She is always right there when I need her

Dawn regarded Rose warily as she sat down across from her. There was a lot she could do to answer Rose’s question- the blonde had certainly missed a lot.

When Dawn had taken a full day to herself with Nick, she’d come back to a few surprises the next day.

That couldn’t compare to what Rose had avoided. Yesterday had been pandemonium that made pandemonium look like a child’s tantrum.

So rather than answer Rose’s question, she asked one of her own.

“…Why are you dressed like a cheerleader?” Dawn asked, scanning over Rose’s outfit in confusion.

“What, you don’t think I look good?” Rose puffed up her cheeks in a pout and Dawn frowned. That wasn’t what she’d said at all, but…

“No, it’s not that, it’s just… confusing. …And why aren’t you wearing underwear?” Dawn asked next, raising her eyebrow quizzically.

Rose puffed up her cheeks again, and then exhaled. Her expression looked surprised. “You can tell?” She asked, raising her eyebrow.

“Of course I can tell,” Dawn said, running her eyes over her again.

“What, because you’re a doctor you can see how my boobs are hanging a little looser, is that it? That’s really something, Dawn!” Rose tittered.

Dawn adjusted her glasses.

“…No, your nipples are protruding.”

Rose glanced down at her shirt. There were two tiny nubs sticking out of the white fabric.

Her cheeks flushed and she laughed sheepishly. “…Oh, yeah, that,” she said, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “I guess that works too.”

She’d gotten more turned on from teasing Nick than she’d expected. And not to mention all the salacious heat between them since last night.

“Yup,” Dawn nodded. “So out with it, what’s the deal? Is ‘go without underwear’ and ‘wear a cheerleader outfit’ two of your rewards or something?”

Rose whistled. “Well, the cheerleader one, for sure, I’m gonna make a nice 300 BP off that one as long as I wear this for the rest of the day. As for the underwear, that one was last round, remember?”

Dawn raised her eyebrow. “So what, you’re just wearing nothing for the fun of it?” She asked, not sure if that was too farfetched for Rose or not. It seemed like the kind of crazy thing she would do to arouse Nick.

Rose shook her head and grinned. “Well…” She shrugged. “Didn’t have any when I woke up in the Master’s Suite, and it’s not like I was going to ditch Nick just to go change, so…”

“So you decided to go commando.” Dawn rolled her eyes. That sounded like Rose, alright.

Rose shrugged. “Not a big deal. I’m planning to go for a bath in the hot springs later to relax myself, considering how sore I am. I think you know a bit about that,” she giggled, wiggling her eyebrows. “Considering how your night with Nick in Dream Alley went.”

Dawn’s cheeks flushed slightly. She adjusted her glasses and coughed. “…Yes, well, those sorts of things happen, I suppose. You still feel sore?”

“Extremely,” Rose nodded. “But nothing a good soak can’t fix!”

Dawn decided that it was time to break the news to the blonde.

“To be clear, your bounty reward or whatever it was, it said you had to wear the cheerleader costume the entire day or something, right?” She figured it would be something like that. Dakota wasn’t nice enough to give out BP for just a couple of hours.

Rose nodded.

“Yup,” she confirmed. “I just have to wear this for the whole day, and then I get some BP! Pretty easy deal if you ask me.”

Dawn sighed. She was right on the money. “Read it again. You know that means you can’t go in the bath, right?”

“What?” Rose laughed, shaking her head. “That’s ridiculous, of course I can. What are you talking about, Dawn?”

“They don’t let you wear clothes into the bath, remember?” Dawn reminded the other woman. “The sign at the spa says so.”

Rose snorted and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, DUH. Then I’ll just take it off…”

Her voice trailed off and she sat up straight in her chair. She summoned her bounty sheet and tore over the restriction again.

• Spend the Entire Day in a Skimpy Cheerleader Uniform – 300 BP

“Wait, so… that means…” Rose’s eyes widened and she looked up at Dawn. The shorter woman just nodded solemnly.

“Yup,” Dawn confirmed. “Entire day. No taking it off to use the hot spring, or take regular bath or shower. No taking it off to put on a bra, either. …Panties are fine, though, if you can get them on under the skirt.”

She smiled ruefully at Rose. “Shouldn’t you have read the fine print?”

Rose started sulking. She was really looking forward to that hot spring. “Well… fine. I can wait a day or so,” she muttered. “But you seem to be particularly nasty today, Dawn, rubbing it in my face like that. What, did you wake up on the wrong side of the litterbox or something?”

“Cat’s don’t sleep in litterboxes you-” Dawn caught herself and took a few deep breaths. This was pointless and petty. There was no need to say all that stuff. She regained her composure, inhaled, and exhaled. “…You’re right,” she admitted. “I’m in a bit of a foul mood… but I shouldn’t take it out on you, Rose. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no worries,” Rose chirped, brightening up immediately. She waved her hand dismissively and leaned back in her chair. “We’re all friends here, after all. There’s nothing to be concerned about!”

Dawn bit her lip. She couldn’t rightly say that was the truth anymore… and she’d danced around the issue enough. Dawn valued honesty, and that meant that she should show Rose some of the honesty that she deserved.

“Listen, Rose, there’s something you need to know,” Dawn said, sighing. “About what happened while you and Nick were in Dream Alley. I gave you the run around a few minutes ago, but that’s not fair to you.”

After all, judging by how close Rose and Nick had gotten after their date, there was a good chance that Rose was now the second-closest girl to Nick’s heart, after Mary. She deserved to know what was going on as much as the rest of them.

As for Rose, she certainly perked up, leaning forward with intrigue. After Kim had alluded to some serious shit going down, she’d been wondering what that entailed. And it looked like Dawn was going to finally spill the beans.

Dawn stared down at the remains of her breakfast. She really hadn’t had much of an appetite this morning, and had **** herself to eat because breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Finally, she raised her head and looked Rose in the eye.

“Yesterday, while you and Nick were off on your date, a few of us girls… we used those mirrors. The ones from the Hall of Mirrors, that turned Nick into a woman and gave Dani her short hair back? You know the ones.”

Rose’s eyes widened. “Oh! Yeah, I remember those mirrors! I was actually thinking of trying them out myself when I got back,” she tittered. “Can you imagine? I could find all sorts of different roles to play! It would be just darling!”

She smirked. “Of course, as far as physical changes go, who needs it?” She scoffed, standing up and striking a pose. She cradled the back of her head and stuck out her chin to make her hair bounce. “Like there’s anything on this that would need to be improved.”

Dawn wasn’t impressed. A little jealous, maybe, but not impressed.

“Come off it, this isn’t some joke,” she chided Rose, shaking her head. “Take this seriously. We tried to use the mirrors, and-”

“Let me guess,” Rose tittered. “You were trying to get a little taller, weren’t you? Bigger boobs, more curves? You can admit it.”

Dawn’s eyes widened and her face turned red. Rose smirked, knowing that she was right.

“That isn’t what this is about!” Dawn exclaimed, not denying Rose’s correct allegation. “The point is, those mirrors… they don’t just change you physically. They can change you mentally, too. And they did that. Change us, I mean.”

Rose blinked. “…Changed you mentally how?” She asked suspiciously. “Who was involved in this whole mess?”

Dawn sighed. “It was just me, Morgana, and Gina. But the stuff that happened…” She shivered and shook her head. “We all got serious mental transformations. Gina turned into a complete doormat. She was nice and sweet, like a good girl should be, but she didn’t have any backbone. And Morgana… Morgana, she turned into this evil dominatrix witch, who tried to **** all of us to be her slaves… it was like something out of a horror movie!”

Rose nodded thoughtfully and stroked her chin. “Yeah… I can see how that was a problem.” She could already envision Morgana pushing Gina down and having her way with her. Yeah, that wasn’t something anyone would want to see probably.

Dawn nodded sadly. “It was a really big mess.”

“And what about you?” Rose leaned forward, a smirk slowly turning up the corners of her lips. “What did you transform into.”

Dawn’s blush deepened and she couldn’t look Rose in the eye. She sighed and shook her head.

“I, um… I became… I turned into this really sexy cat lady, with these, um, pheromones, that would arouse people…”

“Hold on, when you say sexy, you mean…”

Rose cupped her chest, ignoring her fingers rubbing against her erect nipples.

The fact that Dawn couldn’t even look at her, and somehow shrunk to become even smaller, wasn’t lost on her. She smiled in amusement.

“I knew it! You totally picked a big boobs transformation and didn’t even think about what would happen!” Rose cackled with glee.

“Sh-shut up!” Dawn hissed. “So what?! I didn’t think that would happen! It wasn’t rational to assume there would be mental transformations, when neither of the previous cases resulted in one! I made a perfectly fine decision touching that mirror, one that just happened to turn out poorly, that’s all!”

“Right, right,” Rose nodded, suppressing her urge to burst out laughing. “Whatever you say, Dawn, whatever you say…”

“Rose!!!”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” Rose said, shaking her head. “So what happened? What did you do? You said you were under a mental transformation, right?”

“Right…” Dawn nodded. “So while I was under the influence of that transformation, I just kind of… snapped. I went after the other girls, and I used my pheromones to try to seduce them.”

Rose blinked. That was surprising. “Dawn, are you bi?” She asked curiously. “I mean, I’m totally fine if you are, I’m just curious.”

Dawn quickly shook her head. “No, I’m not,” she assured the other girl. “But I think… I think my other self… I think she was. Because she was really, really focused on getting the other women to become her cuddle pets with her. You know?”

Rose had a good idea what that meant.

“And?” She asked, intrigued. “How did it go? Public orgy? Seems kind of a waste if you ask me, I prefer some one-on-one intimacy… although, with my new transformation…”

“Could you get your mind out of the gutter, please?” Dawn groaned. Again, though, she didn’t deny it. “…But you’re right, it did almost turn out that way,” she admitted. “Pretty much everyone got roped in by the end…”

Her face flashed with guilt, and for the first time Rose could fully grasp the consequences of what Dawn was saying. She gasped.

“Wait, Dawn… did you… did you **** anybody?” She asked, her eyes widening.

“No!” Dawn exclaimed. “No, that… that wasn’t me. It was someone using my body… someone who took me over, and did… all those things. But… that person, yes. She assaulted people with her pheromones. She tried to control Kim… she sort-of had sex with Dani… and Mary, she…”

Dawn started to tear up. That right there was a red flag for Rose.

“Dawn, are you crying?” Rose’s voice softened. Dawn had been good to her when they’d been buddies. She didn’t like seeing the other girl sad like this.

“I-I’m fine,” Dawn sniffled and shook her head. “…Fine… don’t worry about me, you don’t need to worry about me…”

It was obvious she wasn’t fine, though. Rose could see it, and so could anyone else with eyes.

Not sure what else to do, Rose reached over and placed her hand over Dawn’s to comfort her.

“Hey, come on now, it’s okay,” she said softly. “Just tell me what happened.”

And Dawn confessed the rest of the story.

Rose was stunned.

“Whoa, that’s…” She shook her head incredulously. “Okay, like, the way you were talking before, I knew it was bad, but…”

“It’s practically ****,” Dawn nodded bitterly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dani and Mary never talked to me again.”

“But I mean, you weren’t in control of yourself,” Rose said gently. “It wasn’t like you could help what you did!”

The rationalist in Dawn knew that Rose was telling the truth. But the moralist didn’t think that made much of a difference.

Either way, the damage had been done. People had gotten hurt. The fact that Dawn hadn’t been conscious of it at the time, that didn’t make a difference.

“What did the others say?” Rose asked quietly. “Have you talked to Dani yet? I can’t imagine that she would hold that against you, not after you gave her the orgasm she’s been chasing all this time!”

Dawn shot Rose a dirty look. “Don’t make fun,” she snapped. “This isn’t a game, Rose! This is serious! Just because Dani managed to… that, that doesn’t make what I did okay!”

Rose sighed and kneaded her temples. “Okay, so… look, think about it like this. You’re smart, right?”

Dawn didn’t even dignify that with a response.

“Okay, well, little miss smarty pants, let’s say that the tables were reversed, and Dani did something to you,” Rose suggested. “Don’t you think-”

“Yes, I know, in that situation, I would forgive her, I get that,” Dawn said, cutting that train of thought off immediately. She’d gone over that scenario dozens of times already. “You’re missing my entire point here, Rose.”

Rose blinked.

“Then… what is your point?” She asked. “How can I help?”

Dawn shook her head.

“My point is that people got hurt,” she said. “Even if I wasn’t in control, the things that I did to them, I can’t just ask them to forget it. And yeah, they don’t blame me. I’m happy that they don’t. But if you think that really makes it okay that those things happened, that we can just let bygones be bygones because it was nobody’s fault, well… you haven’t grown as much as I thought you did,” Dawn bitterly lashed out at her.

She knew as the words left her lips that they weren’t fair to Rose. She hadn’t done anything. And she was trying to help.

But Dawn was hurting too much right now to let her.

Rose sighed and shook her head.

“Okay… okay. I get it. Really, I do,” she said. “That’s not what I was trying to say. Yes, something bad happened. And as much as you want to take the blame for yourself, you had it right the first time. It was nobody’s fault. And that’s why you haven’t apologized, isn’t that right? Out of fear.”

Dawn flinched. Her ears flared out and her eyes widened. “How… how did you…?”

“You’re here late, because you went to breakfast late, am I right?” Rose asked. “I know how punctual you are, Dawn. And I know it wouldn’t take two hours to barely eat anything, either. You waited until they were all done, then you came down later, right?”

Rose had her dead to rights. She couldn’t even deny it.

“…I was going to,” Dawn said quietly, looking down. “I went to bed last night, sure that I would apologize to Dani and make everything right between the two of us. Mary too. Even if they were angry, I was going to apologize.”

“But you didn’t,” Rose pointed out, piercing through her paper-thin defenses.

Dawn swallowed and shook her head. She pulled her legs up against her chest.

Rose was surprised at how **** she looked. Dawn, for her short stature, always carried herself with absolute surety and composure. She was the most mature girl in the harem by a mile, Rose believed, so seeing her acting like this…

It was like she was a scared little girl.

“Dawn… what happened?” Rose couldn’t understand how someone so strong had changed so much in just one day.

“I… I had a nightmare…” Tears began to well up in Dawn’s eyes. “Morgana… the… the other Morgana… she wrote down nightmares for us. Bad dreams, horrible, abusive dreams… and in mine… I was me again. I could see it all. I relived that moment with Dani over and over again… and it… it was horrible…”

The sex itself had actually been quite pleasurable. But the powerlessness she felt, being a prisoner in her own mind, Morgana’s diary had made her feel that for real, it had made what happened to her that much more solid.

And now, Dawn felt sick. It was like she’d been the one assaulted, and in a way, that was the case. After all, Dani had had sex with her just as much as she had had sex with Dani. And the end result of that had been the two of them reaching orgasm, but just as Dani couldn’t control herself due to Dawn’s pheromones, Dawn had just been a passenger in her own body.

Dawn didn’t like women that way.

“I want things to be right between us… I want to make it right… I want to apologize…” Dawn wiped her eyes and started to shake. “Because it was my fault… because I touched that mirror… but Dani… I’m scared of the things I saw in that diary… how is she going to feel, if I go to her now? And will I even be able to look her in the eye, after everything that happened?”

Dawn needed to apologize to Dani. But at the same time, she was terrified by what they’d put each other through, and felt like she’d been violated herself.

Rose just stared at the other woman in muted horror, not at all sure how to help.

What could she even say in a situation like this?