It surprised Rylia not one bit that the Asari had a thriving sex toy market. That, in fact, they were by far the most prolific current manufacturers of such. Her human self had idly wondered, before her transmigration, just how much of Asari sex was actually physical. After all, they did that whole ‘Embrace Eternity’ thing, right? So was sex for Asari more mental than physical? Thankfully, given that she wasn’t going to be letting anyone meld with her anytime soon with the System in her head, the Rylia part of her had been intimately familiar with the answer.
Sex for Asari was absolutely still physical.
In fact, despite the way that it had been presented in the Mass Effect games, melding wasn’t a casual thing. Not melds that went deep enough to matter for sex, at least. Asari treated melding a lot like most of the more prudish races did sex. It was something for romantic partners to share, at least when you went deep enough for pleasure to be involved, and even then it only amplified the experience by doubling the fun through shared pleasure. It enhanced sex by causing both partners to echo each other’s physical pleasures, rather than creating those pleasures in the first place. In fact, one of the many reasons that Asari liked partnering with other races over their own, was that they got to experience new and interesting sorts of pleasure from alien partners with equally alien anatomy.
There were other types of melds, of course. The type of meld Liara had almost immediately offered to attempt with Shepard was a much shallower informational meld. Asari were effectively touch-telepaths, who could share experiences much faster and with far more context via an informational meld. Coworkers might well use that type of meld to help communicate technical details swiftly and clearly. Family and friends could be expected to use a slightly deeper meld that carried emotional context with the information, allowing clearer and cleaner emotional connections that explained why Asari were such social creatures as a whole. A meld deep enough to share full experiences and physical stimuli? Only very close friends or lovers were generally allowed to dive so deep, and the line between ‘close friend’ and ‘lover’ was razor thin for most Asari in the first place.
There were, of course, exceptions. Medical professionals might need to meld for an easier diagnosis. Being able to experience your patients’ symptoms was a hell of a shortcut, after all. But that was the equivalent for stripping for a doctor to do a medical exam. Likewise, being a Consort was an actual full-blown profession that were closer to mental-health professionals than whores. Yes, sex could be involved with them, but it more often wasn’t. Misunderstandings there from other species came from the fact that it was more common for those other species to have serious mental-health hangups regarding sex.
Maybe only one in two hundred Asari who visited a Consort would have sex with them. Whereas one in twenty Turians might. That was because their fucked-up, military-focused society led to fantastic amounts of sexual health hangups and teaching them ‘a better way’ could help with those hangups. Well, a ‘better way’ by Asari views. With two perspectives to view it from, Rylia could say with certainty that the Asari were probably a bit too quick to jump to that as a diagnosis and solution. Which, of course, only helped spread the reputation.
Either way, it resulted in general misconceptions about the profession, and the romance vids out there didn’t help by depicting melding as part of romance. Asari understood the subcontext. Other races really didn’t get it, and the fact that they didn’t was so alien to Asari in general that it was hard for them to verbalize a correction. Particularly when they didn’t really see the reputation as a bad thing, due to their own open views on sex.
Wrestling back to the main point after drifting rather far from it though…Asari sex wasn’t just ‘still physical.’ It was, in fact, mostly physical, just like the vast majority of other races that developed to take pleasure from sex. As a result, it wasn’t surprising that the race most known for casual attitudes towards sex dominated the porn industry and produced a large range of sex-toys and sex-related paraphernalia.
What had surprised Rylia, or the human Hazel who now resided in Rylia’s brain and life, was how fucking unimaginative the Asari were with the designs of said toys. For all their curiosity made them fantastic explorers, Asari were, in fact, actually sort of bad at being creative. Art was something of an exception there, but even that was the realm of a small minority of Asari who happen to be pushed upward rather strongly in status by the very trait that made them good at it. Asari society and culture as a whole pushed for innovation, but a very small subset of the population were properly good at it.
Worse, in a way, the vast majority that were tended to be snapped up for critical Research and Development. While those that remained tended to be buoyed upward by their society, becoming famous artists, writers, poets, and so on.
The whole thing was, again, an artifact of their age and maturation cycle. Maidens were the only ones who really had the mindset to innovate, and they were too restless and full of wanderlust to actually sit down and do the innovation. Most older Asari, in turn, lost the mindset for it by the time they settled down into jobs where it would be useful. It had, in fact, Rylia could now realize from an outside viewpoint, been why the Asari had latched onto the Salarians when they first met.
The Salarians were their natural opposites in this regard, short-lived and incredibly good at creative innovation. Something Asari culture held in such high regard that it had pushed through an alliance that shouldn’t really have happened. Salarian society and culture made entirely too many of them walking war crimes, which should have put the largely peaceful Asari off. But it hadn’t, because of the collective species-wide high of running into a species chock full of innovators.
In the end, the temptation to ignore the ugly bits in order to benefit from the windfall in innovation had been too great. Doubly so when they (somewhat correctly) didn’t view the Salarians as much of a threat to them. The Salarians were too short lived and too few in number in comparison to the Asari at the time to be an actual, credible threat. Honestly, even thousands of years later, they were still barely a credible threat, which is why the initial alliance had lasted so long.
The reason for that lack of threat was two-fold. First, Asari longevity was the product of cellular regeneration that made even the most virulent of plagues nearly worthless against their biology. Asari didn’t really get sick the same way other species did. To the point that Rylia, after considering it carefully, had actually come to the conclusion that the lack of Asari husks in the Mass Effect games was probably legitimate, rather than an oversight or design limitation.
Be it by nature or something the Protheans had done, Asari would be incredibly resistant to even a Reaper-created form of nanite or pathogen. With that avenue pretty much a non-starter, there weren’t really any super weapons that could deal with the massive and dispersed population of the Asari species. Only the Krogan and Rachni, who could both compete with the Asari numbers game, had ever truly managed to threaten Asari dominance. With those numbers, of course, being the secondary reason the Salarians just…couldn’t really properly threaten their oldest allies. Something which was probably the only reason said Salarians hadn’t genocided more species, really.
Wrestling back to the main point, again. An Asari who was both creative enough to innovate and interested in making sex toys instead of the giant spaceships or amazing artworks that would see them catapulted to the top of Asari society? Yeah, that combination was so rare that it basically didn’t exist. The majority of really interesting toys were actually thought up by other species and then refined and mass produced by the Asari.
Which, as it happened, was doubly problematic. Few of the other species out there had similar enough anatomy to create the right things, unless they were specifically making them for Asari. Salarians didn’t really have a sex drive at all. Turians did and were technically compatible on a physical level but were easily the most prudish species in Citadel Space. Batarians were sadomasochistic psychopaths who brought pain and torture into sex as a matter of cultural norms. Quarians had been fantastic at making sex toys that were Asari compatible. They’d been one of the Asari’s favorite species as a result…right up until the whole Geth thing and Quarian tech had been thrown out en masse for fear of Geth infection.
There was actually a dedicated day of lament for the loss of all the cool sex toys. Ironically, there wasn’t one for the Quarians, since the Asari were among those who remembered that their war had been a civil war. As far as the Asari were concerned, the remaining Quarians had sort of brought their situation on themselves, since they were the remnants of the side that started the shooting. Not the ones that had tried to defend the, until the shooting started, incredibly harmless Geth.
Yeah, the Asari might legitimately have a point in mourning the amazing sex toys they’d had to throw out more than the survivors’ situation. Even if Hazel’s perspective meant she realized, where most Asari didn’t fully process it, that the current Quarians weren’t really the same group any longer. What with all of the originals being long dead by now. Rylia remembered her mother tearing up on the Day of Mourning when she’d recalled having to throw her favorite toys into an industrial furnace, along with a long line of other mourning Asari clutching their own favorites.
Hazel got it. She’d have hated to give up her own favorite toys for the greater good. Even if she might not have teared up over ‘sacrificing’ them…
There was a bright spot on the horizon, as Humans were just as compatible as Quarians had been. Possibly even a bit more so. Yet they hadn’t been around long enough to realize the niche they could make a killing on. More accurately, they probably had, certainly some of her simps likely had ideas. But the Systems Alliance was trying so hard to make a good impression that they’d likely quietly shot ‘sex industry takeover of Asari domestic sex toy production’ in the back of the head whenever it came up as a possibility. Stupid of them, since the Asari would have loved them for it. But the Hazel part of her understood the SA having failed to grasp that fact properly.
All of which, taken together, was fucking fantastic for Rylia.
A perfect storm, even.
After all, she was a reasonably wealthy Asari who had enough money to get things into at least limited mass production. Better, she was a stripper/sex worker for whom it wouldn’t look at all odd if she came up with ideas for sex toys. Best yet, she had a millions strong audience of simps that would cheerfully make the galaxy aware of her new products! All while having a System which meant she could just buy designs for extremely fun looking sex toys from other realities, so she didn’t have to come up with them from scratch. Even if she’d likely have to do some level of adaptation for the local tech base.
Heck, the fact that she showed ‘innovation’ as an Asari would even open doors for her when she started wanting to sell other stuff. Her species had zero negative connotations related to sex and sex products. So, to her fellow Asari, it would just be a sign she was one of those rare few prized members of their species with a mind for innovation at an age where she was still motivated to do something with those ideas.
Now, she just needed to pick out which sex toy(s) from which reality she wanted to show off on a ‘special stream.’ Oh, and she also had to practice her strip routine for tomorrow’s shift. Just to make sure she hadn’t lost her touch with Hazel being the more dominant mind behind the body now…
… … …
Rylia was extremely glad that the part of her that had been Rylia from the start had known her usual routines so deeply that they were pure muscle memory. Her initial attempts at practicing those routines, with the stripper pole that Rylia did, in fact, have in her apartment for just that purpose, had revealed some minor issues. Ones that she suspected were going to carry over into biotic usage as well, leaving her mentally making a note to find a nearby bioti-ball complex and use ‘refreshing her skills’ as an excuse to deal with that as well.
Specifically, the issue she’d noted was that Hazel being the dominant mind got in the way of the muscle memory. Despite what the name made people think, ‘muscle memory’ is still memory. Just like all memory, it’s stored in the brain, a form of procedural long-term memory that enables execution of certain movements without conscious thought. It was, of course, the without conscious thought bit that had screwed with Rylia. The long-term memory was still there, but it only worked smoothly when she didn’t think about what she was doing. The moment she consciously considered her actions, there were…misfires.
Embarrassing ones.
Ones that had caused a few faceplants and one extremely painful ramming of the pole somewhere sensitive. She was really glad no one was recording that, seeing her accidentally bruise her azure with a stripper pole she’s spent thousands of hours on would not have looked good for her image. Not even with her simps. Well, maybe with her simps. She supposed blooper reels were a thing for more than just humans.
Thankfully, her stripping routines were so deeply embedded that even a couple of quick hours had been enough to smooth out the issues with two of the routines. That was enough to get through her current shift, and she could easily refresh the others before she would have to use them. Rylia was a part-timer who only worked three days a week, after all. Days randomly chosen so that her simps would never be quite sure when she would and wouldn’t be there.
Tonight, they were delighted, and Rylia had to admit, with the new perspective of Hazel dominant in her mind, the entire routine was…exhilarating. As she went into a sensual backbend that practically ground her ‘azure’ into the pole and blew a kiss at one of her admirers only a few feet away, she marveled at the confidence that came from the part of her that was still Rylia.
Hazel hadn’t been bad looking at all, pretty in a ‘nerdy girl next door’ sort of way that had resulted in one or two HR issues popping up in her male-dominated field. Yet she’d never, ever, had the sort of raw magnetism and confidence that practically oozed out of the part of her that had been Rylia.
It was a heady sort of feeling for a girl who’d drawn boatloads of hentai, but hadn’t exactly had a whole lot of actual experience with either sex. Almost none with men, as she’d always preferred the curves of the feminine body over the blocky look of most guys. Only a little bit more with women. A few roommates, a single girlfriend that had taught her a lot.
That was about it.
Rylia, on the other hand, was sex-on-legs and knew it. She’d had dozens of flings with Asari, Turians, and even a human fan or two of both genders.
Breathing heavy, but in just the right ways to emphasize her unusually large tits for a Maiden, she spun around the pole and pulled herself upright in a motion that was, in fact, as complicated as it looked. This was fun. She was glad she’d held off any thought of quitting until her contract ran out. She’d have to get serious soon enough, after all. For now, she’d enjoy this as a little bit of fun stress relief…
… … …
“Hmm. So many options, a bunch of which would sell pretty well, I think. Should I go with the ones that would be the most fun for me? Or maybe focus on the ones that most look like they were made for Asari anatomy? This is supposed to be something I came up with, after all…”
Paging through the latest selection of sex toys, this set from the Star Wars universe, she added a few to a ‘wishlist’ she was using for organization. It was something she’d figured out how to do while sorting out far more important items she was going to need, with the ‘wishlist’ system letting her pull together items from multiple different realities in one place. Reluctantly, having been having entirely too much fun imaging what all the different toys would do to her, she decided she’d collated enough options.
The question now was how to sort out the right ones.
After a moment of consideration, she decided to winnow this list down to a secondary ‘best choices’ list by applying two criteria. No…three. Yes, all three should help her pare down the list. First, she needed to remember the difference between human and Asari anatomies and pick out only the ones that looked like they would work best for Asari. An Asari making a human-specific sex toy would get strange looks, after all, and there were some significant differences to consider.
Despite an Asari ‘azure’ looking quite similar to female human genitals, they didn’t at all have the same hot spots. In part, logically, that was because Asari lacked a male counterpart. There was significant evidence back on Thessia that such hadn’t always been the case. There were pre-historic records that indicated there had been male Asari of a sort, and there was some evidence of tampering in their genome that most thought was a natural part of their evolution of the ability to meld.
Personally, Rylia had a different theory.
“We were totally some perverted Prothean’s attempt to make a sex doll race or something, weren’t we? We know they had sexual dimorphism, and I know, or probably know I suppose, that they were touch telepaths. Asari weren’t always the same and it seems to have ‘developed’ into the genome at roughly the same time that we went all-female as a race. Doubt that’s an accident. Particularly not if the not-so-nice bits about the Prothean Empire from the Mass Effect 3 content are accurate.”
Her theory certainly fit some other bits too, such as the particular positioning of Asari sensitive bits being such that even just regular day-to-day movement tended to cause light arousal in adults. Nothing that wasn’t easily ignored, but it was always just sort of there, in the background, and explained quite a lot about Asari sexual openness. It was also the exact sort of thing someone custom-tailoring a servitor race of sex dolls or similar might want.
The reason for the always-on mild arousal was pretty obvious to anyone that bothered reading a basic anatomy summary. Much like human woman, or Quarians for that matter, Asari had a set of ‘lower lips.’ Three layers, instead of two like humans or a single thicker set for Quarians. Unlike humans and Quarians, whose outermost set of lips were more of a natural environmental guard than anything and less sensitive as a result, all three layers of an Asari ‘azure’ were super dense with nerves. The way they were layered meant that even normal walking movements tended to cause them to rub very gently against each other. Just enough to keep a low-level of arousal going if an Asari was up and moving about. If you swayed your hips a bit more, an easy motion for most Asari, it got a fair bit more intense, too.
Add in two separate clitoris-analogues, bracketing the top of their azure and positioned between the second and third layers set of lips, where they could easily rub a bit with the right motion, and there were honestly a pretty intense amount of nerves right at the entrance of an Asari azure. Evolution explainers excused the concentration away as an adaptation to the eventual absence of males in the species. Just as they explained away the fact that there was another major nerve cluster much deeper in, as a ‘left over’ from when there had been Asari males. Fingers would never reach that deep in their pussy-equivalent, it really only getting hit properly with a nicely long toy or a pretty big dick.
Yeah, there was a reason Krogan had been, and to an extent still were, well-liked lovers for a certain segment of Asari. Asari bits were even more elastic than a human’s, their cellular regeneration let them heal up from a little bit of ‘rough use,’ and Krogan dicks were absolutely big enough to hit that extra nerve cluster with every thrust. The fact they had two dicks and some Asari, like humans, enjoyed anal as well and…yeah. Krogan were pretty popular with some Asari. Personally, Rylia hadn’t cared too much for the one time she’d tried out a ‘Krogan Ride,’ their mating instincts being a bit too rough for her to enjoy as much as that segment of the Asari population did.
“Wait. Focus Rylia. The fact Asari are totally engineered for sex is secondary. Except in that it doesn’t exactly exclude a lot of toys. There’s a reason no Asari has ever really needed to think of something super-duper-extra clever. A basic fucking vibrator can turn most of us into mush.”
It was true, and meant that most Asari toys focused on either length to hit that extra set of nerves, or else potent and varied vibrations. Some toys tried to do both, though doing it that way tended to make it not as good at either unless it was a pretty high-end model. The only real ‘exotic’ toys, at least in general use, were ones that used Mass Effect fields as well. The high-Ezeo content of Asari nervous systems made those extra effective. A properly calibrated mass effect field, applied correctly, turned basically their whole nervous system into an erogenous zone. Given that Ezeo was dirt cheap for Asari corporations, since over eighty percent of all Ezeo mining in Citadel Space was controlled by their species, it was even a fairly cheap extra. It did have the downside of being fairly unsafe for other races, though…
Hmmm, with the anatomy bit being less helpful than expected in simplifying her list, better focus on the other two bits. The bigger and more important one was that they needed to be unique. Whatever she introduced needed to either provide a novel type of stimulation that existing mass market toys didn’t, or else be suitable for roleplay. In that area, at least, Asari were suitably creative. Long lives meant plenty of time to explore exotic kinks, which was another part of why they dominated the porn industry.
Vanilla sex was only interesting for so long, before you wanted to branch out. So the other angle would be something that enabled new or existing kinks? That thought got a number of toys specifically earmarked, while others were discarded as being too similar to already-on-market options.
The last criteria, that she’d tacked on almost as an afterthought, actually helped narrow the focus the most. Which toys could she make without using wildly exotic tech for the ME tech base. Using completely unknown materials science in a sex toy would be a bit much. As would including anything that would require whatever a universe’s local unobtanium nonsense material was. Something that relied on psychic energy not present in the Mass Effect verse, or which used metaphysics the locals had no knowledge of, wouldn’t be terribly practical.
Sadly, that did delete a significant number of very interesting toys. Maybe she’d buy a few for herself anyway? Come to think of it, if she wanted to use her simps for advertising, she’d have to be willing to use whatever this toy or toys she selected ended up being on stream. A few of them were a bit…much. At least for now. The Hazel part of her will still adjusting to how much more intense sex could be for Asari, even if the Rylia part of her was well used to it.
“Well, fuck. I still have like…fifty options here. Time to cross reference with existing stuff and common Asari kinks more thoroughly, I guess?”
Who knew taking over the galaxy’s sex toy industry would involve so much research? Sighing, she started trying to piece together some statistics and patterns that would help her figure it out…