A Night with Anby and another guest

Wise had the vague sense something was off as soon as he realized that the doors to the boudoir had been shut, displaying the images of twin Bangboos once more. He was certain they'd been left open when he left Victoria Housekeeping to their work earlier. His suspicions were confirmed when he found that a note had been left on the circular stand right by the door, bearing the seal of a heart-eyed Bangboo from the host herself. A bottle of champagne was there too, though he wasn't sure he felt like partaking. Instead, he just grabbed the note, pulling apart the seal unceremoniously and setting aside the envelope.

"Your guest for the night is Anby Demara! I've picked her as night one because her relationship with you, already lovey-dovey and all that rot, ought to make for an entertaining evening while we're still waiting for the other girls to find their ground legs. She's got her bedroom eyes on! Don't disappoint her, darling."

With love,

Loverboo

He smashed up the letter in his hand and squeezed his eyes shut in irritation. Sure, after spending a lot of time with Anby... late nights at the noodle stand getting mistaken for a couple... movie marathons into the irresponsible hours of the morning... he'd thought from time to time something might be developing between the two of them. He knew he was too passive to act on that and he knew she was a little stunted in terms of her interpretations of the emotions of others, so it probably wouldn't turn into anything.

Still, he'd left the door open and pictured what it might look like. Having all of that dragged out in front of him and thrown at his feet by some kind of magical, hypnotic **** was frustrating.

He pushed the door open and tried to put on a smile. If Anby was here, thinking she was his girlfriend, he at least wanted to avoid hurting her feelings... as much as he could without leading her on, anyway. If he was too accommodating to girlfriend Anby's requests, he might end up doing something they'd both regret after he managed to wipe Loverboo's Resonium off of her. "Anby, I-"

"Wrong. It's Ellen," the girl on the bed introduced herself. The shark maid's tail thrashed through the air impatiently as she sat with her arms crossed beneath her chest and her legs crossed as well, one foot kicking in an antsy way. She was dressed in the same pajamas he'd seen her wearing earlier in the day, now with more appropriate timing in the late hour of the night.

"What? The note was wrong?" he questioned, pressing one hand to his head. "You're spending the night?"

"I'm not. I told Anby to take five and let me have the first turn."

"First turn? There aren't turns!"

"Listen: Loverboo can assign one of us to spend the night each night or whatever, but with this dumb Resonium, I can't sleep at all unless you give me a turn," Ellen sighed, lowering her eyebrows with an irritable frown. He watched as she shifted the stick of a strawberry sucker around in her mouth, poking it up from her lower lip. "There are contests during the day so it's not gonna work to get me out of the way then."

"It's not that I'm not sympathetic, but I'll be surprised if the other women are all going to let you slip one in before they get their shot-"

"Get their shot? Oh, so you really do think you're hot stuff, now?"

"No, I didn't mean it like that," Wise corrected himself, shaking his head and holding one hand behind his neck. "I just mean... We've got to face the inevitability that these Resonium, if nothing else, are designed to make this more and more like a competition. If you get in the way of the opportunity for the others, you're going to make enemies."

"And I think you need to decide if this is a temporary thing we're doing until we escape or, you know, a whole week going on till we're all crazy in the head," she grumbled. "Look, for now, Anby's okay with it. What do I need to do to satisfy the Resonium so I can sleep?"

"Well... I don't actually know," Wise answered, sighing and dropping his arms. "I think we're just going to have to try things."

"Will I even know if it worked? What even is 'light erotic activity?'" Ellen asked. "Actually, I'm so zombified already that I feel like the sign we're done will be whenever I just zonk out. I can tell you're the kind of guy that's always gonna be passive with girls-"

"Hey now!"

"-So I'll start us off. I figure if I just do the same as one of the other girls that got VP, it ought to count, right? So like..." Ellen remarked, turning around and climbing back on the bed for a bit till she reached its center on her knees. Her tail swished out of the way, as if to offer him a better view of her behind, where panty lines were vaguely visible against the seat of her pajama pants. "If I show you my panties... That's plenty?"

Wise gulped. He didn't want to say yes again and be the Master ordering the harem again, but he didn't want her thinking that she had to do more either. "Yeah. That should be fine." Instinctively, he began to avert his eyes for chivalry's sake.

"You've gotta watch, too. I don't think it counts as activity 'with Wise' if Wise isn't watching, y'know?" Once she looked over her shoulder to confirm that he was indeed still paying attention, Ellen hooked both hands into the sides of her panties and then began to slowly inch them down. "I haven't actually done this kind of thing with a guy before. It's kinda..."

Wise filled the word out in his head: "embarrassing." But he wasn't sure that was actually what she wanted to say. Was this actually hesitation on her part or was it a teasing slowness? The feeling in the room was totally different from when he'd walked in on Zhu Yuan in the bathroom or saw her pantsed on stage. It was the same thing, right? Less candid, if anything.

Still, it was different with Loverboo not firing some kind of arrow or spinning a laser circle in the air. Here, it was basically just Ellen, picking her own moves. And the moves she was choosing... the way her Thieren shark tail was swishing back and forth across her goth-fashion, pink-and-black panties with classic ribbons. More and more came into view as the pants crept down her hips towards her thighs. It felt like he was actually being seduced at this moment.

His eyes flashed over to the bathroom where the shower was running. Having Anby in there, knowing what was likely happening outside, made the whole situation feel more dire.

By the time he looked back over, the hands that were initially hooked into Ellen's pajama pants had moved on to her panties. They were slid down about halfway to the point that if they nudged a little further and she spread her legs a bit, he'd be looking inside her one way or another.

"Ellen, wait-!" he called out, reaching out to grab one of her arms and stop her from exposing her further. As he did, he realized that her arm was limp with sleep. She'd entered that unshakeable, trance-like state of slumber that only a few at Victoria Housekeeping knew how to wake her from. "I guess that counted." Gingerly, he nudged her pajama pants back up her legs as best as he could manage, trying not to touch anywhere inappropriate... but when his fingers brushed her soft, feminine flesh, he became aware of just how little female contact he'd had over the course of his eligible adult life.

With as much grace as he could manage, he lifted Ellen up in both arms, carrying under the crooks of her legs and at the back of her shoulders in bridal fashion, then deposited her at the couch near the entertainment center. He wasn't foolish enough to think he could carry her all the way down the stairs to her room on the 2nd floor... he liked to think he had a measure of brains that made up for his lack of masculine strength.

After rising back to his full height and turning to let Ellen rest, he nearly jumped out of his skin, spotting Anby standing in the doorway. She'd redressed after the shower, although her bushy white hair was still somewhat damp, and her sole garment was a black, thigh-length t-shirt with the words "SAY WHAT AGAIN" printed on two lines across the visage of an actor he didn't recognize.

It occurred to him that it might be the first time he'd ever seen her without her headphones on. That held his attention for just a moment before the more important detail became evident: it didn't seem like she was wearing any underwear. The shirt, while dark in color to hide the texture of her body, nonetheless held to the peaks of her modest breasts rather tellingly. The total outfit, scant as it was, wasn't actually much shorter than her ordinary skirt, but knowing that she was likely commando underneath made the effect entirely different.

Also, there was the soft smile on her face.... The kind that would make his heart beat a little faster even if she wasn't dressed this way.

"It was kind of you to put Ellen to sleep without troubling her too much. I was worried about that Resonium might entail," she greeted him, shaking out her hair once more as she ran a white hotel towel through it.

"Yeah. I got lucky," he admitted, then clicked his teeth, realizing how that sounded. "That shirt..."

"Do you not like it? Nicole said that if I picked out something from the catalogue that had to do with movies, you'd be excited. I think it's related to a movie they have on television here at the hotel. It's supposed to be a classic."

"Oh, no, I just meant... Are you wearing...?"

"Nicole also suggested that I should go without underwear. She thought we might win more VP for Team Cunning Hares. I figured you... might not mind. Do you mind?"

"No. What you choose to wear-- or not wear-- is your business," Wise smiled, still worried that the girlfriend-warped part of her brain was making her thing dressing that way and spending the night with him was more appropriate than it was. "Say, they play movies in the hotel? Ones you can't find in New Eridu?"

Anby's eyes lit up. "Oh. Yes." She stretched out the shirt's fabric in her hands. "The words here aren't actually the title of the movie. The work is called 'Pulp Fiction.' It's on the must watch-list. The plot summary says that an ensemble cast in eccentric roles, each acting with their own code of ethics, at times difficult to understand--"

"Yep, uh huh. Let's watch it," Wise interrupted her. He knew how Anby got when talking about movies. There was little doubt in his mind that she'd already read the whole summary and would spoil the whole thing if he let her keep talking.

The two settled into bed together, not under the sheets, but simply lying on top of them instead, while watching the movie from another dimension play out on the unusual, flat-screened television. For a while, Wise awkwardly crossed his hands at his lap, afraid to make a motion that could be misinterpreted. Eventually he realized that, girlfriend or not, Anby was still just as enraptured by movies as ever, and that helped him get into it too.

Once it got going, he began to get a pretty insightful look into this world's movie industry. Somewhere, Loverboo's operator swore and clicked her teeth, running footage of the other girls as Wise and Anby did nothing more than lie around and enjoy the movie for over two hours, including both the movie and time to digest it afterwards.

"The best line in the movie? 'Royale with cheese.' I wish I had a shirt that said that," Anby suggested, now lying on her side under the covers along with Wise. They'd both gotten in at some point to get more comfortable. They'd closed a bit of distance between one another as well. "I might order one from the catalogue."

"That would be a little on-the-nose. I think cheeseburgers are enough of your personality already," Wise chuckled. "Anyway, that was a pretty funny scene, but I think it'd be hard to call it the best one. The scene in the diner? That's what movies are all about." He rolled onto his back with his hands crossed behind the back of his head. "Granted, **** in movies is really more Belle's thing than mine, but the action, the shock value, is all-"

The young man gulped, feeling the softness of the girl's bobbed hair suddenly press up into the crook of his arm as she nudged in closer, effectively pinning his elbow to the pillow. Her arms wrapped around his chest and one leg shifted over from the side, as she spooned him from the side. In this position, he had little choice but to bring one arm comfortingly around her shoulder.

"You don't have to do this for VP, you know."

"It is not about VP. That is not what we are to each other, is it?"

He could feel her small breast rise and fall with her hurried breaths as she cradled herself against his chest, separated from him by only the thin fabric of both their shirts. "Agent and proxy... No, friends-"

"That is also wrong," she spoke quietly, sitting up to look down into his eyes. Anby brought her face down towards his, putting her lips next to his ear. "You and I are lovers." She kissed his ear gently, then his neck. The warmth coming off of her now was something he could never have associated with Anby before-- she was nearly robotic in the average case. Her words ceased as her lips gently smacked against his flesh, now moving from his neck to his cheek.

Wise couldn't stop it. The combination of factors-- the alluring feeling of her freshly washed body wrapped in a thin t-shirt, her body heat, the simple feeling that he couldn't break her heart by spurning her advances-- all of those things made it impossible to push her off or slide out from under her. By the time her lips reached his, he found himself returning the kiss as best he knew how. Both of them were just acting how movies had taught them to, but it was enough. Before long, Anby found his hands in hers, pushing her chest down onto his as she straddled him from above and quietly made out.

"Holding hands... Kissing..." she spoke through breaths. "I am glad our relationship... reached this point... it is finally... like a romantic movie..."

Wise's eyes narrows and his brow twitched with sudden frustration. It was like a movie: manufactured. Recorded. Broadcast, for that matter. He finally found the strength to turn his head away from hers. "Anby... we shouldn't. Let's just sleep for now."

"I am okay if people know. You do not need to worry about me. I will be your girlfriend."

"No, it's... It's about after the contest. You might not feel the same way you do right now."

"You are not going to hurt me, are you, Wise?"

"Of course not!"

"Then why act like I am a victim tonight? This does not feel like a violation. It feels... right," she murmured, catching his neck once again with unpracticed kisses.

"I-I know. I mean. I'm not arguing that," he muttered, as Anby's light body barely weighed upon him, offering the softness of her thighs and chest. "Can we sleep on it?"

"... I do not want to sleep."

"You have to be tired."

"... If I sleep, this may be the last night. Tomorrow will be someone else's turn. Please..."

"Let's turn on another movie, then. You pick. We can watch a movie and... cuddle," he murmured, his own face turning a bit red as he gave the suggestion. He breathed a sigh of relief as Anby smiled and nodded along. She gently nuzzled her face against his neck, resting her chin upon his shoulder, and holding tightly with her arms as the next movie began to play.

They'd remember the first movie of the night, perhaps thinking of it as their symbolic first date movie, but whatever the second movie was, they barely made it past the title screen before drifting off in the comfort of one another's arms.

When Wise awoke, Anby was sleeping so peacefully upon him, exactly where she'd been cuddling him last night, that he barely wanted to move. He managed to slip out without jostling her too much, allowing her to sleep in the admittedly comfortable heart-shaped bed while he took his first shower since arriving at the hotel.

To Anby's surprise, what awoke her was not her beloved new boyfriend, but instead, a sudden activation of the monitors. "Wakey wakey. Downstairs, girls, on the double. We're going to have a nice breakfast, then dress you all into your perfectly fetching new uniforms as Hotel Hotties so you can get on with your first contest. Chop chop, darlings! Failure to report to breakfast will lose you immediate VP."

By the time Wise left the shower, Anby and Ellen were both already gone and breakfast had more or less concluded. The briefing had already finished and the girls were on the move.

Anby's BP -200 for shirt

Ellen's VP +2 for showing the Master her panties

Anby's VP +5 for kissing the Master and sleeping on top of him