Round 1 Day 3 - Eleanor's Date (3/3)

Eleanor’s new fangs stabbed into her own lower lip, the pressure looked hard enough to hurt but not to pierce the skin. Matt watched the fresh wave of arousal bloom through her as the bite activated her second transformation. Her pale skin flushed from the neck upwards. She gasped and dropped the towel he had given her in an effort to preserve her modesty, and he could see her pink nipples puckering up atop her perky teenage tits. She pressed her thighs together, sliding easily past each other from the plentiful lubrication. Her red eyes snapped open and locked onto him.

“Why would you do that?” he asked her, confused and disappointed.

“I... I want...” she moaned, her freshly manicured nails clawing into the wall she was leaning against, that she had backed into while retreating from him.

Even that partial fragment of a sentence was enough to trigger Consent Checker. She wanted him, which still gave him a thrill to see in a woman’s eyes after many years of a relationship where he could never be certain, but at the same time she also didn’t. She was terrified: of him, of the circumstances, of her own desires. She was more confused than he was, which was somewhat impressive even if it was also somewhat less than helpful.

“Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath, and then stepping back towards her. Her eyes went wide with fear, and she tried to recoil even though she was already backed against a wall. He tried not to let that bother him. “I’m not going to touch you, Eleanor,” he told her.

She let out a noise that was half relief and half disappointment. Matt could feel the heat radiating from her body as much as he could see it on her face. He planted a hand on the wall beside her head and leaned in, looking down at her from above. He took a gamble, remembering that Scarlet had said the Contestants were all here to appeal to him and hoping that meant what he thought it meant. His expression hardened as he adapted, letting himself become the sort of person who could make her choose.

“You got yourself into this mess, you can be the one to deal with it,” he instructed sternly, “If you want me to leave while you do that, then tell me. Otherwise, I’m staying right here.”

Eleanor just stared up at him, panting hard, her eyes unfocused.

“Well?” he prompted after several seconds of silence.

“...no,” she whispered, still staring.

“‘No’ what?”

“No, don’t go,” she said, the scarcely audible request still enough to trigger Matt’s transformation again. He held back a sigh of relief that he hadn’t misjudged.

“Alright,” he nodded, accepting her answer, “Which way are you going to deal with it then? Are you going to go about the rest of the day coping with this feeling, or are you going to do something about it now?”

Eleanor swallowed, and kept staring at him. He didn’t look away either, even when her arm moved in the corner of his vision. He saw the exact moment she started touching herself when her eyelids flickered, her lips parted, and a quiet moan escaped her throat. He smiled, a lopsided grin with a slightly sadistic edge to it.

“I see you’ve made your decision. This probably won’t take long, will it? Not after what you just did to yourself.”

She shook her head in a small, rapid motion, keeping her gaze fixed on his. The wet sounds from below increased in speed.

“That’s it,” he said in a husky whisper, “Make yourself cum. Do it.”

Eleanor did it. She thrust her middle two fingers deep inside while grinding her clit against her palm. Her back arched, her breath caught, her jaw clenched and she narrowly avoided biting her lip a second time and trapping herself in a loop. Stars spun across her vision as her pleasure exploded, but not a single one of the dancing lights blocked her view of Matt’s piercing blue eyes.

• Put on a show: +4VP (First! x2 bonus = +8VP)

The fire burned out in one glorious conflagration that left her skin tingling and her lungs gasping for oxygen. She slowly slid down the wall as her muscles went limp, and it was only when her ass hit the tiles that she realised this put her face-to-face with Matt’s throbbing erection. It was hard, twitching a little, and shining at the tip where his precum had been building up. Her lips parted, but before she could either say or do anything Matt moved, turning around and sitting down beside her with his back to the wall.

“So,” he said gently, whatever dominant persona he had been using was entirely gone as he smiled pleasantly at her and raised an eyebrow, “Care to tell me what that was all about?”

They were in the corridor when Sarah’s transformation caught her. She and April had found a small courtyard with a koi pond and a bench, and spent a couple of hours sitting there and chatting, getting to know each other as the afternoon passed. The catgirl was shy but friendly, and had a lot of similar interests to her husband. Some of the same kinds of videogames, though April seemed to have a larger library on that front, and similar tabletop RPGs, though she usually played by text chat rather than voice and video. It was stuff she enjoyed talking about with Matt, and enjoyed nearly as much with her new friend.

Art was a new topic. Sarah had dabbled in some crafting hobbies, mostly knitting and crochet, but she wasn’t all that creative. April worked as an artist though, doing some illustration work for small businesses wanting advertisement art, or commissions of people’s RPG characters. After a little more questioning she did admit that the majority of her income actually came from lewd drawings, blushing adorably as she let the detail slip. Sarah would have been tempted to pursue the topic further if she hadn’t been blushing almost as hard.

During a natural lull in the conversation they had agreed to go and find some refreshments, and they’d barely left the courtyard when Sarah began to feel it. A sudden wave of warmth, and then rubbing - as if she was grinding against something while walking. She managed not to react aside from a slight catch in her breath, to begin with, but she couldn’t help but stumble when she felt the fingers slip inside her.

“Everything alright?” April asked sweetly, innocently.

“I’m fine, just tripped over my own feet,” Sarah smiled back at her, hoping the rising blush would seem like it was from embarrassment rather than the fact that she was being secretly fingered. It wasn’t Matt. She knew what his fingers felt like, she’d gotten reacquainted with them only a few nights ago, so the only thing she could imagine was that Eleanor was masturbating with him right there. In the middle of their date, in the middle of the afternoon.

“Still getting used to your body?”

“Something like that,” Sarah lied, then flinched when she felt a hand firmly grab her by the arm. The transformation apparently had quite a broad definition of ‘pleasure’, not that she didn’t enjoy being manhandled by Matt under the right circumstances. At least the fingers between her legs had stopped.

“You’ll get there,” April said sympathetically.

“It’s not too bad, mainly just my legs being longer,” she shrugged it off and tried to carry on. The feelings had mostly stopped, aside from a slight pressure like she was pressing her thighs together. Hopefully it would stay that way.

“I guess I didn’t have any major physical changes to get used to from hormone therapy,” April skipped to catch up, “The biggest difference was my chest and they’re not exactly massive.” She tugged self-consciously on the bottom of her hoodie, pulling it tight across the front and outlining the pair of small breasts.

“They don’t have to be big to be nice,” Sarah said, then they both blushed again. There was a long and heavy silence as they carried on walking. “Um. Does it cause any other changes?” she asked, floundering for something to say, then winced. “Oh, sorry. That’s probably rude to ask, isn’t it?”

The catgirl shook her head. “No, you’re okay. It would be rude to ask out of nowhere, but I was the one to bring it up and I don’t mind explaining. Let’s see...” she chewed on her lip as she considered what she could say. “It can be different for everyone, but my skin got a bit softer, I think, and my hair got shinier. It affects my mood, like I can tell when I’ve accidentally missed a dose of estrogen because I get really miserable for no reason. A lot of trans women say the testosterone blockers reduce their sex drive but not...” she nervously cleared her throat and her cheeks warmed, “...not all of us. It made me grow boobs, like I said. If I took a big enough dose of the right hormones apparently I could even lactate. It changed my body odour, weirdly. Uh... it shrank my... you know.” She tugged at the front of her skirt, her tail weaved back and forth behind her. “It got a little bit smaller. Oh, and my orgasms are more like a woman’s now, or that’s what they tell me the difference is at least,” she finished with a shy giggle.

April braced herself for another look up and down, assessing the parts of her that were medically induced rather than what she was born with, and she wasn’t disappointed. Sarah looked more thoughtful than disturbed though, which was a relief. It had been nerve-wracking to explain so much about her body, but her roommate hadn’t given her any reason so far to believe it would be a problem. And if it had turned out to be a problem, it would be better to find out now before things went too far.

“I didn’t realise hormones did so much,” Sarah said eventually, sounding almost impressed.

She shrugged in awkward acknowledgement. “It’s been great, really. The only parts I wasn’t happy with was when I ended up going to the toilet eight times a day while the doctors adjusted my doses, I get cold more easily, and that there’s no hormones that would do anything about my voice. I had to train that the hard way. And I guess it might be nice to be a bit shorter, but that’s alright. I know it’s not perfect, but I’m happy with my body now.”

“Really? Even...” Sarah’s eyes flicked downwards involuntarily.

“...I thought I was okay with that,” April admitted quietly, “I didn’t like the idea of surgery to do anything about it. I guess it probably puts me at a disadvantage in this competition though, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t really know, sorry. It’s not like it’s something I ever discussed with Matt.” There was a lot about her husband’s preferences Sarah didn’t know, it seemed like. Things she’d have to learn. She sucked in a breath as she felt teeth on her lower lip and another surge of heat, but the sensation stopped there. The grinding pressure between her thighs increased soon after.

“Maybe I’ll get a transformation to help with it next round,” April continued, thinking about the other season she had read and sent a letter to.

“Maybe,” Sarah said uncertainty, “Or maybe it’s fiiiiiiine!” she yelped on the last word. Fingers back on her clit. Rubbing hard and fast, then slipping inside. Thrusting. Filling her up. In seconds she had gone from mildly turned on to the brink of orgasm.

“Sarah?” her roommate caught her when she stumbled, propping her up, body pressing against hers, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she lied in a breathless gasp, “I’m okay... I’m... Hngh.” She wasn’t okay. She was about to cum. Suddenly, and out of nowhere. She sank to her knees.

“Are you hurt? Are you...” April knelt with her, pulling her close. Concerned. Affectionate. Just like Matt would have been.

Sarah clamped a hand over her mouth but didn’t manage to muffle the squeak as she came, or avoid nearly falling over even further when her muscles sharply spasmed. As she contorted she looked up into her roommate’s widening eyes, and found she couldn’t look away. Even when the feelings had passed, they continued staring at each other.

April’s mouth hung open. She recognised what that was. Sarah hadn’t been in pain. “So...” she began, “What was that all about?”

Eleanor pulled her knees up to cover her breasts and wrapped her arms around her shins, staring blankly straight ahead as she shuddered through the aftershocks of her self-inflicted orgasm. Matt remained where he was, sitting beside her a hands-breadth away with one leg extended straight in front of him and the other raised just enough to block her view of his cock. He said nothing even as the silence stretched on, waiting for her to respond. He was pretty certain she was more impatient than he was, and pressing her more would only result in her pressing back.

“I...” Eleanor’s voice cracked as her patience did. She cleared her throat and blushed. “I need to win this competition.”

Matt let the confession sit for a moment in case she was going to expand on her answer, and when she didn’t he prodded: “The Wish?”

She nodded glumly.

“Why? I thought you said you were doing pretty well in your life.”

“I am,” she briefly scowled at him, but quickly returned to her blank staring, “Or... I was.”

“Then what would you be wishing for?”

“Money,” she said simply.

Matt blinked as he processed one of the least likely answers he could have imagined. “But you already have money. More than the rest of us combined, and then some.”

“No I don’t,” she scoffed, “Daddy has money, but he’s not going to keep paying for me when he finds out I’m in a harem, and you...” she looked over at Matt and tried her best to sneer at him, “You can’t afford me.”

“I suppose not,” he let the insult lie, given her heart didn't seem to be in it and it was probably accurate anyway. Her assumption that she couldn't manage without all that money was a bigger problem, but probably not one she was ready to talk about while naked on a changing room floor. “What made you think this was a good way to go about winning it then?”

That question led to another long silence as Eleanor cast her gaze downwards. She tried several times to start a sentence only to abandon it before the first syllable.

“Max said...” she managed on the eighth attempt, but got no further than that.

Matt took some time to turn over the words, in case they might imply something different than what he first thought. When no sensible alternatives presented themselves, he pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled long and deep.

“You took advice from Max,” he said, flat and entirely unimpressed.

“Of course I did!” Eleanor snapped, as if it was obvious, “She earned 55 points with you in one night!”

He grimaced. He hadn't actually checked the scoreboard since before his date with Max, and he hadn't expected to have gone so far with her so fast. “I know that's a lot, but Max and I had been building towards that for years. She knew what she wanted, and we still spent half the day dancing around each other before it happened,” he remembered the advice he'd been given at the whisky tasting, from a man younger than even Eleanor was but mature beyond his years, “...and honestly, I've got some stuff to work out with her before things go any further between us.”

Eleanor gave a non-committal grunt, and rested her chin on her knees. Matt watched her thinking, and hoped she wasn't learning the wrong lesson.

“What did Max even say to you?” he asked.

“She said... I’d need to really tease you if I wanted you to actually do anything,” the goth mumbled, then buried her face in her knees to partially hide her blush.

Matt started to respond with confusion, then paused and thought back on Max’s date, and the many times he had turned her down or delayed until later. “Okay, yeah. I can see where she got that from. And yeah, it kind of worked for Max. But you’re not Max.”

Eleanor lifted her head again, glaring at him suspiciously. “Is that supposed to be a compliment or an insult?”

“Neither, it just is,” he grinned back at her, “Whatever form the relationship between me and you takes might be nothing at all like me and Max,” he shrugged, “Or it might turn out to be similar after all. We both need to figure out what we want from this.”

“I already told you what I want,” she tutted and rolled her eyes, “Weren't you paying attention?”

Matt held back yet another sigh. Whatever receptive state Eleanor had been in was fading fast, and the entitled brat was coming back with a vengeance. He wouldn't rise to it.

“You told me what you wanted right now, and I had a voice in my head screaming at me that you didn't really mean it,” he pointed out, “Then you told me that you want to win the Wish, but not how you want to get there. What do you actually want our relationship to look like?”

Eleanor fell silent and looked away, and Matt once again waited calmly for her response. The tiles felt cool beneath his skin, but the pleasantly warm air kept him from feeling the chill. In the distance, he could still hear the waves lapping at the shore outside the massage parlour. It was peaceful. It helped take the edge off the difficult conversation.

“I don't know,” she said, quietly enough that he wasn't sure it was deliberate.

“Good answer. Me neither.” He grinned at her, then pushed himself to his feet and offered her a hand. “Want to finish up our date while we try and figure it out?”

Eleanor peered at the hand, because the other option was looking past it to his still-hard cock and she couldn't face that directly. It hung there, waiting for her to do something about it. Something that she was still scared of, but that she knew she'd have to confront at some point. She took a breath, reached up, and let him pull her to her feet.

It was still early for the dinner service at the buffet when Grace arrived, so she was surprised when she wasn't the first one there. Chrissy had taken her usual seat at the far side of the central table and slumped down to hide her chest behind the tabletop, and she was aggressively stabbing a pen into a sheet of paper. She looked angrier than she had been since the opening ceremony.

Grace kept a cautious eye on the topless woman, her living hair preemptively lifting into a protective barrier, but didn't acknowledge her otherwise. She made her way over to the drinks station that was always stocked even when the buffet was empty, as she had planned when she entered the room, and poured herself a cup of tea. Behind her there was a cracking, splintering sound as the pen broke, then a shocked splutter when Chrissy finally noticed she wasn't alone.

“What are you doing here?” the topless woman demanded as Grace turned to face her.

Grace cradled the cup in front of her, her knuckles white as she gripped the handle and kept her first reaction firmly behind her teeth. She'd managed to avoid interacting with Chrissy much since their arrival, but she couldn't have missed her unpleasant attitude, the slurs she had been throwing around, or how she had been introduced as a bully from when Matt was in secondary school.

“Getting some tea,” Grace said stiffly, lifting the cup a fraction, “What are you doing here?”

Chrissy scowled and looked down at the page in front of her, beside the shattered remains of the pen. “Just when I thought this fucked up game couldn't get any worse, I get given fucking homework.”

“Homework?” Grace frowned in confusion, “You mean the fanmail?”

“Yeah,” she grunted unhappily, “That.”

“A short letter is hardly homework. The kids I look after at the nursery could manage that much.”

Chrissy's eyes flashed with anger and she crumpled the page into a tight ball. “What the fuck are you trying to say about me?” she snarled, then hurled the ball of paper. It bounced off of Grace's hair, which surged in response to the harmless attack.

“There’s no need for that,” Grace grumbled with her jaw clenched, “I’m only saying you can just write a couple of lines of vague well-wishes if you really can’t think of anything.”

She knelt down to pick up the screwed up attempt at a letter and unravel the inky-stained paper, careful not to spill her tea on it. Chrissy’s eyes flashed again, but with fear rather than anger this time.

“Wait, don’t!” she called out, sitting up enough to reveal her breasts as she pointlessly reached towards the page she had tossed away.

Grace only managed to get a brief glimpse of a messy spider-scrawl of letters, too chaotic to even make out any words, and then the paper suddenly incinerated between her fingers. On the table, the broken shards of pen did the same, and then with a flash of flame there was suddenly a clean page and an intact ballpoint lying in front of the bully. Chrissy’s fearful cry turned into a strangled groan of frustration and she swept them off the table. A few seconds later there was another flash of flame and they were back in position.

“...seriously, just write some nonsense and sign your name if it’s bothering you that much,” Grace shook her head and took her seat, sipping at the tea and turning away to try and signal the end of the conversation.

Chrissy either picked up on the signal or otherwise didn’t have anything to say. Instead she grabbed her pen again, holding it awkwardly with too many fingers, and very slowly scribbled onto the page with her brow furrowed in frustrated concentration. Several long minutes later, when Grace was most of the way through her tea and was almost starting to feel sorry for her, she stabbed down with the pen one final time and turned her face upwards.

“There! Is that fucking good enough?” she demanded.

She got no answer from the ceiling, but Grace watched out of the corner of her eye as the page and pen disappeared again. Rather than bursting into flames this time, they both dissolved into fine sand and drifted away on a non-existent breeze. That was probably a “yes”, and Chrissy seemed to take it as such. She grunted and slumped back down in her seat, folding her arms beneath her bare breasts.

A few minutes later the doors opened and a catering trolley squeaked through, pushed by a goblin chef. The goblin wheeled it up to the buffet counter and began hauling trays of food under the heating lamps, setting up for the meal. It seemed like a variety of different grilled meats and an array of colourful steamed vegetables tonight. It wasn't all that fancy, but it smelled nice and looked fresh. If nothing else good had come from this situation, then Grace had been eating better since her kidnapping than she did before on her limited budget.

Others began arriving soon after. Emma first, giving Grace a nod of greeting and wincing a little when she saw Chrissy was there too. The tall blonde woman went straight for the plates while the chef was still setting up the food, trailing after the goblin and plating up a generous portion that was mainly chicken by volume. April and Sarah arrived at the same time, walking together but not quite looking at each other. Then Max skulked in, oddly thoughtful with her gaze turned downwards. Nobody asked her about the 55 points, and she wouldn't have answered if they did.

One by one they all gathered their meals and settled into the usual awkward silence. Almost everyone sat in the same seats they had for the last two nights, though Sarah broke the pattern by choosing to sit next to her roommate instead, who was in turn sitting in her usual spot next to Grace. Across the table, Emma kept glancing between the empty chair beside her and the doorway. Several times she started to say something only to think better of it.

Eventually Emma’s anxiety got the better of her nerves and she cleared her throat to attract everyone’s attention. “Does anyone know where Poppy is?” she asked the room, “I haven’t seen her all day, and I’m worried she might have forgotten that the rules say we have to attend these meals.”

Everyone exchanged uncertain glances and shrugs. Emma’s concerns intensified, enough that she risked turning towards someone who she would rather not have become any further indebted to.

“Sarah?” she asked, facing her but with her eyes on the table, “Did you see where she went after you talked to her this morning?”

“This morning?” Sarah blinked, surprised at being addressed, “This morning we... oh, right. Um. We went to the wedding. Me, Matt and Poppy. And Scarlet.”

“Well I guess that explains why I haven’t seen her around,” Emma let out a small laugh of partial relief, but it was only partial. Her girlfriend still wasn’t here. “Where did she go when you came back then?”

Sarah didn’t reply immediately. The silence drew out long enough that Emma eventually risked looking up, only to see Sarah looking pale and confused.

“Um,” she said shakily, “I don’t remember her coming back with us, actually.”

The bottom dropped out of Emma’s stomach. “She didn’t come back with you?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah shrugged, shrinking in on herself, “I had other things on my mind.”

“What could possibly be more important than realising you were missing an entire person?” Emma demanded, her volume increasing, and any deference born of her past with Sarah was forgotten in the moment as worry descended into fear.

“Matt nearly died on the way, okay?!” Sarah snapped back, nevertheless looking guilty, folding her arms in front of her chest, “He’s fine now, but... we got a bit distracted.”

“Poppy didn’t arrive with you from the same trip that nearly killed Matt?” Emma gripped the edge of the table until something started to creak, “Is she... is Poppy...?” She swallowed hard. Her grip slowly loosened. She looked towards the door. “I have to go find her.” She knocked the chair over in her hurry to stand up, and dashed away, leaving her half-eaten meal behind.

Everyone left behind watched her leave, and the awkward silence took advantage of the opportunity to slip back in in the opposite direction. After several tortuous moments, cutlery was picked back up and people gradually resumed eating.

“I know she’s small, but it’s pretty careless to just straight up lose a woman like that,” Max mumbled sarcastically around a mouthful of chicken.

Grace readied herself to intercede in another argument, but Sarah just glumly picked at her vegetables and nobody else rose to it either. When even Max seemed happy to leave it be, Grace turned her attention back to her meal. Hopefully Poppy was okay, wherever she was.