Desert Heat

"WARNING. This game is intended for mature readers and may contain explicit sexual scenes and/or questionable consensuality depending on play. It is possible to complete the game without encountering these elements; however, the reader is assumed to be proceeding at eir own risk.

The sound of windblown sand smoothing the dunes and scouring the city walls is the only song nature produces in Hajima. You have seen representations of colorful and exotic birds in your brother's books, creatures who are said to produce music more easily than a musician's flute, even found in the market rare insects and reptiles that chirr or hum in pleasing tones. But sandsong is not kind to life. The beasts bred for desert work are thick-skinned, dull, and plodding. There is no beauty in them.

The men who drive them are little more appealing, wrapped in the rough, colorless cloth that is all they can afford to protect them from the blowing sand. Brutes and slavers, suitable for nothing more than labor.

Perhaps it is this attitude that has kept you unmarried and untouched, despite your brother's urgings. Even in the slender courtiers with their gold and silks you see reflected the hateful black eyes of the drovers.

You are Aika Sabakan, a free woman of high social class, and no one can force you to do anything against your will, not even carry on the family line." [--blurb from Competition Aught-Zero]