I know that it's hard but you have to try; if you need advice, let me simplify

Kim shuffled over to the juice bar, her face as red as a strawberry. A giddy smile tugged at her lips, but she fought it off, twisting her face into a scowl instead. She wasn’t REALLY angry, of course, but… her plan had completely backfired!

“…Maybe I was pushing myself too hard,” she admitted with a sigh as she sat down at the bar, hanging her head. It had been fun teasing Nick like that- liberating, even! But when he mentioned similarities to Holly, even though he’d said it with a smile, all of a sudden she just got so embarrassed…

I guess it’s still a little too early in our relationship for stuff like that. What works for girls like Carly might not necessarily be what works for me. As Kim played over her actions that morning in her head, she felt more and more embarrassed.

If this is how I feel right now, how am I going to feel when it’s time for the actual threesome?! She wondered. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken that bounty after all.

Kim was still getting used to regular sex. But sex involving Nick and another woman, at the same time? That was asking for quite a lot, she knew that much.

The tomboy sighed.

“Can I get you something to cheer you up?” A familiar voice chirped from behind the bar.

Kim’s head shot up and her eyes widened in recognition.

“Nola?!” She sputtered, looking at the eager-eyed leprechaun in shock. “What… what are YOU doing here? Isn’t a faerie supposed to be running the juice bar? Don’t you have more important things to do?” Kim looked around for the orange-haired faerie she was used to seeing behind the counter, but she was nowhere to be found.

“I’m undercover!” Nola said. She squinted and held her finger up to her lips. “Shhh! Don’t tell anybody, okay?”

Kim looked blankly at her. “…Undercover as… a bartender at a smoothie stand?”

Nola placed her hands on her hips and puffed out her chest. “It’s called a juice bar, actually.”

“Whatever. Aren’t you supposed to be helping Mary?” Kim questioned. “Also, the bartender is supposed to let the customers do all the talking, pretty sure. Is this the right line of work for you?”

“This is me helping Mary,” Nola replied, ignoring the rest of Kim’s statement. “She said that she was worried Nick might mess things up, so she sent me to help if things went wrong!”

“Mary said that?” Kim raised her eyebrow and looked suspiciously at the leprechaun. “Somehow I can’t believe that.”

Nola giggled sheepishly. “Actually what she said was that Nick would probably be so considerate of Dani’s feelings as a lesbian that he might stick his foot in his mouth and make things awkward, technically,” she clarified.

“Ah, yeah, that sounds way more like her,” Kim laughed. “And guess what? She wasn’t that far off… only it was me Nick was being considerate of, not Dani.”

She sighed and shook her head. “I just wanted to be free and fun-loving, you know? Maybe a bit of a tease… Carly said Nick would really like that, and he did, but like… I think I was also making him a little uncomfortable I guess.”

Kim slumped her shoulders. “Why does stuff like this have to be so hard?” She grumbled, resting her elbows on the bar and her chin in her hands. “It should come with an instruction manual or something, I say.”

Nola laughed. “Well… I would give some advice if I could, you know, since that’s what a bartender is supposed to do,” she said, tapping her chin. “But I think you probably wouldn’t listen since my advice would be to just jump him! You know, since it’s Harem Hotel and all that, the sexier the better! My two cents anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s terrible advice,” Kim dryly replied.

“Told ya.”

Kim let out another exasperated sigh. “Look, I get what he’s saying… he wants me to be myself and not **** things. And yeah, maybe soaking his swimsuit, even as a joke, that was a little…” She blushed as she remembered that.

“Just be yourself!” Nola chirped. “Nick likes you for who you are, right? If you want to have a good time with him, then you don’t need to be anything other than yourself! Oh, but wait… I’m always myself around him too, but he doesn’t seem to like me… so if being yourself means being me, don’t do that! Be somebody else.”

“Thanks, Nola,” Kim said, stopping the talkative leprechaun before she could run herself in circles and get herself confused. “Yeah, just be myself.”

Kim tapped her finger on the counter as she considered how today had gone so far. She’d been more heavy-handed than usual, but Nick had seemed to appreciate it, even if he’d been a little confused. When she escalated things to the point where she was simulating a handjob in front of him… yeah, that was a little **** even for her. Everything had been going great before that!

“…Wait, no, that isn’t to say I was enjoying him checking me out the whole time or anything, though,” she mumbled to herself.

“You weren’t?” Nola asked, scrunching up her face in confusion. “Because from over here, it sure looked like-”

Kim shot her a look and for once, Nola shut up.

“…Sorry, forgot, not talking,” Nola said, zipping her lip.

“Really, you?” Kim asked, her irritation fading in place of an amused smile. “That’s a surprise.”

“I’m learning my lesson!” Nola said proudly, placing her hands on her hips and holding her head up high. “See, last time Mary sent me out to help on a date, I kinda ended up getting a little too involved, and my advice, well… it maybe didn’t go as well as it could have, so…”

“So you’re hiding out behind the juice bar?” Kim raised her eyebrow.

Nola nodded rapidly. “Disclaimer!” She swept her hand across the bar like she was underlining invisible words in the air. “All of my advice is not actually advice. I am not providing advice. I am just providing encouragement! All your decisions are your own responsibility, so please do not blame me for the advice that I am definitely not giving.”

She punctuated her disclaimer with a wink that reminded Kim of those shady managers from her past jobs that liked to deflect responsibility from their poor performance.

“…Right. Well, one bananas and cream smoothie with whey protein, please.”

“You got it!” Nola cheerfully saluted. “Now which fruit is a banana…”

Kim felt a chill run down her spine, and she sighed. Man, at least I’m not actually old enough to drink. Though sometimes it would be nice.

“You sure you’re old enough to drink?” Gina looked skeptically at Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin. When Gina had brought up the idea of a celebratory drink for Emmy’s revival, Carly had nixed the idea, pointing out that her daughter was too young. Well, Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin had seemed pretty into the idea, and the eager look she gave Gina hadn’t faded since then.

The dark-haired girl smiled cheerfully, flashing her pearly-white teeth, and nodded her head.

“For the record, I’m not supporting this.”

Oh, and Dawn had tagged along too. Not that Gina had invited her. But Dawn knew that no good could come from a situation where the erratic assassin was exposed to ****, and only Gina was around. So she had taken it upon herself to be the voice of reason and make sure that things didn’t get too out of control.

Or, as Gina put it, being a total buzzkill.

“Come on, Dawn, she says she’s old enough, so she’s old enough,” Gina chirped. “...Well, maybe not says, but come on. Also, she’s been having classes with Amelia for days now, don’t you think she’s earned the right to relax and enjoy a drink? Lemme tell you, when I had a rough day at school, I’d come home and… …Wait, never mind, I probably shouldn’t tell that story.”

Gina laughed and shook her head. But Dawn noted the slight remorse in her laugh, and her ears twitched.

“Gina, it’s okay,” she said gently. “You’re getting much better. You’re not the same person you used to be,” she said encouragingly.

“Oh, uh… thanks?” Gina looked surprised. A smile crept up her lips for a second before she quickly shook her head. “That’s cool of you to say, Dawn,” she chirped, giving the cat girl a wink. A wave of pleasure rolled through her, quite a blissful one. “Appreciate the compliment.”

“It was an observation, not a compliment,” Dawn said, averting her eyes.

Gina shrugged and grinned. “Apparently my transformation doesn’t see the difference. Now, as a thanks for that nice little blissful feeling you just gave me, how about I fix you a drink?”

Dawn looked at her in alarm. “Wait, you know how to prepare drinks? I assumed that you just consumed ****.”

Gina shrugged. “I mean, I freelanced at a couple bars every now and then, to scrounge up some money when I needed it.” She skipped behind the bar and leaned over it, emphasizing her large breasts. “Most places just let me without needing a resume or shit, because they knew these girls would get the booze flowing,” she said with a wink.

Dawn rolled her eyes.

Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin glanced appraisingly at Gina’s boobs, and then down at her own. Her breasts had grown considerably over the course of the round due to not needing to use her nanomachines much, but they were still rather meager when compared to the punk girl’s naturally large bosom.

The assassin pouted.

“So come on, what’s your poison?” Gina drummed her fingers on the bar as the faerie who normally ran things took a break. Common practice was to allow contestants to take over when it came to things like this, to provide them more opportunities to showcase their skills to the master, the audience, and other members of the harem.

Dawn gave Gina a frosty look.

“Water,” she said bluntly.

Gina rolled her eyes. “Only YOU would come to a bar and order just water.”

“You should be getting water when you go out to a bar,” Dawn replied. “Staying hydrated is vital when drinking. Every other drink you have when out at a bar should be water in order to keep you from getting too **** too quickly.”

“Yeah, see, that sounds like boring people talk,” Gina said with a smirk. “What kind of clubs did YOU go to when you were a student? …Wait, I know the answer. Chess club, right?”

Dawn gave her a dirty look.

“…Fine, orange juice,” Dawn sniffed. If Gina was going to make a scene, she’d just change her order. “I know they have that in a bar.”

Gina grinned. “Right on. One screwdriver, coming right up!” She reached down under the bar.

“No!” Dawn immediately objected. “I don’t want a screwdriver.”

Gina looked confused. “But you just said you wanted some orange juice.”

“Right, exactly. Orange juice,” Dawn said, clenching her fists together under the bar.

Gina nodded. “So, a screwdriver.”

“No! Only orange juice, no… whatever else is in there!” Dawn may have been a genius but she hadn’t exactly studied mixology. The most she knew was that a screwdriver was a drink that contained ****, and she wasn’t interested.

Gina shook her head. “Okay, you lost me. So you want just the mixer?”

She looked at Dawn like she was from mars. Dawn looked at Gina with a face completely devoid of amusement.

“Orange. Juice.”

Gina sighed and shrugged. “Yeah, the customer’s always right, I guess,” she muttered. “What kinda weirdo drinks just the orange juice?”

While Gina was stumped by that (or pretended to be, because she knew it just drove Dawn up the wall) Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin was confused about how someone would go about drinking a screwdriver at all. She looked curiously at the two girls who were speaking a language harder to understand than the letters Amelia was insisting she learn.

“Okay, here you go!” Gina set the glass on the table for Dawn, flashing a surprisingly professional smile. “One screwdriver, hold the ****.”

Dawn had been watching the other woman like a hawk, and her eyes didn’t miss much. That was the only reason she took the drink.

But she still didn’t trust Gina entirely. She brought it up to her nose and gave it a sniff first, just to be sure.

“Come on, Dawn,” Gina said, rolling her eyes. “You want to dip a silver spoon in there to make sure it’s not poisoned, too?”

Dawn looked at Gina in shock. “I’m surprised you know about that bit of trivia,” she said honestly.

“What can I say? I’m a surprising woman,” Gina said with a smirk. “Go on, drink it. I promise, no ****.”

Dawn tentatively brought the glass up to her lips and took a hesitant sip. She was mostly just giving Gina a hard time because the punk girl seemed to enjoy the back and forth. Obviously she knew Gina wasn’t the kind of girl to spike her drink. Not anymore. She may have done stuff like that with a gleeful smile back in the early days of the season, but she’d taken some significant strides since then, and had matured quite a bit, even if it wasn’t always apparent when looking at her.

That being said… she did taste a surprisingly unusual flavor… this wasn’t like the orange juice she was used to drinking. Ever since Rose had mixed some cum into Dawn’s soup last night, the cat girl had become much more perceptive when it came to foreign bodies in her food. Or maybe she was just being paranoid?

She glanced at Gina, assuming she was just being stupid.

Then she saw the gleeful smirk on the punk girl’s face, and she froze.

Dawn tore the glass away from her lips and looked at Gina in alarm. “What… what did you put in this?” She demanded.

“Hey, whoa, come on, it’s just what you asked for!” Gina held up her hands and took a step back. “Orange juice! …More or less.”

“More or less!? MORE or LESS?!” Dawn nearly blew a blood vessel. “Gina-! I can’t believe you!”

Gina reached under the counter and took out the carton. She turned it to Dawn for the cat girl to see for herself.

“See? Says it right there, ‘orange juice’,” Gina indicated. Then she underlined the next line with her finger. “…With mango.”

Even Dawn’s genius brain needed more than a few seconds to parse that one. She shook her head slowly. “W-wait, so… you…”

“Yeah!” Gina said gleefully. “I gave you orange juice… with mango! Bwahaha!” She held her sides and cackled maniacally in triumph. “How’s THAT for a prank, huh?”

Dawn looked down at her mango orange juice, and burst out laughing. “Okay… you got me,” she said, finishing her glass. It was a stupid prank, and Gina knew it was a stupid prank. That honestly made it kinda funny, Dawn had to admit.

“Okay, but in seriousness, don’t worry, I wouldn’t mess with your drink,” Gina said, wiping the tears from her eyes. “But now, back to the main event!”

She turned to Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin with an eager gleam in her eye. “What should we get for our lovely little killer here? A Bloody Mary? That would be amusing.”

Dawn rolled her eyes. “How about you start simple? Nothing too complicated or strong. Just like, some small servings of a bunch of different kinds of ****. That would probably be best. Since we don’t know what she likes.”

“We know she likes ice cream,” Gina pointed out.

Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin nodded rapidly.

“So what, you got a scoop of rum raisin back there?” Dawn asked, raising her eyebrow.

“Well, no.”

Gina was just messing around, honestly. She knew that the best thing to do for a situation like this was exactly what Dawn suggested, give the other girl a bunch of different kinds of **** in small servings, and see what she preferred.

Of course, she and Dawn had very different ideas of what constituted a “small serving” of ****.

“Here you go, a beer, some wine, rum, tequila, gin, and some vodka!” Gina said, pouring six glasses for the assassin.

Dawn looked at Gina like she was crazy. “I meant, like, shots or something! Are you doing this on purpose?!”

“Yeah.”

Dawn fumed at Gina as she snickered. But Gina wasn’t laughing when she saw how fast the assassin put them back.

First was the beer. That evaporated almost immediately, and the assassin didn’t seem to like it very much. The gin was next, and the mute girl scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue, looking like she was going to be sick.

After two failures, she went for the wine. After all, she’d done some wine tasting at one of Gina’s parties. So that was passable. Then came the rum. It looked like they finally had a winner! She tasted it and mused over it for a while, slowly nodding her head. Gina looked hopeful.

“So, rum, then?” She asked. “You like that?”

Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin shrugged. Then she reached for the vodka.

“Looks like she’s still experimenting,” Dawn noted.

The assassin’s reaction to the vodka was more neutral. Same with the tequila. None of them really seemed to be doing it for her. She could appreciate the flavors, but apparently she wanted something else.

Gina felt like she was being challenged. While Dawn was just stunned that the other girl could drink six glasses in about six minutes and didn’t even seem to be ****.

Well… who knows what augmentations her creators made to her body? Dawn wondered. Maybe she’s just really good at holding her liquor.

“Here it is, my secret weapon!” Gina poured a seventh glass, filling it with a shiny brown liquid. “Try that and tell me how it tastes!”

Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin brought the glass to her lips, tilted her head back, and drained it dry. The ice rattled as she slammed it down onto the bar and raised her head, her face bright.

She nodded.

“Aha! Gotcha!” Gina laughed. “I knew that would do the trick! So you like whiskey, huh?”

Dawn wasn’t sure why a drink that common was Gina’s secret weapon, but she didn’t question it. What she did question was the sudden shift in Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin’s attitude. The color drained from the other girl’s face, and her smile disappeared. She glared murderously at Gina for a moment, then snatched the glass up from the bar and smashed it on the ground.

Gina stumbled back, stunned. Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin swiveled her head around and stared contemptuously at her, twisting her lips into a snarl.

“…O-okay, okay,” Gina said, holding up her hands in surrender. “Not whiskey then. Something else. You got it.”

Dawn sighed and shook her head. Oh yeah. Getting this girl drunk was going just great.