Moments before Ayano entered The Red Room.
Agile pursuing footsteps echo softly in the long checkered hallway. Oracion had managed to slip past the ballroom guards just as Valerie started her distraction! Thankfully, Valerie was quick on the uptake, and piinku's silvery irises caught the tail end of her bck ced, goat-masked target round the corner up the second floor stairs...! Was this suspicious person able to go up to the second floor? There wasn't much time to think, for when she approached the dividing wall panel which separated the second floor stairs from the first... her target spoke from behind the panel!
"You can't go up there. Too many eyes. Did anyone follow you?"
"Obviously not."
"Good. Let's not waste time, I'm Avalon's insider."
"How do I know for real?"
Piinku has never been the kind of person to take someone for her word! Back leaning against the wall panel like the edgelord she is, she demanded an impossible confirmation!
There is a small pause on the other side of the wall.
Then, turning the octave of her voice just two pitches higher...
"uwoooh (ToT), child's chest and belly..."
"Stop. That's enough."
Hearing her master's favourite catchphrase, even mockingly, was enough to get Oracion to fume over, lightly kicking the wall behind her with her heel like it had hentai bird's face printed on it!
"(sigh). I don't have much time. The auction upstairs, something's wrong."
"When has an auction hurt anyone?"
"Not if they are selling human Descendants."
"They are selling what...?"
Oracion's brow furrows at that revetion. She had heard that word st night when she chased off [La Monarquía].
Something about not being caught between 'multiple descendants' at once.
Now this word was before her again.
Even if piinku didn't know what that word meant, the preceding word told her all she needed to know. The answer to her own question escapes in a snarl through her lips,
"... a 'human auction'."
"You catch on quick." There is some shuffling of bck silk behind the wall panel, "That's all the help I can give now. What you do next... is up to you. We will not be seeing each other."
Oracion grunts in response, her fingernails already digging into the wall's pster, leaving a cw-like mark!
Just as the receding footsteps tap up the staircase, it pauses. our pink-haired friend calls out to the woman in bck ce.
"Who... are you?"
"Did my academy teacher ever teach you 'names are for friends'?"
"...so you aren't just one of Master's call girls."
There is a distorted bleating kind of ughter, but the mysterious goat-head does not answer, leaving piinku to wonder just who that person was!
[SFX:BOOM!]
Oracion didn't manage to think for very long on the information she received, for the start of a rge scuffle sounded from the ballroom's direction!
"Valerie...? What are you doing...?"
Piinku had probably expected Valerie to create a small distraction, but now it sounds like a gigantic fight had broken out in there! Even worse, at this moment, a familiar voice slides down the second-floor bannister, oblivious to gravity and the ws of physics!
"Weeeeee~"
When her butt reaches the bottom of the base rail, she propels herself forward using the forward momentum, crossing her arms before her in a spinning motion, tapping down on lifted toes and extending her arms in a swan-like posture!
"Ehehehe, just a little fanservice for the Princess \V/ee fans out there!"
The very st person that Oracion wanted to see... just came down from the forbidden second floor!
"Madison... Deroux?!"
"Whatcha standing there for, Piinku?" Madi-san snaps her annoyingly red flipphone shut, like she had expected to run into our pink-haired friend in the first pce!
"We're rushing B, wanna come along?!"
Present time, The Red Room.
Two figures walk into the auction room, elbows locked together like a pair of newlyweds. On one side is the completely befuddled Prinz Rufti, red-faced from unsteady embarrassment as her other hand tries to suppress the giddy glee on her face right now!
There she is, walking elbow-in-elbow with the dark majesty, [La Monarquía] herself! If there was a pinnacle of networking, this was it! The tomboy Prinz had waited for this moment for half her life, to rub shoulders with a true elite in Vespana magick! And if the rumors of the dark beauty's voracious appetite were true...
Prinz gulps down a mouthful of her own saliva.
M-maybe there would be more than rubbing of shoulders tonight...!
She was not prepared! Not even one bit!
The more she thought about it, the more spiraly-eyed our tomboy Prinz got!
Pufts of steam escape from the top of her head as she scrunches her face in odd delight!
... and on the other side of this odd armlock is (me), pretending to be [La Monarquía].
I'm going to pretend I didn't hear any of those weird thoughts with the [Narrator's Power].
What is this, yuribaiting? [1] /Conspiracy/ Girls is PG-13! PG-13!
Then again, considering you can now show a literal magical girl having a ballgag stuffed in her mouth and getting a full body massage in front of a shrine these days, and STILL not be considered yuri enough, there's no pleasing some people. N-not that I watch those shows for that, I watch magical girls shows for the cute mascot! Venxlitx is super cute! Super--- cute!
Ahem...
The single room beyond is covered in the night's minute darkness, red-tinted spotlights shining upon a small stage that obscures its back with thin velvet curtains. There is some daemonic consistency to how they flicker in the darkness, not unlike a pair of serpentine eyes. There must be an anteroom beyond the curtains, for I can hear scurrying and low voices in the back quite clearly.
Aside from that, there is an eerie silence that pervades the rest of the room A ring of ornate wooden chairs are set up in small semi-circle, each bearing a rge "G" carved on its back. Their backs face tall windows that overlook the chateau's front garden.
All this would be within my expectations, if not for an obvious oddity: the trio of low cages at the front of the stage. A pair are stacked on each other, with one at the side. If you told me that they were auctioning pets here, I wouldn't believe it at all. These cages are far too rge for any common household pet! Why, your small and cute detective could probably fit in one quite snugly if I curled up and clutched my knees!
"Do you guys sell pets here?"
"Something's wrong... This isn't the Galopin family's usual setup..."
There must have been something about the strange oppressive air that surrounds the Red Room was set up, for I quickly found my thinking limited and difficult to traverse! Thoughts slowed to a crawl inside this room, making the next logical step hard to fathom! Prinz must also have been feeling the effects as well, for she had to clutch the back of one of those chairs to hold steady!
As if to answer my question, a distorted, metallic voice sounds out from the direction of the stage.
"We are selling dreams here."
A person with an oddly shaped fox mask stands on the stage's podium. The [Security Orbs] in all four corners of this room immediately lock onto her, as does the pretend-power couple who were just passing through the line of chairs! The taxidermied fox mask is unlike those elegant and realistic guest masks below, and shows obvious signs of age and poor workmanship! It is fixed into an unpleasant and permanent false grin, the seams are torn in some pces, revealing the false gauze and padding underneath!
Has Fox-Mask always been there? I can't really tell at this point, because my mind feels heavy and my eyelids flit between waking and sleeping, unable to tell the difference now.
[SFX:THUMP!]
"Dreams..." Gssy-eyed and mumbling, the Prinz releases her hold on my elbow and stumbles with a limping foot towards the stage with flickering lights. There, Fox-Face has spread out her arms in a reversed "V", hands pointing outwards like it was ready to give an eerie embrace! Not that I am faring much better when faced with this surreal scene, the heaviness in my mind has spread to the rest of my body, and I colpse to the floor in blinking, blurry vision!
Conscious just enough to see through the ankle-high pink mist on the floor, Fox-Mask leans down with whispers incomprehensible to the now goggly-eyed prince; even I only caught the tail end of it...
"... for that, you will need a Descendants's blood."
"... I need a Descendant's blood...?"
As if waiting for that audio cue, a shaded figure in red robes emerges from behind the curtain. It holds a ntern-like object up before itself, emitting the same sort of sickly pink mist that dissipates in the raised air. Following close behind is a wolfish kind of girl, her wolf ears bent at a wrong angle, clinking chains on her ankle and wrists following the ntern like a moth attracted to a fme.
It is then that Fox-Mask does an inexplicable thing.
Producing a small silvery object resembling a tiny transparent naginata in one hand, it presses the mini-naginata's bde onto the wolfgirl's upper arm. A crimson red flows into the object, and when it is completely filled, Fox-Mask pulls it away, not leaving a mark nor visible injury on the victim's body! A small pained sound escapes the gss-eyed victim when it first makes contact, but she settles into a dazed silence as blood seeps into the daemonic instrument!
The blood is transferred to a small, ft pte, and presented with a swivel of the arm to Prinz, like a roadside marketeer trying to offer you a sample of their product,
"Now, drink."
Go Go And Learn Moonrunes With Aya-chan![1] Yuribaiting - "Yuribaiting... is when an anime or manga shows teases shoujo-ai, but never follows through on it..." "So, Lycxris Recxil?" "No! What are you thinking, Madi-san!"
