"It's just in here, I'll show you!"
"God, it's a creepy fucking place for a shoot Valerie," Alexis said.
The dark-haired girl just smiled.
There was enough here to mask the real intent. Floodlights, a nearly asleep security guard, a few cars parked in the lot, all the trappings of an actual warehouse.
The kind of place countless LA girls were led for seedy casting calls and porn shoots. The kind of people who preyed upon blonde farm girls like Alexis, pretty sweet things from small towns told all their life how beautiful they were...
Only to find a city already busting angels, where finding a job as a cashier became a beauty contest and rent a monthly flirtation with bankruptcy.
She would have gone home but the whispers.
Not to mention her sister, who kept talking of her plan to take the bus and stay on her couch. Worst of all, Alexis kept thinking if she got her sister a job at the grocery store, they might have enough to make rent.
Why the fuck had she needed to make such a big thing about one day being a star?
Head Cheerleader, Prom Queen, had it been so terrible? Wasn't it enough to be a big fish in a small pond?
Not to Alexis. And if it meant dressing in something skimpy for some strange Sci-Fi photoshoot, well... everyone has to shell out a little bit of their dignity to pay for things, pick your poison.
Besides, Valerie had been at this much longer. She was Alexis' best friend in California - her only real friend actually. And Valerie had already made plenty of money from a pair of underwear commercials. Nothing extravagant but it was better than SafeWay.
And was a foot in the door.
"In here..."
Maybe the desperation, that pride, or something more simple, like the inability to say stop, drove her to take that final step into the darkness.
She couldn't say, only part of her knew this was all wrong.
That even Valerie was all wrong... not always, not usually, just of late. Nothing she could put her fingers on, nothing she could actually state even to herself, but the intuition was there.
Suppressed only by her sanity.
She entered through the double doors, waiting for the light...
Then wishing it would blink back into nothing.
In the middle of the pool, a mass of slithering arms, slimy teeth and monstrous jaws splayed out and over the edges of the water. The creature turned, large teardrop-shaped eyes boring into her soul as she took in the thing in all its enormity, unable to understand what she was seeing.
Alexis managed to turn, looking and losing sight of Valerie in her terror. She scanned the room with darting eyes and frozen legs, finding her friend naked and prostrate on the floor, bowing subserviently to the giant octopus monster.
"All hail Dagoth, Defiler of Worlds..."
That sight, her monotone chant, her bare ass and pussy, open as if presented to the creature, combined to slap Alexis across the face harder than the sight of the alien. She had a moment, a second where she started to turn, recognizing the need to run, only for her will to crash crestfallen at the sight of another tentacle barring her path.
They wrapped around her ankles first, spreading her legs as Alexis tried running too late, falling into the multi-tendrilled clutches of the creature. It held her aloft in the air, rising out of the pool and pulling her close. The talon-like claws at the end of each tentacle ripped through her dress, slashing open her bra and skin with one quick tap.
She let out a scream, more in terror than pain, left only in her cotton panties. Two tentacles curled around her calves, their spikes scraping against her skin. She tried to hit at a spongy opening of flesh, only to have her hands caught and coiled like handcuffs by the alien.
