Some Confusion, Some Rage, Some Leveling

Gaia

After the meeting, everyone kind of scatters. Tyalangan and Tina both disappear with their signature exits. Mona gives a friendly wave as she heads out of the Hotel to go... somewhere, promising to check in with everyone as soon as she finishes an errand or two. Craig, the asshole, beelines it upstairs. Good riddance. Tegan, the poor thing, rushes out of the throne room to... somewhere. Gaia wants to go after her friend, but Teach holds her back, saying, “The girl wants some space. Check on her during dinner, if she’s not back by then.”

Ootah is helping to hold up Jenny, “So, Jenny was promised that leveling her up will help her be able to walk again? We should go do that. Where do we go?”

“Oh, upstairs,” Caoimhe offers, “I sure most of us have some business with Daphne. Everyone else coming?”

Gaia shrugs. She doesn’t see a need to level up right now. Tessa sighs and offers Jenny another shoulder to wrap around. Andromeda follows behind the big group heading over to the dungeon mermaid’s domain.

That leaves Gaia and Mineko. The latter, still kneeling on the floor, is staring, confused. To be fair, Gaia is equally confused by the kitty-girl. Mineko awkwardly greets, “Hello, fellow ****. The trainer **** left without giving me instructions. What should I be doing?”

“Uhhh... hi? I’m Gaia. We could hang out. Whatcha want to do?”

The kitty-girl again looks confused. “Does Owner-Mona not want us to do specific tasks for her? Should I ask her for instructions? This is not how I was taught how a household is to be run?”

“Nah. The kid is pretty chill. She mostly just wants us happy.”

The kitty’s head cocks further to the side. “Happy? I do not know what the word means. My Common is not perfect. The trainer slaves back at the academy only taught us enough Common to serve an Owner that does not speak Sylvan...”

She doesn’t know what ‘happy’ means? That’s sad... Wait... I know Sylvan! “[The kid just wants us to be happy.]”

“[Happy? That is a feeling for Owners...]”

Okay, something is massively wrong about where this kitty girl came from. Gaia pulls the girl up to her feet. “Tell you what. Let’s go see our room and you can tell me about your school thingy.”

Mineko shares as they climb the stairs. The results break Gaia’s heart. This poor kid! Never knowing her parents. Spending every waking moment of her life until graduation learning how to cook, clean, fight, and sexually service some future **** owner? That life was so ingrained that the girl can’t even conceive of love? Okay. New project! Help Mineko with being less... slavey.

The Summer Room feels... different. The bed is wider. There is an extra wardrobe with Mineko’s name on it. Tegan’s name is on Teach’s old wardrobe. The love seat has an accompanying overstuffed chair by the fireplace. Mineko pulls out a feather duster; Gaia needs to grab her wrist, “Wait.”

Summer pokes her head out of the bathroom, “Oh, hey you two. I’m not going to complain if the cat wants to do my job, but you are a guest here, Mineko. You don’t need to clean. I have the bounty board updated for the week, if you want to check. Starts tomorrow.”

As expected, posted behind the door is the updated bounty board. The poster still reads “Summer’s Summer Room Bounties!” Underneath is listed first a set of bounties labeled “Daily (Exclusive ;-P)”:

• 5 BP – Wear a pet play collar from the morning meeting until curfew
• +5 BP – ...and it is obviously visible the whole time
• +10 BP – Perform a pet play action with Mona while wearing the collar.

Then a second list labeled “Week 1 Bounties”:

• 20 BP – Successfully complete your first dungeon delve.
• 25 BP – Earn Level 5
• 50 BP – (Exclusive!!!) Wear ONLY your collar during your date with Mona this week!

Mineko moves her mouth as she reads. Gaia guesses the kitty-girl is translating the gist of the board into Sylvan. “Does my collar count for Owner-Mona’s tasks?”

Summer walks over and flicks the bell on it slightly, adding, “I’d say so.”

“I want to please my owner. If it isn’t...”

Summer laughs a little, “Hey, I bet Mona likes you and has fantasized about doing stuff with you already. You have nothing to worry about.”

Cute kitty ears flatten as Mineko’s twin tails flick wildly behind her. She instinctively covers her latex clad crotch. “You really think so? Owner-Mona is pleased by me?”

Both Summer and Gaia nods. “Mona is definitely excited by having a kitty-girl maid. Especially one as cute as you.”

The kitty-girl crouches, hands still over her kitty pussy, as she blushes and purrs. She scurries under the bed. Uhh... that might be a problem...

Tegan

After the meeting from hell, Tegan needed to blow off some steam. The freaks that did this to her need to pay. She even went to that disgusting shop outside the castle to order a new target for the range; while she was there, she replaced the blanket for a T-shirt with some cat girl with respectable breasts on it declaring: “Dawn Does It Kitty Style.” Now, she knows the face of her enemy.

Tegan: -25 BP (Life size Shar statue, T-shirt)

Then, the true pain began.

The accursed cow-tits have utterly ruined her. Her drawstring pull is completely shot. Either she only gets about a quarter of the pull she would normally get, which is insufficient to make a decent shot, or the bowstring would smack into her indecent chest, ruining the shot and leaving a giant, painful welt on her. Twenty practice arrows fired and not a single one even makes it halfway down the range to that vampire bitch’s stupid face.

So, completely defeated, Tegan curls up as best she can (the ginormous breasts even prevent her from doing that normally) and cries. What am I going to do now? The show has taken everything away from me. What good am I, now that I am such a freak that I can’t even do the one thing I was ever good at?

The sound of a gunshot breaks her out of her funk, ears alert, tail bristling. The catsuit-clad freak put a bullet right between a stuffed prairie dog’s eyes. She then bends down to look Tegan in the eyes, saying, “Hey, Tegan. Ready to try again?”

“Fuck you, you fucking freak! What’s the point? I should just be eliminated now. There’s no hope for me. Not anymore. Not with these impossible things.”

The slap the freak delivers fucking hurts. Tegan rubs her jaw and sobs some more.

“Look, dumbass, you can insult me all you want but you DON’T just throw your life away like that. So, you got big tits now; how is that the end of the world?”

Tegan just gestures to her bleeding cow-tit and the pile of arrows too close to the firing line. The vicious vixen flinches as the gun nut makes a couple of magic bullets and shoots her with them. The bloody welts heal, followed by the bloody shirt cleaned.

“Do you love Mona?”

“She’s my fiancée.” Tegan growls.

“That’s not what I asked. You can be engaged to someone you hate. You can have a loveless marriage. Ootah’s parents are an example of that. The question I asked was: Do you love Mona?”

Tegan blinks. She is Mona’s and Mona is hers. Feelings never came into the equation. “I-I don’t know...”

“Well, if you even have an inkling of a sliver of an iota of love for the girl, you will NOT give up on yourself. You met Vix. My wife feels guilty enough about some things that happened to us during our version of the game. With most of the other mistakes, the fact that we are all okay and love each other soothes those guilts. Not so with Vix. Vix hurts her, every time she sees her, because, no matter how much that brat earned that elimination, there is no repairing the relationship. Vix is stuck that way. So, you give up, you get yourself eliminated, and you will be a permanent wound to Mona.”

Tegan whimpers. “The blue freak wouldn’t...”

The astral elf growls, “There are worse eliminations out there than what Sarge wrote for Vix and she had to be dragged, kicking and screaming by the producer cat, to make that one as hard as she made it because she felt partially responsible for Vix’s actions. You think she will show you more kindness than her? She won’t have to see you after the show is done. And you haven’t exactly made an impression that would elicit mercy. You are as bad as Craig, as far as your attitude is concerned.”

That makes the angry archer bristle. I’m not as bad as that bastard...

“For the same of argument,” Tegan concedes, “let’s say that I don’t want to give up. How do I deal with these fucking nightmare tits?”

“You want the easy way or the hard way? Easy way, waste most of your SP every morning to get down to near base level, then hope you never actually need your magic. You’ll be a little bigger than you are used to, but it will be manageable, especially if you figure out a way to smuggle in some compression bras. Hard way, accept that you got big tits now, accept that you are bound by some perverse magic rules, learn how to wear light armor, then I have an armor piece to sell you.”

The freak pulls out a chest guard. It is made of whale net, a half sleeve on the left arm and looks to wrap snugly under the armpit on the right. It looks to cover both breasts; if only Tegan wasn’t so grotesquely huge.

“How is that supposed to help? I am not going to fit in it...”

That earns Tegan a whack to the back of the head. “Here’s the description, dummy.”

The star-eyed freak pulls out a notecard. Tegan reads and snarls a little:

Chest Guard of Incoporealness – (requires proficiency in light armor and must be worn as part of a light armor set) While worn, this chest guard stores breasts in an interdimensional pocket space. They remain visible (though intangible) on the material plane.

“So, my disgusting cow-tits are put on display, but they don’t get in the way of my draw?”

The astral elf nods, “Aye. And it will **** you in armor that will let you cast, at least when you need a bow.”

Tegan snarls, but nods. I guess that is my next immediate goal.

Ootah

This girl is starting to be overwhelmed again. Tessa is whispering some soothing words to the newly made dryad. Ootah does not have time to panic, even if she was so inclined. There are too many new variables to take in. The orc scans the amenities floor. Some of it is just the warrior’s instinctual need to get a tactical view of the area: looking for potential ambush points, exits, blind spots. Some of it is that she needs to understand as much about this version of the game as possible. Ootah has watched enough Harem Hotel to understand that every season is done a little different; she knows enough about her Queen Aunt to guess at what she would do, but a bad guess could be disastrous.

Aunt Daphne decorated her Dungeons for Damsels with scenes from their endgame. The mermaid is there, messily eating a squid while floating in a pool of water behind the counter. She waves everyone in.

“Aunt Daphne,” Ootah states as the others offer their greetings.

Swallowing, the dungeon mermaid flashes them a shark-toothed grin, “Hey, guys! We here to do some very early leveling?”

“Yeah, Daphne. Do I have enough to get Level 1?” Jenny asks, “I was told getting a level is enough to get me properly back on my feet.”

Daphne checks a tablet. She notes, “You got enough for Level 3, with a little left over.”

That strikes Ootah as extremely unusual. As Jenny leans over the counter to work out her levels, the orc asks the others, “How is it possible to get that much XP so quickly? Was she used as a weapon against a horde of foes when she was a table?”

Daphne answers the question, “Oh, we fiddled with VP to turn it into XP. So, Harem Hotel actions give you experience. We also have a different XP curve than Ioun.”

Ootah sits on that information. So, playing the game will get us the means to be stronger, faster than going to war? For what purpose? I really should have watched this season before auditioning...

Jenny is walking much better as she turns to face the others. She has an amulet around her neck that wasn’t there before. Apparently, she received a number of spells, some changes to her bonsai tree, a couple of invocations, and that amulet as class features. Daphne was kind enough to expand Jenny’s choices to be more flavorful than the usual warlock list.

“I feel a lot better. Thanks, all of you. Now what?”

Caoimhe steps up to the counter, “Now, we handle our leveling and then show you two the rooms upstairs.”

Caoimhe makes the proper first feat decision for her singular level: Elven Accuracy, choosing Wisdom as her stat boost. Getting a level of advantage on all of her attacks is incredibly good. The drow also picks up Gentle Repose, Enhance Ability, and the Thaumaturgy cantrip for her spells. She steps back and starts to switch to Kevin.

Tessa and Andromeda step up as Kevin transforms. Andromeda grabs Mirror Image, Misty Step, and the Shocking Grasp cantrip for her spells, and the Keen Mind feat. “It would have been helpful to recall things during the challenge,” the warforged replies.

Tessa also picks up Elven Accuracy, choosing Charisma for her stat boost instead. Her spell selection is again Enhance Ability and the Minor Illusion cantrip. For her first maneuver turned flourish, she opts for a disarming strike. “That’s all, for now,” the sea elf replies, “I am going to wait a bit for the rest of my levels.”

“Why did both of you pick that spell?”

“It’s useful for training, which is another source of XP,” Kevin states as he steps up to level again. The Compelled Duel spell pick is interesting. Weapon Master, picking Strength, is definitely a weird choice. Kevin answers the unasked question again, “We were all basically civilians before coming here. I have no experience with the weaponry here from before we arrived. I would rather spend training time working on broadsword expertise than basic proficiency.”

As everyone exits, Ootah can’t help but ask, “All three of you surely could level more. Why wait?”

“I have a transformation that encourages me to scribe my spells onto my body. That takes time.”

“I have to level up my forms separately and there is a one-hour cooldown between swaps. I have to string it out over time.”

“I honestly need to spend some time reading up on my class before I get too deep into it. I probably would have waited on even that level if it wasn’t for needing to pick another flourish.”

Hmm. They really are from another world, aren’t they...

Kevin splits off from the group before too long. The hu-cow looks nervous; he has something like a date with cousin Winter. The others head upstairs. Ootah takes the rear, half suspecting that she may need to catch Jenny if the girl stumbles, half used to marching orders and the importance of a rear guard. I need to relax; the walls are not likely to attack us here...

“Third floor has teleportation portals, essentially,” the warforged flatly states, “Less useful than they sound.”

They keep walking upstairs, Ootah contemplating how teleportation would not be useful. Music that must be from the others’ world wafts through the common area of the fourth floor. Cousin Lyra is in a maid’s outfit, beckoning the other three in and daring Ootah to say anything; she’ll tease her sometimes sparring partner later, once she is settled. One of her many, many, MANY bunny-girl cousins is pulling on her arm with comically ineffective ****.

“Which one are you again, Cousin?”

“Bella! I’m the maid for your room, Ootah! C’mon, I need to make up for how badly I did the room introduction last week!”

Ootah humors the excitable bunny-girl and follows her to the room. It is certainly a cheery one, smelling like a field of wildflowers in full bloom. Little flowers bloom in the walls and bed canopy.

Ootah approaches her wardrobe and sees that her things are already present. The orc is likely not going to wear much of it; most of her clothes are for court and she’s more comfortable in armor than all of that. She notes her sparse makeup is arrayed on the vanity.

Bella is holding up a bag, which Ootah takes. Phone. Rule book (which she should read at some point). A very lovely whetstone, with a small bottle of sharpening oil. I hope that I can soon afford that magic greataxe, so that I don’t have to worry about my weapon keeping its edge. Still a thoughtful gift.

“Thank you, Bella.”

“Welcome! Ooh, and don’t forget about the bounty board!” The bunny-girl maid does jazz hands towards an **** on her senses in poster form. Ootah reads:

Bella’s Things for Her New Friends to Do, Week 2!

Do These Everyday!!!!:

• 5 BP – Suck on a Man-Carrot!
• +5 BP – ...Get it in suuuuuuper deep!
• +10 BP – ...And swallow like good bunnies do!

Do These Sometime This Week!!!!:

• 20 BP – Do Good at a Delve Thingie for the First Time!
• 25 BP – Get Level 5!
• 50 BP – Get Your (Wo)Man-Carrot sucked on real good by Mistress!!!!

Bounties, huh? Okay. Giving a blowjob is not something I would want to do, but I suppose that is fine, assuming that I can find someone to suck on that would not offend Mona or me. I presume that three levels in a week are doable, once I get into the swing of things. That last option, however, will be nice, if Mona can handle me...

Speaking of Mona, the human has fired off a text. Ootah reads it, then smiles. She heads to the shower to get ready.