Alt Dreams [One-Shots] (#73—'Stripping')

[brythain]

This one was written for the 2021 Secret Santa project initiated by ProfAllister.

Victim: Lap

Prompt: A blizzard strikes just before winter holidays, and although most students have already left for the winter, a few are trapped at school together, trying to make the best of a bad situation. So, what do Hisao and his sweetie (your choice) get up to?

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Inflourious Basterds

“Mom’s stuck way out. She’s just going to park her beautiful butt at a capsule hotel and wait for it to blow over.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Hisao, stop even hinting at dirty thoughts! Pervert. Hmph!”

Hisao stretched, feeling his lower back click slightly. How was he expected to not have a reaction to his girlfriend talking about a beautiful butt being blown over? Especially her mother’s beautiful butt, which Emi was inheriting. Nope, he told himself, not saying anything.

Emi’s death stare drilled into him.

“Ouch!” he said involuntarily. Casting around desperately for a change of subject, he yelled, “Turkey!”

“Turkey?” Emi sat up, the blanket gracefully falling from her shoulders to her hips. “What are you talking about?”

Her eyes were almost crossed in confusion, Hisao noted. Her nose was wrinkled, rather cutely. And her nipples were hardening in the cold air…

He closed his eyes. “Turkey,” he repeated. “Kenji’s away and the fridge has a frozen turkey in it. I thought it might be a good cooking project.”

“Hisao, I’m not great at cooking.”

“It might be fun.”

“Do we have anything to cook with it? Do you know anything about cooking a turkey? Do you roast it, stew it, what?”

“We still have a gas oven in the pantry. And I think there must be some other things in there: breadcrumbs, stuffing, something. Kenji has a stash.”

“Ooh, it’s cold!” Emi gasped, as the chill finally got to her. She dived back into the blankets, and encountered quite a bit of Hisao.

“Argh! Your hands are cold!”

“Too late!”

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“So, how does this work?” Emi mused, absent-mindedly rubbing her bottom.

“First, you’re supposed to take out the giblets and clean the insides.”

She looked skeptically at him, all the while thinking how adorable he looked staring blankly at a grubby piece of paper.

“Where’d you get those instructions?”

“Kenji.”

“Kenji?!”

“Kenji. Wait, it says here that that’s already been done, this is a hollow turkey. Do you know how to baste a turkey?”

“Let me see that!” She grabbed the paper from him, wondering what the hell they’d gotten into, or perhaps what hell they’d got to.

Hisao released the paper a fraction of a second too late, and now each of them had half the instructions, torn down the middle where Kenji had obligingly penciled a line between two columns.

“There are four tubs in the fridge,” Hisao read slowly. “They contain panko and egg substitute, and flour, and spiced salt.”

“Rub the spiced salt in tub #4 into the turkey until evenly salty,” read Emi.

Hisao rummaged around inside the fridge. “Erm, these tubs are all over the place. There are eleven tubs with numbers like 3.1 on them.”

Emi shrugged. “Maybe he… oh, right, here he says that he diversified his holdings into separate tubs so that if one went bad the others would survive.”

“I think he ran out of tubs. There are some tubes here too. Does it say ‘tubs’ or ‘tubes’.”

Emi tapped her titanium toes on the tiles. “His handwriting is very small, Hisao.”

“Hrrrm.” Hisao continued rummaging. At least, he thought, Kenji had been decent enough to label all the plain white plastic containers. Although Emi was perfectly right about the small writing.

In the end, he dumped all the containers out on the table, more or less arranged by number.

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“Pretty tasty, though it’s a bit weird,” she said, daintily licking up breadcrumbs and eyeing the huge plate of leftovers. “Mom might like some.”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“Kind of an ethereal lemony taste. Feels a bit familiar, although I don’t know why.”

“I think we did everything right. Maybe it’s like lemon chicken, except that this is a lemon turkey recipe. Let me look at your half. Perhaps we should’ve taped them back together.”

“Yeah. But it’s a good meal. I feel energetic again, Hisao! Mum won’t be in till tomorrow earliest, we can do lots of things before then!”

“Hmm. Yes! We can do whatever we want!”

Emi grinned fetchingly.

Except for one thing, Hisao mused. The now reassembled instructions he was reading said, “And don’t use the lemon lube, it looks just like the oil/mayo mixture.”

END

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alt index

[brythain]

This one was written for the 2022 Secret Santa project initiated by ProfAllister. Apologies for extreme lateness. My cat died in late 2022 and this piece failed to get written for a long time.

Victim: ProfAllister

Prompt: Several cast members are somewhere isolated (e.g., snowed-in cabin). Perhaps against their better judgment, they decide to play a strip game (e.g., strip poker). Halfway into the game, there's a knock on the door.

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Stripping

It was yet another Yamaku winter. The dorms were mostly empty at this time of year, and the roads had been closed because of frost. In some parts of the school, groups of students isolated themselves, for activities that perhaps were best done without the overt knowledge of the authorities—or of other students.

“This is a stupid game.”

“Well, when Kenji explained it to me, it sounded like fun.”

“Hisao, we’re playing a game that Kenji invented?”

“Sort of. Your turn.”

“More oil.”

Miki squinted, her posture awkward. Her tanned skin was beginning to glow, and though she wasn’t going to say it, it was rather exciting. She gave the long tube another half turn.

“Aaarhhh,” sighed Suzu. “How is it that life can’t be this relaxing all the time?”

Click. “Oooooh,” said Hisao, his voice trembling. “Almost there.”

“Y’know, I bet Kenji taught you this because blind people are really good at it once they get started. It’s hard to do it with only one proper hand, though. But since you people aren’t used to that, I have a clean —” Miki wiggled a furry pipe-cleaner suggestively and then gave a little gasp of satisfaction. “ — advantage, me.”

She turned to Hisao, who closed one eye and bent over to look at what her nicely lubed fingers were doing.

There was a knock on the door. Suzu, her concentration total and intense, let out a faint grunt, but her rhythm never faltered. Miki, no stranger to lawbreaking, closed her eyes, her lips showing the slightest shadow of frustration. Hisao, not the most reliable partner in any illegal act, groaned, “Coming!”

The door opened.

“Good evening, I couldn’t help but overhear you mention differently-sighted people. Also, there’ve been intermittent and slightly irritating sounds.”

“Hello, Lilly!” Hisao said brightly, with an underlying frisson of indefinable guiltiness.

“What exactly is this game that Kenji has been teaching you? Do you think I’d be good at it?”

“Aaaaaaaaah,” moaned Suzu. “Yesssss!!” She ran her fingers along the instrument of destruction. “Sooooo good!”

Hisao looked up at Lilly, his eyes wandering down from her clear blue eyes to her long slim fingers. “It’s probably illegal, we had to borrow these things from Kenji and you’ve spoilt my timing anyway. I can teach you.”

The blonde girl wrinkled her nose slightly, but she held her hands out anyway. He grasped her wrists tenderly.

“Can you feel this knob? Before you use it, you have to check that this is empty and you have to make sure you’re safe…”

Lilly gasped at the sudden contact and what she felt in her delicate hands.

“Let me introduce you to the M16A1, and welcome to Kenji’s one-handed stripping and cleaning challenge.”

END

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