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How Not To Become Lunch: 75 - Spin to Win
As all in attendance gathered round and found a place, their eyes were only focused on one thing. Mr. Belv stood in the center of a ring of pillows, and in his hand was the object of anxiety, dread, and excitement: an empty glass bottle.
“Please, be seated,” the butler mage instructed.
Sarabeth took the lead, folding her legs elegantly down onto one of the many pillows arranged into the large circle. Fiona, next to her, followed her lead and did the same. Jack- naturally right next to Fiona- was about to follow in turn, when he heard an unexpected voice.
“Hey, um, mind if I sit with you guys?”
Jack looked back to see a somewhat familiar face approaching. The new arrival, a burly boy about their age, gently shoved his way between Jack and Harry, like he was trying to make it through a closing door, placing a friendly, beefy hand on Jack’s shoulder in the process.
“Oh, um…” The marked boy looked to Harry, who recognized the other kid as well and shrugged acceptingly. “Sure.” The three of them took their pillow-seats, Harry moving over one to make room.
“Brutus, right?” the spectacled boy asked, remembering the name.
“Yeah,” the buff kid replied.
Jack stayed silent for a moment, more inclined to remember the way Fiona had dragged this kid out of his hiding place and taken a generous ‘sampling’ of his flavor. The marked boy glanced to his werewolf friend; she’d taken notice of the newcomer, but decided to keep to herself.
“Spin the bottle,” Mr. Belv enunciated. There was a collective *gulp* from the seated crowd, carrying more than one implication. “The spinner must bestow a kiss to the person upon whom the bottle’s neck settles. That person then spins the bottle themselves… assuming they are able to.” The mage looked over the uneasy faces of the various guests circled around him; he found his eyes settling for a moment on the two familiar boys: Jack and Harry. Nice children… he thought to himself, then specifically focused on Jack. …It’s a shame Lady Sarabeth desires you dead.
“W-we’re supposed to kiss people!?” Jack asked Fiona in a hushed but frantic whisper. “And what does he mean ‘if they’re able to’?”
“Well, licks and kisses are pretty interchangeable for most preds, so…” Fiona explained, trailing off with a mischievous shrug.
Ah, right, so a pred could go up and ‘kiss’ a human, and decide they want more than a taste, Jack understood. Great, as if a game where you have to kiss people isn’t traumatic enough.
“Lady Sarabeth will be granted the first spin,” Mr. Belv announced, placing the empty bottle on the floor and taking a few steps back.
She’s actually playing this? Jack thought, watching the vampire girl rise and make her way to the center. He wouldn’t have expected someone ‘refined’ like Sarabeth to opt into a game like this; why would she want to take a chance on kissing any random guest at her party?
Spin true, good bottle, Sarabeth thought as she crouched down and took hold. Spin true and grant me the kiss of my chosen… or I'll SMASH you to BITS.
With a flick of her wrist, the glass began to whirl. A quiet whirring reached her ears, swift and then slow and then slower, until the bottle finally came to a halt. Sarabeth followed the neck out toward the edge of the encircled crowd, and for just a moment her heart leapt. Her eyes fell upon a fine, furred female huntress, well known for her skill. But she quickly recognized that this predator was a feline, not a canine.
Drat!! I should have had Mr. Belv fix the blasted bottle! To the Abyss with ‘fairness’!
But Sarabeth’s outward reaction was much more reserved, by which I mean hardly visible at all. She simply turned her head up to look at Chelsie, and then began walking silently in her direction, fighting to keep the scowl from her face. She didn’t want to show any disrespect to the girl, after all.
At the very least I am bestowing this token of affection on someone deserving, she told herself, as if this consolation would improve her mood. It wouldn’t.
The cat watched her hostess approach, with her characteristically intent gaze which somehow seemed both curious and neutral at the same time depending on when you blinked. She rose, her belly sloshing audibly as the limp, digesting human inside wobbled in its personal acid bath, and she turned her head a quarter to the side, eyes still perfectly trained, presenting her cheek to the lady of the evening.
Sarabeth leaned in, over the protruding bulge, and gave the furry cheek a reserved little peck. She withdrew quickly, the two made silent eye contact for a moment as if coming to an understanding, and then the vampire turned and walked away.
Fiona made a rather polite little giggle. Lily, on the other side of the circle, made a not-quite-so-polite chuckle. Jack failed to find the entertainment, not quite sure whether it was a girl thing or a predator thing.
As Sarabeth returned to her seat, Chelsie rose and made her way to the center. The neko bent over, nose twitching for a moment, then raised a hand and pawed at the bottle in a quick swipe, sending it spinning in place. It whirled and whirled until it finally came to a halt, pointing right at-
OH COME ON!! Sarabeth screamed internally.
Chelsie turned fully to face Fiona, and began to walk in her direction.
The vampire teen choked down her frustration like a rowdy meal struggling back up her throat. That cat stealing her kiss!? She had half a mind to intervene! But she held herself back. Not only would an outburst be an utter embarrassment, but she knew her jealousy would be misplaced. She’d specifically confirmed that Chelsie had no intimate affections toward girls before inviting her to the party with Fiona, in fact Sarabeth wasn’t sure the neko had any particular affections toward anything.
“Oh, do you have something for me?” Fiona asked through a playful smirk in a quiet, teasing voice as Chelsie arrived.
“If you’ll accept it,” the neko replied, in a tone that probably suggested she was playing along, though the flatness made it hard to tell.
Fiona leaned forward on her hands and presented her cheek. The tilt of her head put her face in Jack’s direction as she put on a faux-flattered expression at the arrival of Chelsie’s quiet lips on her fur. The human frowned at the strange mixture of awkwardness, confusion and… something else, bubbling up inside him, but quickly put on a smile to cover it when Fiona made eye contact with him. Sarabeth, on the werewolf’s opposite side, did all she could to resist grinding her fangs.
“Cats and dogs? We shouldn’t have,” Fiona joked, giggling to herself again as the friendly feline withdrew. For a very brief moment, Chelsie showed what might have been a hint of an amused smirk before she turned and started back to her pillow-seat.
Jack let his emotions go as the moment passed. Well, this game doesn’t seem so bad after all, he told himself as his friend stood up to take her spin. Just some innocent fun.
The proverbial glass arrow whirled round and its point landed on an unfamiliar face in the crowd. A boy. A human.
Jack saw the blood drain from the kid’s face like he’d been bitten by a vampire- one of those comic book vampires that drank blood, not a real one like their hostess. The boy cowered back slightly as the werewolf began to approach, her tail swaying happily back and forth. Fiona made no attempts to hide her predatory intentions as her prey looked around and realized that with Sarabeth and her staff watching, he had nowhere to go- he would have to hold his ground and accept his ‘kiss’.
“So, um, what’s the deal with you and the wolf?” The quiet question pulled Jack’s attention away and onto Brutus, sitting next to him. He took a moment to consider how he wanted to respond, he wasn’t sure exactly how high on Fiona’s dinner list this kid was.
“Fiona’s my friend,” Jack answered simply.
“Guts, I already tasted you, didn’t I?” The werewolf girl thought aloud in disappointment as she got closer to her target, canine nose twitching. She’d been hoping to grab tastes of the last few unsampled guests, this game was the perfect opportunity for it after all, but it seemed the bottle had other plans.
*gurgle* went her empty belly, as the intently sampled scent of an edible human meal filled her snout. The human boy shivered, which honestly only enticed her more. A little smile crept across her muzzle as she pondered perhaps just eating this one and finally giving her hungry gut a nice big dinner to work on. She crouched down and leaned forward, putting a clawed hand firmly on her prey’s shoulder to keep him from going anywhere. The scent of a frightened meal wafted through her nostrils, growing stronger. Surely this kid would feel just fine filling up her achingly empty stomach for the night.
“She’s your friend?” Brutus asked, still keeping his voice low. “But aren’t you marked?” The buff boy looked Jack up and down for a second. “Are you a mage pred?” His tone made it clear that he thought it unlikely.
“Yes, yes, and no,” replied Jack, answering the same tired old questions, though that last one was new.
“So… how does that work with…?” Brutus gestured to the unfolding scene.
Fiona leaned in closer, her breath lightly washing over her potential food’s face. Trembling lightly and not quite able to speak, the boy forced his lips into a pucker, as if silently hoping beyond hope that maybe she would actually just kiss him and leave him with his life.
*grrg* went her greedy gut, more than close enough for him to hear.
Her mouth parted, and his heart skipped a beat as- for the second time that night- the boy was confronted with the sight of the wolf girl’s hungry maw, silently calling out to him. The pink tongue within flexed and glinted in the firelight, stealing his gaze and holding it as it grew slowly closer and closer.
“Well, basically…” Jack answered. “…I’m off the menu, and other humans are…”
*sluuuuuuurp*
The slick wall of werewolf tastebuds plastered itself over and across the boy’s face, smearing the length of his head with warm saliva. Tempting as it was to gulp him down, she’d tasted several much more tempting treats that she would rather spend the evening digesting.
Fiona withdrew, and revealed to the crowd the poor boy’s terrified face, eyes squeezed shut in anticipation, puckered lips dripping slowly with fresh dog drool. He’d gotten his kiss alright.
Lily, Petal and even a few of the humans giggled or laughed at various volumes, Brutus included. The kid opened his eyes when he heard them and realized he wasn’t inside a canine’s throat. He saw Fiona’s tail lightly wagging as she walked away from him and fell back in relief, now being one of the few humans to have ever had his face touch her tongue twice and still be alive to tell the tale.
“Well, she’s got flair, I’ll give her that,” Brutus muttered, even quieter now that she was returning.
Jack couldn’t quite catch his tone, but a moment later Fiona was back and something about the other boy’s expression signaled that the brief conversation was over.
“So, still on the hunt?” he asked his friend casually.
“Yeah, I found a few that taste pretty good, especially this one guy. …Hey, where did he go?” Fiona glanced around the circle, ears drooping as she failed to locate the future food in question. “Did someone else get him?” None of the predators she could see seemed to have any new occupants in their bellies. She sniffed the air. His scent was still fairly fresh. “Whatever, he’s around here somewhere,” she said, deciding she’d hunt him down if it came to that.
“You know, one day maybe I’ll ask you what exactly makes a human taste ‘good’,” Jack remarked. Fiona chuckled in response.
That was just about when a quiet round of mournful “Oooh”s went through the crowd. That kid who Fiona had just licked out of his senses had pulled himself back up, trudged over to the bottle and given it a spin. And the bottle had landed on one particular, big-bellied, black and white, bloated panda bear.
“Oh, come on,” the poor boy whimpered to himself.
Petal was leaning back on one arm, the other hand gently caressing her beach ball of a belly. It was still moving, but much differently now. The harsh, erratic, violent protests of her meal had given way to calm, slow, smooth undulations; little shifts from beneath the mass of white fur, accompanied constantly by the wet, spluttery sounds of digestion.
The bear looked up at the unlucky boy and smirked from behind her rosy shades. Hair still slicked back from Fiona’s tongue, the kid slowly began his very reluctant approach toward the lounging predator and her burbling dome of a gut.
At least this one’s already full, so I don’t have to worry about her eating me… probably, the poor boy thought. Uhhh, let’s just get this over with.
He stepped closer and began eyeing the sheer size of her gut, trying to overlook the morbid knowledge of its contents enough to consider the practical question of how exactly he was supposed to get close enough to her face to give her a kiss. Maybe if he just-
“Whoa-”
In what may or may not have been an ‘unfortunate’ accident. Petal chose that particular moment as the best time to stretch a leg. Kissy boy had been so focused on her belly that he hadn’t really noticed beyond the jiggle it caused, and one bad step later he found himself tumbling forward, face first, right down into the engorged gut.
*plorsh*!
With a loud plop, a multi-layered squelch, a vigorous slosh and several soft cracks, the kid impacted the white-furred bulge and sunk deep into the fatty, fleshy dome, falling atop the curled up form of the panda’s meal, now only a vague lumpy mass, and compacting it heavily under his new weight.
*blurble*
“Uuuuurrp,” came the eruption from the predator’s mouth as the gas rose through her chest, wafting out over the fallen kid.
‘Luckily’ he couldn’t smell it, his nose was a bit too deep in panda pudge. Petal’s free hand came over and, just as the boy was pushing himself up, shoved his head back down deeper into her loudly gurgling gut.
*sigh* *urp* went the bloated bear, as the fresh struggles from just outside her belly helped free the last bit of trapped gas from the inside.
After a moment, though, the girl let go, and the boy very quickly thrust himself away from the fleshy, digestive abyss, falling back onto his butt at the predator’s feet, panting for air.
*guuurgle*
“That means ‘thanks for the kiss’,” Petal replied, grinning as she spoke for her stomach.
“You’re welcome,” the boy muttered like he was talking to a lunatic, quickly scurrying away back to his pillow where he could safely check that his heart was still beating.
The crowd’s reaction died down, followed by a moment of quiet, and then another.
“Ms. Perry, I do believe it is your turn,” Mr. Belv urged.
“Right, okay,” Petal replied.
Lethargically, she pushed herself up and got her feet underneath, enormous belly shaking and sloshing as she hauled it off her lap and into the air. With slow, lumbering steps that sent her bulge swinging side to side, she trudged over to the bottle resting on the ground. Too lazy- or perhaps bloated- to bend all the way down, she decided after a moment to just give the thing a gentle kick. The glass clacked quietly off her bottom claws and skidded a short distance across the ground, completing just two full turns before wobbling to a stop.
With its neck pointing directly at Harry.
“…No,” the boy breathed in disbelief.
Jack looked past Brutus to his friend’s face, just in time to see the look of incredulous dread take hold. There were so many other kids, what were the odds!? How!? Why had it landed on him!?
Petal smirked deviously. Harry could feel her gaze on him from behind her tinted glasses, dangerous, amused, hungry. She started walking, belly swaying.
*guuurgle*
*slosh* *slosh*
*glorp* *grooooan*
*slosh* *slosh*
He could have sworn it was calling for him. Things sure sounded a lot softer in there now, significantly more gooey. When he’d been shoved in there before, he and his stomach mate had been fighting for space, pressing and prodding with arms and legs. But now… well, he got the distinct impression that whatever was left in there didn’t have limbs capable of putting up anything resembling a fight. Just a lumpy mass of digesting human, now fairly air-free thanks to that last kid who’d stumbled by.
‘Gotta make sure I have room’. The panda’s words drifted back to him in his mind. She had room for him now, and they both knew it. Not much, but just enough; just enough to cram him down and bury him in the slop already brewing away inside, to give her belly a fresh round of struggles, a magnificent two-course meal that would keep her blissful and bloated all night long and into the week.
Jack wanted to do something, but felt himself paralyzed with fear as the plump panda thudded over, looming large with her gluttonous gut at face-level. Brutus scooted away, getting as close to Jack as he could- and as far from Harry.
Maybe Fiona could- He looked to his friend as the thought came, catching her concerned frown. Right, what is she supposed to do? Fight a bear!? In the middle of Sarabeth’s party?
Sarabeth only promised Jack protection, the werewolf thought forlornly. She invited Harry here specifically to be food for her guests. I can’t exactly make her take him off the menu. She put a clawed hand comfortingly- and perhaps a bit possessively- on Jack’s thigh.
Harry brought his arms in close across his chest, lightly gripping himself as he tilted his head higher to watch the approaching predator. Petal stopped just a step or two away, just enough distance to keep her belly from plowing into his face, the rounded bulge just slightly covering her face from his view, like a partial eclipse.
“Hello there,” she said through her smirk.
“U-u-u-um, h-hi.”
“Ready for your ‘kiss’?”
Harry only shrunk back further in response. The way she said that word made it perfectly clear she meant anything but.
In a slow, strenuous movement, she leaned over. Her gut *squarsh*ed and *glorp*ed and *groooan*ed in protest as it was pressed increasingly tight between her chest and her thighs. The contents shifted and sloshed in a series of wet plops, forced out around her sides or further down toward her knees amidst the rolls of white-furred panda pudge. The way the meaty mass was so carelessly and casually shoved out of the way to make room for the girl’s movements, that more than anything showed just how thoroughly the ex-girl inside her stomach had crossed the line from human to food.
Harry only stopped looking at it when Petal’s face eventually came down to his level, blocking out most of his view, her shadow now fully cast over him so that his meager silhouette was completely devoured by hers. Now he had something new to stare at: the tip of her muzzle, and the bit of anticipatory drool dangling from her chin. Her tongue crept out and swiped it away, giving him the briefest of preemptive glimpses into her maw.
Her smile widened, and she spoke her last words to him:
“Hope you still taste as good as yesterday.”
Harry’s heart stopped. Petal’s jaws opened.
The maw rushed forward and engulfed the boy’s terror-wide eyes, glasses and all. Thrust into the depths, his face collided with her soft, slick, fleshy tongue, pressing into his skin and coating him in her mounting drool. A soft, hungry gurgle crept up from her very nearby throat, like her stomach whispering in his ear.
He felt her maw flex around him, tongue arcing, and-
*sluuuuuuuuuuuuurp*
The long, wet muscle ran its length slow and firm against his face in a deep, full-muzzle lick, flicking up at the very end to knock his glasses askew as it left. The saliva-saturated lenses were more like blurry blinders now, but around their crooked rims he could see glimpses of black, white and tie-dye swirls retreating, the panda’s belly giving another loud series of gurgles and glorps along with what sounded like a small waterfall as the contents resettled into newly opened space.
Harry hastily wiped an arm across his eyewear and looked up. Petal smacked her lips and swallowed happily, sending his flavor down to join her digesting meal. …But not him.
“You… y-you… didn’t eat me…” the petrified boy muttered. The panda’s satisfied smile shifted back towards a mischievous smirk.
“I really wanted to see the look on your face,” she teased.
Her belly gave another long burble as they held eye contact through her obscuring shades, and then she turned and began walking off, back to her pillow-seat where she could digest in peace.
“I… I’m not dead,” Harry muttered.