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INDUSTRIAL ZONE S3E1 - ROUND 2

Written by Iron-K

Alex burst through a set of double doors, and the team struggled to catch up with their energetic host as they swung closed, hiding him from view. Jess, arriving there first, pushed them back open and looked up as she heard the hiss of spraying water. There was a tiled section of the corridor ahead of them, a few yards long, with several showerheads fixed to the walls spraying a mist of water into the corridor. Alex was waiting for them on the other side.

"It's just a washer - I think the others will need it more than you do, Jess..."

Jess nodded, then bowed her head down, shielding her hair with her hands, and stepped onto the white rubber-gripped tiles. She dashed through the cool but not unpleasant shower, and stepped off the other side to join the red wolf, who was dabbing his top half dry with a grubby towel from the wall.

She took it as he offered it to her, and distractedly wiped at her shoulders, very aware that she was the only one still clean as she looked back at the slightly stained fur of the others. Helen stepped into the shower section first with her eyes closed, but turned to face the water and smiled at the feeling of some of the foam and slime on her coming off.

As they all stepped out of the shower section, she passed the towel on to the catgirl, looking at Yasa gathering up his long hair and wringing it out. Alex pointed towards the end of the short corridor, where it split into a T-junction with another door on the opposite wall. This door had a more industrial look to it than the futuristic area they'd been in before, with a cross-hatched metal surface and a small barred window.

"From here on is the storage area - and our first stop is just over there." He glanced back at them, giving them a moment to dry off, before leading them towards it.

As Jess followed him, she looked around at their new surroundings. The scenery here was far gloomier than the previous area, with bare stone-textured walls and floor, though she could feel that it was actually painted plastic under her feet. The roof of the tunnel was slightly curved, with round lights that hung down from a cable along the middle, looped over support beams that stretched across the corridor just below the arch. A couple of boxes and containers lay propped up against the walls.

The group gathered around as Alex stopped, all of them still dripping a little from the wet corridor. Skye stood up on her tiptoes, peering through the barred window near the top of the door.

"This is just a stop-off before we go further in - one of the card keys that we need to get into the purifier room at the end should be here," Alex said as he stepped in front of Skye, putting his hand on the door's heavy bolt. Realizing she was bouncing on her heels, showing her nerves, Jess stepped forward and tried to stay calm. She watched, swallowing again and knowing that this situation was an obvious setup to get them into another game, as Alex hauled the bolt aside and shoved the door open. It made a rusty squeak as he forced it aside, and he beckoned them all to follow as he stepped into the room.

Jess padded in, surprised at the room's size compared to the other game rooms that they'd been in before. As the name of the area implied, it looked like a medium-sized storage room, with several crates and barrels in varying states of repair strewn about, a few wheeled metal shelf trolleys, and other miscellaneous items of junk placed haphazardly around the room. After looking at the scraps for a moment, her eyes were drawn up to the back of the room, where just past a shallow set of rising stairs, there was a row of four plain white rounded booths with several pipes and tubes leading into them from the back wall and low ceiling. Their fronts each had a narrow window from top to bottom - three of them were dark inside, but the one second from the left had a flickering light on. Its door was hinged from the bottom, and it was hanging open slightly.

Alex was searching through a discarded box on the floor next to the entrance. "I'm not seeing any of them where they're usually kept..." he said over his shoulder, then straightened up and kicked the box aside. As if noticing them for the first time, he looked up at the row of chambers at the far end of the room.

"We could always try in there..." he started, picking his way over the bits and pieces scattered on the floor and making his way up, checking to make sure the team were following him. "Often the key cards were used for more than one place, and if one's been left in one of those, we'll probably be able to use that too." Jess tried to concentrate on where she was putting her feet, her heart pounding harder all the time.

The four of them gathered around the machine, and he looked through the clear window. "Yes!" he exclaimed, pointing inside, and reached up to pull the door down. "There's a little panel in the back of each of these..." he explained as he struggled with it, "... so that they could be tested and turned on and off with a card, or a combination. Some things taken up by the research center needed to be preserved under oil or water, and these were the tanks used to store them. About two hundred gallons in each of them, I think..."

As he hauled the door down the way, Jess shuffled her feet, thinking about what was obviously about to happen to her. Pushing the door open the rest of the way with his foot, he stepped inside and looked up at the panel, reaching out for the card. Suddenly, he seemed to have second thoughts and turned around. "Actually, Jess - do you want to try this instead, just in case anything happens?" He stepped down from the booth and over the door, putting his hand out to indicate she should go inside. "You've managed to stay clean for quite a while, but I think it's time that you got a chance to gamble on that... what do you think?"

Shivering at the sight of the imposing machine, Jess tried not to sound frightened as she responded. "All right," she said, breathed out, and put her foot on the ramp formed by the door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Alex indicating to the others to take a few steps back.

As she stepped inside, she looked around at the inside of the chamber - the walls were as white as the outside, with two rows of small nozzles placed on either side near the ceiling. On the very top there was a much wider pipe, like the one she'd seen in the tank at the very beginning. Shaking her head and putting those out of her mind for the moment, she turned her attention to the panel at the top of the back wall.

The metal panel consisted of a set of ten numbered plastic-coated buttons arranged in a grid, a couple of lights, an LED display and a card poking out of the slot on the right. With a deep breath, she tugged it out.

Her hands jumped to her ears as a siren screamed, even though she knew it had been coming, and she spun around to see the door automatically close, trapping her inside. As it clunked shut, she heard a series of mechanical and electronic noises of locks clicking into place. The flickering fluorescent tube above her went out for a moment and was then replaced with a brighter, white light. As an insistent regular beeping noise started up from the back wall, she slowly turned back to it and saw the display had turned on, showing a yellow timer counting backwards from just over two and a half minutes.

Reassuring herself that this was all meant to happen, she bounded to the front of the tank as she heard Alex speaking. His voice was played to her over a speaker at the top of the booth.

"You three!" he said, and the three team members on the outside of the tank jumped to attention. "Jess is locked inside the tank and there are only about... a hundred and fifty seconds before it fills up. There are four different locks on the side..." - he pointed to a section of the door beside the window - "and a combination that should be somewhere in the room, too. Get down there, find those keys! Go!" He repeated the last word, gesticulating wildly, as the three of them scrambled down into the main part of the room again. Jess pressed her muzzle to the tank's window as she watched them hover around, unsure where to start looking.

Yasa was the first to move, heading right for a stack of crates in the middle of the room and tipping them over one by one, searching each side as he went and throwing the light props behind him afterwards. The girls followed his example, taking one side of the room each.

Alex stepped across Jess's vision, looking down at the panel of locks but shifting his eyes over to look at her. "You okay?" he mouthed, and she nodded in response. He gave her a reassuring smile before turning back to call to the team, shouting over the noise of the junk being hunted through.

"You're looking for four plastic card keys to get her out! They should look something like this!" He stepped aside and raised his hand to Jess. Realizing, she looked down at the card in her hand before holding it up to the window.

Her hand pressed against the card, she looked at the back of the tank a couple of feet away, and the unforgiving timer that had already reached two minutes. Only dimly hearing the sound of metal barrels being tipped over and things being dragged down off the shelves, her gaze shifted up to the row of nozzles in the walls and the large hole in the ceiling, and she shivered as she imagined what was going to happen if she wasn't let out in time.

"Helen's got one!" Alex's call made her whip her head round, and she leaned to the side to see Helen triumphantly holding up a red card key amid a cluster of barrels, some of them leaking dark ooze onto the floor around her feet. "Come back here and open the lock..."

"Come on!" Jess joined in involuntarily as Helen picked her way carefully over the debris, and bounced on her heels as she approached. With her hands pressed on the clear window again, she craned her neck to see as Helen slid the card into one of the locks and a confirmation beep played.

"That's one! It's taken you nearly a minute to get that far, keep going!" Alex called after her as she went back to her side of the room, making Yasa start hunting through the polystyrene bead-filled boxes in front of him even more frantically, digging through them with both hands. Almost as soon as Helen had left, a shout came from Skye's side of the room, and Jess clapped her hands together as the husky girl approached with another card.

"Don't forget that you've got to find the combination to open it from the inside as well!" Alex said, glancing over his shoulder to watch Skye slide her card into the slot. Flashing a grin through the glass at Jess, she bounded off back to the side of the room, changing her mind halfway and heading for the boxes that Yasa had now abandoned. "It'll be four digits, and they'll have written it in a few places around the room, these people could never remember their passwords to anything..."

He turned around again to peer past Jess, and she stepped out of the way as she realized he was reading the timer. Hardly daring to look, she slowly turned her head towards it too.

"And you've got one minute to find it and the two remaining keys! One minute!" The host stepped off to the side again, and Jess swallowed, trying to keep calm as she watched the three of them searching madly.

Yasa had reached the shelves at the front of the room. She watched as he reached up to tip a wide cylindrical container towards him, and giggled as the black ooze that had been inside it sloshed over him. Wiping at his face, he looked up into it again and felt around inside, finding nothing and moving on to the other things on the shelves quickly. As the others looked around at the clusters of crates and oil drums at the edges of the room, he pulled each miscellaneous container and tatty cardboard box off the shelf and briefly dipped his hand in to feel around inside. Jumping up to grab the last one at the top, he appeared to notice something on its base and spun it around in his hands.

"Yes!" he suddenly shouted, dropping the box and hopping over the scattered debris as he hurried back up to Jess's booth. She moved forward to listen to him as he breathlessly leaned on the outside.

"6891," he said, pointing up to the keypad at the back of the tank. Jess stepped over and tapped out the numbers, nervously looking over at the timer beside them as it ticked down past thirty seconds. As she pressed the last number, a harsh buzzer sounded. Frowning at it, she glanced over her shoulder at the anxious-looking rabbit boy and tried the combination again, to the same effect.

"Sure?" she asked, stepping forward again.

"...I'll go and check!" With that, he bounded off again, heading for the place that he had found the numbers.

She watched as he dashed back to the shelves, glancing left and right and hoping that either of the girls were close to finding the other two keys. As Yasa reached the front of the room again, he skidded to a halt. Glancing around to see where he'd discarded the box, he picked it up and read it again. His brow furrowed as his lips moved, reciting it back to himself, then an expression of shocked realization crossed his face and he turned the box the other way up.

"One six eight nine!" he called up to her, repeating it as he ran towards the tank. Quickly, Jess moved to the panel again and pressed the buttons in sequence firmly, this time to the sound of another lock sliding aside. She smiled for a moment, but then looked over at the timer and gasped as a louder noise signaled the last five seconds going by. Transfixed by the rapidly decreasing counter, she held her breath as it hit zero, turning to red, and instinctively covered her ears as a low siren sounded from outside the tank.

She turned around slowly as the foghorn-like alarm sounded again, flicking her eyes around the chamber and balling and unballing her fists as she waited anxiously for something to happen. She glanced at Yasa briefly, who had his hands on the door and his face pressed against the glass to see inside. A wet glooping noise sounded from near the top of the tank and she looked up, gasping as two curtains of opaque green goo began to emerge from the grilles at her head height and dribble stickily down the walls.

She froze as the streams gradually got stronger, pouring more into the center of the tank and splashing against her ankles. Stifling a squeak as she felt the cold slippery liquid slap against the fur on her legs, she did her best not to make a sound as the gunge licked up her. As the streams reached her hips, she jerked her hands out of the way, holding them up at chest height and feeling the slimy green stuff dribble from her fingers. She drummed her feet on the floor and squealed as she felt the puddle of gunge ooze between her toes. Squirming at the ticklish feeling and crossing her arms across her chest, she breathed out as the gunge flow from the sides stopped rising at her tummy.

As soon as she had relaxed, another blast came from the alarm, she heard a mechanical noise from above her and she only just had time to squeeze her eyes closed before flinching as a cool, heavy wave of thick slime poured on to her from the pipe on the ceiling.

She shrieked through her clenched teeth as the sticky, slippery liquid poured off her head and slipped down her hair, but all she could hear was the continuous slurping noise that the gunge made as it worked its way around her ears, down the sides of her face, slapping on to her shoulders and slithering down her back and chest, coating her in a wet, heavy layer. She shook her head from side to side a little, gasping as the movement made the ooze splatter all across the tank, some splashes of it landing on her muzzle and creeping down to cover it.

Stumbling forward out of the flow, she turned to the side and raised her heavy arm up, putting a hand on the chamber's door to steady herself. Wriggling away a little further from the torrent that was sloshing down on to her shoulder, she squeaked as she became aware of the tank filling up. The level was already at her knees, and her heart was pounding as she blinked her eyes open, pushing her soaked fringe up with her free hand, and looked down at the rapidly rising surface. She tried to angle the rest of her arm to defend her face from the gunge jets from the sides which were still splashing against her waist and hips.

Rubbing her eyes with the palm of her free hand and backing against the door, she breathlessly watched the smooth thick green stuff pour into the center of the tank, forming a glutinous small well in the surface as it broke through it. She shivered as the gunk crept up her thighs, shifting from foot to foot and feeling it working its way into her fur even more with every movement.

As her hips disappeared underneath the cool gooey surface, she saw the torrent in front of her begin to ease off, the column of slime becoming gradually thinner. With a deep breath, she smiled to herself and determinedly stepped forward underneath it.

She giggled as she felt the stuff slither over her muzzle briefly and envelop her head again, and tentatively turned her head a little from side to side to get totally covered, beginning to enjoy the experience more after the initial shock. She wriggled as the goo rose over her tummy, and raised her hands up to the sides to defend herself against the thin green sprays that were gradually creeping higher with the slime level. Leaning forward just a little to protect her face, she felt the downpour from above slowly subside to a drizzle, then a series of thick drops that splatted heavily against her soaking hair. She sighed, relaxing now that it was over, and dropped her hands back to her sides. They made a rich thick splatting noise as they glooped below the surface.

"Jess, I'm afraid your first gunging had to come sooner or later - and what a way for it to happen!" Alex's voice came over the speaker at the top of the booth as she caught her breath, the chest-height gunge bath glooping thickly around her in a way that felt totally different from water. "Are you all right in there?"

Jess pulled her hands back out of the gunk, shivering as she felt the thick slime drip off them in heavy dollops, and shook them in an attempt to get it off. Scraping the slime off her right hand with her left, she got it nearly clean and wiped at her eyes with the palm of her hand as she nodded her head, managing a smile. Opening her eyes and blinking a couple of times, she looked around at the gunge-filled booth, with what was left visible of the previously white walls stained various shades of green. Beads of slime still dribbled out of the nozzles at the sides.

She shrieked involuntarily and squeezed her eyes closed as another burst of gunge from the ceiling nozzle glooped on to her head, making a ghastly slurping noise all around her as it smacked onto the thick surface. Turning around as she stepped out of its way, she bobbed up and down a little in the glop as she gathered up her soaking hair, throwing it back behind her head and grimacing as it slapped heavily on to her neck.

Propping herself up breathlessly against the slimy wall next to the door, she sagged down, then squeaked and stood upright again as she felt the gunk spill into the top of her swimsuit. She turned her head to look out and saw her team mates crowding to look through the narrow window. Relaxing with a sigh, she couldn't help laughing as she watched the three of them whooping and cheering at the sight of her, and she looked down at the surface again, her slimy shoulders just poking out of the opaque liquid. She tried to imagine what her gunge-drenched head looked like to them, shaking herself to try and clear the drips of the green stuff creeping down over her eyes.

"I think there's a drain lever around here somewhere..." the red wolf said, disappearing off to the side of the tank. With a loud clunk, she heard something shift under her feet, and as the surface bubbled, the level quickly began to go down, leaving a glistening coating of slime on her fur and the walls of the tank as it went. "Got the key?" he asked, coming to the front again and leaning to the side to see past the other three team members.

Jess realized she wasn't holding it any more and turned around, shivering as she moved through the waist-high gloop. She quickly spotted the card floating on top of the green stuff and bent down a little to scoop it up in her messy hands, then held it up to the door to show them. The gunge level was below her knees again, and she looked down at herself, grinning at the sight of her thickly dripping fur.

As the last of it drained away through the floor, making a loud and unpleasant gurgling noise, Alex hauled the door back open away from her, using his foot to push it right down on to the floor. Offering both his hands towards her, he smiled as she stepped heavily out, catching her hands and just stopping her slimy feet from slipping out from under her on the ramp.

"Dangerous thing, that..." he remarked, taking the key from Jess and guiding her gently to the stone-textured floor. Putting the card key in his pocket, he bent down to pull the door back up. Touching its edges reluctantly at first with his fingers, he moved his hands underneath and began to haul it upwards back into place.

Jess reached over her shoulder and grabbed a handful of slime from her back, eeping as the viscous liquid oozed between her fingers. As Alex pushed the door all the way shut with his shoulder, she laughingly threw the handful she'd gathered up at him, and he flinched back as it splattered across the side of his face.

"Hey..." he said, a red hand coming up to drag the green stuff off his cheek. "We did try and save you, you know." Flicking his hand to the floor a couple of times, he stepped away from the chamber and pointed towards the door.

"All right! Thanks to Jess, we've got one of the keys that'll let us in to the purifier room at the end, and you earned sixty points for getting two locks open and finding the password, but we've still got three more games to play here. Skye - Yasa and Helen haven't been picked for a while, who do you want to go in the next one?"

"It's going to be..." The husky girl looked between the rabbit and catgirl, both a little messy from the search. Yasa looked down at himself, picking some stray polystyrene packing beads off his fur.

"Helen." Skye nodded as she chose, and the quiet catgirl smiled up at the host as he stepped towards her.

"Helen, we've got something you might recognize around the corner," he said, taking her hand and hopping over the even more cluttered floor towards the exit. The other three followed them out back into the corridor and down one of the legs of the T-junction.

Jess followed behind them, still on a high from the excitement of the game she'd been in. The slippery green stuff slid down her heavy fur with every movement, feeling cool against the warmth of the large lights above them. Trying to clean off her forearms by scraping her hands down them as they got to a turn in the passageway, she looked up to see another door surrounded by warning stripes on the corner. Looking back at it as they ran past, she almost crashed into the others as Alex stopped them in the middle of a dark area of the corridor.

"Seen this before, Helen?" she heard him say, and she walked to the side to see what they were gathered around. At the side of the corridor was an angular metallic chair, slightly like a dentist's chair with a headrest and footrest. A strap hung loosely across it. There was double door-sized opening on the wall behind it, covered by heavy black plastic strips that formed a curtain so that they couldn't see what was inside.

The pink catgirl looked down at the chair, swinging her tail behind her nervously, but stepped forward and accepted Alex's hand as he brushed the strap out the way and helped her up into it.

"Now, this game does involve not letting you escape..." he said, holding the two halves of the seat belt up in both hands. They formed two V shapes from the sides of the chair. "Are you OK with that?"

Hesitantly, she nodded, and wriggled up to see as the red wolf clipped the straps together over her tummy. She leaned down to look at the buckle in the centre as he stepped back, and looked up again, wide-eyed, as she saw that it had a large keyhole in place of a release button.

"Comfortable, Helen?" the host asked her. She pushed off the footrest and wriggled a little, sitting upright.

"Yeah, I guess," she replied.

"Good... now, the rules of this game. You might have noticed that the chair you're sitting in now is mounted on a rail - I don't think you can see now," he added as she leaned to the side to try and look downwards. Jess crouched down to see the single metal rod supporting the chair stretched down to a groove in the floor, that ran straight back underneath the black curtaining.

Alex continued, pacing around the chair. "Your friends are going to try and get the key to let you out, as your chair slowly takes you inch by inch towards... there," he said, pointing behind her. She twisted in the seat to look at the blank strips covering the entrance. "Want to see what's inside, team?"

He stepped up to the curtaining, and brushed some of the strips aside with his arm, waving them through. Jess looked at Helen, whose mouth dropped open as she saw what was inside, and she nervously giggled as the three free team members stepped through into the room with Alex.

As she ducked into the room, she looked up at the thing that she had caught a glimpse of through the curtain. At the back of the room was a large arrangement of metal beams that formed a crude frame - three Y-shaped supports at the back and sides connected by a few cross bars. Around the frame, between the arms of each Y shape, three rectangular tanks were positioned, pivoted so that they could tip down into the center. The groove in the floor ran all the way into the middle of the arrangement, and right above its ending point was the biggest tank of them all, about three feet wide with a slightly curved base that ended in a wide nozzle. Several other tubes and cables were wrapped around the frame, connecting separate pieces of it or running down into the floor.

"You three are going to be responsible for rescuing Helen before she reaches that thing," Alex said as he turned around, giving them a moment to look up at it. "And you're going to do it by using this..."

He beckoned them over to the left side of the room, where a cannon-like device was bolted to the floor. Jess glanced over her shoulder to see that ten targets were fixed to the wall opposite it, arranged in a circular pattern from floor to ceiling with a perspex-covered box containing a large key in the center of the wall.

Alex walked to the back wall and fished a green waterbomb out of a tarpaulin pool that was set up there. Jess watched it wobble oddly as he held it up, shaking it as a clear liquid dripped from it. She could guess what it was filled with.

"Your task in the game is to hit all ten of those targets using this cannon," he explained as he dropped the waterbomb down a hole at the top edge of the barrel. "It's spring-loaded, so it's not dangerous, but make sure you don't have your hands or any part of your body in front of it when it goes off. Helen won't have the luxury of being able to get out the way, so you'll have to make sure you don't hit her by mistake..."

Slowly, he pulled the plunger on the base of the barrel back, aiming away from the targets. He let it go, the rubber balloon thumped out of the end of the barrel and the team watched it travel in a slow arc through the air, dripping as it went, eventually bursting in the top corner of the opposite wall and leaving a wide yellow splatter mark.

"And you'll have until Helen reaches the center of that gunge machine before the time's up - should be about two and a half minutes. Ready?"

Skye nodded, and was the first to move to crouch behind the cannon. Yasa stepped forward too, stepping forward and picking two balloons out of the pool.

"Good luck." Alex stepped back, pressed something on his controller, and a mechanical whine started up as the strips of the black plastic curtain on the right wall were pushed aside to reveal Helen being dragged backwards.

Yasa quickly dropped one of the waterbombs into the cannon as Skye hefted the barrel around to aim. As Helen looked from them to the targets and back, she fired the cannon, and the four of them followed its path as it flew upwards, then back down to splat on the floor just in front of the wall.

"Damn... let's have another, quick!" Skye determinedly pulled the plunger back further as the rabbit boy loaded the barrel again, and Jess jumped at the much louder noise of the balloon being shot out. This time, she smiled as the target at the top of the circle was hit, accompanied by a confirmation bell sound. Helen clapped her hands together appreciatively, then leaned over her shoulder a little worriedly to see how far away she was.

"Come on, I need more of them!" The gray husky's shout got Jess's attention again, and she turned around to dash towards the tarpaulin pool on the wall. Kneeling down beside it, she dipped both hands into the gel-like liquid to fish out two more of the green rubber bombs, and gently tossed them towards Yasa's feet. He grabbed one of them as it rolled, and loaded the cannon again.

Jess watched over her shoulder as she continued pulling the balloons out of the pool, throwing them behind her each time. Skye's aim was getting better as the game went on - with only a few misses, she had soon hit the top left quarter of the circle and changed her aim to clear the right hand side. As another balloon thumped into the bottom rightmost target, Jess straightened up to watch as Helen's chair continued to move backwards, blocking the line to the three remaining ones.

"We should have done those first..." Jess said under her breath as she looked from the clean targets to Skye and back, the husky girl trying to line up a shot that wouldn't hit the girl being dragged across the middle, her arm shaking from the effort of holding the plunger back. The catgirl wriggled down, her hands across her face.

As soon as Helen was clear of the rightmost target, Skye let go of the plunger again, and a balloon thumped out of the nozzle. The four of them followed its curved path with their eyes, and Helen flinched up as it flew across her lap. She opened her eyes again and turned to her left just in time to see it burst against the far right of the row of three remaining targets.

"Yes!" Skye punched the air. "Quick, give me another one!" The rabbit boy scooped a balloon from the pile next to his feet and leaned in to drop it down the nozzle. Jess looked over at Helen - she was very close to reaching the end of the track now, with only a few feet between her and the frame.

"You've got just under thirty seconds left... you're going to have to be quick!" Jess glanced back at Alex as he spoke for the first time in a while, then jumped as another balloon was launched out of the cannon, lower and harder this time. She only just had time to spin round and see where it was before it splattered into the center of the second-last target.

"Come on, one more!" she encouraged, joining in Helen's shouts of support as she bounced up and down as far as the strap across her tummy would let her.

Skye concentrated, looking along the barrel as she lined up the last shot. She drew the plunger back as Helen was moved to reveal the target again, and shaking, let it go. Jess watched as the heavy slime-filled balloon sailed through the air, passing above Helen, and burst leaving a wide yellow splat mark on the floor in front of the wall.

Jess, realizing she was wringing her hands worriedly in front of her, turned disappointedly to the frame to see Helen leaning back to watch as the chair moved back towards it. Suddenly, Skye moved again, grabbed another of the balloons from the floor, dropped it into the barrel and shot it again. This time, the bell sounded again as the fired balloon slammed into the target's surface. With a hum, the plastic cover on the small box in the far wall slid open to expose the key.

"You've done it!" Alex pushed himself off his leaning position on the wall, looking genuinely excited even though he had acted calm all through the game. "Get the key and rescue Helen, someone!"

The three of them looked at each other, frozen for a moment, and Yasa was the first to take off. Wide-eyed, Jess watched as he sprinted over to the far wall, grabbed the key out of the box and ran back to the excited catgirl's chair. He slid to a halt in front of it and bent down to put the key in the lock across her tummy.

"Come on!" The catgirl burst out hysterically, jiggling in the seat as Yasa struggled with the lock. Waddling forward awkwardly along with the seat as he tried to turn the key, he flinched as a loud siren sounded. Two rotating red lights at the sides of the frame turned on as Helen's chair reached the end of the track, juddering to a halt. Struggling against the straps and holding the lock up for him, she drummed her feet rapidly on the footrest, looking from the rabbit boy leaning over her to the tanks right above her and back.

Shouting encouragement along with Skye, Jess worriedly stepped forward towards the frame, gasping as the two tanks at the sides slowly began tilting inwards. Suddenly, she heard a click, and Yasa straightened up, pushing the straps aside with his hands. With a loud whoop, the catgirl leapt out of the seat and hit him in mid-air in a hug, wrapping her legs and arms around him and making him stumble backwards in surprise.

At the same moment, the alarm hooted again and two waves of lime green gunge slapped down into the middle of the chair that Helen had been sitting in, hiding it from view underneath a brightly-colored cascade as it splattered out from the hard surface. Yasa, gently putting his arms underneath Helen's bottom to support her, took a few steps backwards as the stuff splashed onto his toes. He turned to the side, watching the glutinous green downpours ease off and dribble across the floor underneath the frame. Helen looked back at the stuff that was sprayed all over the floor and bottom of the pipes, gaping at it as her shoulders shook in an excited laugh, then she put her head over the rabbit boy's shoulder and squeezed her arms tighter around him.

"I think that's what they call 'just in time'... that was nearly you, Helen!" The catgirl turned to Alex as he spoke, sliding her hands to Yasa's shoulders and wriggling to be let down. As she put her feet on the floor again she clasped one hand to her chest, panting to catch her breath. She looked back at the chair and shivered, watching the thick slime slither down it and ooze from its edges, then her eyes went up to the other tanks around the frame that would have gone off if she had still been sitting there. She swallowed, then a smile crossed her face and she sighed relievedly, putting her other arm around Yasa.

"Even though it did start to go off, you escaped clean, so I can give you a full score for the game," Alex continued, looking to the side as the gunge-covered chair started forwards, rattling a little out of the frame. Helen grinned, cuddling Yasa a bit closer to her again, as Jess and Skye stepped forward to join them.

"Yasa was the one who nearly got you gunged, so how would you like to put him in a game next?"

"Yeah!" The catgirl turned her head to look Yasa in the eye, and he returned the look with a defeated smile, shrugging her hands off his shoulders and stepping forwards away from the group as she patted him on the back.

As Alex led him back towards the curtain over the door of the room, Jess realized that Skye hadn't been given the chance to be in a game for a while, and remembered that the programme usually had an especially messy challenge for the team leader at the end of one of the rounds. As they followed the two of them, she glanced sideways at the husky girl, but either she hadn't realized she was being led into it or she was keeping quiet.

After pushing back through the black curtain, Alex looked up and down the corridor as if thinking about where to go next, and then pulled his computer out of his pocket. "Hang on a moment," he said, looking down at it in concentration.

Jess took a couple of steps up and down the gloomy corridor, looking around at the occasional pipes running along the walls and into the floor, and the identical metallic doors, wondering where they would be taken next. She looked back at the door that was marked with black and yellow stripes, straining to read the warning symbols on the walls to either side, then was distracted again by a beep from Alex's computer.

"Here we go... it's just down here." The red wolf took Yasa's hand and he eagerly followed him as they dashed another few yards down the passage, towards a door that was partially hidden by the shadow of a pipe placed across it.

Alex leaned down past the pipe to put his hand on the bolt of the door, and pushed it open with his foot. "Mind your heads," he said as he indicated to the team to go inside. Jess ducked down first, pushing the door open the rest of the way as she stepped into the room.

She straightened up and took in the surroundings as Helen walked in behind her with a shocked squeak. The pipe outside the door came through the wall on either side and joined a large maze of pipes of varying sizes that ran all over the walls and ceiling of the room, twisting and turning in and out of each other with wheeled valves fixed at various joints. At the end of the room to the left, three pipes from the surrounding walls jutted out and led towards a small rectangular tank on the floor, a couple of feet high and long enough to sit down in. One of the pipes ended directly above it, bending down to form a nozzle, and the other two were pointed down diagonally from the sides. The box had a sort of crude backrest on it made of plastic matting that extended up from the plastic back wall about a foot.

Above the plastic box, suspended from the ceiling, there was a large round metallic tank with a variety of warning stripes, dials and blinking lights on its surface. Stretching from top to bottom, there was a narrow window that showed that it was full of a yellow-green liquid. Like the arrangement below it, three pipes came out of its base and headed off into the tangle of the walls. A large red digital readout was mounted on the front of the tank, displaying a time of sixty seconds.

The four team members turned at the sound of the door closing, and watched Alex as he turned around from it and looked up at the machine, stroking his chin.

"You know where we're putting you, don't you, Yasa?" he asked, looking over at him with a smile.

"Yeah." He gave a nod, and started towards the machine, eyes up at the large tank near the ceiling all the time. Alex followed him and reached the box as he turned around to sit down inside it, wriggling backwards to rest his back against the plastic backrest and looking up into the nozzle above him.

"All right, he's ready, so..." Alex turned to the girls, walking the few feet back towards them as he explained the rules. "This game's very simple, actually - all you three have to do is find the six valves on the pipes that lead out of that tank..." he pointed up at the threatening machine mounted on the roof, "and turn them off. You're only allowed to spin six of them, though, so make sure you know which ones are right before you touch them... know what you're doing?"

Jess nodded, already looking up at the pipe jutting out from the right hand side of the tank and trying to follow its path with her eyes.

"Good luck!" Alex aimed the controller over his shoulder and pressed it, causing an exaggerated mechanical noise to signal the timer starting.

As the red wolf retreated to the side of the room, Skye leaned over to the others, pointing to herself and them in turn.

"Left, middle, right," she said simply. "OK?"

They nodded in agreement, and Jess moved away from them to find where the pipe she was following emerged from behind a tangle of others. She traced its path with her finger, trying not to glance over at the rapidly decreasing timer as she concentrated on finding the first valve along its path.

Eventually she followed it down to one of the red wheels right in front of her, and grabbed the circular handle. After twisting it in both directions it came loose, and she spun it around once, glancing over at Alex.

"Keep going!" he encouraged. "You'll know when it's off."

Determinedly, she turned back to the wheel and tried to get into a rhythm spinning it. After what seemed like ages, a red light came on behind it and she stepped away, her hand on the pipe to follow it again.

She looked over her shoulder as she moved, watching Helen move towards a valve on the opposite wall and stretch up on her tiptoes to reach it. Batting at it with her right hand, she eventually caught it and began spinning it awkwardly as Skye stepped around her, following a pipe of her own. Jess jumped as her arm hit a pipe that crossed over the one she had her hand on, and as she stepped around it, she glanced backwards at the timer to see it drop below twenty seconds.

Shocked at how much time had already gone past, she looked back at what she hoped was the right pipe and quickly followed it up and down the room with her eyes. Skye ran to the same side of the room, equally frantically, took hold of a wheel and started spinning it. Knowing that she didn't have any time left to search, Jess grabbed the valve in front of her and quickly spun it around with both hands.

Breathlessly, she finally felt it lock into place, and followed the gray husky as she wandered into the center of the room. Yasa looked back at them, then cheered Helen on as she finished turning her second valve too. As she scampered into the middle of the room to join the other two girls, she glanced tensely back at the red wolf.

"Don't look at me - you're about to find out if you're right!" Alex stepped forward, pointing up to the tank on the ceiling.

Jess looked tensely up at the liquid through the tall window as the last few seconds ticked off the timer above it. As it hit zero, the blare of an alarm filled the room, and an unpleasant gurgling noise played as the liquid bubbled and began to drain out, leaving a slimy sheen behind on the window.

She looked down at Yasa again, who had his eyes squeezed closed and a nervous hint of a grin on his face. Opening one eye for a second, he glanced upwards and suddenly flinched to one side as a wave of gooey translucent yellow stuff spewed out of the pipe to his left, instantly covering one side of his face and chest. He held his hand up instinctively, squeaking as he turned his face away from the slippery torrent, then was hidden entirely as the other two pipes turned on, splattering green and yellow goo off his shoulders, head and splashing to the floor around the tank.

As Helen jumped up and down excitedly, he slowly moved his hands from his sides, shaking them as gooey strings dripped down from them, and raised them through the slippery curtain pouring off his head to his darkened soaking hair. Pushing them under his fringe, he flicked his hair back to reveal his face for just a second before the gunge flow slopped down over it. With the tank beginning to fill up around him, he tilted his face up briefly as if showering in the stuff, then shook his head, sending a wide spray of gunk out to the sides, and bowed forwards underneath the three torrents again.

At that moment, the pipes shut off, leaving only the continuous dripping sound of the gunk falling from Yasa's fur into the small pool around him. Sloshing his legs from side to side a little in the tummy-deep slime, he grinned back at the girls, blinking and shaking his head again as another brief burst glooped out of the pipe to splash on to him. His heavy hair fell forwards across his eyes, and he tossed his head to one side to escape the downpour and look at them again.

Alex stepped carefully over the gungy yellow-green puddle on the floor and offered his hand to the doused rabbit boy, his fur dripping all over with the stringy mixture. He hauled one arm out of the stuff to grab on, and shivered as drips of it slithered stickily down his raised arm. Struggling upright, he reached around to his back to hold on to his soaked and tightly clinging swimming shorts embarrassedly.

He kept holding Alex's wrist as he carefully stepped out of the filled tank, back to the relative safety of the floor with its gripped surface. With strings of the gel-like gunge dripping from all over him, he left a shiny trail behind him as he walked back to join the rest of the team. Helen looked him up and down, her hand over her mouth to stifle her giggles as he held his arms out to the sides, looking down at himself and the gooey curtains of slime dripping from all over his fur.

"It was a good try, team, but you only found three of the right valves..." Alex said, walking over to the pipes on the side of the room that Helen had been searching. "Sadly this one that Helen found was the wrong one..." He slapped his hand onto the one just above the one that had been turned, then pointed over to another two on the far wall.

"Sorry, Yasa..." Helen giggled, covering her mouth as the messy rabbit boy looked at her. "I didn't have my glasses..."

"I don't think he minds too much!" Alex said, heading for the door. "You still got fifty points for the game, and it's time to get going."

He swung the door towards him and waved for them to follow as he stepped through it, ducking under the low pipe above the top on the outside. "Watch the pipe again," he called back as he waited for the team to make their way out.

"Now - team leader!" he said as Skye ducked out last. She looked up at him as he closed the door behind them, waiting for him to continue. Jess held her breath, realizing that this was what she had been expecting.

"It's been a while since you were in a game, hasn't it?" he asked, spinning around from the door.

"Well, yeah..." she answered, rubbing a hand up and down the back of her head and neck uneasily, then sagged. "All right, what's going to happen?" she agreed, recovering and looking him in the eye as she took his hand.

"You're going to just love this," Alex laughed as he marched her back down the corridor, Skye skipping a little to keep up at first.

"I don't like the sound of that..." she said, half to herself as she looked between the various doors leading off the passageway. Striding past them all and back to the corridor corner, Alex stopped her next to the door bordered with black and yellow stripes. He took hold of the handle, put his thumb on the bolt to slide it aside, and with a smile over his shoulder as the other three team members caught up with them, pushed the heavy door open.

Jess craned her neck to see as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. They were stepping into another small side room, this one looking like an older area that wasn't used much. A couple of wide rusty pipes stretched from floor to ceiling in indents in the walls, and the lights hanging from the girders on the ceiling flickered weakly. At the end of the room, a small ramp led up to a rectangular chamber set into the wall, covered until half-way up by a metal door. The chamber was lit from above in dull green, and various blinking lights, small tubes and displays made up the back and side walls surrounding a curved metallic chair.

"You know what this is, Skye?" Alex asked, stepping forwards and turning to face her.

The husky girl squirmed, biting her lip. "It's the Hotseat, isn't it?" she asked, looking nervously over his shoulder at the machine.

"That's right, and you're going inside!" the red wolf answered, heading towards it, her hand still held in his. "Just three more correct answers and you can escape it clean..."

Jess watched as they approached it, and he pulled a switch on the wall beside the tank, making the metal door slide into the ground. The Hotseat was one of the show's most well-known games, and its specialty was covering its victim from all angles in all kinds of gunge and grime. It was also infamously difficult to escape - she couldn't remember anyone ever coming out of it clean. Skye, though, seemed pretty eager despite her nerves as she sat down and watched the door of the tank slide up to waist height to trap her inside.

"You know the game, don't you?" Alex asked her as she glanced around the inside of the tank, making her look back at him. "I've got three questions here - if they're all answered correctly then I promise you won't be gunged, but if you get just one wrong... the Hotseat starts up."

Skye nodded throughout his explanation of the game, and glanced again to her left and right, looking for the gunge nozzles in the walls.

"Actually, there is one more question before we start... you can either try and save yourself, or rely on your team mates to get you out of there. Which is it going to be?"

Skye thought for a moment, leaning forward and putting her hand on the side of her muzzle, stroking it up and down. "I think... I've got a better chance if they do it," she decided.

"All right!" Alex hopped down from the raised section of the floor and returned to the others, pointing to a projection screen above the door. Jess stepped to the other side of the room to let the others line up in front of it and looked at Alex as he reached the door and turned around.

"Now, you've been in this situation before - the computer's going to ask three questions," he said, pointing to the screen. "Each of you has to answer one of them, but you're not allowed to speak apart from to give answers - so you can't discuss among each other!" The three of them glanced at each other as he continued. "If all three questions are answered correctly, then the tank will open and Skye can get out - but if not, then she gets covered in all the muck and other nasty stuff that's built up around it."

Jess looked over her shoulder along with the others, watching Skye bounce nervously in the seat, looking up into the hidden mechanism at the top of the tank.

"Ready?" Alex asked, making them face the front again. With a nod from them, he stepped back and the lights dimmed, leaving only the green light from the top of the gunge tank behind them. A dim shadow moved around the room as Skye shifted in the seat.

"True or false?" the mechanical voice read out. "You have more bones when you're born than you do as an adult."

Jess looked down from the board and glanced at the two others. Yasa pointed to himself, raising his eyebrows to indicate he knew the answer, and turned back to the screen as the girls nodded.

"True," he declared loudly, making Helen jump. Jess looked over to Alex, who was now leaning relaxedly against the wall next to the door, but he just looked up at the screen as the question faded out and was replaced by another one.

About to answer it, Jess opened her mouth, but stopped as the catgirl took a breath too, and she sagged relievedly as she shouted out the answer that she had been about to give. But her relief at being sure that they had got that answer right was quickly replaced by new tension as she realized that everything was now up to her.

"Before we converted to the international language, what word would you have used to mean 'a bird'?" the monotone voice read out.

Jess gulped, only slightly relieved to see three choices appear on the screen - 'Kiki', 'Kimi' and 'Kibi'. Even though it had been phased out years before she had been born, the older language was still taught as a separate subject in schools and she tried to think back to her lessons on it. She stared at the three words, mouthing them to herself, and slowly shook her head.

"'Kimi' looks the most familiar of them..." she said aloud, then stopped as she realized she wasn't supposed to talk to the others. "Kimi", she repeated quickly, and looked over at Alex again. His expression still not giving anything away, he pushed himself off the wall and walked back over to them as the lights came back up.

"Any idea how they've done, Skye?" he asked as the three of them turned to look at her. She took a deep breath and let it out, looking tensely up into the chute above her head as he strolled over to his left to put his hand on Yasa's shoulder.

"A bit unlikely, the idea of losing bones, isn't it, Yasa?" he asked.

The rabbit boy shook his head, smiling self-assuredly for the first time on the show. Alex shrugged.

"Well, I try to make people worried about their answers here, but nothing gets past you... bones fuse together as you grow up, so you don't have as many as you did when you were born. Good!" He moved along the row so that he was standing next to Helen.

"Helen... very confident as well," he said. She turned around to look up at him, eyes wide open and with a smile on her face. "And she got hers right! You've got two out of three, at least..."

Jess grimaced uncomfortably as Alex strolled towards her, shuffling her feet on the ground and knowing that everyone was looking at her.

"And Jess... she had a hard question, and she looks pretty nervous about it..." She looked up as Alex put his hands on her shoulders, gently turning her around to face the tank and crouching down so that their faces were level. The husky girl drummed her fingers on the edges of the seat, practically bouncing as she waited to hear her fate, and Jess shivered as she was reminded that she alone was responsible for the result of the game and Skye's immediate future.

Alex interrupted her thoughts as he spoke again. "And as it happened... she got it wrong." With that, he stood up and took a step back.

Jess covered her mouth in surprise, and watched the husky girl's shocked expression turn into a sickly grimace as she realized what that meant. Her eyes widened as a loud click sounded, and with a slurping noise, two translucent green jets of gunge shot towards her from the walls of the tank.

Skye yipped as the green stuff slapped on to her shoulders, drawing her arms in tighter and squeezing her hands between her thighs as she hunched her shoulders up to protect her neck. She closed her eyes, a grin spreading on her face, as the streams angled up slowly to go up to her shoulders and eventually her cheeks, sticky globs of the stuff rolling down her chest and sides and dripping to the floor.

As the green sprays tilted down the way, she wriggled from side to side making them spray on to her back and tummy, giggling at the ticklish feeling of it on her waist. Suddenly a hooter blared and she disappeared under a wide flood of yellow gunge from the ceiling with a loud squeak.

Jess laughed as the smooth custard-like liquid domed out over Skye's head, the upturned bowl shape spilling outwards and breaking as it hit the continuing side sprays. Her hands poked through the twitching dome briefly as she brought them up to protect her face, leaning out to the side to get her head away from the slimy downpour. Sliding her slippery arm around to the side of her head, she moved it up to cover her ear, shaking her coated head to try and get the gunge off as she struggled underneath the flow.

As quickly as it had begun, the flood from the ceiling shut off, leaving the husky girl to straighten up again, batting at the continuing green jets of goo slapping at her waist. Her eyes were firmly squeezed shut but she still had a grin on her face as she wriggled up in the seat, the yellow layer of gunge sliding down her body and dripping from her soaked hair and muzzle. At that moment the klaxon whooped and the yellow stuff splurged down from the ceiling again, a little further forward this time and splattering heavily into Skye's lap.

The husky girl leaned backwards and to the other side this time, her hands out in front of her and shaking her head to try and keep her face away from the gungy wave. A couple of streaks of slime licked over the door and dribbled slowly down the way as the flood subsided.

The klaxon continued as Skye gradually became visible again, a mess of yellow and translucent green gunge. As the sprayers at her sides slowly eased back, making a dribbling sound as the green stuff slopped into the puddle at the bottom of the tank, she brought her hands up to her eyes and used two fingers on each one to wipe the slimy stuff away from them, dragging her hands down her muzzle to clear it off. She froze as the klaxon abruptly dropped to a continuous lower blare, and just had time to bring her hands back to her eyes before a thick column of heavy black grime poured in from the ceiling.

Jess glanced to the side to see the others' expressions as Skye was covered in the lumpy slop - Yasa was gaping fascinatedly into the tank and Helen was giggling a little to herself, looking embarrassed at watching what was happening. She turned back to watch as the goo slithered all over the husky girl after pouring onto her head, not doming out but creeping down and sticking to her messy fur, mingling with the bright yellow to form a murky dark green and making a hideous glooping noise as thick streams of it dripped off her. Skye rocked back and forward, her hands just visible balled up next to her head as the gunk slid over them.

After tilting from side to side a little and slapping on to her shoulders, the black stuff eventually eased off, the last few dollops smacking heavily on to the husky girl's head as she slowly sat upright. She dragged her hands over her messy face, clearing it off a little, and hesitantly blinked her eyes open, their color showing up brightly against the rest of her mucky fur.

Slapping her gungy hands on to her knees with a wet smacking noise, she managed another smile out at the others. The gunk oozing and dripping from all over her made a continuous slapping sound as it hit the bottom of the tank. She gasped, twitching as the gooey streams from the sides spurted into life again, slurping against her waist and cleaning a little of the black stuff on her sides and shoulders away as they played up and down.

Jess realized that she was holding her hands over her mouth, and slowly dropped them to her sides, giggling as the gunged husky girl sighed to herself, sagging down as the streams finally shut off. Her once gray fur was almost completely hidden under a murky layer of mixed dark and light glop, which was still running down and mingling into itself with every slight movement she made. As the lights in the rest of the room flickered back into life, Alex energetically stepped up beside the dripping gunge machine.

"Well, Skye," he started, smiling cheerfully in at her as she raised her head under the weight of the gloop to look him in the eye, "I'm afraid you didn't quite escape in the end, but two questions right means that that gunging earned you fifty points for the team." With a quiet laugh, she rolled her eyes and nodded.

"How did it feel to be gunged by Jess?" he asked nonchalantly. Jess's mouth fell open and tried to stutter something by way of apology, but the husky girl's shoulders shook in a laugh as she brought her hands up to wipe at her shoulders.

"I'll get my own back on her later," she said simply. She wiped at her eyes again, trying to clean the rest of her face off with her other hand.

"Well, the good news is that we're at the end of the second round and it's time to get you into the showers. I hope that there's some water in the reserve tanks somewhere... Anyway, fifty points for the game brings you up to..." - he brought up his pocket computer again and idly tapped at the screen - "well, the same as you had in the last round, actually. Another two hundred and sixty brings you up to a half-time score of 520!"

The husky girl nodded relievedly, bringing her hands up and letting the black ooze trickle from the ends of her fingers. She shuffled back in the seat as Alex pulled the switch next to the tank, making the metallic door slide back into the floor, then carefully put a foot down on the slippery floor. Alex took her hand to help her up and she unsteadily got out of the tank, revealing the yellow and green stained chair and back wall just before the door slid closed again.

"Come on, let's go and get you cleaned up..." he reassured her as he led her towards the door. "Skye, I have to say to you - that was pretty spectacular..."

Jess walked behind them as they left the room and headed back down the corridor they'd just come from, Skye dragging the murky gunge off her face and flicking it to the floor or towards Alex. She shuddered as she became aware of the remnants of the slippery green slime she'd been covered with still clinging to her - she was looking forward to being clean again at least for a little while.