Demonic Po*nstar System Chapter 959: Beautiful Monster Girls

"...If you say so," Calypso nodded with some reservation.

Pale yellow and printed with small white flowers, the dress should not have worked on a crimson demoness with horns, and it worked so well it was upsetting.

Her warm red skin turned the cheap-cheerful cotton into something expensive. Her shoulders and arms were bare, muscle moving under the gleam whenever she reached for anything, and the neckline had required two separate emergency interventions and was now holding on with reinforced stitching and prayer.

"But hey. I could totally fight in this," Calypso said, turning in the mirror, pleased. "The arms are free. Good rotation."

"You will not be fighting in it."

"You never know~ I heard shopping malls have a lot of drama!"

"Oh dear," Nyx giggled, worried what this outing had in store for her two quirky friends.

Nyx’s own hands were full, because Nyx had taken personal command of the Bastet problem, and the Bastet problem was proving to be a campaign.

Everything fit her. That was never going to be the problem. The problem was that Bastet stood in the middle of a growing ring of rejected garments, enduring, and every single thing Nyx put on her read as a costume.

Civilian clothes looked like a queen in disguise. Elegant clothes looked like a queen at a funeral. One attempt at jeans had been removed from the room entirely, by unspoken mutual agreement, and never spoken of again.

"No," Bastet said, examining attempt eleven, and there was nothing regal left in it at all; there was a woman with a date in two hours and a rack of insufficient options. "No, no, no. Nyx. This is a date. In public, in person, with him choosing it. The garment must be worthy of that, and this one is..." She searched for the word and found only honesty. "This one is fine. Master needs more than fine."

"So the queen has left the building," Nyx observed, delighted, diving back into the rail. "And what’s left is a girlfriend with standards."

"The queen will return after I have been kissed at a mall," Bastet said, with what dignity remained. "Let’s keep looking."

"Wear the gold thing," Calypso advised from her pedestal, wagging. "The one with no back. He goes stupid at backs."

"You are not helping," Bastet said, without turning.

"I am helping myself. I want to watch him go stupid."

But Nyx Cosmos had not brokered corporate deals at two in the morning to be defeated by a wardrobe, and attempt twelve came off a back rail where it had been waiting all along, because Nyx always let the client exhaust themselves before presenting the real offer.

Wide-leg trousers in bronze silk, high-waisted, that moved like poured metal when Bastet walked. A cream wrap top that bared her midriff and made the tan of her skin look like the whole point of skin. And her own gold kept on top of it, the armlets and the chiming anklets, recontextualized from regalia into style.

Bastet looked at herself in the mirror and did not say anything.

Her ears came forward. Her tail went still. For a long moment she studied the woman in the glass, modern and golden and gorgeous, dressed for no court that had ever existed, and then both her hands came up and pressed flat against her own stomach, a girl’s gesture, one nobody had ever taught her.

"...Will he like it?" she asked the mirror, softer than anyone in that chamber had ever heard her.

"Bestie." Nyx set her chin on Bastet’s shoulder and grinned at her in the glass. "He’s going to walk into a wall."

There remained the matter of shoes, which escalated into negotiation at the highest levels. Bastet’s position was that she had ruled a domain barefoot and would visit a shopping center the same way. Alexandra’s position involved health codes, and was ignored.

Nyx’s position won, because Nyx’s position was a pair of flat gold sandals that consisted of four straps and a rumor, presented with the argument that they were technically closer to being barefoot than to being shoes.

"As close to nothing as commerce allows," Bastet conceded, examining her own feet. "Acceptable."

Aria had drifted in somewhere in the middle of it all, officially to supervise, and had lasted ninety seconds before her hands got involved on their own.

She fixed the fall of Calypso’s collar. She rethreaded a strap. She stood back, looked at both monster girls with her chin tilted, and felt zero shame about the fact that she had come up here pouting.

"He doesn’t stand a chance," the Moon Valkyrie admitted.

"That’s the target outcome," Nyx said.

Luna appraised the results from the doorway, arms crossed, and delivered her verdict half a beat late.

"Not bad. You’d make killer porn in this."

"...I make killer porn in anything," mused Bastet.

Alice had claimed the other side of the doorframe, arms crossed in a mirror of Luna that neither of them would have acknowledged, and she surveyed the finished monster girls for a long, sour moment.

"You both look incredible," she reported, aggrieved. "Objectively. I’m being a big person about this and I want it on the record."

"Noted, little sis," Calypso said.

"Don’t call me that while you’re this pretty. It makes it worse."

Kaiden was waiting in the gate room when they came through, dressed himself, dark shirt and darker trousers.

Calypso came first, sundress and sandals and a denim jacket she’d claimed at the last second, warm red skin against printed cotton with her tail swishing the skirt and her grin at full sail, and she did a turn for him without being asked, arms out, letting the skirt flare.

"Well, darling?"

Kaiden looked, and took his time about it, and whatever clever thing he had loaded went unused.

"You’re gorgeous," he said, plainly, because it was the only thing left in his head.

Calypso grinned hard. Behind her, Bastet came into the gate room like slow gold, silk pouring off her hips with every step, anklets marking time, midriff bare and chin high, her eyes on his face, watching his reaction arrive because his reaction belonged to her and she intended to collect all of it.

Kaiden looked at her for a while, and he did not have anything clever for this one either, and she watched the answer to her mirror question arrive on his face a full second before he found any words for it. Her ears went up and stayed there. The thing that had been sitting under her ribs since attempt eleven let go all at once.

"Yeah," he concluded, hoarse. "The mall’s not ready."

"No," Bastet agreed, taking his left arm and settling it exactly where she wanted it. "It is not."

...

The plan, because there was a plan, had been settled in the war room in under ten minutes.

Nobody in that building had forgotten what the last family meeting had been about.

They were the most-watched people on the continent, and the people watching hardest were the ones without faces, and only last night the whole family had sat in this room and agreed that the invitation was part of the hunt. So Kaiden had walked back into the ops floor, laid out where he was going and who he was taking, and let the room turn it into an operation.

It was time for the date to begin, and, in typical Sinners fashion, this little outing would not go uneventful!