FortySixtyFour
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AnimeCon Harem Bonus: Super Slash Sisters (Old)
🕑 Added 2018-12-06 04:24:18 +0000 UTC“Waiting on your friends?” Lucas guessed, nonchalantly picking up one of the Gamestation controllers and cleaning it with a sanitary wipe. Although the latest generation of Gamestation controllers were wireless, the convention center had procured batches of wired ones that plugged into the console itself, as they were less likely to walk away from Game Room one in the hands of enterprising little thieves. Almost all of the controllers had been greasy with sweat following their official Super Slash Sisters tournament, and one of them’d actually had crumbs of cheese snack dust on it.
“Um… no,” the lone player answered, staring vacantly at the screen. She was an Akane Kurokawa cosplayer with a trim, petite body and a cute face, sitting at one of the TVs that was set up for multiplayer matches. The tide of combatants and onlookers for the Slash Sisters tournament had come and gone, and this game room had all but emptied out. A handful of dedicated players were continuing to play Grail 5 over the gaming PCs connected into a LAN party, there were a few friends playing around together on one of the Rythm Dance Rebellion platform cabinets... and then there was this girl.
“You alright?” Lucas asked, setting the controller down on its chair and moving on to the next one. As he stood there wiping it clean, he felt a bit like a bartender cleaning whiskey glasses in front of a distraught bar patron.
But, Lucas Macrae wasn’t a bartender, or even one of the volunteer staff in charge of the room. He was the new Live Culture Correspondent for Radio 95.2 FM, here with a press badge to cover the convention. No one knew where the volunteer for Game Room one went, although Lucas suspected he was one of the dudes over there camped out on the Grail 5 server.
“Um… no,” the girl said again. She was holding one of the controllers and gazing vacantly at the select a character screen as if waiting for him to join.
Uh…? He gave her another look. The Akane cosplayer’s face was composed, it wasn’t like she was emotional or anything. Maybe she’s just having a shitty day?
Feeling an awkward sort of tension build in the air, and never knowing any comforting words that he could use for total strangers, Lucas did what came naturally to him—he hit A on the controller he was wiping and selected a character, joining her game.
Before his life went to hell, he’d been a semi-professional We’ll Play Livestreamer, playing live on camera for a multitude of fans. Trying to please everyone had burnt him out fast, however, and for three years he’d been trying to put a healthy dose of perspective in his life. Naturally, on his first real assignment for 95.2, he discovers he’s more or less the same pushover he always was, and finds himself pressed by one of the convention staffers into running the Slash Sisters tournament for them.
In a burst of raucous theme music and pastel stars, Flarefox and Plumber Princess Maria dropped onto the series of platforms that made up their battlefield. Lucas had selected Flarefox by habit— she was by far the most competitive character. Princess Maria was… fairly garbage, in his recollection, so he determined this cosplayer girl must not be a serious player.
I’ll just take it easy, play around a bit, Lucas decided. Watching everyone else play for several hours had him itching to get into the game again, but at the same time he was trying to take his new job seriously. He should be on his laptop editing his commentary over the tournament final’s audio feed. He was responsible for forty minutes of useable (and re-useable) content that covered various interests throughout AnimeCon.
Princess Maria jumped to the central platform, arriving at the same moment Flarefox did, but Lucas had already prepared an attack. Flarefox, the fox-eared girl in the pilot’s jumpsuit fired her laser pistol towards Princess Maria, and then Lucas teched a fastfall that cancelled the after-firing lag, immediately firing again.
Only his sense of guilt kept him from turning the shortened-hop double into a triple, and he let Flarefox stop in place for a moment while watching the laser bolts fly across the screen into Plumber Princess Maria. Or, at least, they should have. The two laser bolts arrived at different heights, and one of them should have either connected or necessitated a blocking move…
On the screen in front of him, the Plumber Princess jumped, cancelled the jump partway through the air, and performed a split-second aerial dodge between the two lasers. She hit the ground sliding towards Flarefox and was attacking before Lucas could properly react.
Oh, damn. She’s WAY better than I thought, Lucas swore, failing to escape her lunging jab-grab combo and getting summarily tossed off of the platform.
“Something happen?” He finally asked, deciding to play seriously.
“I don’t know,” the girl responded, shrugging. “It’s weird. Have you ever had something… supernatural happen to you? Something you can’t explain at all?”
“Uh… I don’t think so?” Lucas replied. He managed to have Flarefox catch the edge of a platform and immediately segued into a ledge-hopped double laser, forcing Princess Maria to abandon her second charge.
“This girl appeared, like, out of thin air,” the cosplayer said, not distracted in the slightest. “And, she knew things about me, about why I’m here and what’s going on, things that nobody could possibly know. I keep trying to figure it out. Or rationalize it somehow. But, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes.”
“A girl ‘appeared?’” Lucas frowned, and his fingers danced across the buttons to mount a counterattack. “Appeared how?”
“I can’t explain it without sounding crazy,” the girl sighed. “I was all alone one second, and then the next, she’s right up in my face, she knows my name, she knows what I’m trying to do. I don’t get it at all.”
“Sounds like you picked up a stalker?” He guessed, triumphantly managing to shave off ten percent of the Plumber Princess’s health in a devastating point-blank laser barrage. Phew. Was worried I’d lost my edge, there.
“I don’t know,” the girl sounded doubtful. “She was way too hot. It doesn’t make sense that this fifteen out of ten chick would give a damn about anything I was doing.”
“Fifteen out of ten?” He laughed. “Why can’t a girl like that appear out of nowhere for me?”
“You’d piss yourself,” the cosplayer snorted. With precisely-timed dodges and a wave-dash, she completely avoided his next salvo of lasers and managed to stun-lock him. “It was scary as fuck.”
“Yeah, to you,” Lucas shot back, happy that she seemed to be lightening up a bit. He mashed the buttons on his controller, but Flarefox was helplessly snared in an endless combo of hits, maneuvered by Princess Plumber Maria until her helplessly flailing form was at the edge of the arena. “Really? Really?”
“Sorry,” the girl said. She sent both her character and Lucas’ way off of the arena platform. Flarefox had no means of recovering and fell helplessly down into the abyss below, while Princess Maria performed a skirt glide followed by an aerial lightning blitz that somehow placed her right back on the arena platform.
“Damn,” Lucas swore. “You’re good, you would’ve placed in the tournament if you’d been here earlier.” There was a moment to spare as his character swooped back in on its next life, and he turned to look at his opponent. He’d meant to gauge her expression, but was immediately distracted by how her yukata had fallen open and was exposing most of a small breast, only covered by a thin veil of fishnet. He slowly turned his head back to the screen.
“I shouldn’t even be here now,” the girl groaned. “I just. I was freaking out a bit, and needed to calm down.”
“I shouldn’t be here, either,” Lucas admitted. Flarefox was dashing from one platform to another, spewing a steady stream of distance attacks at Princess Maria and whittling her health away. “The cosplay contest’s going on right now. Or maybe just wrapping up. I’m supposed to be getting sound bytes for my station.”
“You’re not the staff dude here?”
“Nah, I’m actually here on a press badge. Supposed to be getting all the interesting stuff at the con, so I fit it into a forty-minute segment.”
“Am I holding you up?”
“No, I just really don’t want to go,” Lucas sighed. His Flarefox closed the distance and managed to time a counter on Prince Maria’s surprisingly predictable attack, before flipping back out of her range again. “I wanna say that I got pushed into helping out here, but really… my ex is over there, at the contest. I really don’t want it to seem like I’m here at the con just to see her. ‘Cause I’m not.”
“It’s always exes,” the girl griped. After a battering series of blasts, Princess Maria was forced to the arena edge, hanging on for dear life. “Hey, you’re not too bad at Slash Sisters, either.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Lucas said. He’d started to smile, but it stiffened in place on his face when the girl used an edge skirt-cancel move for a brief moment to escape the laser bomb that should have cast her off the playing field and down into oblivion. She uses WAY too many advanced techniques to be some casual pick-up player. Not that I’m one to talk. The two of us could’ve changed the entire course of that tournament.
“I’m Emily,” the Akane cosplayer finally introduced herself. She sent a surprise spam of firewads bouncing towards his character instead of a handshake. “Emily of Cerulean Cosplay.”
“Luke Macrae,” he weathered the firewads without damage, pulling off a split second double-shine by using Flarefox’s deflector and then jump-cancelling into yet another deflector. His timing was good enough that his character never seemed to leave the ground. “I used to livestream for a living.”
“Always wanted to livestream,” Emily said. “But, I just don’t have the tits for it.”
“Me neither, turns out,” Lucas chuckled. The players during the tournament hadn’t been able to banter back and forth during their match—they’d been locked in a desperate, teeth-gritting struggle. Not a single one of those players had showcased the kind of technical skill Lucas and Emily were casually using, either.
“It was great, at first. I loved it. But, it got to some point where, when everyone wanted to watch me play for hours and hours, I couldn’t say no. They were my fans. So, I messed up my sleep schedule, messed up my own groove, and well… I messed everything up.”
“I hate it when that happens,” Emily said. Princess Plumber Maria swept Flarefox flying into the air and then skirt-glided underneath her to smash her back up into the air again and again. “You’re playing the game ‘cause you love it. But, before you know it, the game’s playing you.”
“Shit, that’s exactly it, too,” Lucas shook his head as Flarefox tumbled helplessly off the arena. “That’s gonna wind up as my epitaph, or something.”
“Epitaph?” She sent him a curious glance, and when he turned towards her he couldn’t help but notice her costume had slipped off her breast even more. A pale perfect handful of skin, with a pink nub visible through the netting of her body stocking. “Whassat?”
“Uh, epitaph,” he blinked. “Like, what gets written on your tombstone.”
“I get it,” Emily nodded, sending Princess Maria on a collision course with Flarefox as she spawned back in. “You’re gettin’ on up there, yeah. You’re what, thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
“Twenty-nine,” Lucas winced, and Flarefox slapped Princess Maria out of the air and sent her smacking out in a sprawl on the bottom platform. “Which makes you… fourteen? Fifteen? I figured you were here waiting for your parents to pick you up?”
“Very juvenile,” Emily rolled her eyes. The Plumber Princess made her way back towards Flarefox’s sniping position in a series of jumps, several times momentum-cancelling in mid-air to avoid the laser blasts raining down. “Why were you hiding in here again? Afraid of your ex?”
“Hey now, you don’t know my ex,” Lucas griped. He sent his character into a dive roll away from Princess Maria as she took control of the uppermost platform where he’d been camping. “You’d better watch out, your costume’s slipping a bit there.”
“Yeah, nice one, like I’m gonna—” Emily yelped and dropped her controller as she remembered what she was wearing and discovered he wasn’t kidding. “Fucking FUCK!”
( Previous: Girlfriend and Goodbye | AnimeCon Harem | Bonus: The Cosplaying Girls )
Comments
V01D
Too bad it wasn’t called ‘Super Bash Sisters’... like the name that shows up in Kid Icarus Uprising. Funnier than ‘slash’, in my opinion...
Kimu Taka
Late note, but I wanted to mention that as a regular watcher of fighting tournaments like EVO and others, your battle descriptions were choice. I could almost hear overly excited announcers yelling out the tricks and moves being pulled off.
ZeroCross
Oh, I entirely get that. I enjoy breasts of all size and I prefer variety when I have multiple partners. (I'm polyamorous.) On the other hand, it isn't as if there is anyone in the harem as of now with boobs so large that you expect her to be gainixing all over the place. So, it feels (felt?) to me as if the spot has been voluntarily left open for Emily and as if it's been foreshadowed since her first appearance. It isn't as if she's been set up as the loli tsundere or some other "flat is justice" thrope. Plus, with how she's been reacting to the "supernatural" so far, it felt like a good set up for hilarious antics.
FortySixtyFour
Lol, I definitely wasn't expecting this comment. Personal preferences are one thing, but the major perk of any harem is variety. Emily just needs to be taught (in an extremely vivid way) to love small breasts, because there's a lot of things about them to love.
ZeroCross
I sincerely hope that the harem charm will give Emily bigger boobs. It feels as though it's been foreshadowed in every scene she's in, more or less. Lamenting about her small breasts, wearing a cosplay of a busty character, her mom being busy, not having the tits to livestream, etc. Maybe it's just wishful thinking. I like tasteful breast expansion but it feels we're being set up for it. So I'm expecting her bust size to grow so far, as she gets more ... "blue."
Zhilbar
Apologies for last time; I was facing both computer and lack-of-sleep problems. But yes, I very much like the chance to bring in someone who can challenge Brian on a moral level- and pairing him with Emily is perfect. The polygamous circumstances of the current three is something a decent man wouldn't quite be able to object to, for all its unusual nature... But throwing Emily onto the pile to get only a piece of Brian's (and others') focus instead of the entirety of someone else's (someone like Lucas, for example) is a powerful counterargument for a traditional mindset. I kinda DO want some emotional tug-of-war for Emily... I just hope Lucas doesn't lessen himself to try to get an edge on getting (saving!) the girl. The seductive call of that kind of white-knighting is all too real.
Roethan
Ahh, even better! Tried reading faster than I was able to comprehend, it seems.
FortySixtyFour
As a guy going to conventions now, I can definitely empathize with Lucas more than I can Brian, haha.
FortySixtyFour
I actually used "Criminal Lives," but I'm glad the difference is subtle enough to be overlooked!
Roethan
I also like the normal guy take on it. Just hoping it doesn't become a tug of war with Emily caught in the middle. He seems a little older though, so maybe he could get with Emily's cousin. Dont remember her name. The one who gave Emily the Harem Charm to begin with.
Roethan
Ahhh, I was thinking skirt glide was her floating thing, but had fireballs too so wasn't sure. Besides, you are more than welcome to make your own little changes. As long as we recognize it that's all that matters. One thing, though. On your other effort, Bad end, you referenced criminal minds, which is an actual show. You might want to change that as it's the only time you haven't altered something and I think figuring out what the reference is brings as much fun as anything else.
FortySixtyFour
After spending hours on a SSB wiki looking up actual professional techniques, all I ended up doing was slightly changing a few names. Cape glide->skirt glide, reflector->deflector, so on and so forth. In case anyone with a deep interest in gaming reads this someday, I want them to laugh at the similarities rather than be aghast at the inaccuracies.
FortySixtyFour
Introduction? Foxy's attraction to the girls of the main cast is easy to brush off, but I like that Lucas is a decent guy who'll have actual chemistry with other characters, opening up avenues for a very different sort of conflict!
FortySixtyFour
Inside the AnimeCon universe, the actual girl/girl fanfic shipping sites are intrigued and troubled by this.
Zhilbar
That... is actually a hugely intriguing way to do a side character, especially with this o roducrion.
Arcanist Lupus
I love the idea of Plumber Princess Maria, but I can't help but think that "Super Slash Sisters" sounds like a fanfic shipping club.
Timtom12
I'd say it was Mario and Starfox but Maria had a few gender specific abilities. The firewads were certainly Mario.
Roethan
I agree. Also it would seem kinda cheap to make it keep happening. It would need a very good reason. On the other hand a female stud farm would be more interesting story-wise, although, I dont know if I'd like that quite as much.
FortySixtyFour
Much as I'd like to, I need more time to develop the magic'd characters we just got from last time.
Roethan
I'm liking it. They both seem pretty real here. Question though... was that supposed to be Mario, Peach, or an amalgamation of the two? I'm kinda hoping this isn't a third Magic Harem Master. I guess I'll find out.
![Murasaki [ムラサキ] from fanbox](https://leaqio.com/kistorage/44954.jpg)
