Chapter 4: Bait

Deanna walked down the dark halls with just the light of her phone. It wasn’t like Lauren to not pick up on the first ring. She felt relief when her friend finally answered.

“Lauren. Are you alright? I was looking around for you and-”

“Deanna.” said Lauren’s voice on the speaker. “Come quick!”

“Lauren?! Where are you?”

“Where we left Blair. She’s gone and I tripped on something in the dark.”

“Say no more. Just stay on the phone with me and-”

Blair hung up, snickering to herself.

Deanna broke into a sprint towards the room in question and arrived after a few minutes. The once-locked door was now open, and the large room inside illuminated with a strange shade of green from the ceiling. That didn’t make sense: there was no power in here before. Still, she didn’t think much of it. She wanted to get to Lauren as fast as possible so she just ran right in.

The floor was sticky against the underside of her sneakers. Her costume was a bit more half-assed than that of her friend’s--which were also kind of half-assed. So, no fancy shoes or anything to worry about. There were a bunch of open vats in this room. The light wasn’t bright enough to see far into the back of the chamber here, but for a second she though she saw a puddle in the back. She took a step towards it till she heard Great’s voice to her right.

“Deanna!” she turned to the corner of the room and saw Lauren standing there, right where the glow was most bright. The blonde woman had on her clown costume from before.

“Lauren!”

Deanna slid her pocket knife back into her jester-pants pocket ran over to hug her friend. Lauren felt... different. A little sticky.

“Lauren, are you ok?”

“Oh yeah.” said the Blonde. She giggled. “I slipped into some stale syrup or something.”

“Oh? Yuck. Well, where’s Blair? Did she do this to you?”

Lauren rubbed her hands down Deanna’s back. “Don’t worry about her.”, she said, before moving her lips onto Deanna’s.

The redhead opened her eyes wide, startled. She pulled away. “Wait, but you said you weren’t interested-”

Lauren just leaned back in. “That was then. I want you now. Kiss me.”

Deanna felt something was wrong here, but who was she to deny her own fantasy? She closed her eyes and slipped her tongue into Lauren’s lips, grunting. Her hands sifted through Lauren’s blond hair and they felt more stringy than usual. Lauren’s spit tasted sweet. She heard the sound of something soft moving about. She opened her eyes to see Lauren’s blue irises were now a caramel shade.

Deanna tried to pull away but her lips were stuck on Lauren’s--or whatever this ‘thing’ was. With great effort she managed to pull her face free, but fell onto her back. Lauren started laughing. The jester clothes faded away. Her blond hair changed colors to black and formed a ponytail with a red-licorice ring as the ‘hair-tie’ on it. Her skin shifted slightly fairer, and her shaped morphed to that thin slight build Deanna knew so well.

“Blair? What in the fuck did you do?” said Deanna.

The redhead hurriedly drew her pocket knife from her pocket.

“That’s a rude welcome. I know I’m not Lauren, but I think I’m still pretty fetching right? Plus, unlike her, I enjoy other women like you do.”

Blair chuckled. “You know, that little thing can’t hurt me anymore. *You* can’t hurt me anymore. Look up.”

Deanna did and saw the source of the light. A glowing green blob of marshmallow sticking to the ceiling. It quickly slithered all the way back towards the door to the room and used its bulk to block it.

“Like the lighting? I’m working on a sort of phosphorescence, like in glow-in-the-dark candies and the like.”, said Blair.

The red-headed jester clambered back to her feet. With her phone in the left hand, she brandished her knife in the right. “Fuck off Blair I’m warning you. I don’t know what’s going on here but-”

“Aww.” Blair said with a mock pout. “Sounds like your upset you weren’t kissing your crush?”

“How the fuck do you know about... Where the fuck is Lauren? The real one?”

Blair giggled. “She’s inside me. Wanna see her?” She tapped at her naked front like knocking at a door. An imprint of Lauren’s face pushed out from Blair’s taut stomach. It looked like the blonde’s head was right in her abdominal cavity and pressing out from the inside as a face through tent tarp. She was trying to say something based on how the morphed mouth bits were moving. Only muffled gibberish came out.

“What the fuck?!” Deanna was equal parts horrified and repulsed. Blair kept moving forward with the seemingly trapped Lauren pressing harder and harder against the taffy flesh. The ponytailed woman laughed all the while.

“Lauren? Are you ok in there? Fuck, fuck...”

Soon Deanna was pinned against the opposite wall. She dropped her phone and its light went out. Only the green of the marshmallow bulk by the door lit the room up.

“You really want to talk her do you? I suppose I can let her out just this once~”

Blair moved her taffy into the shape of Lauren’s head. She made a gummy tongue, some hard candy teeth: the materials were the same as her own head now, basically, and looked indistinguishable from their human equivalents at a glance. Blair had been practicing a bit in the time Deanna took to get here.

Of course, it was still attached to her stomach, sticking out like a strange growth.

“L-Lauren?” said Deanna. Blair quietly rejoiced. She made the toughest of the three bullies shiver in fear.

Lauren wasted no time speaking. “Deanna! You need to get out of here somehow! Blair’s a monster. She took my soul and mmfmfmfm” her words trailed off into desperate muffles as Blair just took her mouth away. Only fair taffy-flesh remained where that hole used to be. She let Deanna drink in Lauren’s desperate expression as she sucked that ‘head’ back in and recompressed Great’s soul back to the speck it deserved to be.

Blair laughed. “Oh you should’ve seen the look on your face: or hers. I felt the way her face contorted in despair getting *slurrrrped* right back inside. That makes sense to you right? That head you saw was me giving her some of my body on a loan.”

Blair stepped a bit closer then stopped in the middle of the room.

“Well don’t worry, you and her will get real close soon enough. Imagine how lonely her soul is in me? You two can be together for ever.”

Deanna slumped against the wall a bit. “F-fuck you.” She felt her adrenaline rise. The redhead’s anger issues sparked up. “Fuck you! I’ll cut her out of you.”

She ran towards Blair and the green light cut out. She swung her blade wildly in the dark.

“Where’d you go?”

She heard Blair’s laughter from those vats she saw earlier. Each of the candy cisterns lit up an eerie shade of greenish-white, like the marshmallow before.

“Let’s see how you like being outnumbered.” said Blair, many times over.

Those vat lights cut out. Deanna was in the dark again, sweat dripping from her brow. She heard the sound of naked feet pattering across concrete. It came from everywhere.

The room lit up. All around Deanna were glow-in-the-dark Blairs. Each one was naked with a big smile on their faces.

Deanna fought through her fear and lunged at one right in front. She dug the tip of her pocket knife right below that Blair’s luminous chest. The tip got stuck and Deanna heard it get crunched up with the kneading of that Blair body’s inner taffy.

“Oh, was that a little appetizer or something? Not very tasty...”

One Blair body came up from behind Deanna and punched her in the side. The candy-woman hardened her taffy-fist at the moment of impact, and Deanna slumped to her knees.

The bodies talked in unison. “If you’re even half as delicious as Lauren was, I’ll be very pleased.”

Deanna’s temper flared again and she charged at a Blair, actually managing to knock that body down. She punched at the taffy surface of her stomach, but each blow was harmlessly absorbed--each dent quickly reformed.

“It’s no use.” said every body in unison once again. “There’s more of me than there is of you, and you can’t beat a single one. You’re just fighting pieces of me Deanna.”

A Blair behind Deanna kicked the redhead to the ground. Another Blair grabbed onto that one and melded into her. The fusion made a new Blair, 12ft tall.

“You were always a tall gal Deanna. Let’s see how you like being picked on by someone bigger yourself?”

Smiling with glee, that amazonian Blair body reached out and grabbed Deanna’s body up by her arm. Memories of how Deanna would hold her back by her own resurfaced, along with the anger and sense of powerlessness she felt then. Blair couldn’t resist snapping that limb of Deanna’s like a twig. The scream her former bully let out was oh so satisfying.

Deanna whimpered. “You’re a monster.”

“You deserve one.” said Blair.

More of those clone bodies she made walked over to her, flowed into her, and Blair grew up and up till she stood a good 35ft tall. In one hand, she curled her fingers around Deanna’s sides like she was holding a doll. Her head was close to the ceiling, and her steps thudded on the hard concrete. She walked to the wall of the room again.

Deanna went back to being incensed. Her mood swung like that: anger to sorrow, sorrow to anger. Blair’s warm taffy-hand had her pinned against the wall. She gasped in horror as Blair pulled her arm away, leaving her detached hand stuck on the wall and pinning her body there. The flesh-like taffy composition of the palm shifted to something else: something sweet, gooey and sticky. Caramel. The rest of the hand soft of fluffed out and down like marshmallow. This new blobish sweet mass then morphed around Deanna.

Blair leaned in with a head nearly as tall as the tough tomboy in her candy-mass. She smiled wide. “There’s only one of you left now. The worst of them all. Even the thought of her makes me sick.”

Blair lurched her throat and made some sick-sounding noises in her stomach.

“Hyurk”

She spit up a blast of caramel goop all over Deanna. Seeing the redhead grossed out for once made her chuckle.

“Relax, that was just theatrics, not actual puke. All I did was spit a little more some of my special caramel over you. It should speed up your absorption into my sweet body mass~” she giggled.

“You. You’re awful.” said Deanna, gagging on the sweet orange-goo.

“You’re delicious. I can taste you already. I’m gonna experiment here with a slower means of digestion so, I hope you have fun inside my candy-flesh. Karen should be around here at some point.”

Deanna opened her mouth to speak but the marshmallow over her exterior crept up to seal her in. She couldn’t speak through it, and the only thing she could see now was the ghastly-green glow of its candy phosphorescence.