"We bet our clothes?"

(chapter originally by Teraton at writing.com)

Mackenzie wavered at the suggestion. "You... you can't be serious."

The girl just shrugged. "Hey, just a suggestion, is all." She grinned, still smug as ever. "I get why you'd want to turn the bet down, though."

The red head bristled at this. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Look, just forget about it. It's no skin off my back- and no clothes off yours- if you don't want to spice things up."

Mackenzie wasn't dumb. A little easily incensed, but not dumb. She knew what the girl was implying, and it was getting too hard to not want to humiliate her. "...How would this work," she said after a minute, keeping her growing annoyance from creeping into her voice as best she could, "if I were to take you up on this offer?"

The other girl smiled, knowing she'd sunk a deal. "There's 10 levels in this game; 3 stages with 3 sections each, and 1 final level with the difficulty jacked way up." She glanced her opponent once over. "I'm assuming you're wearing something under there, so that'd be 5 items from where I'm standing: Footwear, 2 outer items, and 2 items underneath."

Mackenzie nodded. "So at the end of each level, whoever has the lower score loses an item? What happens if there's more to the game after one of us gets, uh...." Mackenzie coughed, "if you runs out of items?" The black haired girl just chuckled.

"If you're deadset on embarrassing yourself at that point then I guess you can stick around and play for forfeits. I'll be nice and let you leave if you feel like it, but if you want to make things worse for yourself, then..."

Mackenzie huffed. "We'll see whose making themselves look stupid in a few rounds." And with that, she slotted a few quarters into the machine, grabbed her gun, and stood ready to fire.

"Alright!" the girl laughed, doing the same. "Name's Rosalyn by the way."

"Mackenzie."

With a silent nod, and a grim look of determination towards one another, the two girls got ready to play.

The game was a simple enough shooter. Two female cyborg-soldiers were decked out in some sort of futuristic armor that gave them superhuman durability and reflexes- the games 'health bar' tracked how well the armor was holding together, with each character 'dying' (read; unable to fight) once they'd lost too much of the suit. 1 to 2 players could hop in, blast a vaguely defined enemy faction, and try to get the highest scores they could.

Speaking of which, after only four rounds, it seemed pretty clear how things were going to go in this contest: