You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table

Kim revealed the results of her coin toss for everyone to see.

Heads.

“Awesome!” Kim grinned as the coin began to glow with bright golden light. The light spun around her hand, and the “6” emblazoned on it transformed into a 12.

Got Lucky! +6 VP

“Uh… I don’t like how that’s worded, though,” she frowned.

“You did it, Kim!” Mary cheered, rushing over to hug her friend. “You won!”

Dawn was stunned. “Well, damn,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. With how her luck had been going today, she’d seriously expected Kim to completely flop her coin toss.

Instead, she’d won.

Mary’s celebration lasted only for a few moments. She turned to Dawn with renewed fervor.

“There, you see?” She grinned. “Kim won! Now you can’t give up! Have faith and we can all work together to help you get the win!”

Dawn sighed. While she didn’t like the idea of putting her faith in something as ridiculous as gambling (or God, whatever Mary was trying to imply) she couldn’t back out now. She might now have verbally agreed to the deal, but in her heart she had, and if there was one thing she couldn’t stand it was a liar.

I just have to be faithful to myself and believe in my abilities, Dawn decided. Just because I can’t see a path to victory now, that doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.

“Okay, you win,” she nodded. “I won’t give up now. I’ll keep trying.”

“That’s great!” Mary beamed. “Then let’s all three of us work together! Okay?”

The girls all nodded. Then Mary reached to her belt for the Queen of Clubs again, but Dawn stopped her.

“No, that’s fine,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t need it.”

Mary frowned. “But…” She wanted to do something nice for the other girl, since Dawn had been nice enough to give Kim back her cards.

“Look, it’s just… I don’t think that card is going to help me win,” Dawn said. “Instead, there’s something else I want.”

Mary blinked. “Oh?”

“Your Seven,” Dawn said, pointing to the Seven of Spades.

“This?” Mary had almost forgotten she had it. “But the Queen is worth more.”

“Yeah, but look,” Dawn said, pointing to the scoreboard. “Gina has two Sevens already, and the third one hasn’t been found. If she gets her hands on it, then that’s the last card she needs to complete a set. Right now, her hand is clogged with low value cards. If she finishes the set, then she’ll be able to add even more cards to her hand, and then I’ll definitely lose. If I’m playing to win, then the best way to do that is if I safeguard this last Seven, and work to find the other high cards remaining.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Kim nodded. “After all, you and Gina aren’t on the best terms. Unlike Mary and I, I’m guessing she’s not going to pick you if she wins?”

“…That would be a safe assumption, yes,” Dawn dryly replied. “The only way I’ll be safe is if I stay ahead of her in points. And while the extra five points from the Queen would be nice, I think my safest bet is still holding onto the Seven.”

“Well, okay then,” Mary nodded. She didn’t understand why SHE couldn’t just hold onto the Seven to keep Gina from getting it, but she didn’t argue.

As Dawn took the Seven, a guilty look crossed her face. Honestly, she had considered exactly that, leaving the Seven in Mary’s custody. But she just couldn’t do it. At the end of the day, even if Dawn was going to team up with these girls, in her heart she still couldn't bring herself to rely on someone else. She could only count on herself.

“So what should we do now, then?” Kim asked. “Keep looking for cards?”

She was itching to get the last Five.

“I think that’s a good plan,” Dawn nodded. “Mary? What do you think?”

“Sure thing!” Mary grinned.

The three women set out down the hill, keeping their eyes peeled for any more boxes.

“Another fucking dead end?!” Dani spat, glaring at the wall of the hedge as it stared back at her, mockingly. “Come on!”

Dani was really starting to hate mazes. They made her brain hurt.

Frustrated, Dani punched the wall. Her fist flew right through it and she nearly fell over, not expecting such a thick-looking bush to give in so easily.

Then she lighted on an idea that usually crossed her mind. It was almost never the right idea, but this time she had a feeling it would work.

If you can’t figure out what to do, punch your way through!

“I should get that on a t-shirt,” she chuckled. She checked her scanner one last time, and saw that the girl she assumed was Carly was pretty close. Probably. She still hadn't figured out all the distances yet. Doesn't matter though. She turned in the direction of the other girl and lifted her arms to shield her face, then charged.

Dani had decided to do what she did best: put holes in walls. She broke through the hedge like it was made of tissue paper and came out the other side covered in twigs and leaves. She braced herself and charged through the next wall the same way.

Dakota stalked after her, following the trail of destruction Dani left in her wake with a smirk. This is almost too easy.

She picked up the pace, doubting that Dani would check her Radar System while she was busy finding the shortest distance between two points.

Finally, Dani broke out into the clearing.

“Carly?” She shouted, looking around at all the strange sights. “Carly, you here?”

She never got the chance to hear a reply, because something lunged at her from behind. Now, Dani was strong, and it took a lot to knock her off her feet. But that’s when she knew it was coming. She’d been completely blindsided by the sneak attack, and tumbled to the ground.

“What the hell?!” She screamed, whirling around and flailing her arms and legs, kicking her assailant off her.

“…Dakota?” Dani stared at the pale girl in shock. “What’s the big idea?!”

“This… is the big idea…” Dakota panted. It had taken everything she had to tackle Dani with enough strength to knock her over. But it was worth it. She held up the King of Clubs.

“Give that back!” Dani growled, hopping to her feet.

Dakota just smirked. The King began to glow, as did the three Kings on her belt. Before Dani could do anything to try and stop it, the four cards merged together, forming a box.

Dani grabbed her opponent by the collar and lifted her up into the air with the ease one might pick up a kitten. But Dakota just kept smirking.

“You can pummel me if you want, but it won’t matter,” Dakota stated triumphantly. “The cards are banked now, you can’t get them. Sorry.”

Dani was about ready to throw Dakota through the hedges, but she stayed her hand.

Who was she to get mad at the other girl? She’d done exactly the same thing only hours ago, to someone who couldn’t even fight back.

Muttering to herself, she set Dakota back down. The pale girl scoffed and adjusted her rumpled black blouse, then opened up the box to see her prize.

It was a single slip of paper.

Unlucky Thirteen: [Information Redacted] (NOTE: All information concerning this reward will be revealed at the next transformation vote.)

“Just as I thought,” Dakota said, crumpling up the paper and throwing it away. “Of course it’s a transformation.”

Dani may have been pissed at the fact that Dakota had just stolen her King, but part of her had to admit that they way the other girl seemed so nonchalant about receiving what would probably be the worst punishment of this challenge was admirable.

“Hey, no hard feelings,” Dakota said to Dani, offering her hand. “It’s just the way the game is played.”

Sighing, Dani didn’t really feel like she had any room to call the other girl out. She took Dakota’s hand and nodded.

Before they could finish making amends, though, they heard a shout come from deeper in the plaza.

“No! Get back!”

Dakota’s eyes widened.

“That… was Nick!” Dani was an immediate afterthought. She turned and raced in the direction of the cries for help. Dani followed behind her, and soon outran the slower girl, reaching the center of the plaza in a matter of seconds.

What she saw made her freeze in place.

Dani had hoped that her Radar System had been leading her to Carly. But Carly wasn’t there. At least not the Carly she knew.

In the center of an enclosure sat what Dani could only describe as a mountain of jell-o if the jell-o was made out of semen. It warbled and shook in the wind, and must have been ten feet tall. But once the shock of seeing that wore off, her eyes fell upon Nick, who was sitting in the dirt beside the mountain of splooge.

The figure crawling towards Nick like a predator was a woman who could have been Carly, but clearly wasn’t. Dani could recognize her buddy’s sexbomb of a body anywhere, and even the strange girl’s face was proportioned to resemble her. But the thing hovering in front of Nick looked like nothing Dani had ever seen before. Its skin, if it was skin, looked sticky and slimy, having the same consistency as the warbling jelly. She seemed to be dripping the stuff, like a girl who had gone through a thousand-man bukakke.

“A… slime girl?” She breathed. It was the only explanation. Because as much as Dani wanted to believe that the figure before her eyes was just Carly in desperate need of a bath, the fact that she could partially see through the strange person like looking at a foggy window was proof enough that whatever this was, it wasn’t human.

“D-Dani!” Nick sputtered, glancing away from the slime girl for a second to see his friend come into the clearing. That bit of movement was enough, and the strange thing stopped waiting patiently and pounced on him.

Nick threw up his hands, trying to hold her back. He made contact with the creature’s huge tits, which felt just as slimy as he’d expected. The goo covering her body had the same feel to it as lotion mixed with semen, and was disgustingly warm. Her breasts felt even springier than Carly’s, with a lot more give. And then he found out why.

His hands sank right into them.

“U-Uwaaaah!” He cried as he felt a brand-new sensation run over his body. Whatever this girl was, his hands were inside her, and he felt the sticky wet softness of her slimy body rub over him from every direction. The creature kept pushing forward and he saw his shirt sleeves start to dissolve as they made contact with the white goop. Afraid of being melted he tried to pull himself free, but his hands were trapped.

Then her hands started moving. The creature sluggishly reached for his pants, dripping all over them as she approached his crotch. Tiny holes began to appear where her secretions landed, and when she finally touched him it wasn’t to undo his zipper.

She just melted right through it.

Dani watched this happen with a mixture of horror and curious excitement. The slime girl shifted herself, scooting back to get better access to Nick’s cock. His hands popped free as she adjusted her position, and he found part of himself wishing they had never left. As terrified by this situation as he was, his penis couldn’t help but harden, rising up to greet the white girl as she opened the slime-dripping orifice that resembled Carly’s mouth.

She plunged herself down, taking his entire shaft inside of her without hesitation.

“Igh… ugh, oh fuck!” Nick groaned, bucking his hips up into the creature’s simulation of a mouth. It didn’t feel anything like Carly’s. The playful girl would have lashed her tongue around the head of his shaft to tease him, pleasuring him with glee. But whatever this thing was, it didn’t have a tongue. The inside of her “mouth” felt identical to when he’d plunged his hands into her chest, and that same warm and gooey sensation now massaged the length of his shaft, as if he were receiving the slimiest, sloppiest blowjob he’d ever gotten.

“Glumplgh! Glumplgh! Glumplgh!” She picked up speed, massaging him ever more intensely. She wasn't bobbing her head, refusing to let a single inch of him escape her. Rather the way her insides rubbed against him almost simulated the same feeling of lips running up and down his meat.

Nick cracked open his eyes to get a closer look at what was happening, and wished he hadn’t. He could actually SEE his penis through the slime-thing’s translucent “skin”, shaking and shivering as her insides squirmed around it. She stared back up at him with empty eyes, and that’s when he realized that this thing wasn’t a “she”. It was an it, a simulacrum of Carly apparently designed to milk out his seed, without any consciousness of its own.

“Ungh… ahh!” Nick couldn’t even last ten seconds inside of it. He sprayed his semen out into the creature, and watched as the white liquid spread through its head, clouding up its insides even more. To his horror, the thing… it actually began to grow. Its breasts fattened up even larger and its hips grew even plumper, and it began to massage his cock with more vigor than before. He had started to soften, but the way the creature’s insides suckled on him was quickly working him back up to full hardness.

As Nick kept looking into the thing’s eyes, he realized that his earlier thought was wrong. There was a consciousness of some sort in the creature. He could see intention and desire in the way she looked at him now.

Like he was dinner.

“Get off him!”

A flash of black in the corner of his eye broke Nick’s trance, and he saw Dakota slam her leg into the creature’s side. Rather than slip through it like he had, the force of her blow knocked the thing off of him and she flew through the air, crashing into the ground. Upon impact the creature’s humanoid body immediately broke, splattering into a puddle of white gunk to Nick’s horror.

“Nick! Are you okay?!” Dakota exclaimed. Her eyes were wide with panic. Nick stared numbly at her as he watched her jeans start to melt before his eyes.

“What’s going on?!” Dani finally came to her senses. “That… what WAS that thing?! It looked like Carly!”

“I-I don’t know,” Nick mumbled, shaking his head. “Carly, she… she completed the set of Tens, and then… this huge flower opened up, and sprayed her with that gunk, and now… she-she’s trapped in there!”

He pointed at the white mound of slime wobbling in front of them. Dani squinted closely, seeing what looked like a pale shadow in the center of the muck, and she gasped.

“Carly!” Dani ignored the danger of the slime and threw both her hands into the sludge. She winced and choked down her disgust. She didn’t have very much experience with semen, but even if this slime didn’t smell like the stuff, it certainly felt like it. She could feel it wriggling and writhing over her hands, massaging her and sucking on her like it was trying to pull her inside to join her buddy. But Dani was stronger than that. She braced herself against the ground, refusing to back down, and fumbled through the slimy substance until she made contact with something solid.

Her fingers wrapped around Carly’s arm, and she pulled with all her might.

Dani stumbled backwards and yanked the naked girl out with her. They crashed into Nick and fell into a pile on the ground.

To Dani’s relief, her friend was still breathing. She just looked a little shaky. Almost as fortunate, whatever that slimy stuff was, Carly didn’t bring any with her on the way out. She was as clean as if she’d just stepped out of the shower, which meant Dani’s clothes didn’t melt like hers had.

But it wasn’t all good. Because when Dani fell, she felt something warm, hard, and wet poking her in the cheek, and she didn’t have to look to know what it was.

“Eww! Eeeeeeeww, gross, gross, gross!” She groaned, scrambling away from Nick’s erection as fast as she could. She bitterly noted that this little endeavor would probably join the queue of her dreams in the future.

At least she had a naked Carly clinging to her. The girl didn’t have a stitch on her besides the belt and the Radar System. That might make her nightmares tolerable.

“What… that…” Carly was still dazed. She shook her head, trying to figure out what was going on. “What the hell just happened?!”

Nick and the three girls backed up, staring warily at the shivering pile of slime.

“I can answer that!”

Sylvia’s face popped up on a screen in front of the slime, like a notification on your browser. She wore a shit-eating grin on her face that pissed everyone off.

“What the hell did you do?!” Nick growled.

Sylvia frowned. “What did I do?!” She exclaimed indignantly. “That sign said ‘NO TRESPASSING!’ And yet, here you are! Trespassing! Can’t you read?”

“Don’t give me that crap!” Nick exclaimed, ignoring the fact that the front of his pants had melted and his dick was hanging out. He was too upset. “You knew one of the girls had to go in there and get those cards! You planned for this to happen!”

“Yes, I did!” Sylvia’s tone made it sound like that was some sort of rebuttal to his statement, rather than an admission of guilt. It was so out of place Nick was at a loss for words for a second.

“What was it?” Carly demanded. She’d finally come to her senses and now she was seething with anger. “That thing, it was like… I felt sticky all over the place! Like I was bathing in-”

“Semen?” Sylvia helpfully offered. “Well, you’re not quite wrong.”

Dani gagged, holding back her urge to throw up. Dakota just glared at the host.

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding, it’s not semen,” Sylvia said, rolling her eyes. “It feels like it, sure, but that’s just how the Mimic Jelly attracts a host.”

Carly turned pale. “A… host?”

“That’s right,” Sylvia nodded. “Mimic Jellies are a special type of plant. They’re usually found in the demon world, but this one was actually discovered on Earth! I took great care to bring it to this island, where I nourished it with love and affection!”

She was talking like it was a piece of produce that had won some big ribbon.

“What did it do to me?! What do you mean by a ‘host’!?” Carly demanded. It had taken a LOT, but Sylvia had FINALLY found the line. Carly wasn’t just shrugging everything off anymore, now she was pissed.

And even Dakota had to take a step back from the tornado of fury that was an upset Carly Granger.

“Relax, you’re safe, nothing happened to you,” Sylvia assured her. But the casual dismissal in her voice wasn’t helping Carly’s mood. “Mimic Jellies don’t feed on people. Well, that one doesn’t, anyway. Even though they consume bodily fluids, we trained that one to only absorb the fun ones. You know, semen, saliva, sweat, girlcum, uri-”

“Eeeew!” Dani shivered, cutting her off. “That’s so gross!”

Sylvia shrugged.

“What a Mimic Jelly does is it rests in its dormant state, like you saw with that flower bulb. Then when a potential host comes by, it sprays out its main body, that white goop, and swallows her whole. After melting away all the useless stuff like clothes, it uses its host body as a template and creates replicas of her. Then it sends out those slime copies sends to find more vict- err, I mean, food sources.”

“That’s why it went after me, then,” Nick frowned.

“Exactly!” Sylvia chirped. “While a Mimic Jelly can be satisfied by the body fluids of fair maidens, its preferred source of sustenance is semen! That’s why it targets female hosts, particularly those with very alluring figures. And like a siren it uses the attractiveness of the host’s features to lure in its main prey! It sucks its fill of semen, and uses the seed it absorbs to reproduce, creating more seeds that will grow into Mimic Jellies!”

Now Nick was the one who felt like throwing up.

“It’s like that one Disney song. Um… it’s the ciiiiiircle of liiiiiiiiife…”

“Well now it’s a puddle,” Dakota snapped. “Are you crazy? We had a good, competitive challenge going here, and you just interrupted it with this… whatever that is?!”

Sylvia pouted. “I prefer to think of it as a late-game twist!” She scoffed. “Think of the Mimic Jellies as another obstacle you have to overcome! Because frankly, this challenge has been exciting, but not exactly sexy. Hot slime girls that melt clothes and thirst for the cum of the master and his harem? Now that’s sexy.”

Dani may have agreed in theory, but right now it was NOT the time for that.

“Wait…” Nick went pale. “Mimic… Jellies? As in… multiple?”

Sylvia blinked, taken aback. “Wait… you didn’t think we were done, did you? Oh, my, no, my baby girl is just getting started!” She giggled.

The white sludge began to warble. And then they saw it. More slime girls, gooey replicas of Carly, formed out of the muck, emerging like spiders from an egg sac. They shambled slowly towards the group, arms outstretched and eyes filled with hunger.

“Good luck!” Sylvia chirped, sitting back on her throne and taking a sip from her cocktail. Oh yes, things are always much better when there’s a little sexiness involved.

She glanced at the scoreboard. Not many cards had been discovered since the last time she checked, but it was always good to keep updated.