The Dating Game - Prologue

by ~L-is-for-LOSER-17

With a contented sigh, the woman stared at her reflection in the mirror.

“Another day, and I’m still gorgeous.”

Batting her eyes at her reflection, dipping her head at different angles, and just plain making faces to see what would happen, it seemed all too soon for Madame when her Creator knocked on the door impatiently and demanded, “This was your idea, I’ve got everyone here, are you coming out or not?” The knocks themselves were short and choppy, and when Madame swung in the door to get a better look and see why Kelly was so on edge, she barely had the good sense not to laugh at her frazzled appearance.

“You should wear your hair like that more often,” she managed, instead of a million funnier things about the vegetable-infested, flying-everywhere hairdo her Creator seemed to be trying her hardest (and failing) to ignore that she was sporting.

Kelly glanced the woman’s way and glared dully. “It looks like I’m growing corn instead of hair.” Giving in and taking another delicious sidelong glance at it, Madame smirkingly had to agree. A few ears and cobs seemed to sprout straight from her scalp. “And I don’t care how much fun this might turn out to be, I am never letting you talk me into trying something like this again, okay?”

“Sure, sure,” the elder readily agreed, leaning closer instead of arguing to pick at Kelly’s hair with long, bony fingers as they walked further down the hall towards a set of double doors. Pulling strands away to get a look, Madame suddenly exclaimed, “How on Earth did you get that in there, Kelly?!”

“… The banana?” Flat and toneless, wary.

“It’s a banana?” The insane woman squinted slightly, prodding it with her fingertip. “It looks like it’s made completely out of—“

“Yes, ground beef, I know.” Sighing heavily, the teenager stopped in front of the doors, staring intensely at the line of light shining from beyond onto the floor.

“How did you manage that?” The kind of pout Madame normally reserved for special occasions was brought out and dusted a little, then hastily set on her face. “You didn’t mess with the plan, did you?”

Her hand moved to the door handle, gripping it tightly and cranking it inwards. “I don’t know what part of your plan could’ve involved it, but no, Madame, this is simply a product of me being too slow and not flexible enough.” Yanking the on the smooth, metal handle, she pulled the one door open and light flooded their eyes for a moment before they adjusted and revealed a cheesy game show set, bedazzled with obnoxiously coloured patterns painted all everywhere, swirls and whorls of string lights thrown in incongruously in unexpected places. “If you want to know who’s really responsible for my tresses present troubles, you need look no further than Bachelor Number One.”

Swinging her free arm out to gesture at the three bound men on the stage, Kelly nodded toward the one nearest the main partition. The head was craned back, the group of them still unconscious, but even from their hundred foot distance, the pallor of the skin and the slightly more formal dress made the unfortunate soul in the first chair a (Madame giggled to herself) dead-ringer.

Kelly smiled half-heartedly after a sidelong glance and then walked forward, quickly covering the distance to the sound board set up just beyond the foot of the stage, in front of the empty bleachers where a studio audience belonged. Madame whistled long and low behind her, eyeing up the set and the three male victims on the right half of the stage. “How’d you get such a good place, Kel?”

Dryly, the girl replied, “I made it up, Madame. Or, remind me, how exactly did you get Fangirl Headquarters again?”

Before Madame could reply and continue their banter, the middle man, the blonde fellow, groaned softly and rolled his head forward, shiny hair forming a brief curtain between his eyes and them. Immediately, Kelly’s hand flashed out and slammed on the stage lights, effectively rendering any investigative stares beyond the edge of the stage ineffective at anything but blinding oneself. The sudden change had the man swinging his head up, aimed at the lights, giving himself a quick headache with the fast motion. He tried a few times for a curious yell, but largely found his vocal cords to be sluggish and uncooperative. Gags soaked in soporific drugs tend to do that to you.

“Where are the girls?” A glance around reported no sign of the four women who were also supposed to be here.

Without looking away from the light board as she hastily flipped switches and turned the light pre-sets on, Kelly said, “Behind the stage, in some chairs.” A pause filled with only the sound of fingers tapping and poking at a plastic board. “You may want to hurry, actually. The chairs are rolly, so you can just go and wheel them out onto the other side of the stage.”

Though she didn’t appreciate the dismissive tone, she ambled away, walking slowly and curiously onto the set and around the centre region with her podium, ignoring the garbled cries of surprise from the blonde one, and the dazed groans the other two men were starting to make. She knocked three times rapidly on the wall under a particularly fetching mural of a mongoose in an eye patch and brandishing a sword, and Madame only smiled and hopped through the hole when that part of the flat dropped away.

She emerged right in the middle of the chairs, the four women still thankfully unconscious, though back here the lights didn’t reach and it was extremely dark anyway. The woman made short work of unwrapping her whip from around her hips and then tangled it around the four chairs as a whole, tying them together and then dragging the herd of passed-out women behind her. When she emerged back into the light, Madame glanced over in surprise at Kelly, whose hair was now back to its normal, though still frazzled, style.

“Oh, and I was starting to like the idea of never having to go to the grocer again.” A smirk accompanied the jibe, and Madame followed it more seriously with, “How exactly did he manage to get that all in? And the how’d you get it out?”

Seated with her feet on the sound board table, Kelly shrugged and said, “I have no clue how he got any of that stuff into my hair, I was just busy trying to remember how to tie knots after my blood-oxygen got low enough that my vision blacked out.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah.” Rubbing her neck thoughtfully and sparing a glance to the now awake and livid three fellows on stage, all of whom were focused on the outrageously dressed Madame right at the edge of the stage lighting and her four-person swarm of awakening females, Kelly continued, “I managed to get the noose off afterwards, but I swear to you, I am bringing a switch-blade with me next time, if you do somehow manage to convince me to ever try this again.” Rolling her eyes, she quickly warned, “And please make no jokes about a meat-banana and bad experiences, please.”

With a shove and a flick of her wrist, Madame ousted the corralled quadruplet of chairs onto the pink-and-yellow-themed end of the stage and reiterated, “Fine. But how did you get that stuff back out?” Crossing her arms, she managed to pull off an authoritative and curious tone at once, “I know I wasn’t gone more than a minute, and your hair was a mess.”

Fingers pulled through the tangled locks absent-mindedly, and Kelly replied, “Yet again, Madame, this is mostly imaginary. I can really do anything here. Fixing my hair, for certain at least.” Over the rim of her glasses, “See?”

Madame felt the dread immediately in her gut and swallowed hard before sparing a look down. Kelly had done this once before after an argument (Madame made the mistake of pointing out that the whole argument was futile as Kelly was essentially arguing with herself), and she knew without looking the way the horrid sequinned, multi-hued, low-quality overalls would hang unflatteringly over her otherwise perfectly presupposing frame. The way the immediate area around her would now be flecked with splashes of reflected colour and light. Growling, Madame agreed stiffly, “Yes, I see.”

In an instant, the ugly outfit was gone, replaced by Madame’s usual three-piece suit (she ignored the claim that wearing a matching miniskirt didn’t count as part of the suit), and she fidgeted slightly, happy to feel the leather of her thigh-high grey matte leather boots back once more where they belonged. Relieved, she turned away from her Creator and stared intently at each of the three male contestants and said ominously, barely containing a smile, “Shall we begin, my Lady Creator?”

Back at the desk, Kelly obligingly shifted to attention in her seat, imagining the appropriate microphone in Madame’s hand just as she flipped the toggle switch that turned on the bright neon sign right smack in the middle of the stage set. Curlicue letters declared proudly the same words Madame cheered encouragingly into her microphone, to the joy of the imagined audience now cheering in the bleachers behind Kelly.

“Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to…” Her eyes sparkled mischievously under the bright lights as she threw her arm out in a sweeping gesture over the seven now un-bound men and women behind her.

“THE DATING GAME!”