Marianne turns to a friend for help.

Marianne stumbled through the torchlit darkness of the Academy as quickly as she could, panting as she left the chapel behind her. On top of being possessed a moment ago, on top of the bizarre scene she'd witnessed and the many mysteries laid before her, she was aware she'd missed the curfew to be back in the dormitories.

There was probably no reason to freak out about it; students often managed to slip through far later than she was now with even a middling excuse. The school staff who enforced the curfew weren't jailers, after all. From Marianne's perpetually cloud-shaded perspective, however, she was on the brink of expulsion. Why would the Academy want someone like her to attend? Wouldn't they be looking for the first excuse to send her packing if they could justify keeping the tuition her adoptive father had paid? "And how will I face him after this... expelled for failing to be in my room by curfew, like a delinquent?" She continued to gasp as she ran with her arms swinging at her sides.

The slight flouting of the curfew wasn't actually the main way Marianne was breaking the school's rules, if she could stop to think about it. She hadn't managed to find the jacket she'd taken off earlier, and in a panic, she'd left it in the darkness, determined not to be any later getting back. More importantly, she hadn't gotten her shirt buttoned back up, and the coin Ashe had put there (an action Marianne didn't have the extra bandwidth to think about) still jostled along with her chest as she ran.

Finally, she made it back to the dorm, catching her breath with her hands on her knees. As expected, one of the church staff was there in full robe, looking bored with a book in his hand. It wasn't new for him to see a student running to beat the clock: after all, he was pretty laid back, but not everyone in his position was. That said, he definitely wasn't used to seeing this...

Marianne stood before him, her white shirt so stained with sweat that the grey bra she wore, ornate with lace but aggressively conservative in color and coverage, was on full display. Even more on display was a coin she had lodged between the cleavage of her unbuttoned shirt. When the young woman caught her breath, she looked up at him with swimming, **** eyes. "I'm so, so sorry! S-surely this can be overlooked just this once? I p-p-promise... I'll double my efforts and become a proper student... just after tonight...!"

The man was baffled, trying to make heads or tails of the display, but he eventually realized what was surely going on. The student was laying it on pretty thick with a three-headed attack on his greed, his sympathy, and his lust, but luckily for her, he was a pushover. With a wink and a smile, the man reached into her cleavage. She was nearly cross-eyed as her gaze followed the man's hand, plunging into the space between her cups and retrieving the coin from her valley. "Sounds like a cheaper plan to me. Get on in there and get some rest, young lady!"

Marianne's lip trembled as her face went red. "What... is happening tonight...?" she muttered cryptically before gliding past the man. She was no longer ignorant of the state of her chest, and crossed her arms shyly over her breasts as she moved, fast as her heeled boots could carry her.

She had been determined to get back to her room as fast as possible. She barely acknowledged the Blue Lions ladies in their nightclothes, flinching like they'd been caught at something outside of Annette's room before quickly filing in once they realized Marianne wasn't there for them or stopping for them. Marianne glided up the stairs with her head hung low, intent on retiring early and waking up early to look for her jacket.

When she turned the corner at the top of the stairs, heading towards the end of the hall, she suddenly found her shoulder grabbed from behind. "Marianne! Just who I was looking for!" a peppy voice spoke to her. "Do you have time to talk?"

Hilda Valentine Goneril, a fellow Golden Deer student with a room just on the other side of the stair, was still fully dressed in her schoolday best: hair in pink twintails past her shoulders; the white, black, and gold of the academy uniform terminating at a short skirt, giving a peek of thighs before her tall blue stockings and black boots; her nails carefully painted and trimmed in a way Marianne never knew how she made time for, even though Hilda spared no opportunity to talk about it. Her pink, lined eyes smiled at Marianne from below her equally pink bangs, but widened when the other girl turned to face her.

Marianne looked at Hilda with a face so miserable, she seemed just on the verge of tears. "H-H-Hilda..."

The sunnier of the two gulped, mentally shelving her own concerns. "Yeeeah... I'm thinking you have time to talk. C'mon, Marianne. Let's have a little late night chat."

The two of them sat in Hilda's room, surrounded by her feminine decorating sense in all eight corners. Marianne both looked and felt like she didn't belong in a place like that, but she found herself there commonly, as Hilda spent late nights unloading all of the good things and bad things that had happened through the day on her friend while begging that friend to say a word or two about herself.

That wasn't the case tonight. Hilda understood that it was Marianne's show to run. She always made a point to have tea ready for these, although it tended to be cold by the time she got it from the dining hall to her room. So, she sipped on her cold tea as she listened to her friend's bizarre, disjointed story.

"It was so horrible, Hilda... I-I went to the chapel... a-and... M-Mercedes, from the Blue Lions, do you know her?"

Hilda nodded, sipping her tea, trying and failing to construct a mental image ahead of Marianne's story where the sweet, clumsy, religious older student bullied her bestie.

"Mercedes was in the chapel... s-so I didn't stay... but then I saw Ashe... and then I went back... a-and when I went back, I... I can hardly describe what happened! Oh, Hilda! It's all my fault for going back!" Now she actually was crying, and she took the perfumed handkerchief Hilda offered her. She blew her nose into it before continuing. "I'm... s-sure it's my fault... M-Mercedes was doing some kind of profane, obscene dance... and I just know she was doing it because I was doing it! I heard strange music, and I c-couldn't control my body! It moved on its own, Hilda, and started making me do incredibly foolish things and I couldn't help it and I lost my jacket and I would've gotten expelled except the man took Ashe's coin but when he did he touched my b-b-breasts and-"

Hilda thought Marianne had said more words in that one run-on sentence than she had in her entire semester so far, and she didn't need to be told how badly shaken Marianne was. She crossed the table and gave her friend a small hug, rubbing her shoulder to calm her down. She winced as Marianne blew her nose into the handkerchief loudly. "There, there... Look, I know you're freaked out, but we've gotta talk about this. I have a pretty good idea about what happened to you, and if I'm right, it's not your fault at all."

"H-how could it not be my fault?" Marianne asked, as if there were any evidence it was.

"So, you wouldn't know this because you aren't chatty like me, but just yesterday, something happened in the market. Nobody knew why at all until they started sharing their stories, and then it got a little clearer. A bunch of girls claimed they heard crazy music that made it so they couldn't help but dance."

"... M-maybe... b-but I didn't just dance, Hilda! I was doing all kinds of... terrible, terrible things... I took off my jacket... a-and swung it over my head, Hilda..."

Hilda sipped her tea again with big eyes, trying to formulate a diplomatic response to the image of the trembling, timid woman across from her doing that in public.

Marianne continued before she could. "The strangest part though, Hilda... i-it wasn't just that I was **** to do it. I was so humiliated, you understand? It was humiliating, but... oh Goddess... it was like a part of me wanted someone to come and see it. So you see, it wasn't just evil magic. It was my own nasty, twisted personality... How could I want to? How could I...?"

Hilda lowered her tea and gave her friend a sunny, unbothered laugh. "Of course you wanted to! It sounds like you were going crazy and pulling out all the stops! When you work hard, don't you want someone to notice?"

Marianne didn't understand the response, so she waited for Hilda to continue with a frown.

Hilda sighed and lowered her cup to the table, then leaned back in her chair casually. "Marianne, I'm gonna tell it like it is. It sounds like the music made you wanna go wild and shake your stuff, and you were upset with yourself because you liked it. But is there a problem with that?"

"Th-there's... a big problem with that!" Marianne responded instantly. She normally wouldn't express such a strong opinion, but she couldn't believe what Hilda was saying.

Hilda leaned forward now, resting her elbows on the table. "Remember those ladies I talked to earlier? I was curious, so I really needled them. I asked 'Gosh, that sounds so dreadful! Was dancing like that exhausting?' And you know what they told me? To a one, they said it was just weird, not bad."

"Are you trying to say... I shouldn't worry about it?" Marianne creased her brow, unwilling to drop it. "Hilda, this wasn't just... f-fun music... my body was acting against my will. I was doing things I've never done before, and could never do again."

"Prove it," Hilda replied, egging her friend on.

"P-prove... it?"

"Try to do it again, right now," Hilda encouraged her with a smile. "Maybe you're right, and what you had to do was so horrible that you're right to be scared. I won't know until I see it. Or maybe you won't be able to do it at all, and it'll prove you were possessed by scary magic. I'll believe you. So show me."

"... H-Hilda..." Marianne shut her eyes, as if trying to make herself invisible by breaking eye contact with the world. "Y-you're... so strange... I don't know why you're even bothering to help me, but... if you insist, I..."

The blue-haired student sighed and rose from her chair. With a second thought, she moved it into a corner, making it clear she believed she needed lots of floor space. She gulped, shut her eyes, and, with a miserable frown, stooped to put her hands on her knees. With a flush across her face, she began moving her skinny bottom while standing in place, skillfully bending her legs to make her hips shake under her long, conservative skirt.

Hilda spit out her tea, quickly taking another handkerchief to clean it up off the table when she realized Marianne hadn't seen it.

Marianne clearly hadn't seen it because she kept going. She rose, turned, and showed off her long, slender frame, placing one hand on her hip and shaking her bottom with unheard rhythm. Awkwardly, she pantomimed taking off a jacket she wasn't wearing, then whipped it off and began spinning it over her head. She peeked over her shoulder to see Hilda with her jaw dropped. Immediately, she became rigid again, crossing her arms in front of her exposed bra even though there was no one to see it. "D-do you see? It's scandalous! If anyone saw me doing this, I'd have to do something drastic!"

"Yeah you would," Hilda agreed, nodding so hard her twintails shook. "How much would you charge them?"

"How much would I... what?"

"Forget it... Marianne, all I saw was my friend doing a hot dance and looking hot doing it. And you did it without any music! Doesn't that prove it's just something you can do and want to do, instead of something magic made you do?"

"I... don't think it proves that at all," Marianne confessed, still peering shyly over her shoulder.

Hilda put a hand on her chin and tried to come up with something else. "Okay, how about this. I haven't heard any crazy music yet. If I can do the same thing you just did, we know there's no scary magic. Got it?"

Marianne shook her head no, watching her friend get up to try it anyway. "Um..."

The shorter student moved her chair to the corner of the room along with Marianne's. Hilda's tongue worked her lip as she exerted rare effort, clumsily trying to do the same thing Marianne had done so easily a moment ago. "Wait, why is it so hard? All you did was shake your butt, right? Is there some trick to it?" Since Marianne didn't answer, she continued trying, bending her knees and waving her bottom in awkward arcs as she tried and failed to twerk.

Suddenly, something happened. Just as she was about to give up, she began to feel the music. Immediately, her legs went from shaky flailing to skillful shaking, sending her butt motoring so fast it surprised even her. "Wah?! Woah! L-look Marianne, I got it!" A big grin broke out over her face as she held one of her manicured hands splayed over her mouth. "I'm doing it! Not bad, right?"

"... Y-you're a natural, Hilda..." Marianne muttered, momentarily forgetting her worries and getting caught up in her friend's delight. Without thinking, she'd joined in Hilda's dance, matching her movements.

The two mirrored Marianne's imitation from earlier, except that since Hilda's uniform didn't include the same jacket to take off, she unbuckled her belt and began whipping it wildly over her held with the same hip-rocking to an invisible audience. "I knew it! All those girls were worried over nothing. How could dancing be some scary, creepy thing? It's just fun!"

"It's... n-not that bad... dancing with you, Hilda," her friend admitted shyly.

The two approached each other and, to each of their surprise, embraced in a hug, each momentarily believing the other had initiated it.

"Um... Hilda?"

"Marianne?"

Marianne remained quiet as she pressed her chest against Hilda's, then dropped her body low, bouncing in a squat as she looked up at Hilda past her blunt blue bangs. "The music... do you hear it?" she whispered.

Now that Marianne mentioned it, Hilda realized there was a strange, catchy beat that could be vaguely described as music coming from the floor. When Marianne stood again, Hilda found herself quickly dropped into a squat, looking up at Marianne's frightened face. "Uh, yeah..." She saw Marianne's eyes grow wide and her lower lip begin to tremble, shooting an arrow through her heart. "Yeah!" Hilda corrected her tune, putting on a brave face and trying a wink. "Like I said, it's fun, right?"

As she said it, Hilda rose again to hook her hands into the waist of Marianne's skirt. For her part, Marianne had begun unfastening buttons on Hilda's outfit. "F-fun?" Marianne squeaked in disbelief. "No, no, this is all my fault. I was cursed by this music, and now you are... I dragged you into it. H-Hilda, I can't stop myself! I'm going to-"

"Relax!" Hilda urged her, still holding her wink. Unable to belive what was happening, she dipped her body and her still easily jerking hips to lower Marianne's skirt around her legs, revealing an unflatteringly conservative panty set to match the bra. The shirt would have been long enough to cover it, were the shirt not stained with sweat. "There's... nothing to worry about!" Hilda proclaimed as she stared with disbelief at her friend's pale, skinny legs.

"Hilda...!" Marianne squeaked in protest. Her own humiliation became secondary as she finished unfastening Hilda's garment once the other student stood again. The dual corset and skirt dropped to the floor, leaving Hilda standing in her neat white shirt, a triangle of pink panties visible peeking through at the bottom. Marianne had dropped in a similar way to Hilda, so she found herself looking at the cute undergarments with a flummoxed, reddened face. "Oh, Hilda... y-you're so pretty," she couldn't help but comment.

"R-right?!" Hilda replied with a nervous smile, unsure how to respond to a compliment in this situation. "People think I just laze around, but I take pretty good care of my figure. I-!" Her small talk was cut off as Marianne rose to her feet again and their unintentional dance entered another phase. Each of them hiked up their shirts, turned so their butts were cheek to cheek, and bent to begin grinding them together in performance for an absent third party.

Neither of them spoke for a moment, experiencing the strange feeling of another woman's ass against their own for the first time. Hilda gulped, marveling at how frail Marianne's body felt. Her mind was feeding her the crazy thought that if she wasn't careful, she could hurt the other woman with her own relative dumptruck of an ass. "That's right... Whatever happens to me, I need to protect Marianne! This is going a little too far for a prank... Should I call out for help? It'll be humiliating, but it might be the only way to save us..."

"Hilda... i-it's actually... kind of fun, isn't it?" Marianne spoke from behind Hilda. "I didn't expect it, but...i-it's not so bad. It's fun to do it with you. A-and... your body's so soft..."

Hilda's eyebrows spiked as she considered Marianne's tone. "Huh? Huh? Wait a second... what's happening here?" She was glad Marianne was happy, but she was nervous about the way this mood was headed. She cleared her throat. "Yeah, you know. Just two friends, two girls partying! D-don't need guys to have a fun, friendly time, right?"

"Y-yes... I'm much more comfortable with you than with any strange men, Hilda," Marianne admitted, smiling bashfully.

"Mmhm," Hilda replied sheepishly, unsure if this was working. "I can tell you're comfortable now...!"

The dance had the two of them turn to face each other, revealing each of their faces to the other. Hilda saw just a glimpse of Marianne's unsettlingly calm smile and unusually sparkling eyes; Marianne, in turn, saw just a bit of rare embarrassment from Hilda as she darted her eyes away after initial contact, wearing a shaky smile. Hilda shut her eyes to hide that evasion, but whether she was watching or not, the dance continued. By this point, it was less a dance and more a striptease, with both ladies merely rocking their shoulders idly as they unbuttoned the shirt of the other.

As those garments fell to the floor, the two were left looking even more plainly like the unusual disparate pair they were. Hilda's curvy but surprisingly toned body was visible in a gaudy pair of garments, pink with lighter pink bands and plenty of lace. Marianne's own slender shape was still wrapped in frumpy underwear Hilda thought would look more natural on someone's mom than her pretty friend- "N-nope! Dangerous to be thinking like that in this situation," Hilda reminded herself with a gulp. "How long are they going to keep going? If they don't stop soon...!"

With the mood getting weirder and weirder, Hilda felt she had a responsibility to make things clear. "Marianne, if you ever get nervous, like, um, if things are getting out of hand...? Just remember that we'll always be fwh-"

Hilda's words were cut off as, to the surprise of both women, their faces were pulled together to start a makeout session. It was less a meeting of lips than a meeting of tongues, a performatively erotic type of kiss that was many steps removed from what either of them had dreamed of doing with a lover. In this situation, Hilda couldn't help but see Marianne's brown eyes popped open wide, slowly settling into a half-lidded expression Hilda begged not to mean she was getting comfortable with it. Marianne, meanwhile, saw a strange, cloudy expression of resignation cross Hilda's eyes, which a quiet, newly awakened part of her dared to imagine meant she was enjoying herself.

Even with all the tongue movement, there wasn't much of a dance if only their faces were moving: the two young ladies' half-naked bodies began to slide against each other dangerously. Hilda's **** efforts and Marianne's inherent shyness were the only things holding their hands back from exploring each other, as the music threatened to kick the show up yet another notch.

Finally, the music stopped. The two women almost choked on each other's tongues as they scrambled to get unlocked, Hilda realizing she'd gained her freedom and Marianne realizing she'd lost any defense if she kept going.

"... Friends," Hilda finished her earlier sentence, wiping her mouth of Marianne's spit and feeling emotionally exhausted.

"... Yes. I don't know why you tolerate me, but... I'm so happy to be your special friend," Marianne agreed, nodding repeatedly.

"Oh no," Hilda thought to herself, forcing a smile as she gathered up her clothes in her arms and held it in a bundle in front of her chest. "You know, uh... I'm sure there's a lot you probably want to do right now, and there's things we need to do about this, but boooy!" Hilda gave a big performative yawn, flexing her manipulative acting skills. "I'm so tired, Marianne! I think you ought to go rest and try to put all this craziness behind you. You're not scared anymore, right?"

"N-no... not with you helping me out," Marianne commented with a different shyness than usual as she rebuttoned her shirt. "Thank you, Hilda."

Hilda knew this was the time when she ought to make things clear, but... "Agh! Marianne! Your smile's too bright!" she thought to herself. How hard had she tried to cheer Marianne up in the past, only to find out now that what the gloomy girl evidently wanted was a partner to strip her to her underwear and french kiss her?! She could only smile and hope that after a night of sleep and thinking about what had happened, Marianne would realize her knee-jerk awakening was a mistake. She wanted Marianne to be happy, but this was too much to handle. "Any time, Marianne!" she replied with a **** grin.

"A-a-anytime?!" Marianne gasped, reddening even further. "O-oh... ah... I c-couldn't... I mean..."

"I screwed that up!" Hilda screamed internally. "I mean you can talk to me any time," Hilda corrected Marianne's impression, putting her own clothes on as quickly as she could in hopes of hurrying up Marianne's own redressing. Finally, both girls were back in their own clothes and in control of their own bodies. "Sleep well!" Hilda told her friend, stopping just short of pushing her out the door.

"G-good night, Hilda," Marianne told her with a small but brilliant smile that made Hilda hesitate to shut the door on her.

When Marianne was finally gone, Hilda slumped her back against the door behind her and put her head in her hands. "Aaah, what am I gonna do about this? Marianne's a cutie, but cuties like me and her are supposed to be out getting guys, not smooching each other in my room! I **** her to tell me what kind of guy she likes before, and she definitely didn't say 'one with boobs!' S-so, like... there's no way Marianne's... into girls, right? That had to just be the music messing with her. Then again... what do I really know about her?" she muttered to herself, letting out a long sigh. "This is gonna be a big pain, I can tell. Uuuugh..."

After sitting a while, Hilda sorted out her thoughts. "Okay, so... I need to be open-minded here. If Marianne was actually into girls, what's wrong with that? I should support her as a friend, I just need to make clear that I'm..." she trailed off with another sigh. "I'm tired," she finished her sentence decisively, dragging herself over to her bed and collapsing onto it without changing.

Soon enough, Hilda was snoring. Supporting her friend and shaking her ass were both way more effort than she normally put into her bedtime routine, and she had no trouble drifting off...

This turned out to be lucky for a girl valuing her beauty sleep. The faint remnants of music that started thrumming beneath her floor again didn't reach her, as another party continued late into the night.