After the Rally at VR R'lyeh

The journalist closed his laptop. "The angles of the limbs were all wrong" was the only thing he could write about the Metaverse orgy. It was about the only thing he remembered, which he guessed meant it hadn't been much of an orgy even taking into account the usual logistical issues of VR sex.

Not the sort of insight any site would pay for. Everybody knew AI generated avatars were bad at the fine details of anatomy. Jokes aside, it had led avatar-on-avatar porn to lean into large groups, trading quality for quantity and often symptomatic personalization. Deliberately unrealistic avatars —even for the long-artificial standards of porn— had been another development.

None of it worth writing about anymore unless it was for media for people who pretended to simultaneously not know and disapprove. The journalist had though he had found a new angle to upscale his very borderline specialty: cultist sex. Everybody was, always, fascinated with them. QAnon had collapsed under the weight of its own visibility but there were always more from the depths it had come from. There were always people wanting to believe in something to sell their souls to in exchange for permission to be as cruel as they wanted to be.

The Cthulhu Army would never be taken seriously, never grow beyond the weird fringes of the psychiatrically undiagnosed and the politically horrifying - at least that was the common wisdom. The journalist wasn't so sure. Maybe, he had thought, infiltrating their rituals would be a way to get expertise that would be valuable later. The viral article-to-book-to-streaming traditional path, with any luck.

But the orgy had been strange, its doctrinal preface almost nonexistent, no like-and-subscribe, no crypto collection plate. Just indescribable interactive porn he remembered little of except for the strangeness itself.

The article idea was a dud, his interest in the Cthulhu Army nonetheless grown. They were cryptic, strange, disruptive, fanatical, but he was just starting to think they might have some valid points. Getting off his desk to make a coffee, he noticed for the first time his hands looked like always yet at the same time strangely weird. Their joints not quite right, somehow.