There's a meteor out there, with the world in its sights and it's closing

“That was great!” Dani patted her stomach as they walked back from the pool. It was a strange feeling, touching her abs again. For a moment she didn’t understand what her fingers were brushing up against. “I really worked up an appetite, what about you guys?”

“Sure, I could eat,” Carly chirped, nodding in agreement.

A lightbulb went off over Sylvia’s head. “Oh hey, Dani! This is the perfect opportunity for you, isn’t it?”

“Oh?” Vivian’s ears perked up when she heard the word “opportunity”.

“What do you mean by that?” Marley asked her curiously. She knew that look on her mother’s face well. It was the look her mother made when she had an idea.

How good of an idea?

That was a whole different matter…

Sylvia had a twinkle in her eye. She licked her lips and winked at Dani, who suddenly felt very uncomfortable.

“I’m confused,” Emmy said. “Aren’t we just going to go to the Banquet Hall? Or get the faeries to deliver our food? Mom, you said there was a curfew, right?”

“Good point, we gotta be back in our rooms soon,” Carly noted.

“Eh, I wouldn’t worry about that, my girls,” Sylvia said, waving her hand. “The curfew, it’s more like a suggestion, let’s be real.”

That sounded well and good on paper, but given Dakota’s mood today, Vivian wasn’t so sure they should push their luck.

“I still want to hear about this opportunity,” Dani said, frowning. “And how it’s supposed to be ‘mine’ Sylvia. Well?”

Sylvia was smiling from ear to ear. “I just meant that this is the perfect chance for you to complete your bounty! That’s what you’re aiming for, right?”

Vivian perked up when she heard that. “The bounty? You got a new one?” She asked curiously, looking at the tomboy.

Dani shook her head. “No, it’s not a new one. Same one as before, I told you about that. Still haven’t completed it yet.”

“The one where she has to bring- err, never mind,” Carly said, blushing. Her eyes slid over to Emmy and she stopped talking about it. It was a bit of a sensitive subject for her.

Emmy frowned, not sure she liked that her mom was keeping secrets from her like that. “Is it something I need to be worried about?” She asked timidly.

“Absolutely not,” Dani assured her. “I just need to bring, um, five women to… uh…”

Her eyes met with Carly’s and she decided to close her mouth. “Anyway, there’s Gina, and Kim, and Carly, of course, so that just leaves two people left… before I finish it.”

Sylvia nodded. “Yep! Exactly! And this is your perfect chance, because Vivian and I are right here! Yup, yup!”

Vivian was lost in thought, so she didn’t say anything for once. Marley had more than enough to say in her stead, though.

“You can’t be serious, mom!” She groaned, slapping her face in frustration. “Right here!? Now?! In front of everybody? You aren’t ACTUALLY proposing that Dani… you know. That stuff!”

Sylvia blinked. “What, an orgy?”

A chorus of groans rang out through the hallway as Emmy’s face turned scarlet.

“In front of my daughter?! No way!” Carly insisted, placing her hands on her hips.

“I wouldn’t want to do that kind of stuff anyway!” Dani’s face was red. Of course, an orgy wasn’t at all necessary, technically speaking. She’d already given Carly an orgasm, and doing anything with Marley or, god forbid, Emmy, wouldn’t be worth any points in the first place. Really what Sylvia was proposing could be settled with a single threesome with herself and Vivian.

Not that Dani was willing to go that far, either. Vivian had already propositioned her in that regard herself, and Dani had shot her down, knowing that the heiress wasn’t actually sincere about it. If she was, then maybe Dani would be open to the idea, but right now?

Plus, there was a time and a place to bring up that sort of thing! And this DEFINITELY wasn’t it. Not with Carly, Marley, and Emmy here!

“Calm down, all of you!” Sylvia rolled her eyes and sighed in exasperation. “No, I wasn’t talking about an orgy.”

“Can we please stop using that word!?” Marley’s face was hot out of sympathy for her niece, and how Emmy was repeatedly being exposed to this stuff. And for once, her sister was her staunchest companion in terms of guarding the morality of the conversation.

Sylvia rolled her eyes again. “I’m just saying, YOU ALL were the ones talking about being hungry, my girls,” she pointed out.

A sea of blank stares reflected back at her.

Sylvia sighed. “…The upgrade, Dani? To your transformation?”

Dani blinked. Then her face turned scarlet.

“Th-that-!” With everything that had happened today, she’d almost forgotten. Hastily she summoned up her screen and checked the wording of her upgrade to make sure she was remembering it correctly and to refresh everyone else’s memory.

• I’ll Have What She’s Having: The last challenge has given Dani a compulsion to practice her culinary skills. She’ll feel a sexual thrill whenever she’s preparing food, and seeing other people enjoy her dishes is practically orgasmic. UPGRADE: Food tastes best when shared with others! Now the effects of Dani’s orgasmic cooking will be passed on through the food she eats! When someone samples Dani’s cooking, they’ll receive a burst of pleasure from eating it! The strength of this pleasure increase is proportional to how much they like that particular dish, and meals prepared well enough can actually bring someone to orgasm just from a single bite! (Girly Girl)

  “See?” Sylvia crowed. “Right there! It’s perfect, don’t you think? All we have to do is have Dani cook us up our favorite meals, and then BLAM! Orgasm city, baby! Vivian and I cum all over ourselves, and Dani adds two more notches to her bedpost, and she’s at five! It’s not like the bounty says she has to give us the orgasms by hand, right?”

No, it didn’t. But that was hardly the issue here!

“Are you saying you want Dani to give my daughter an orgasm with her cooking!?” Carly exclaimed.

Sylvia stared blankly at her. Then she walked over to Carly and placed her hand on her shoulder.

“Carly… as one mother to another, don’t you think it’s time to cut the cord?”

Carly’s eye twitched. “I don’t want to hear that from you,” she snorted.

Marley couldn’t help but agree.

“It’s a joke,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “You guys can go eat in the Banquet Hall or whatever, Dani just has to cook for Vivian and I! And then she can finally obtain her reward! She’s spent days on this bounty already, after all!”

All of a sudden Vivian returned to the conversation, snapped out of her contemplation by Sylvia’s statement, confirming what she’d been mulling over.

“That’s it! Something shady’s going on here!” She declared, snapping her fingers before anyone could address the absurd still somewhat understandable statement Sylvia had just made.

“What do you mean?” Dani was immediately suspicious of anything on this show by default. If Vivian implied something shady was happening, she wanted to know about it.

“Dani, you’ve been working on that bounty of yours for days, right?” Vivian asked her. “I know it’s been at least 24 hours by this point, since you brought it up to me the other night.”

“That’s right,” Dani said, nodding. “Why?”

“I thought that bounties were supposed to only have a 24-hour window to complete them in?” Vivian reminded the girls. “The first ones did, anyway. Dakota said, it was for the purposes of fairness. So someone couldn’t claim one that another girl wanted, and then sit on it for the rest of the round and refuse to do it themselves.”

With this new information, everyone except Emmy suddenly realized that Vivian was totally right.

“I-I forgot,” Marley said, her face heating up. “I never did any myself, so I didn’t realize…”

“I haven’t been thinking about it at all,” Carly conceded. She looked over at Dani. “But Dani… you’ve had that one…”

“Way longer than 24 hours,” Dani said. A shadow crossed over her face. “And no one said a word about any time deadlines.”

She checked her bounty just to be sure. It still indicated that she was 3/5ths of the way done. So what was she supposed to make of that? Did this mean there was no time deadline for this one, or something? Or was there something else going on here?

Dani had no idea, but she had a feeling someone else here, did.

Specifically, the girl who was trying very hard to look innocent while avoiding eye contact with everybody in the hallway.

“Sylvia, what do you know about this?” Dani asked, holding up the bounty and thrusting it towards the redhead.

“Leave Sylvia alone, she wasn’t even the host when this system was set in place,” Marley protested, coming to support her mother.

“That’s right, I wasn’t!” Sylvia shook her head.

“But you still know something, right?” Vivian looked sharply at her.

“Weeeellll… I don’t know, but… when it comes to suspecting… weeeeeeeelllllllll… …Okay, yes.” Sylvia slumped her shoulders and sighed. “It could be that Dakota decided to just wave the deadline. She can do that, you know. Just like how she can enforce curfew arbitrarily.”

“Doesn’t that break the rules?” Dani demanded. Sure they were being broken for her benefit… this time. But the fact that Dakota could arbitrarily enforce whatever she wanted didn’t sit well with her, for obvious reasons.

“Well, the rules, some of them are more like ‘guidelines’ technically,” Sylvia said, clearing her throat. “I did it a couple times myself when I was the host, remember? And you all weren’t complaining about that!”

“She’s right, Dani,” Carly said, placing her hand on Dani’s arm. “Before, when… when I was in a really bad place… Sylvia let me leave the Master’s Suite, even though she wasn’t supposed to do that. She bent the rules, for my sake.”

“No, no, I just left the door unlocked, wasn’t my fault,” Sylvia said, smiling cheekily.

Carly knew that was just her way. She still smiled.

“So there are some rules that are rules, and some rules that aren’t?” Vivian groaned. She was good when it came to finding loopholes, but when the rules weren’t even actually rules, what was she supposed to do then!?

Emmy sympathized with Vivian’s visible frustration. Her head was starting to hurt. And she was getting hungry, too.

“There’s only one person who can sort this all out,” Carly said, placing her hands on her hips. “Dakota, get your butt down here, now!”

Marley was surprised. Carly was really coming into her own as a mother, if she could muster a voice like that.

“I don’t serve at your pleasure, you know,” Dakota said, appearing at the end of the hall with an irritated expression on her face.

Dani turned to the host, and tried to keep her temper in check. She had to remember, no matter how frustrated she was with Dakota playing fast and loose with the rules, she was still ultimately the one who had benefited from it. This time, anyway.

And she knew that Dakota would likely throw that in her face if she made too big of a stink.

“Shouldn’t you girls be heading to bed?” Dakota raised her eyebrow. “It’s almost time for curfew. Spent a bit too long in the pool? You’re looking rather wrinkly.”

Vivian scoffed. Her skin was as flawless as ever thanks to not even dipping a toe in the water.

“What’s this?” Dani held up her bounty and waved it in the host’s face.

Dakota looked blankly at her. “…A bounty. And you’ve still got a ways to go yet.”

“Oh please.” Dani rolled her eyes. “You listen in on everything, Dakota. So you know EXACTLY what we’re talking about here.”

Dakota sighed. “…Yes, you’re right, I do,” she conceded, nodding. “So you finally figured it out, huh? Well.”

Dani’s cheeks flushed. “Look… I wasn’t thinking about it, okay!?”

“So we’re right, then?” Marley pressed. “You did suspend the time deadline?”

“For this bounty only,” Dakota confirmed with a nod. “And the one Kim chose instead. Both of those bounties didn’t have any time limit on completion. It was… an oversight.”

Right. An oversight. Why didn’t anybody here believe that?

“Any other oversights we should know about?” Carly asked, frowning.

Dakota looked at her, and Carly’s voice softened. She didn’t want to make an enemy. “You’re the one running the show, Dakota. What you say goes. We understand that. We’re just trying to make the best of things that we can, and we can’t do that if we don’t know what the rules are.”

Vivian nodded. “It’s important for games to have steadfast rules. If you can just bend them to your whims, it’s not really fair, is it?”

Sylvia grimaced. They were saying all this stuff because they didn’t know Dakota. But as Nick would be glad to tell them, Dakota only liked rules that worked in her favor. As a kid, she was happy to change the rules as many times as it took to win a game.

And as a host, she hadn’t gotten better in that regard.

Dakota let out a tired sigh and rubbed her forehead. “First Kim, now you lot… look, Dani, I’ll admit, I should have been less… careless when it came to these bounties. That’s all it was. A personal mistake; an oversight.”

Vivian smelled a rat. She recalled Kim’s hostile conversation with Dakota earlier that morning, where the other girl had alluded to several questionable things. This seemed like one of them. And frankly, she didn’t trust Dakota at all.

But she also really didn’t want to start another mess like the one Kim had gotten herself into. She hardly had any BP left; whose breasts would she have to spend it on this time!?

So with that in mind, Vivian didn’t voice her concerns. She decided to let Dakota pretend like this was some big oversight, and not a conspiracy.

Whether that was the right move or not, she didn’t know. But Vivian didn’t like making enemies, especially not ones as powerful as Dakota. Right now Kim was in the hot seat, and Vivian wasn’t a nice enough person to take her place.

“So it really was a mistake?” Sylvia scrunched up her face and frowned. That was strange. It wasn’t like her creator to make mistakes like that.

“Yes, it was. And to amend that mistake, I’m making a few new rules to how the Bounty Board operates,” Dakota said, waving her cane. “As of now, the deadline of bounties has been altered slightly. Most bounties will still operate within a 24-hour window to avoid penalties and hoarding and the like. But every now and then, there might be a bounty with a deadline that falls outside that window… the tasks will be difficult, likely necessitating several days to complete, but the rewards will be far grander to compensate.”

“Oh, that sounds pretty good, then!” Carly perked up when she heard that.

Marley was less confident. All she took away from this was further proof that Dakota could change the rules however she wanted, which was exactly what Dani and Vivian had been concerned about.

Then she saw the smirk on Dakota’s face, which confirmed that she had reason to worry. Carly saw it too and frowned.

“Of course… for the same reason we enforced the 24-hour deadline on the previous bounties to discourage sitting on them by bad actors… there will also be a punishment involved, should you fail to complete them in the allotted time,” Dakota warned, narrowing her eyes.

A hush fell over the hallway.

“Wait, you’re serious?” Dani’s face twisted in frustration. “YOU make a mistake, and now I’m punished if I can’t finish this bounty by the end of your arbitrary deadline!?”

Dakota rolled her eyes. “Don’t be absurd,” she scoffed. “How unreasonable to you think I am?”

Sylvia coughed. Loudly.

Dakota’s eye twitched in irritation. Then a saccharine smile stretched across her lips. “…Because your bounty was taken before the change in the rules, you’re exempt from it,” she assured the tomboy. “Even if you make it all the way to the end of the round before the bounty is completed, you won’t receive any penalties. You can continue completing it at your own pace!” She placed the palms of her hands together around the head of her cane.

“Isn’t that rather generous of me?”

Dani could acknowledge that it was, while also acknowledging that Dakota’s flippant change of the rules was a bad thing.

“…Thank you for going to that length,” she said finally, even though she wasn’t exactly grateful about it. “I’ll do my best to complete it in a timely manner anyway.”

Again, all Dakota had proven tonight was that the rules were whatever she wanted them to be. Dani needed to get this done before Dakota changed her mind and decided to implement a punishment anyway.

“Now, if there’s nothing else, I’ve had an exceptionally long day. I’d say we all have,” Dakota said, miming a fake yawn. “And I would very much like to get some rest.”

As a host, she didn’t need sleep, which everyone except Emmy was well aware of.

“Dakota, hold on a second.”

The last person anyone expected to speak up got Dakota’s attention. She turned and looked back at Sylvia, perturbed by the other girl.

“…Did you need something?” Dakota asked, raising her eyebrow.

“You should be more careful with the rules,” Sylvia said. “I know as the host you can twist them a lot, but… the producers might get angry with you if you **** that power too much. Obviously, I don’t have to tell you that, but… I just…”

Nobody said anything. They were all too busy being shocked that Sylvia would speak up to try and warn Dakota about this.

And no one was more shocked than Dakota herself.

She cleared her throat and took another incredulous look at Sylvia.

“Are you… concerned about my standing with the producers?” For the first time any of them could remember she sounded utterly flummoxed.

The most Sylvia could muster was an awkward shrug.

“I mean… those guys are really unreasonable sometimes, and when it comes to a reasonableness contest I don’t think even you could beat them,” Sylvia rambled, not sure what she was trying to say.

Dakota wasn’t sure either. “…Right. Uh… okay, then,” she said with a stumbling nod. She tapped her cane and disappeared before the situation got even more awkward.

As soon as she was gone, Sylvia was all smiles again. “…Okay! Now that that’s settled, Dani, how about that dinner?”