Schemes and Strategies

Dinah

Dinah really doesn’t want to be the team Mom, but it feels like she may just have to be. After helping Scarlet get the drowsy, depressed Josie to the one table in the dinning area big enough to hold all of them, she jogged over to check on the others. She quickly hears Añil masturbating loudly with some kind of bee stinger? The Fuck? While dragging her to the showers to get the stink from jilling for an hour off her, she sees Tina and Skye returning. Tina has given up on clothes altogether. Dinah can’t tell if she is trying to cheer Skye up with a show of camaraderie or if she tried casting her spell again and it just ruined her bikini top; given that Tina’s pubic hair is in the perfect shape of a diamond, Dinah is leaning towards the later option. Skye starts to fidget uncomfortably again as soon as the girl sees the annoyed woman dragging the pervert, both basically fully dressed. Tina whispers something into the younger girl’s ear and she calms down a little. Nice to see that I can occasionally rely on that one.

Finally at the showers, Dinah orders, “Shower. 5 minutes. Go. Now.”

“But...”

“No buts, missy. This nightmare porn game is bad enough without you smelling like you fucked half the volleyball team. Shower.”

“But...”

“Don’t make me go back to your room and smash that abominable thing into a thousand pieces.”

That got her to start moving. 15 minutes later, everybody is sitting down to eat. Of course, the harpy of a host planned quite the phallic meal for the first one in this gilded prison: Korean corn dogs, with various chocolate dipped fruits and treats on a stick for dessert. It’s a sick joke.

Añil adds to the awkwardness almost immediately, “I like corn dogs. They are like dildos made of unspeakable meats.” She bites into one to emphasize her point.

Skye is sitting such that she is staring away from the table. It’s too hard to look at us clothed. I’d be harder on the girl if I hadn’t just spent the last few hours reading insanity and watching how a bit of that insanity kept Josie from getting any real comfort.

She asks no one in particular, “What’s a dildo? Oh, and has the sun started setting yet? It’s hard to figure out when evening starts when there are no windows outside.”

Scarlet pulls out one of the magic phones and opens a time app. “If we were on Earth, I’d say we were in the evening. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, it’s time for Evensong. It’s the most important part of the day. I need to sing my prayers. I will find a quiet spot so my bad singing doesn’t bother any of you.” The girl gets up and walks away.

The table is quiet for a bit, outside of Añil chowing down. Josie breaks the tension, “Sorry about the whole freak out thing. I’ll try to do better.” She wraps her arms around her chest, clearly still hurting. Also clearly trying to avoid touching her abs.

“I feel like I missed something,” Añil asks, “Does somebody care to fill me in?”

And fill her in the table did. The full details of her transformation (it took us several minutes of arguing to get her to leave the playtime app thing on our phones alone for now), the transformations **** on the bottom 3 contestants, the extra transformation she earned the Master. By the time Skye returns to the table, Añil is stunned into silence.

Josie

I should be dead. I hurt my friend on crazy magic TV. How can these strangers be so nice to me?

Josie eats mechanically. She knows she needs calories (and a shower, but that’s for later), so she eats. She sees the others eat, but everyone seems too somber. Not how I was planning on spending tonight.

Dinah apparently read the rule book to this psychotic game. She does not look happy about what she found.

“So, we need to make some decisions here before the game really begins. And, before you ask, the violations they did to us are just the beginning. If you want to go through the existential horror of reading this legalese tripe, please go ahead, but here is the executive summary. They plucked us from a dimension they deem beneath contempt to serve as yet another group on their trashy reality altering TV. This is like **** people to be on Big Brother 483. We cannot argue or sue our way out. The only chance any of us have to getting out of here alive and sane is for the one who wins fixing the problem on the back end. It does not help that our host seems to be a midwit promoted beyond her capabilities. Or maybe it does...”

“Wait, the all-powerful host is dumb?”

Dinah responds, “One, she is not all-powerful. There is at least a few orders of magnitude difference between her power and the power of her bosses, the so-called Producers of the show. Much of what she has done has likely been with borrowed power. Appealing to the Producers would probably do little good, unless we could successfully argue that giving us what we want would be good for the show. Two, it is obvious she is dumb.”

Tina chimes in, “She thinks Bea Arthur is a sex icon.”

“I was leaning towards how much she left out of the explanation during the opening. She forgot to mention the most important part, the prize.”

Añil asks, “I mean, the prize is obviously that we get the girl at the end, right?”

“We don’t get the Professor, Añil,” Dinah grates her teeth on this, “The Professor gets us. All of us. We are bound to the professor in some magical way no matter what happens. The question is, how much of us are left? Elimination means either a complete mindbreak or being trapped inside your body outside of your control. Ending the game at under 100 VP but not eliminated means that you will only exist as the Professor’s property wherever we end up. Scoring above 100 VP at the end means you still get to be a person; a person that may be so fucked up from these transformations that you can’t function in normal society anymore, but a person none-the-less. The prize goes to the top girl. Whoever scores the most VP gets a wish, so long that it meets a long list of stipulations; over the years, previous winners have figured out a bunch of loopholes the wish could generate and those loose ends have been tied up. All of this brings us to our first decision, one that I want an answer to right now: are we going to play like this is Big Brother 483, where at most one of us wins, or are we going to play this like we are a team that will have to live together with the results?”

Everyone is stunned into silence. Josie did not expect the quiet naked girl to be the first to speak; she seems too timid to contribute much of anything, “My Goddess teaches us to fight against evil, especially in dire odds. She could never win back her sisters and brothers from the clutches of the Spider without daring to try. If I am to die with only the love of Her in my heart, then so be it. But I would much rather stand against this with friends than with enemies. I’m with us. Team Family. Who else?”

After a too long, too awkward pause, Añil blurts out, “Which option will get me laid sooner?”

Now this is something I can speak to, Josie thinks. She then explains, “I’m not calling it ‘Team Family’, but I’m all for doing this as a team. Añil, you are young and...”

“Wow. You actually pronounced my name right. First time all day. Everyone, please just call me Indigo, or Indi for short.”

“The Master and I are both from south Texas. We both know at least a little Spanish. Anyways, Indi, you are young and very likely to make the same fucking mistakes I did when I was your age. My senior year of high school, I was co-captain of the volleyball team,” Indigo interrupts with a snicker. Josie glares at the pervert, then continues, “I talked most of the girls into an arrangement similar to what I had at the gym, casual hook-ups among friends-with-benefits. The one hottie hold-out was the captain; I knew she had a crush on me, but she wanted exclusivity. She wanted me all to herself. By the time the season was over, even the backup freshman girls were making fun of her being the only virgin on the team.”

Let’s leave out the fact that she and I were the only ones who didn’t have a date to the prom and move onto the point, Josie bitterly mulled, then she continued the argument, “I don’t know all the details, but I do know that, if you are not on Team Polycule, it is in the team’s best interest to keep you from scoring. Someone on the team has to win the wish to try and make things work. How much sex do you think you will have when no one on the team will touch you and will try their best to make The Master hate you?”

Indigo looks down at her feet. Josie feels Dinah’s hand on her shoulders.

Scarlet chimes in, “So long as whoever wins will cover my student debt with one striptease tip, I’m down for teamwork.”

Tina looks at the redhead with a curious expression, “All the power of a wish, and you’re just asking for that?”

“Yeah, for now at least. I reserve the right to add to it after I find the time to read through the rules. As long as we agree to all the aspects of the wish, working together to get it just makes sense.”

“I’ve been obsessed with magic all of my life,” the blonde bunny begins, pulling down one of her ears in a nervous tic, “and now I have a taste of it. What kind of assurance can I get that, at the end of this, I can still live out my dream? Riches and fame, performing to sold-out crowds on the Strip?”

“Little to none,” the de-aged woman pointedly responds, “even with the limited controls we have, we may still be broken beyond repair by the process. But, you’ll have the best chance at it if we work together.”

“I know of the sacred writings of the scribe Gygax. While he did not believe, he did record truths beyond his understanding,” Skye adds, “If you are with us, Ms. Tina, I will help you grasp those truths. Maybe you’ll find more magic within you than what the mean lady can give. Team Family?”

The bunny girl beams, “You mean Team Tina and Her Groupies? I’m in.”

Indigo takes another bite of a corn dog, “Okay. Fuck it. Team Hentai Harem, assemble.”

Dinah gives the young pervert a look, “I don’t care what we call this, but I’m glad that we all agree. Next issue. Is the professor a part of our team or an enemy? I personally feel that the professor should be a part of us. We’ll need cooperation and The Master, shit, will provide it when we ask. But, if the majority wants to try and undermine the professor...”

Skye and Josie interrupt simultaneously. The more timid girl backs off long enough for Josie to speak.

“If you dare hurt The Master, I will rip out your intestines and strangle you to **** with them.”

“The Master is a victim of this, too. If we **** The Master to bend to our wills, we are no better than the monsters that threw us into this mess.”

The other girls appear to consider the matter, but, in the end, reject the proposal.

Dinah sighs, “Glad that we agree here too. Just needed to get the thought out there. Can’t have it fester in the back of anyone’s mind. So, our goal is to get everyone up to 100 VP. We work with the professor to get us all there. The rulebook specifies that we are not allowed to know the point value of a particular action, outside of sex being worth more than friendship. There is a bonus multiplier for one of us having a ‘first’ with The Master and another one for one of us being a ‘first’ with The Master. I really hate that mind control compulsion. So, think about what you haven’t done sexually; we’ll strategize to maximize points.”

“Don’t forget about that ‘no touchy’ transformation the witch gave The Master,” Scarlet adds, “we are all going to have to get over that to actually get any points.”

Everyone looks somber at that. Josie gets up.

“I know I just slept for the past several hours, but I’m still pretty exhausted. Can we continue this in the morning? I’m going to get the smell of sex off me and then head back to bed.”

The gym girl heads back to her room to get her shower gear ready. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.

Scarlet

With Indigo dragging Skye away for another lesson on “Internet speak”, 3 women remain at the table, all lost in thought. Scarlet finally speaks up.

“So, are we sure that The Master is going to play along with The Master’s side of the game? I mean, I don’t want to be a bitch about it, but, given the dumb secret the game’s built around…”

“I mean, if we need to be evil about it, there are always transformations we could foist,” Tina notes, holding up the shop screen on her phone displaying the Master’s transformations page, “There are plenty of options to make The Master more compliant. Rather not go that way. I hope that we can trust The Master’s desire to do ‘whatever it takes’ to get us all out of here.”

“Rather not be talking strategy with half of us out,” Dinah adds, “but, given the topic, I’m sure Josie and Skye would both be objecting too strenuously to finish it. We shouldn’t give in to that, Tina. That harpy will want us to play the game that way. While I’m sure that some of us will buy some of the less grievous options in that shop to help the game along, none of us should do so without first getting consent from the whole team, including the professor.”

“So, since I’ll be the first among us to go on a date, we’ll have a talk. Huh. Plural pronouns still work. Anyways, has everyone figured out said dumb secret?”

“Not sure. Both Josie and Indigo looked rather out of it for the explanation portion of the opening. Granted, Josie definitely knows, but Indigo probably doesn’t,” Tina, seemingly the most observant one, replies, “Skye definitely doesn’t have a clue. This is literally the first time she has left her farm and seems really sheltered. Don’t even know how to broach the subject with her.”

Scarlet nods. “One of us is going to have to find the right timing to have that conversation. We should all probably turn in soon. It’s been a long day. We’ll work this out once one of us can get everyone on the same page.”