Scarlet Date 3, Part 4: Meet the Dragon

Glitterdust

Glitterdust the emerald dragon lands on her offering platform, bits of gnoll still stuck in her beak-like maw. Ooooooh! Offering here already! Yeah! She drools a little over the panicking sheep, her spines waving in glee. With a shake of her rump, she leaps onto the defenseless animal, snapping it’s spine in several places with a singular crunch. Happily lost in the moment as sheep blood and viscera drips down her gullet, she savors the taste: meat, fat, fear. She chews and swallows, almost eating the rope used to tie the sheep to the offering plate in the process. Ever resourceful, she uses her vast psionic power to floss, sliding the rope between her teeth to dislodge any remnants of gnoll bits in her mouth. She doesn’t try to actually swallow any of said bits, of course; while the extra few calories would be appreciated, gnolls taste bad. Isn’t that how it is meant to be? Predators like gnolls taste bad. Prey like sheep taste good. Still, every offering comes with a note. I should read and respond.

She is relatively happy with her neighbors, sitting in that building in the shadow of her mountain. They offer sheep to please her gullet, information to please her curious mind, and, rarely, entertainment to please her more prurient obsession. She scans through the note, looking for some key words. Blah, blah, blah, new visitors from other dimensions, blah, blah, blah, MY mountain is threatening eruption, blah, blah, blah, the gnoll army is still assaulting the elves north of ME, blah, blah, blah, NO CHANGEDANCES SCHEDULED FOR THE NEXT FULL MOON FESTIVAL! C’mon! How hard is it to **** those gross boys to embrace becoming sexy girls! Ugh!

Glitterdust’s spines shake angrily. The nearby rocks shake a little. Several giant lizards scurry away. The dragon slowly calms down. She goes back to read the letter more closely. She mutters to herself as she writes her response, using her vast mental powers to elegantly manipulate a fountain pen they leave up here for such purposes. “I’LL get around to looking into MY mountain once I’M done eating gnolls for you. You can always give ME some sexy changedances if you want ME to prioritize digging through MY mountain. Much love, Glitterdust.”

The dragon stomps through its illusions, the squirts, rivers, and cascading flows of lava removing the grime off her gemstone like scales. Once she’s in her “mud room” (actually a section of cave before she enters her lair proper), she shakes the cooled lava rocks off of her body and saunters off to her relaxation nest. Soooo many dragon-sized cushions over a more generic mound of treasure. Her real treasures are, of course, hidden away in a special little cache, the entrance of which is concealed under some illusory stones.

With a little mental click, she turns on her projector television, firing up Harem Hotel Hereafter. After such a long day of hunting minions of The Hunger, there’s nothing like grinding MY cloaca into Chloe’s face while I watch ME some sexy hotel antics. She checks her favorited active (or at least active-ish) seasons first. The Bros to Hoes season showed some life there for a moment, but seemed to have gone back to hiding; in the middle of sexy Beer Pong, too. Ooooh, Lana is on a date with Turner and it looks like she is finally not struggling against her sexy new womanhood! That’s a strong maybe. Bed and Breakfast is going strong, but Aife seems to not be struggling with the whole sex shift enough. That’s the sexiest part, where the boys slowly embrace becoming sexy women! The Hashtag Keep Mark Mary season is going, but again, without the **** nature of the sex change, it’s not sexy enough; I mean letting Mary revert to gross Mark version is such a mistake. While the They Asked for It season has some potential, they are still in first round voting. The wrestling one seems to have gone into hiding, but Renee seems like too much of a bitch to really cheer for.

Decision made, she clicks on the episode to watch Lana and Turner paint pots. Glitterdust grinds her cloaca into her Chloe pillow. She was initially annoyed that the Harem Hotel merch store charged her twenty times what they usually do for a stuffed rendition of the former bully now current tomboy in Dan’s harem, but the pillow is twenty sizes bigger than the usual one, so she can’t complain too much. She’s already gone through several of them (and she pays the premium every time).

She snorts as her nethers start to warm up to the friction of tomboy on cloaca rubbing action. Of course, the season she really wants to watch is under some weird embargo. Like, Glitterdust sees notifications that new episodes are out, but delayed for her dimension. Super annoying. Aww, and Turner ruined the mood. Booo! Stupid boy. Hashtag Turn Turner Too!

She turns off the TV. Glitterdust contemplates a quick lava dip to clean up the smell of her rutting, taking a deep sniff of her lair to figure out whether she should. In addition to the faint scent of her own juices, she picks up a whiff of something else. Something foreign. Something has invaded MY room in MY mountain! Oh, they’ll regret it once I find them!

Scarlet

Scarlet, face barely sticking out of a curtain of lava flowing down the side of this room, spies a sinuous winged thing stomp through the cave passage and proceed to turn on a large projector. A Harem Hotel Hereafter menu is projected on the opposite wall from Scarlet’s hidey hole. The thing, huge and menacing, seems to be somehow controlling the menu, scrolling and selecting things without using a remote. Scarlet doesn’t recognize any of the episodes the thing is looking through but, then again, she hasn’t exactly sat down to watch much of the interdimensional smut show that kidnapped her. Eventually, the thing selects an episode with a couple of humans paint pots and lays down on a heap of riches, grinding onto a female human shaped pillow. Is that a dragon?

She telepathically calls out, “Hey, I think I found our dragon!” just to not get a reply. Shoot. Too long away. It’s might get difficult to sneak away from this thing, but I got to chance it. Taking a final quick look at the room, Scarlet slips back into the blackness of the lava. Funny thing, her oread senses let her know when she reaches the edge of a lava flow, but she can’t see in it. So, wading through lava is like crawling around in the pitch darkness of a moonless night during a complete blackout. Her city girl senses are not made for this. She oozes through the molten rock, looking for the seam of lava she took to get in here in the first place. She finds an edge and stumbles through it?

On the other side are shelves and shelves of figurines. Various women in various poses and clothing. She doesn’t recognize most of them. Lana, Renee, KaliCat, Aife, Mary, Sam and Alex. There are a whole wall of them devoted to a collection labeled Bros to Hoes? Strange.

A suddenly, loud scream from behind rattles the shelves. Scarlet struggles to look for a place to hide and slips into a little nook. She hears snuffling, sniffing. A shriek erupts from the room, “Come out, come out, wherever you are, little thief! I don’t neeeeed to see you, but I may go easy on you if you comply.”

Scarlet holds her mouth and nose, trying to avoid the creature hearing her breathing, before she remembers that she just doesn’t have to breathe anymore. There are advantages to being a fire monster, I guess. With perfect stillness of body, she just sits.

The sniffing gets louder, then softer, then louder again. Then, a sinuous head presses through some rocks and scans the room. “There you are, little thief! You trying to steal MY Harem Hotel merch? Huh? Buy your own! Get out here, before I make you!”

Acting on instinct, Scarlet grabs a random figure at throws it at the dragon’s eye. She then starts dashing away.

“One of MY ultra limited edition Harper figures! You smudged it, you monster! Oh, and was one of the serialized boxes, too! I’LL get you for this!”

Scarlet snarls at being called a monster, then loses a step as she thought about the rest of that. Harper? She can’t be talking about my Harper, can she? The oread skids 5 feet as the dragon barrels into her. A huge head, easily able to bite Scarlet into two, hovers menacingly over her as she’s flipped onto her back. “Look what you did to MY Harper figure!”

Some of the plastic is melted and the cardboard underneath is singed as, floating above her head is a figure of Harper, looking like she did before turning blue, is looking back at her. The serial number 82/100 is mostly still legible. Mostly.

“It’ll buff out?” Scarlet weakly offers.

“If the box is damaged, it’s no longer in mint condition! Don’t you know anything about collectibles! Sheesh, stealing things you know nothing about! What is wrong with you!”

“I wasn’t trying to steal from you! I... I was trying to figure out if you’re a... nice dragon?”

The dragon’s giggles reverberate through Scarlet. “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Trying to figure out if I’M a nice dragon. Of course I am! The monastery I let live beside MY mountain could have told you that.”

“Actually, the cart driver said you weren’t the most friendly. And you’re weird.”

Another giggling fit. “Now THAT is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. I get you oreads are effectively immortal, but you do realize you could still be killed, right? Wait... The monastery did make noises about something messing with MY mountain. New theory! You’re here to blow up MY home! Now I’M REALLY mad!”

Harper

Harper comes out of her Find Familiar trance. She placed Vix on the other side of the rocks blocking the stairwell to give the next area a quick look around. Big dragon of a type she’s not familiar with, looming over Scarlet.

“We need to move these rocks now!” Harper telepathically demands.

Tina pops her fingers, “Well, I know the solution to all problems...”

Before she says ‘Fireball’, Harper stops her, “We are in a volcano, Tina. You are more likely to fuse the rock into the stone walls than actually bust them out. A different tactic is needed. I’m going to cast Resilient Sphere on the rocks. Tina, strongest Dust Devil you can manage, heighten it against the sphere I make. Josie, if the Dust Devil isn’t enough, be ready to push. Go!”

Speaking in Aquan, a circular chunk of the rocks are encased in a nigh-impenetrable sphere. Tina summons her little tornado and the rocks start to budge. Slowly. Too slowly. With a flick of her Ring of Two Minds, she casts Haste on Josie. “Go!”

A speedy Josie slams through the tornado and pushes. Hard. With one final shove, breaking the last couple of steps, the rocks fling into the air, landing with a pleasant boing. Harper checks back into Vix’s body, feeling inadequately slow to fight. Josie keeps going, howling, snarling, bloodlust bursting forth as her claws pop out.

“STAY AWAY FROM MY GIRL!”

Josie lunges; the dragon flaps its wings to try to push the raging wolf-girl away. Josie slashes air twice and once through this floating cardboard box. Scarlet staggers up, then apologizes, “Sorry about your figure. This is all just a big misunderstanding. Josie, stand down.”

Grabbing onto the wall, almost to the ceiling of the room, the dragon says, “Josie? Josie Wulf? Eeeeeeeeeh! It is you! Wow! To think, I was nearly mildly inconvenienced by THE Josie Wulf! The way you showed Harper the joys of being penetrated like a good woman was SO hot!”

Did the dragon just squee at seeing Josie? Josie looks confused, too (at least at the angle Vix can get).

Tina gingerly pops her head over the stairwell. “Um, you aren’t gonna eat us now, are you? What with being Josie’s fan and all that?”

Harper feels the walls shake as the dragon’s head pushes into the stairwell. “Eeeeeeeeeh! It’s Tina, Titan of Trickery! I’M subscribed to you at the Bodacious Bunny tier! Am I going to be in your Feed? Oooh, oooh, can I make suggestions on how to best have sex with Harper? You know you are going to want a great statue when you finally get around to banging some more gross residual masculinity out of her! Oh, this is so exciting! Come in, come in!”

“Um, okay? Hey, cutie, are you here or in the fox?”

Harper feels her body being lifted and shifts back to her own perspective. She is gently laid back down on a pillow that looks weirdly moist. Vix seems content to sit in the wet spot with a foxy grin. “Hey, Tina, this your Insta-Thot production assistant or something? What are you two doing here anyways? Oooh, is this the second challenge? How exciting! And how do you know MY burglar or arsonist? Haven’t figured it out yet.”

Harper starts to refresh Telepathic Bond. She can’t really participate in the conversation if half of them can’t hear her. Scarlet speaks up, “Actually, this is part of my date. I’m Scarlet.”

“No, Scarlet is definitely not an oread. She’s a human. And it can’t be date time, since I haven’t seen the second challenge and they definitely wouldn’t be embargoing that much of the season on ME.”

“Okay, I’m officially confused,” Tina moans, “Can someone explain what’s going on?”

“Sure. Hi, I’M Glitterdust. This is MY mountain. I came home from hunting straggling gnolls for the monastery to find MY delicious offering. I had it for dinner, read MY note from the monastery, replied to it for next offering delivery, came in to watch some Harem Hotel, got annoyed because Turner is such a clueless boy, and then I smelled an intruder. She was in MY priceless Harem Hotel treasure room and she damaged one of MY ultra limited edition Harper figures. I was just about to move from verbal intimidation to limb removal when Josie – eeeh, I still can’t believe you’re here! – burst through some rocks I use to seal off MY room since I still haven’t gotten a good handle on shrinking down to elvenoid shape. And there you go, a perfect summary by ME, Glitterdust!”

Telepathic Bond finally finished, Harper speaks telepathically to Glitterdust, “Ma’am, I apologize for our intrusion. With more sincere apologies, what was the last thing you remember from the Harper season?”

“Oh, uh, not sure why THAT matters, weird blue PA chick, but last thing that happened was Harper and Skye stepping into a painting during that gross Indigo girl’s date. That help?”

“So, you’re behind. Sparing you a bunch of details, Indigo’s date did not go well, she got eliminated, second challenge came and went, Scarlet was turned into an oread during the transformation round, and we are now on her date. Tina’s date was yesterday. I’m sure some of her date footage popped up on her Insta-Thot account.”

The projector fires up behind Harper, projecting a web browser like page. With some mental commands, Glitterdust pulls up her Insta-Thot feed and, after scanning though some of Tina’s latest posts, starts to freak out. “Oh MY Sardior! It’s you! It’s REALLY you! Why are you blue? You shouldn’t be blue! That means all of MY figures of you are out of date! I bought SOOOO many of them! Can I stick MY tongue inside you? Please!”

Harper considers the tongue that is wider than her entire body for a moment, then shudders. “We were sent here to fix your mountain, Glitterdust. Business first.”

“Oh, uh, sorry. Was I coming on too strong? I was coming on too strong! That’s what MY twin always says! Don’t come on so strong! Stupid! Stupid Glitterdust! It’s just that you’re an example of MY perfect embodiment of beauty and you’re the first one I’VE gotten to meet and I’M just so excited! I should remember that you have a bunch of women to do that sort of stuff and I’D probably break you! Okay, no tonguing. Can I be your girlfriend? Pretty please with a dozen live sheep on top?”

Harper lets out a low, rumbling sigh (or at least as close to that as she can when encapsulated in this seawater suit). This girl is a lot.

Josie

The last several hours were exhausting for Harper and Josie knows it. The hike down to Glitterdust’s place was physically exhausting to the old lady and the dragon’s fangirling is emotionally exhausting to her. Josie has never seen Harper so bewildered. Conclusions were drawn, though. Glitterdust accepted that Scarlet was here to keep her home from exploding (and the monastery from being buried in magma). While she didn’t know what was causing the problem, she had a good idea that the problem was down in the base of the volcano’s caldera. The dragon even offered to let them stay the night and give them a lift to the caldera base in the morning. Then, the Harem Hotel marathon began.

The emerald dragon had us watch the entirety (at least so far) of her “second favorite” season, Harem Hotel: Bros to Hoes Edition. The way she watched Harper’s expression the bulk of the time at least hinted at what her “favorite” season is. Harper took it better than Josie expected. While she feels this weird sense of camaraderie with the former guys on screen as fellow contestants on a version of this interdimensional smut show she’s trapped on, it would be quite another to be subjected to a season where all of the contestants got the same basic starting deal that Josie got. The old lady even giggled in that strange whalesong language (not bothering to refresh the mental walkie talkie spell if they were just going to watch TV) a little at Yui’s antics. Tina alternatively dragged Scarlet and Josie over to burn off some bunny sex energy, which made Josie feel wanted. Whoever wasn’t tending to the rabbit got some weird “I’m trapped in this stupid suit but I still wanna cuddle!” cuddles from Harper, which also made Josie feel wanted.

Finally, two-thirds of the way through this Beer Pong competition, the show just stops. Tina, by now satiated enough to watch the show, expresses the general sentiment the best way she knows how, “Boo! You can’t just leave it there!”

Glitterdust concurs, “I know!”

“Yeah, you can’t just have 2 rounds of a three round thing and leave the best one out! That last round, without the lame-o dude, is gonna be so hot.”

Harper blurbles something, but no one here speaks whale.

Glitterdust concurs again, “I know! Hashtag Dan Go Ho!”

Harper arches an eyebrow at that one. Scarlet sees it too and translates, “Do you have a hashtag for all of the seasons?”

“Um, no. Your season didn’t need one, nor did Bed and Breakfast Edition. Just the ones that leave the Master as a stinky gross boy. I’M the Founder, President, and CEO of the Harem Hotel MtF Fetish Fanclub! It’s part of MY duty to spread the joy of fixing boys by making them sexy women!”

“Soooo, cutie, I got a question. Would Tina Hut help the whole thing with the suit for you? I mean, I hope so, since that’s why I got my orgasm count in a little early. I imagine you would like out of it for a bit. Maybe get some food in you?”

Everyone else snacking on dinner around her must have been annoying. Even Vix got some Rat Leavings from Glitterdust. With a positive nod, Tina gathers the foursome together and starts ritually casting the spell. 11 minutes later, a big pink dome surrounds them, filled with slumber party paraphernalia. A pile of pillows, some sleeping bags, a little boom box playing the girlie pop Tina loves so much. After Harper teleports herself out of the suit and stretches, she helps fill in Tina’s explanation of how the spell works. It is actually super convenient for situations like this one. With a nod, Josie steps out a bit before everyone goes to bed. She has business with a certain someone.

“Hey, dragon, you got a few minutes for me or are you getting ready to get some sleep, too?”

The dragon yawns, baring fangs as big as Josie’s leg. “I’M pretty sleepy, but I got time, Josie. Whatcha need? More limited edition snacks? I still have most of this bag of the Indigo’s Mexican Chili Ranch Rat Leavings Kang-oos made as a promotional item for your season.”

Josie shudders. “Man, they missed the mark. Indi was Cubana.”

“Was?”

“She’s the old lady’s fox familiar now.”

The dragon blinks once. Twice. Then nods. “Okay. Makes sense.”

Josie doesn’t know exactly how to approach this, so she just verbally charges in, “How serious were you in wanting to be Harper’s girlfriend?”

“As super serious about an impossible dream as I can be. I get that Harper, even if she was the sort to cheat on all of you, is simply going to be too busy with 6...”

“Eight.”

“Really? I missed two new girls added to Harper’s harem? Tell ME about them! Are they cute? Are either of them gross boys turned into sexy women? Maybe both? Oooh, that would be exciting!”

“Focus, Glitterdust, focus. Sorry for interrupting. Complete that first thought.”

“Was I being too much again? I always do that! Harper is going to be too busy with all 8 of you pulling her attention every which way that she won’t have time for someone out of the harem.”

“What if I had a way of getting you in the harem? How serious would you be in being with Harper?”

“In that ridiculously theoretical world, since there is NO way a season would just let a contestant do that, I would do just about ANYTHING for you to make that happen.”

Josie smirks. Excellent. “One more thing: this isn’t hallowed ground or anything right?”

Glitterdust snorts. “Some have worshiped ME for MY beauty, but, nope. MY mountain is MINE. The monastery grounds stop at MY foothills.”

“Then, let me fill you in on some more details you missed. I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.”