212: Just A Show

on May 9, 2008 in Book 8

In Which Sooni Shoes A Cat Girl

“Oh good, you are already dressed this time,” Sooni said, as she arrived in the lounge.

For some reason, only one of her neko retainers was with her: Kai, dolled up in an absurd yellow outfit patterned with ducks, and a sun hat that looked like an upside-down flower. It looked like it might have been somebody’s idea of a child’s bathing suit. There was no pacifier obscuring her face this time, and when she caught me staring she glared at me and mouthed the word “Don’t.” Just that word. I could imagine what she meant: don’t say anything, don’t stare, don’t even start… just don’t.

Kai was trading her dignity and freedom for an education. I couldn’t pretend to understand her decision… I didn’t know what her other prospects could be, that they made Sooni look attractive by comparison… but it was her decision to make.

Sooni herself was wearing a silk robe and some kind of wrap over her head. Usually it seemed like she showered before show time, but today she didn’t seem to have done so.

“Hi, Sooni,” I said, resignedly.

“I have Maliko and Suzi guarding the downstairs television,” she said, a very fox-like gleam in her black eyes. “So that nobody else gets it.”

“Who the hell is going to be getting up at five in the morning on Sunday to watch TV in the downstairs lounge?”

“You might be surprised,” Sooni said. “There were a bunch of boys watching it when I put them there at two.”

“You made them get up three hours early so you could have the television?”

“So we could,” Sooni said. “You’re welcome.”

I sighed.

“It’s just a show, you know,” I said, before I could stop myself. I was already pre-wincing before the sentence was even half finished, and the look spreading across Sooni’s face suggested I wasn’t doing it hard enough.

“What… um… what are you guys watching, again?” Ian asked very quickly, before she could say anything.

“Pretty Neko Science Princess,” Sooni gushed. “You would not like it. It’s for girls.”

“Mack is a girl,” Two said. “So is Steff.”

“Oh,” Ian said. “Have fun, I guess.” He stood up, stretching. “I should probably go back to Weyland… I’m pretty tired.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I mean, it’s still dark out. If you crash in my room for a couple hours, you could walk back in daylight.”

“It’s not that far,” he said. “And it’s not like there’s gonna be bunches of monsters prowling between the residence halls at five in the morning, dark or not.”

“Well… stick to the paths, anyway,” I said. I gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“If you are done making out,” Sooni said, actually sticking her tongue out as she spoke the last two words, “we have to get downstairs before we miss the beginning!”

“Come on,” I said to Ian. “If you’re leaving, you can walk down with us.”

“Are you actually going to go downstairs dressed like that?” Ian asked me.

“We don’t have time to be changing clothes!” Sooni shrieked, stomping her sandaled foot. Both her voice and the impact of wood on tile ripped through my brain like a barbed arrowhead, and I clutched my head.

“It’s just not worth fighting her,” I said quietly to Ian. “Anyway, we’re probably the only ones up in the building. Goodbye, Two. I’ll see you later.”

“Bye, Mack!”

Sooni, enthusiastically dragging “Baby Kai-Kai” along with her, ended up ahead of us. Her robe was actually fairly long compared to her usual tastes, though it had a wide slit up the back to let her fox tail stick out, though it exposed a good deal more than that.

“I don’t know how she can go out wearing something like that,” I said to Ian.

“I can see your tits through that,” he said.

“It wasn’t my idea… look, she isn’t even wearing underwear,” I said, disgusted.

“I, uh, hadn’t noticed,” Ian said.

“How can you not notice?” I asked, gesturing at her rear. The way her tail was swishing excitedly and the back of the robe was flapping, it was hard to miss. “She’s completely hanging out… and do you think she has any hair on her body? Because you can just about see everything, and…”

Ian snorted.

“What?” I asked.

“I’m not, you know, telling you what to do,” he said. “But don’t you think you have enough girlfriends for now?”

I stopped, staring at him in confusion and consternation. Couldn’t he even tell when I was complaining about somebody?

“What?” he asked.

“Hurry up!” Sooni called from the stairwell door.

Amazingly enough, saying that nobody else would be up so early didn’t seem to have jinxed anything… we met nobody on the way down. The lounge was utterly deserted except for the other two nekos. Even the front desk was unmanned, the office door behind it closed.

I said goodbye to Ian… and endured more faces and noises of disgust from Sooni as we shared a kiss… and then he left, heading out into the dark morning.

The downstairs lounge had a much larger TV, and a much larger seating area around it. Maliko and Suzi both appeared to be asleep in a pair of chairs, but Suzi was more obvious about it. The largest of the catgirls was curled up like the animal she resembled, her body overflowing the front edge and partially draped over the arm rests.

Sooni stomped up to her, took off one of her heavy wooden sandals, and whacked her on the head with it. Suzi woke up with a yowl, spitting and popping her claws until she saw who it was. I wondered if the nekos had thicker skulls than most races, like the dwarves… or if Suzi was simply used to being conked on the head.

“Dolt!” Sooni said. “What are you doing, sleeping on guard duty?”

I wasn’t sleeping, Sooni,” Maliko said, sleepily.

“Then why didn’t you wake her up?” Sooni asked, throwing her shoe at Maliko, who unwisely ducked.

Sooni turned bright red.

“Hold still when I’m hitting you!” she yelled, whipping off her other sandal and throwing it at the unfortunate neko. Maliko flinched and twisted her body in place, but did nothing to avoid the heavy wooden projectile. There was a kind of fierce, sad pride in her eyes as she absorbed the impact without complaint, then scampered without being asked to retrieve Sooni’s footwear.

“My nekos are trained in all the arts of evasion,” Sooni informed me happily, a smile pasted over the rage-contorted features of a moment before with a speed that was almost as sickening as the display of violence. “Yet, I always hit them,” she continued, as if I hadn’t just seen Maliko avoid the first attack and Sooni order her to keep still.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. I started to head for a comfortably overstuffed chair that was neither too close to the couch Sooni headed for nor far enough to seem weird, but she stopped me and insisted I sit next to her.

Again, it wasn’t worth arguing.

Maliko came crawling over and tried to put the sandals back on Sooni’s feet herself, but Sooni reached down and swiped them out of her hands, then shooed her away before setting them down between herself and Kai.

“Look what I bought,” she said to me, opening a big pastry box that sat on the table. “Doughnuts!”

“I, uh, kind of already had breakfast,” I said.

“Well, that was rude of you,” Sooni said. “I hope you don’t think you’re getting out of eating my doughnuts just because you ate before.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll have a stupid doughnut.”

“Not if that’s your attitude,” she said, closing the box.

“Sooni, I would like to have a doughnut,” Maliko said, but Sooni didn’t seem to hear her.

“It’s starting, it’s starting, it’s starting!” Sooni said, practically yelling in her excitement and bouncing up and down on the couch. As usual—and it depressed me that I knew this was usual—she sang along to the show’s moronic theme song.

I felt like I was in an episode of Mecknights, and Buzz Saber was slicing through my head.

“What is your problem?” Sooni asked me when the credits ended and the TV launched into a commercial for Science Princess enaction figures. “You look like you’ve been crying. Did your naked lesbian girlfriend dump you?”

“No,” I said, not bothering to clarify the girlfriend/owner distinction. “She didn’t dump me and I wasn’t up crying.”

“Your eyes are red,” Sooni said, perversely happy. “I think you were.”

“Well, I wasn’t.”

“I saw how you were with that boy,” Sooni said. “You’re not a lesbian any more.”

“Fine, I’m not,” I said. “I never said I was in the first place.”

“There’s nothing to cry about,” Sooni said. “You should be glad that you’re not a lesbian any more. I knew it would happen. Anybody who is beaten as often as you are is bound to turn straight, and you have my good influence, too.”

“Oh, wh…”

“It’s back, it’s back!”

I didn’t even pretend to try to focus on the show. I’d been jolted pretty wide awake by the sight of Ian in Two’s bed, but I was starting to feel sleepy again, and my eyes kept wanting to slip off of the bright, rapidly moving images inside the TV box. Fortunately, Sooni was too absorbed in her favorite show to notice.

Unfortunately, Maliko was apparently watching me like a hawk.

“Sooni,” she simpered during the second commercial break, “I don’t think Mack is really watching. She kept closing her eyes during the show.”

“You closed your eyes during Science Princess?” Sooni said, straightening her back and drawing herself up as tall as she could.

“Sooni, you wanted me here and I’m here,” I said. “Okay? But I’m also tired, and hungover…”

“Hungover?” Sooni echoed. This seemed to take her aback, and I was about to explain the term to her when she said, “You mean, you were up all night drinking?” I expected a loud, strident, high-pitched lecture to follow, but instead her face lit up and she threw her arms around me, practically climbing onto my lap. “Oh, you are so bad, Miss Mackenzie! It’s a good thing you have me to help teach you how to be good.”

Oh, great, I thought. On top of all its myriad other wonderful features, my hangover was more proof that Sooni was the central character of her own personal drama.

Also, her crushing embrace had caught me unprepared, and now my hand was kind of stuck between us. Worse, Sooni somehow decided this was my fault.

“Um, Miss Mackenzie, you may please stop squeezing my breast,” she said, as if I had anything to do with the position we were in.

“I’m not squeezing your breast, you’re squishing my hand,” I said. “If you’d let go of me, I could move it.”

“In a minute,” Sooni said.

“Okay.”

She had a big nipple, firm beneath the silk of her robes. Her breasts were as maddeningly perfect as everything else about her. I wondered what had possessed her to hug me like that, and when she was going to let the awkwardness end. Despite her smooth skin, there was nothing human about her scent. It was more… animalistic, musky even, and only partially obscured by an artificial scent of cherry blossoms and what I guessed was the tanning oil that she used.

She squeezed me tighter, and I wondered what she would do next. Try to kiss me? Start groping me back? She was so annoyingly unpredictable. It was just one of the things that I hated about her.

Whatever it was, I hoped she would do it soon. It was getting unbearable waiting.

“It’s back, it’s back!” she cried suddenly, not so much releasing me as shoving me, hard, over the end of the couch, and twisting back to face the TV.

“What the fuck?” I yelled, getting to my feet.

“Shh!” Sooni hissed, launching one of her sandals at me. I was very much not trained in the arts of evasion, and it caught me in the forehead.

“Ow!” I said, tumbling back on my ass.

“No talking during the show!” Sooni barked.

“Sooni, I can shut her up for you,” Maliko said, earning another sandal-throw. I watched the sad, sick little sycophant scurrying to retrieve it as I brought Sooni her other sandal.

Once again Sooni contemptuously ripped the sandal out of Maliko’s hands, this time without even looking. Also without taking her eyes off the TV show, she handed it to me, and angled her foot towards me. I knelt down and, taking care not to touch her foot directly, slid the sandal onto it, then did the same with her other foot.

When I started to rise, Sooni grabbed me by the shoulders and wrestled me around so I was sitting on the floor between her knees, facing the TV. . I looked at the nekos to see if they had any ideas what was going on. Suzi obviously didn’t, on a lot of levels… but Maliko looked furious.

Actually, she had a very cat-like look on her face, one which pretty much said, “I’m going to eat your face while you’re asleep.” She was so fiercely resolute that, despite being fairly certain I could take her in a fight, I squirmed under her gaze and shrank back against the front of the couch. Sooni responded to this by draping her long, bare legs over my shoulders and stroking the top of my head, playing with my hair.

If there had been any doubt that Sooni now numbered me among her “friends”, it was gone now… she was treating me like a plaything. While I could probably have thought of a number of places I’d rather have been than between her legs if I’d really tried to, the touch of her fingers on my head was actually kind of soothing in a way.

I let her stroke my hair and feed me three or four doughnuts and exclaim over how many crumbs I was dropping during the commercial breaks. It was better than being yelled at or hit with a sandal, and anyway, it was easier not to argue.


Tales of MU is now on Patreon! Help keep the story going!

Or if you particularly enjoyed this chapter, leave a tip!


Characters: , , , , , ,





9 Responses to “212: Just A Show”

  1. HollowGolem says:

    Let it be known: this is the first chapter that has nauseated me. Sooni is a special kind of unbearable.

    Current score: 8
  2. pedestrian says:

    If you ever get the “splendiferous” opportunity to meet an old world aristocrat. i mean with a real lineage of inbred narcissism “those who are born, booted and spurred, to ride the rest of humanity”. You would contribute to my idea of building a large monument to Dr. Guillotine.

    Current score: 0
  3. Psi-Ko says:

    1. Firmly grab Sooni’s arms.
    2. Twist
    3. Ask, in a loud clear voice “Do you surrender?”
    4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until the reply is “Yes”
    5. Declare “I have beaten you, you are defeated”

    If she argues after that, just lock her up amd use her as a food source. She’s gotta be a virgin.

    Current score: 5
    • Anonymous says:

      No good, she’s not even a little bit a human. She is a magical fox.

      Current score: 6
  4. Arkeus says:

    Yeah, nauseating chapter. Not the first for me though. A lot of Amy chapters are really sick, and Seth is getting that way too.

    Current score: 0
  5. Mickey says:

    Y’know, maybe I’m just identifying too much with Mack (and her huge, massive crush on Sooni), but…I ended up mostly just feeling sorry for Sooni after this chapter. Anybody who has to have her parents buy her friends is just pathetic.

    It’s…mmmm…honestly, I’m kind of hoping that Sooni and Mack get together, so that an actual relationship (as opposed to what Sooni has with the nekos) can have its normal humanizing effect on Sooni.

    Current score: 2
  6. Pamela says:

    I actually kind of like Sooni. Maybe I’m insane. I mean, she bugs me, but so do all the other characters.

    Current score: 2
  7. BlackWizard says:

    If you look up “denial” in the dictionary there would be a picture of Mac saying; I can’th sthanth Sooni” while avidly licking and sucking her feet with soaking panties on.

    Current score: 6
    • nobody says:

      Or Sooni claiming to have friends.

      Current score: 5