Pt 5

By the time Jessica and April returned from their meeting with the organisers, the hall was filling up quite nicely. It was still half an hour or so before the public were to be let in but all the other contestants were there, setting up their demonstrations. Since plagiarism or other types of copying would be pretty much impossible by that point, and all devices and procedures were described on the entry forms, there was no restriction on contestants who were already set up wandering around and taking a look at what others had come up with. Since Penny was well on her way to being done and there was very little for them to do other than wait, the two girls decided to go explore. After setting their video running on the provided screen, showing Penny’s introduction and the early stages of the prep, they set off.

The first thing that struck them both was the number of naked girls and young women either wandering around, helping to set up the devices in or on which they would likely very soon be cooked or simply sitting in the booths, flicking though magazines or on their phones while they waited for their teams to get set up. Nobody other than Penny actually seemed to be cooking yet so it seemed fair to assume most other cooking methods on display that day involved a shorter process. The youngest they saw seemed to be a pair of girls, sisters from the looks of them, around nine or ten years old who were chasing each other around the booth playing tag to the obvious irritation of the team that were trying to set up in there. There were a few young women, mostly from the mixed teams, who looked to be around nineteen or twenty but most seemed to be in their mid-teens, as was fairly typical for meat girls. Chatting with each other as they explored, April and Jessica pondered how many had been purchased for the demonstrations and how many were friends or family members talked into helping out.

Although no girls were cooking yet, it was not too difficult to work out the rough mechanics of the majority of entries. There seemed to be a lot of variations on the traditional spit or stew pot but others were a little more intriguing, such as a device that seemed to consist of a pair of flexible tubes, like thick garden hoses, fed from something that they were pretty sure was a repurposed immersion heater from an old house! There was also a sort of cage which had several cables running from it as if it cooked by passing electric current through the girl.

“Wow, that’s gotta hurt!” Jessica observed, looking with a mixture of fear and fascination at what she was pretty sure was a deep-fryer. It was a large tank of straw-coloured oil which, while not boiling yet, was clearly starting to heat up. Beside it, on the floor for now but attached to a kind of hoist system and swinging arm was a metal basket large enough for a girl or small adult to sit in with her knees tucked up. A petite brunette around there own age stood close by, naked buy holding a folder in her hands and giving sharp instructions to the boys who made up the rest of the team – clearly in this mixed team she was both the leader and test-subject! At least she would know what she was letting herself in for and there could be no question about her willingness, April and Jessica thought to themselves.

“I guess we should get back to our booth.” April commented, noticing that the hall was starting to fill up and that not everyone was attached to a team so the public must have been allowed in. “I hope Penny was able to sleep like she wanted to and that it’s not hurting her too much.”

“Honestly,” Jessica replied with a slight shrug, “of all the devices I’ve seen so far, ours looks to be one of the most humane. Some of those things looks pretty grim and some of the girls are really young!”

“Yeah…” April looked a little troubled. “I hope they’re going to kill them or at least give them something to knock them out before they start cooking or there’s going to be a lot of tears!”

Back at their own booth, a small group of onlookers had gathered. Some were touching the outside of the box, commenting to each other about the warmth they could feel through the wood. Others were watching the video with interest, intrigued to see how the process worked. None of them were paying any attention to Penny herself, despite the fact that her crudely blindfolded head was sticking out the end of the box.

April approached a little gingerly. From what she could tell, Penny was in a slightly delirious state, neither quite awake nor asleep. She was muttering something about sand but she couldn’t really make it out. She was clearly not too long for this world. Wanting to make her last few minutes as comfortable as possible, April took the water bottle out of the fridge again and poured a little more water into her friend’s slightly-open mouth before leaning down and giving her a tender kiss.