Even if we technically know each other, this is what most people would call a parasocial relationship. And I hate it.
To improve my condition, I would have to somehow impress Yusei through my words or actions, but what could impress someone as stoic and handsome as King Crab himself? Nothing, not even Aki's massive chest in a sexy Duel Runner suit would get the Stardust Dragon in his pants to even consider rising.
I sigh. Ah, how much do I envy Aki? Even more so Chris and Yuri… In a boy's mind, bigger must equal better, why else would they compare their dicks to each others to such an extent? But I can't let myself be discouraged here. I'll bet everything I have on the slim chance, that Yusei might like small ones better!