But First, A Tour!

“Mind the gap,” Jack declared, “Parts of the Hotel are… still apparently under construction.”

Having had already demonstrated the floating island mechanic, the tour has reached the entrance of the Hotel proper. Right at said entrance was a small dimensional rift, maybe about a foot wide, leading to a tentacle filled abyss.

Jack, a little tired of the mundanity of walking, transformed into a house cat wearing a jet pack. He caterwauled as he flew across the rift and hovered above the first proper stop of the tour.

Most of the others were naturally wary of the eldritch horrors wiggling from the gap in space-time. A couple were not.

“Hi, Terry! Hey, if this harem thing doesn’t work out, can I crash at your place again?” Leanne greeted a particular writhing tentacle.

The entity wiggled in a particular cadence. Eleana helpfully translated, “Laurie says no. Also, she would like you to return the umbrella you borrowed during your stay.”

“Sure thing, Larry!”

Leanne hopped over the gap and approached the hovering Jack. Zoe, having finally recovered from the revelation, shouted, “How do you know a giant interdimensional tentacle?”

Once again, her question was ignored.

Zoe easily stepped across the gap, with Itzel on her back, still grumbling about how limiting her jointed legs are. Beverly, still wearing Zoe’s jacket, chirped as she also gets a piggy-back ride after the blaring sirens of the island rotation mechanic frightened her; Robin felt a wet spot forming on the middle of their back. It took more effort for the Mastress to cross the gap, but not by much. Nyx strode over the gap, trying her best to ignore fantasies of herself in the resulting hentai if she fell. Ipheara flapped across, giving the writhing tentacles a wide berth. The tentacles gave Ulyssa a wide berth as the delivery girl strode over the pit. Eleana finished her conversation with Laurie, then waves as she sauntered over to the others.

The group observed the Hotel lobby. It seemed designed by a committee that eventually gave up and decided that everyone gets what they want. The carpeting was a hodgepodge of flooring store sample squares. The wallpaper was the same, an eclectic mix of patterns. Wall sconces, torches, even glow sticks lined the walls at regular intervals in a random pattern.

With no game participants falling through the crack and into a nightmare realm that would psychically shatter the stoutest of men, Jack started a new speech, “This here is the concierge desk. A helpful staff member will always be present to answer any questions or otherwise assist you in date preparations. Just ring the bell and someone will be here to assist you. Does anyone want to try?”

While Itzel moved to ring the bell, Eleana addressed the gelatin mold sitting on the table, unable to generate a hologram of a gelatin mold undulating at the moment. The mold wiggles back, then telepathically responded to the group, “No need. This one is right here.”

Several of the harem exclaimed, “A talking dessert!?!?”

Jack gave a wolfish grin (which, on a cat, is quite disturbing), “Oh, about that. You see, my appearance fee is quite expensive. Between that and the sheer… quantity of producers we have, they all have to work overtime as hotel staff. So, expect some oddities. Who needs a uniform staff of mecha, mermaids, or Mildreds when you can have an eclectic mix of unattractive weirdoes!”

“This one is quite fetching for its species,” the gelatin dessert retorted.

Eleana agreed and the staff member… blushed?

“So, can I have Gary’s umbrella? I need to return it,” Leanne asked. Said umbrella fell into the rift from nowhere; the particular tentacle grabbed onto it and sank into the gap. Jack was already floating away, having lost interest. His jet pack sputtered as he continued talking, “All along the hallways of the Hotel are a wide variety of advertisements for various places on the other islands. You may examine them more fully later. Come along.”

So, the Mastress and their entourage walked down the hallway, glancing at the attraction posters. A wrestletorium, featuring all kinds of wrestling matches including “both kinds of pudding wrestling.” Mr. Amanitins Deadly Fungus Petting Zoo (advertising that they have not had a visitor death in 14 hours). An exact replica of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (Texas, not France). The Harem Hotel retail store (currently running a fire sale on Craig merchandise). A zombie hayride (featuring real zombies AND real hay!!!). A movie entitled “Who Killed Aaron Burr? The Answer May Surprise You!” playing at The Illustrious Illuminati. There were more posters, of course, but Jack was getting impatient.

He puttered over through the double doors, then addressed the gathered gaggle of guests, “Here is the Hotel Cafetorium. Breakfast is served 6-8 AM, lunch is served from 11 AM - 1 PM. Depression Hour, where you are only allowed to order drinks and sob quietly to yourself, is 4-5 PM. Dinner service is 6-8 PM. Fourthmeal, sponsored by Taco Bell, is 1-2 AM, but that is after curfew, so I imagine that there won’t be many takers. If you get hungry outside of those official meal times, there are restaurants in the MEGA MALL that will serve you food; outside of dates, it will cost you BP. In addition, we always have ‘delicious’ nutrient slurry on tap.”

Just about everyone makes an involuntary face of disgust about the use of the phrase “nutrient slurry.” Leanne and Beverly did not, but Robin suspects that the latter does not understand what a slurry is. “Is the slurry vegetarian?” Ipheara asked, not sure which answer would be less revolting.

Jack snorted, “Definitely not. We did get a good deal on it from Skynet over at Harem Hotel: It’s All Your Fault, though.”

Robin was instantly wary of this slurry, as it sounded like something Terminators would serve to their human batteries. They stared down the spigot. Before they could object, Nyx, the bravest woman in the harem, grabbed a cup and watched the slurry ooze out from the tap. She gave it a smell check, cringing. “It smells… weird.”

Nyx passed the cup to the others. Robin poked at it, resolving never to get hungry enough to consider drinking it. Beverly took a whiff, then growled at the cup. Ulyssa handed it to Ipheara without even looking at it, who did the same to Itzel (still on Zoe’s back), who held it up for Zoe to examine. Zoe gagged, noting, “It smells like when the walk-in cooler was on the fritz.”

Leanne drank it when it was handed to her. She didn’t immediately die, which was a good sign. “Not bad for free food,” she quipped.

Eleana wafted the cup as she went to dispose of it. “Oh, Stargazer cuisine! Quite an interesting food culture. It’s amazing what they can do with little more than mushrooms and breast milk.”

Most of the harem gags at the concept. Leanne just shrugs, “Free food IS free.”

“Is the normal food going to be more Stargazer cuisine?” Robin asked Jack, hoping for it to not be the case.

“If that’s what you want. The Mastress gets to choose the menu. If you don’t submit your selections in time, we’ll just pull out whatever food you are craving at the time from your mind. It’ll keep the kitchen staff on their toes or equivalents. Moving on!”

The next hallway is again lined with advertisements about other destinations. The Museum of Jack. The “Stepping on a Random Lego on the Floor Barefoot Experience!” which, weirdly enough, also advertised that it has not had a visitor die in 14 hours. The Weird Al Improv Concert Hall, where a dimension’s Weird Al has to make parody songs about requested topics on demand. A field of butterflies. A dining hall of buttered flies.

The entered what looks to be an old computer lab, with green glowing CRT monitors and scroll wheel mice. “And here is the Hotel business center. I am sure that all of you have many, many e-mails to read and respond to.”

“So, we can write home?” Itzel asked.

Jack chuckled, “Of course not. All meaningful communication between the Hotel and the outside world is forbidden. But, we still want to give you the full Hotel experience, which can involve sneaking downstairs to empty your junk e-mail and maybe falling for a phishing attack.”

“Fish no attack me!” Beverly proudly declared. “Me have Stick!”

They thereupon continued down the hallway, looking at the advertisements. An official Calvinball arena. A life-sized Beyblades arena. A combination frisbee golf / club golf course. Guided expeditions for the lost control room of the MEGA MALL. A Sbarro Pizza located inside the MEGA MALL at the CUISINE COURT.

Ulyssa asked, “What is this Mega Mall thing and why would we care about a lost control room?”

“First of all,” Jack snarked back in reply, “It is pronounced MEGA MALL. The all-caps pronunciation is essential. Second, prophesy states that, in the harem’s darkest hour, the chosen one shall find the control room and pilot the MEGA MALL to glory! Anyhoo, next stop, the Hotel gym and pool! Here, you can workout to appeal to the Mastress. Everything you could possibly want: free weights, exercise machines, cold plunges, a steamy sauna, and, of course, the pool, just on the other side of the locker room. There is the Hotel pro shop for personal exercise equipment and supplements.”

“Supplements? Not that I need supplements. I’m naturally muscly. My body is a tent pole, as they say… For the others, what supplements?” Nyx asked, looking at the pro shop. A television screen played an ad of some moderately muscular wolf-girl clean-and-jerking a VW Minibus filled to capacity with what looks to be glass jars of protein powder. Nyx could barely read the warning about the woman being enhanced with a super strength transformation. The ad concluded by pitching something called Vagi-Taste?

“I don’t need to worry about such things, obviously,” Jack snarked, gesturing towards his house cat body, “but the usual, and unusual, workout supplements to get those mad gains. Protein, BCAAs, creatine, collagen, Omega-3s, phytonutrients, such like that. Then there is the crazy fun magic stuff if you want to pay extra. Shall we saunter over to the pool?”

The jet pack propelled Jack into the locker room. Robin and their entourage followed. They then realized that there is only one locker room. Beverly ignored it and followed the Host like a beaver follows a jet pack cat. The sign over both exits to the locker room declared “Clothes optional beyond this point.”

“I guess that’s good for Beverly?”

What was not good for Beverly is Jack grabbing her hair with both forepaws trying to keep her from diving into the pool. He grunted, “This is the pool, featuring a built-in hot tub, diving boards, a swim-up bar, and an industrious river. Giant sunlamps will keep the place sunny and warm.”

Jack lost his grip on the feral girl, who scrambled into the water. When she came up, it was with a disgusted face. She growled, “Water taste bad!”

“It’s a pool. It’s got chlorine in it.”

“What is ‘chlorine?’”

“Stuff that keeps the pool clean.”

“That dumb. Water already clean!”

Deciding he wasn’t going to continue that argument, Jack teleported the whole group to the next destination. Beverly whimpered as pool water dripped off her and onto the cheap carpeting. Zoe’s jacket was soaked and Beverly shivered slightly.

“For those of you that really want the true ‘hotel of this size’ experience, welcome to the conference hall! Specifically, welcome to Queue-Con 97, the multiverse’s most premier expo for the line technology industry! Other conferences will rotate in and out if you can’t handle the excitement of how to better organize people waiting in line.”

The conference goers appeared to be manikins. Moving metal manikins. One smiled and waved, displaying several rows of serrated teeth.

Itzel ignored the potential source of horror and focused on the conference itinerary. “Ooh, an interactive symposium on new developments for the turnstile!” she exclaimed, “Do we have time to sit in on it?”

“No. Moving on!”

Jack led the group out of the conference, much to Itzel’s chagrin. Another hallway full of advertisements awaited them. A Build-a-Bear Workshop. A Build-an-Owlbear Workshop (with an especially disturbing note that they haven’t had a dead visitor in 5 hours). A tour of an absinthe distillery. Potato gun artillery range. A record store at the MEGA MALL that exclusively sells 8-tracks, calling them the “auditory wave of the future.”

And, at the end of the hallway, they are back in the Hotel lobby.

“And that is basically the ground floor. The Mastress Suite is, of course, located at the top floor of the Hotel. To get there, you have three options. The Mastress only option is to request a taxi from the concierge desk. Ask, and a staff member will ferry you up to the Suite in whatever fashion make sense to them. The boring option is that elevator. It will only open for the Mastress or the contestant whose date night it is. If the Mastress is in the Suite, they can also invite someone else up. The exciting option is the Hotel Spider-Person Experience, where you climb up the side of the Hotel using the provided equipment. Now the door up top will only open if the Mastress is upstairs and it is your date night, so be aware that it will be a looooooong fall if you try to sneak into the Suite that way.”

The cat rode the jet pack over to the stairs. “But, the rest of your rooms are this way. On the (4800)^(1/2) floor.”

Robin and their entourage stared dumbfounded at the ascending cat Host. At least most of them did. Neither Beverly or Leanne had the math skills to understand what that means, so they just start climbing the stairs. Itzel still did not trust her ability to navigate stairs with so few limbs, so she remained on Zoe’s back. The rest (reluctantly) follow.

A grueling climb later, and they found themselves on the indicated floor.

“That was NOT that many floors,” Zoe grumbled.

“Shh… the head of the building subcommittee has a vendetta against integers. Only irrational numbers are used in the Hotel. Anyways, welcome to your guest rooms! In true Harem Hotel fashion, the contestants are paired off into roommates. What fun! The rooms are all currently the same, so it doesn’t matter which one we examine, so how about room number i^3?”

Inside, they found an exact facsimile of a cheap one-star hotel room. A single queen sized bed is placed about midway from the door and the window. An pair of end tables, each with a cheap lamp and a plastic cup, bookended the bed. Below the window, the cheap air conditioning unit rattled and belched out frigid air. Two wardrobes, each with a few hangers and no doors, are along the opposite wall. A small en-suite bathroom is walled off in those 70’s glass cube bricks.

“A perfectly functional space. You may spend BP to improve your room, once you have earned enough VP to qualify for a room upgrade. Also, I have been told that there is an inaccessible ice machine on the other end of each room’s headboard, so enjoy that.”

“Uhm, why is there only one bed?” Zoe asked, expecting her question to once again be ignored.

Not this time, as Jack responded, “So you and your roommate can cuddle in bed. A sizable portion of the audience really likes to ship the contestants together. It helps to break the monotonous ‘GetXPreggers’ hashtag spam. Nighttime cuddles encourage those ships to become reality.”

Robin wisely kept their mouth shut, though they couldn’t help but raise their eyebrows in curious wonder at the prospect.

The reactions among the contestants were… mixed. As the two adults in the room, Ipheara and Eleana both sigh in exasperation at the other’s reactions. Leanne and Nyx both have grins, the former casual, the latter wolfish. Ulyssa glared at Leanne, muttering, “Of course that skank finds the concept perfectly fine.” Beverly, once again not understanding the concept, squeaked, “Me no want to be boat! Me Beverly!” Itzel attempted to explain the concept of “shipping” to the confused feral girl, with limited immediate success. To cap it all off, Zoe sputtered, “But… but we’re all girls? Not that there is anything wrong with girls being with other girls like that, but just not with me?”

“Don’t worry,” Jack replied, “We aren’t expecting the all-harem orgies to begin until Week 3, if the pattern holds.” He thereupon hacked out the magic hat from inside of him as if were a fur ball. He dug out a piece of paper from it, noting as he scanned it, “Oops, we forgot about the Popularity Poll in all of the tour excitement. We really should have handled this outside, as I am now required to give you an irrational amount of BP. Say 10000e times the percentage of the poll points you earned? Sure, that works. Let’s see now…”

The cat tapped its paw to its chin as he mulled over the results. A wolfish grin appeared as he chuckles. Most of the others shuffled around nervously as they wait.

“In first place, and receiving a whopping 4230 BP, plus an infinitely repeating decimal that we are going to ignore and not mention for the others, is…”

Jack paused for drama. Once satisfied that the suspense had reached its peak, one of the doorless wardrobes filled with a cornucopia of punk gear that may no longer fit well. He continued, “…our resident pack mule Zoe! Obviously, as the current Best Girl, you need to be in Room i^3, as that is the equivalent of the best room. How does it feel?”

Zoe cocked an eyebrow, “Fine, I guess? How is this the best room, if all of them are equally crappy? Did my win translate to social media clout?”

“It IS the closest room to the stairwell, do there is that. You have earned approximately 2.33 thousand subscribers, pending your account activation on Insta-Thot. You can set up your account at the business center. Engaging with the audience is good for business, so chop-chop once you’re free to go.”

Zoe made a disgusted face, “Insta-Thot? Isn’t that a trashy OnlyFans clone with a worse monetization scheme?”

“Yes. Multidimensional servers are much more expensive to maintain, apparently. Moving on. Your roommate for the week shall be second place on the poll. And that would be, with 4023 BP…”

Another pause. The other wardrobe filled. Nyx made the hurry up motion, then Jack smiled, “…our impatient bouncer with the bouncy bottom, Nyx. I believe that Team Titanic Tomboys shall get along just splendidly.”

Nyx glared at Jack, bristling at the Tomboy designation. Then she thinks of more practical matters. “How are we supposed to fit on that bed?”

“I’m sure you two can figure it out. Third place, rooming in Room e^1, is Leanne. You have 3433 BP. A respectable amount, more money than you have ever had at once in your life, but significantly lower than Zoe and Nyx. I hope you spend it wisely.”

Leanne gave a lazy smile. “Thank you, audience, for liking me for me. Hey, is that Insta-Thot thing easy to do?”

Robin found a spot on the ceiling extremely interesting. Eleana, of all people, answered, “Well, I found it easy. I spent a week on it before conquering the algorithm. I quickly grew bored.”

The harem felt a whisper of a hand rub against their collective nipples as Leanne groped herself through her shirt again. “Good to know.”

“Fourth place, with 3327 BP and seemingly about to blow a gasket, is Leanne’s roommate for the week, Ulyssa. I am sure Team Brother Lovers will smooth things over soon.”

Ulyssa DID look like she was going to burst several blood vessels, “You’re telling me that that skank somehow impressed the audience more than me AND I have to share a room with her!?!?!?!? And what’s with that team name?”

“I mean, you love your brother right?”

“As a sibling, not in whatever degenerate sense you use the term.”

“Well, Leanne is the closest thing your brother has had as a lover, sooooo…”

Ulyssa stomped out of the room, screaming. Jack smiled and quipped, “Moving on. Fifth place, in Room Pi, is Itzel. You have 3295 BP. You feel competent enough at walking to get to your room?”

Itzel, who has been sitting on the bed, looked up startled. “Uh, I will manage, hopefully?”

“Well, maybe your roommate can help. Sixth place and the other half of Team Exotica Erotica, is Ipheara. You have 3085 BP.”

The moth woman shrugged, then offered the alien a shoulder to lean on as she figures out how knees work.

“Finally, we have Team Age Gap. Eleana got seventh, with 2911 BP and Beverly got last place, with 2879 BP. You’ll be in…”

Beverly, still damp from her swim, interrupted in an attempt to finish the thought, “Mate’s room?”

“Room e^2. Don’t confuse it for Room e^1. Now, shoo. The Mastress and I have to go to the Mastress Suite for their final part of the tour.”

And, with that, Jack and Robin were gone.

Zoe rolled her eyes as Nyx asked, “So, anyone want to fuck?”

Eleana chirped at a somber Beverly and those roommates left the room together, leaving the two tall women alone to figure out how they are going to fit in that bed.

[Pop Poll: Zoe - 4230 BP, Nyx - 4023 BP, Leanne - 3433 BP, Ulyssa - 3327 BP, Itzel - 3295 BP, Ipheara - 3085 BP, Eleana - 2911 BP, Beverly - 2879 BP]