A Family Breakfast, A Demotion, A Torment

Harper

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!

Harper groans as loud as she can manage in Aquan, a deep rumbling that strains her collapsed lungs. Eyes frantic, she looks for someone who can help. Everyone else is sleeping. I’m going to die. Not like this. Please not like this!

She feels herself scooped up. Carried. She’s passing out. Then, she feels the cold splash of water and her gills start to work. Oxygen returns to her brain and she starts to collect herself.

Daphne: +2 VP (Carry Mistress Like The Princess She Will Be x2 [first time slut participant])

“<Sorry, Beloved. I was outvoted. It’s okay. You’ll be okay.>”

Harper feels arms wrap around her, holding her tight at the bottom of the pool. Daphne feels so warm. Harper nuzzles into the mermaid’s shoulder, gills flaring. Just enjoying the hug and breathing.

“<Thank you, Daphne. What happened to me? Last I remember...>”

“<Skye will explain everything at breakfast. Relax. Just stay down here in the pool until one of us gets you, okay?>”

Not knowing what else to say, Harper nods. Daphne gives her a kiss on the forehead, then swims back up to the surface. Harper lays down on the bottom of the pool and closes her eyes. A little more rest. Then we can face the morning.

Skye

Harper’s gone! Oh no! I must have fell asleep!

Daphne returns to the bedroom nook, nodding at Skye. She forces herself out of the chair, feeling stiff. Daphne follows.

“Worried about her? She’s in the pool, perfectly fine, probably trying to get a little more shut-eye. She had a stressful wake-up.”

“I failed her, Ms. Daphne. I should have been on it as soon as she woke.” Skye pulls out her phone. Time to work on breakfast. Do I have time to check on her first? Skye heads to the pool anyways, only to be grabbed by the mermaid.

“Hey, she’s fine. It’s okay. Let me help you make breakfast sashimi. That’s a thing, right?”

Giggling at that bit of absurdity, Skye says, “No, Ms. Daphne, most people do not want to eat a bowl of raw fish for breakfast. But, I’ll make you one anyways. Just one, though.”

Sizzling meat and eggs fill the kitchen with sounds and smells galore. Corn-beef hash frying up in a pan. Pancake batter mixing and maple syrup infusing add sensations, too. Fruits washed, chopped, and tossed, awaiting service. And Ms. Daphne was almost helpful at times. Soon enough, Skye hears stirring from the bedroom nook.

“WHERE’S HARPER!!!!!!!”

Josie stomps into the kitchen, fangs bared. She at least didn’t go into her bloodlust. Ms. Daphne simply says, “She’s in the pool. She was asphyxiating when she woke up, like I said she would have been. She’s fine now.”

The wolf-girl deflates like a balloon, sheepishly going, “Oh.”

“Well, carefully get her out of the pool. Breakfast is almost ready.”

The gym girl heads to the pool as Ms. Daphne and Skye start carrying breakfast to the dining room table. Ms. Tina, Ms. Scarlet, and Ms. Dinah are all sitting at the table. Is everyone as tired as I am?

“I can walk, Josie. I’m not a complete invalid.”

“Quiet, you. How many times have you died in the past 24 hours?”

“I don’t know? Once, twice at most.”

“And that is two times too many, Harper. Here. Sit. Eat.” And Josie pours Harper into the dining room throne, much to Harper’s displeasure. It takes a few moments, but, as Harper takes an incidental look at herself for the first time this morning, she starts to freak out.

“WHY AM I BLUE?!?!?!?”

Skye tries to comfort her wife, noting, “It’s a pretty shade of blue, at least.”

Harper’s gills flare. “That’s beside the point, love. I went on my date looking normal. I wake up here suffocating and blue. I’ll allowed to be...”

Ms. Daphne stops Harper before she says something she’ll regret later by explaining her theory from last night. The sea elf calms down. “Okay. Need to take stock here. I’m aquamarine blue now. And my hair is like sea-foam green? My fingers are webbed. The weird feeling between my toes makes me think that those are webbed now too. My grip feels a little weird. Looks like we’ll need to resize my wedding ring, Skye; it’s too small to deal with the webbing. I guess we can pattern it after my magic ring, since it seemed to have adjusted just fine. The only thing that’s disturbing now that I’ve had a chance to calm down is that my gills are acting up a lot more than yesterday, almost like my lungs are vestigial now? What does that mean for all of us?”

“We’ll need to monitor you for a while, Beloved. It’ll take time to figure out how long you can stay out of the water. For now, let us know when you start feeling light-headed or are ****. It’s important that you spend at least an hour in salt water whenever that happens. Otherwise, things will be as they were.” Ms. Daphne then switches to Aquan to talk some more. Harper answers back and Ms. Daphne looks relieved.

“Now that we’ve solved the mystery color palette swap, we have more important things to discuss. Like Josie’s new rule. ‘If you boink her, you gotta date her.’” Ms. Tina has the subtlety of a catapult launching diseased cattle.

Harper laughs at that. “What made that proposal a thing?”

“Oh, when you were dying from, like, 50 bajillion broken muscle and bone thingies, Skye ran out of magic trying to patch you up and made me like finger her to orgasm several times. Twice.”

Harper turns ashen at that. “Ignoring how badly I got back here for a moment. You okay, love?”

Skye nods.

“Good. Tell me what happened last night. It got... fuzzy when I tried to fight that fox guy.”

For the second time, Skye tells what happened to the best of her ability, adding what she understood about how Ms. Dinah and the rest of them mended her. This time, the reactions are a lot less calm.

“What the hell were you thinking, Harper? You should have torn that bitch limb from limb for what she did.” Josie growls.

“What the hell were you thinking, Harper? All of you should have ran instead of you making some stupid last stand.” both Ms. Scarlet and Ms. Dinah exclaim, basically simultaneously.

“What the hell were you thinking, Harper? I don’t have a specific complaint. I just want to feel like I’m contributing.” Ms. Tina quips.

“It was a stupid, idiotic thing I did and I get I fucked up really badly. I think having to spend the rest of my life near the ocean so I don’t suffocate is going to be a good reminder not to throw my life away like that again. As for Añil, I’m not apologizing for sparring her, Josie. The Moonlit Dancer is a goddess of second chances. She has a few more hours to repent. Granted, I don’t expect that she will be able to dig herself out of whatever points hole she is in; I think that there were some errors with our phones connecting to the points system.”

Harper pulls out her phone to check for notifications. She is not happy about the results as she reads them out.

Indigo: -2 VP (Insulting the Mistress)

Indigo: -2 VP (Insulting the Mistress)

Indigo: Elimination Pending (Attempting to **** the Mistress)

Harper: +1 XP (Knocked Out 1 Level 4 Player x0.5 penalty [overleveled], x0.5 penalty [sparring])

Harper: +7 XP (Killed 1 Level 15 Monster, x0.5 penalty, rounded down [divine intervention])

“So, Indi’s like super-mega fucked, huh?” Josie asks.

Harper is strangely silent about Josie’s comment. She tries to change the subject. “Are most of you going to ignore that whole ‘divine intervention’ penalty?”

Three “yeses”, three “nos”. Surprised that Tina is on our side about that.

“Hey, it happened. No need to make a big deal out of it,” Ms. Daphne offers. Yes, it is a big deal. My Lady saved my love and the rest of us. But Skye is too polite to say that out loud. Ms. Daphne also tries a conversation change, “Soooo, how about that boinking rule, Harper?”

“Is it even necessary?”

Josie gives off a wolfish grin. “Actually, it might be. Skye and I had a bit of a tiff yesterday morning. Apparently, she didn’t feel close enough to us to treat us familiarly, despite all her ‘we’re family’ talk. Having a clear line marking ‘we are now close enough to stop with the constant Miss titles’ would be nice.”

Skye blushes, “Um, Josie, do you have to tease me?”

“I tease those I like, Skye. Right, old lady?”

“Right, whipper-snapper. Skye, would having that rule make you feel more comfortable?”

“I’d prefer just to talk to people as I feel like I’ve earned that closeness.”

While Harper just nods, some of the others seem less happy. “Wow, Skye,” Ms. Tina starts, “I thought we were totally close! We’ve been roommates all week. I even maybe shared a bed with you this week once, I think? Don’t I mean anything to you?”

“Um, of course you do, uh, Tina,” Skye stammers, looking to her wife to bail her out of this awkward situation. Harper pulls Skye in close and gives her a side hug.

“What about me, Skye? Are we close enough?”

Oh no! Harper’s teasing me too? “Of course you mean a whole bunch to me, love. You’re my wife!”

“Good.” Harper kisses Skye on the nose. “Now, play nice with your future sister-wives. If they tell you that you don’t have to be so formal, you can treat them like you treat me. That work for everyone?” Skye blushes so hard she thinks she might die. Harper presses Skye into the sea elf’s chest, letting her hear the sound of Harper’s heartbeat. It’s different, but still soothing. Skye traces Harper’s scar from their wedding night.

“Okay, love. If that’s what you want.”

Harper kisses her drow on the forehead, then changes the subject again. “Hey, Daph, in all of the hub-bub yesterday, I forgot to ask you about something. Do you know why Identify wouldn’t tell me the name of my wedding gift sword?”

Daphne contemplates that for a few minutes as she devours her bowl of raw fish. “Identify is only supposed to tell you enough information for you to use the item effectively. Either one of two things would be true: the sword doesn’t have a name, and you would have been given something generic, like ‘Sword of +1’; or the sword has a name and the name needs to be hidden for some reason. I can take Legend Lore next level-up if you think that would help?”

“Nah, I don’t want you sacrificing a free 6th Level spell for that. I’ll do it when I got the chance. Thanks though. Any other family business before we go downstairs and deal with the show?”

Beckie Petersen

Beckie’s office smells of licorice and there are large black stains everywhere. She’s giddy, though, again, she doesn’t know what that word means anymore. Smexy slut lost game. Soon, Beckie gets to eat her. Yummy! Turn slut into more smarts for Beckie! And get smexy body! Things look up for Beckie.

Suddenly, a ringing noise starts in the room. Beckie does not exactly remember what that means, only that the ringing is important.

“Ring!” she shouts.

The ringing continues. What ring noise mean again? She starts to wander the room, shouting “Ring!” at various things.

A melodic booming voice echoes in the room, “Alright, I’m officially tired of the shtick. Ms. Petersen, it’s time for your weekly evaluation.”

“Beckie did great job this week! Beckie deserves raise!”

The producer’s laugh puts a chill through Beckie’s body. Something about the tone would warn a smarter Beckie that this is not going to go well, but it only leaves current Beckie with a vague sense of unease.

“Ms. Petersen, you did abysmally this week. Instead of spending 95% of your time in your private quarters watching Matlock, you spent the bulk of your time this week in here masturbating to one of the contestants, which screams a lack of professionalism and bias. When given opportunities to improve your relations with the contestants by resolving their issues with the game, you stonewalled them every single time. I’ve been picking up so much of your slack that, frankly, you are not worth employing anymore. Ms. Alecto, if you please?”

One of the fish sluts come into the office, holding a cardboard box.

“You are officially reassigned, Ms. Petersen. Ms. Alecto here is now your immediate supervisor. You are to pack up whatever personal items you have in here and she will give you your next tasks. Your personal effects in your private quarters have already been packed up and put into storage.”

“But what about the meeting? And the challenge? Beckie is host!”

“I will handle the hosting duties for the moment, but I have a number of candidates identified to replace you for the on-camera parts of the host’s responsibilities. So, show me you can handle a lesser task, and I may consider allowing you not to be eternally digested in the stomach of a demonic frog once the show is over. If you excuse me, I have some host tasks to prepare for. Challenge days are always so busy.”

As the producer’s presence withdraws, the fish slut remains. She tosses the empty box at Beckie, barking, “Pack your shit up, you worthless waste of space. You have work to do.” The fish summons a whip and cracks it once. That gets Beckie to start working. But what about eating loser slut?

Indigo

Indigo is exhausting, demoralized, defeated. While whatever that thing that took over the veijito’s body gave Indi protection from the other girls while she awaits execution, that thing said nothing about protection from the staff. The mermaids certainly took advantage of that.

They threw her in a tiny cage in a damp cave. They surrounded the cage with television screens. Then the streams start. A cacophony of elimination compilations. Indigo watched hundred, thousands of contestants being turned into things less than human: mindless maids, milkable breeding cows, bimbo sex toys, cuckquean slaves, a sexy coffee table(?). When Indigo tries to close her eyes, to shut out the bombardment of terrible potential futures, she feels the butt of a spear smack her in the flank or feel a javelin whiz by her head. Whenever she tries to plug her ears to turn off the noise, rough sisal ropes would soon be used to pull her arms away. They kept it up all night, keeping the televisions playing static once they ran out of footage.

Then the verbal taunts started. The staff would whisper, shout, bellow out things, sometimes in English, sometimes in whale(?), sometimes in dolphin(?), once even in Japanese. From the English bits, the theme seems to be, “You think those are bad? Wait until you see what we wrote for you!” Still, they don’t let up. They kept it up all night and into the morning.

Stiff from the cage and bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, Indi sees Irene turn on a big hanging light bulb and turn off the televisions.

“Any last words?” the pokeyfish mermaid snarls, tossing a stale chunk of moldy bread at Indigo’s feet.

“Can I have one last six-pack of original formula Cuartos Locos? I’d like to be passed out drunk for this.”

“Fuck you, Mega-Bitch. Even knowing that everything you care about yourself is going to be forcibly stripped away from you and you still don’t want to apologize? Well, elimination couldn’t happen to a worse person. Eat you last meal and then we can get going.”

Indigo grabs the chuck of bread and chunks it at the pokeyfish. “Get me an actual last meal, then I’ll eat it.”

“Fine, you don’t want human food? Here.”

A different mermaid drops a bowlful of raw fish offal on Indigo’s head. Indigo gags. She’s done with this. “Just take me to my **** already.”

“Be ready to hold your breath; we aren’t bothering with giving you a way to breathe underwater.”