Into the Game, Part 3 (Fantasy TFTG)

By FoxFaceStories

A Story Tier Prompt for TGSorcerer

David and June are a happy married couple who love to play geeky fantasy tabletop games together. But everything goes wrong when they try a new two-player card game and instead are sucked into a fantasy world - one where David is his burly dwarf cleric and June is stuck as her lithe catfolk rogue.

First Part

Previous Part

Part 3: A Mystical Curse in the Dark Forest

Strongborn Ironarm and Naralae held hands as they walked down the lonely road towards the dark forest that the game had prophesied for them. The strongly-built dwarf chuckled as his wife removed herself from his grip to easily climb up a tree and retrieve some fruit for them.

“And to think you once hated heights!” the former human said.

“That was when I was June!” Naralae proclaimed, the sexy grey-furred catfolk moving with ease and then acrobatically leaping down to the ground again. “Now I’m your catgirl, honey.”

She bent down and kissed him passionately, and he took advantage of the moment to pat the fur along her lower back. He loved how it felt, and she loved being petted now, to the point where she actually purred.

“Mhmm, you like my fur, don’t you?”

“Just like you love my dwarven muscles,” Strongborn said.

She giggled. “Among other things,” Naralae replied, letting her tail curl and caress his crotch suggestively for a moment. Now enjoy the fruit! I suspect this and our rations might be the last thing we eat before we enter this dark forest.”

“Anything to expect, do you think?”

Naralae shrugged. “All we know is that this is one of the challenges we have to go through to get out of Erutell and back to real life. There’s a ‘mystical curse in the dark forest’ that we’ve got to overcome, whatever that is.”

“Well, you’re the librarian, honey,” Strongborn said.

“Was a librarian.”

“Still, any ideas of what the dark curse could be? Folklore and the like?”

She purred while they approached the dark forest’s edge. It loomed menacingly, the trees tall and foreboding, their leaves dark, the mist preventing one from seeing too far in.

“Well, a lot of folklore has cruel witches in the forests. Or moral tests. Given how we’ve been changed, we could be changed again.”

“I’d prefer not,” the dwarf said, admiring his muscled and armoured form. “I’m rather liking this dwarven body. Though I suppose I could be some goliath; it would be nice to be taller than my wife again.”

At this, she teased him by bumping her chest directly into his face. “Please, you like having my big furry boobs at head height.”

“Ah, then I retract my previous opinion!” he declared.

They rested and ate, devouring the fruit and their rations. And then, just because they were a little nervous and it was already late in the afternoon, the pair decided to pitch their tents and wait until tomorrow before voyaging in. It also gave them an excuse to vent their lusts upon one another. They made love beneath the stars out in the open view, with Naralae riding her dwarven husband and letting him play with her large furry breasts and suck on her nipples. It was pure ecstasy, and she let loose a loud meow while he exclaimed a battle roar in dwarvish. The pair had always had their own little kinks bound up in their tabletop personas, and now they could finally live them out, it seemed.

***

The dark forest was not named poorly. It was indeed dark, even in the midst of a sunny day as they travelled through it. The canopies were thick, and Naralae had to climb high just to get a sense of how they were travelling. Soon though, the trees were too tall for even her to ascend without getting tired, and instead she had to flit and climb through small spaces while Strongborn hacked his own path through with his axe. The mists were getting thicker, and they had to stay close, but their own unique ways of travel would separate them sometimes: she would have to scurry across a chasm by leaping through the trees while he used his dwarven strength to simply leap the gap.

“This really is a creepy forest!” Naralae said. “And so silent! Even my cat ears aren’t picking anything up.”

“Lucky you,” Strongborn said, his shield glimmering with celestial light, “because I can sense a nasty presence in this mist.”

“Undead?”

He nodded. “Definitely. I can’t pinpoint it, though. It’s like it’s all around us. We should be careful, and ready to smite any danger, my love.”

“Just like we do whenever we play at the table, honey,” she said with a wink.

The pair continued to venture through the eerily silent forest. Strongborn tried to keep his focus on detecting the presence of undeath, but that proved his undoing, because when his catfolk wife easily stepped across a fallen log crossing a broken stretch of the earth, he lost his footing on some of the loose moss because he was too busy concentrating.

“Aghh!” he shouted, falling down into the earth and hitting his rump painfully on the ground. 

“Honey!?” Naralae shouted from high above. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”

She couldn’t see, even with her cat-like vision, into the darkness, and she immediately began to panic. “Please tell me you’re alright!?”

Strongborn stood up, his shield lighting up to show her that he was okay.

“I’m fine!” he declared. “Just bumped my ass. Lucky I’ve got this armour and this dwarven constitution.”

“Yes you are, honey. That would have killed me, I suspect! Do you want me to come down?”

Strongborn grimaced. This place he’d fallen into looked like the entrance to a cave, one that had the scent of death in it. Undeath, even. 

“No!” he yelled. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. You keep going ahead, sweetie. I’ll meet you back up there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Aye,” he said in a dwarven-like manner. “This feels like the path for a cleric. Don’t want a catfolk down in little tunnels where none of your abilities can function well.”

Naralae nodded, understanding his point, but still fearing for her husband.

“You make it out the other side, my beautiful dwarf husband!” she declared.

“Don’t you worry, love! I want to touch that furry backside of yours again soon!”

She giggled. They were really getting into this. But now they were going to be split up, and neither were too happy about that.

Not with a mystical curse they were yet to face.

***

Naralae jumped across the tree branches. It was lonely without her husband. Without her David. Or Strongborn now, as she easily thought of him as. Still, she was a catfolk rogue, capable of great feats of athletics and acrobatics, and she needed to draw upon both now, because the forest was starting to become harder to traverse. 

“Ewww,” she whined as she landed on the next treebranch. “Is that - a cobweb?”

She hurriedly used her paws to get it off her nose, only for her eyes to widen as she took in the path of the forest ahead. 

Webs.

Webs everywhere.

Enormous spiderwebs with thick, rope-like webbing that spoke of much, much larger arachnids than would ever be possible in her own reality. But here in Erutell, it seemed the classic threat of giant spiders were real. 

“Oh God,” she whimpered. “Spiders. I hate spiders.”

She took a heavy breath, patting her own fur and calming herself. Her tail was still ramrod straight, but after some petting it began to soften too. 

“Just think of your husband, Naralae,” she told herself. “And your goal. You’re going to gain access to a forbidden place. Obtain riches. Get a happy ending on that beach.”

Of course, the image on the card she’d drawn also showed a rogue being fed grapes by numerous fawning women, but she doubted that part would be literal. Instead, she focused on the calm of that image.

“And jump!” she declared.

She launched from her tree and began to leap and twirl and swing and dance between the branches. The webs were everywhere, and she had to literally somersault through the gaps in some of them. It was as exhilarating as it was terrifying, but still she moved with alacrity, eager to reach the end.

“I’m doing it!” she declared. “I’m actually doing it! I’m - agh!”

Her foot caught in some webbing, and she immediately fell from her branch, sticking into an enormous spider web that hung in a clearing, massive and surrounded by many other, slightly smaller webs. Naralae groaned, trying to pull herself free, but her strength was too little, and each pull only made her stick tighter. And then the skittering began, and large dark shapes began to emerge from the mist.

“Oh God! Oh shit! Strongborn! David! Husband! HELP ME!”

They were huge, each the size of a fridge, their black abdomens sleek and shining, with a thick red line over the top. They were moving along the web silently towards her. Naralae was starting to panic.

“Get away from me! I’ll kill you! I will!”

But she didn’t even have her dagger in her hand. The spiders drew closer, closer, closer, and then -

A loud shriek, high-pitched and unnatural, and the spiders fell back. They rimmed the edge of the web, their red eyes watching her, glowing slightly in the mist.

“What? Who was that?”

“I am the Mother of Spiders,” echoed a voice from above. Naralae shivered, looked up. A huge profile of an arachnid was far above, as large as a house, its abdomen bloated with eggs. “And you are in my home.”
“I was just passing through! I swear!”

“You threaten my young!”

“They were going to eat me! I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hurt them, and I still haven’t! I - I love spiders! I really do!”

The large creature shifted far above. Eight enormous red eyes stared down upon her from one hundred feet or more away.

“You . . . love spiders? Few love my kind. Most despise them.”

“N-not me!” Naralae lied. “I love a good arachnid!”

“Interesting. Perhaps you will not be our lunch. Perhaps I shall bless you, and curse you. I cannot let a trespasser go easily, but since you claim to love spiders so much, I shall leave my mark upon you, and let you go. Do you agree to these terms?”

Naralae nodded rapidly “Yes, yes! I agree! So long as you don’t eat me, I agree!”

The spider twitched. Its eyes glowed as it descended, revealing its impossible size. 

“Then take this curse, outsider. Gain the spider’s form.”

Naralae began to grunt and groan. Beneath the spider’s glowing gaze, her form twisted. She gasped, trying to ask what was happening to her, but it was already too late. Her fur was withdrawing, her lower half growing and extending, her ass swelling beyond imagining. 

“No! I didn’t - oh God! OHHHHH!!!”

By the time her legs began to split in two, and more limbs started to form, Naralae realised she had made a very, very big mistake. But by that point, her eyes were already beginning to glow, and her abdomen was enlarging to impossible proportions.

***

Strongborn crawled through the tunnels, his beard bristling with tension. He had to hack his way through at times, or use his dwarven strength to push aside stalactites and other obstacles, but he was making steady progress. Slowly the tunnel was changing, widening, but it was going down instead of up, much to his frustration. And the undead presence was growing stronger. 

“You are in my domain,” a woman’s voice whispered in his ear suddenly.

“Fuck!” he cried, readying his shield. He looked around, but within the glow of his cleric power he could spot no true enemy, just shadows that seemed to stretch impossibly around him. 

“Hearing things. Not a good sign. Unless it’s a revenant or something. Then it’s a really, really bad sign.”

He soldiered on, relying on the courage his dwarven form gave him, and the stubbornness that infused it as well. He entered a large chasm, and when the rocks gave way he found himself skidding down into it. He readied for a hard landing, but instead the dwarf’s feet landed on something much . . . crunchier.

Bones.

Lots of them.

Mounds and mounds of bones covering the entire cavern floor.

“Fuck,” he said. “Okay, this is very much where the undead presence is. On your guard, Strongborn.”

As David, he’d fought off dozens of supernatural threats while playing tabletop games, especially as his favourite dwarven cleric. He relied on his powers now, illuminating the space around him, turning slowly as he advanced through the chamber.

“You will be cursed, Strongborn. You have entered a cursed place, and you will be changed by it. Death will come to you. As it came for me.”

Again, that sweet woman’s voice speaking those horrific words. Strongborn turned again, holding out his axe.

“Who are you!?” he demanded.

For just a moment, he saw the image of a woman, a beautiful noble in an elegant outfit befitting her station. She was ethereal and transparent, her eyes unnaturally dark. She smiled at him from afar, standing atop a mound of bones.

“I died long ago. I wished to warn my true love not to go to battle, but instead my corpse fell here, between the two armies who had taken my love. I rose. I cursed them. I ensured their bones would lie here forever . . . as yours will, Strongborn.”

She raised her arms, and suddenly hordes of nightmarish spirits, sickly green in colour, leapt from her finger tips. Strongborn yelled in horror, but ran to her, beating aside the spirits with his radiant axe and celestial shield. He roared in a battle rage as he surged towards the spirit.

“I am no soldier! I am looking for my true love as well! I’m not like them, I’m just like you! Now let me pass!”

The spirit’s eyes went wide. “Just like . . . me? Very well.”

And then she vanished, and darkness reigned once more. Strongborn trembled, feeling that this was too easy. And he was right, because suddenly his feet were sucked into the bone pile he stood upon.

“Gah!” he exclaimed. He slashed at the pile, but it was like quicksand, opening as a great maw to suck him down among the rib cages and skulls and leg-bones.

“No! Vile spirit! Let me go!”

“I will let you go,” her voice echoed as he was pulled further in. “You are like me. It is time for you to become like meeeee . . .”

Suddenly, the bones began to pull against him. He struggled, but one by one they pierced his body. Strongborn screamed, but the pain did not come, not even as shard after shard of bone tore through him. He was dragged down into darkness, but it was as if he was watching the event take place, instead of actually experiencing it. He was having an out-of-body moment, he realised. That thing people talked about when they died on an operating table before being revived. Except this was no dream; he was actually starting to float upwards, passing through the bone pile he’d just been pulled down through.

“What!?” he said, only to clutch his throat. His voice was all wrong. His body felt all wrong. He was floating upwards, he was flying. And yet he did not possess a dwarven form anymore. He could already tell that he was taller, more slender, and his voice had sounded almost . . . womanly. Panic in his being, he shot up out of the bone pile, his form moving through it in an ethereal manner. He continued upwards, right into the middle of the massive chamber. The noblewoman’s spirit awaited him there, a beautiful woman with ghostly blonde hair and a slightly deranged smile.

“You are so beautiful now,” she whispered. “So much like me.”

It was only then that the terrified Strongborn looked down and realised that his own body was not only transparent and ghostly, but that his figure was definitely not a dwarf’s anymore, and certainly not male. Instead, two prominent breasts pushed up by a fine noblewoman’s dress were now in view, and his hair, long and white-blonde in its transparency, fell down over his shoulders on either side.

“Oh, spirits!” the new woman cried.

And then she screamed, flying through the cavern roof to get away.

***

Naralae was still trying to get used to her grotesque new body as she fled from the web-filled region of the forest. The mist was starting to disappear and the moonlight had come through, but that only reminded her of just how much she had changed. Where once she had been a sleek, grey-furred and beautiful catfolk, one with lovely proportions as she had always dreamed of possessing, now her figure was much, much more monstrous.

“Spider legs! I’ve got fucking spider legs! Eww, they’re so gross! And too many!”

She scuttled over a log with surprising ease, her eight long spider legs moving swiftly and almost elegantly, which somehow made the experience all the worse. The Mother of Spiders had transformed her into a half-spider; humanoid up top, but arachnid from the hips down. Naralae had never felt so alien inside her own skin before; having a tail and fur was nothing compared to this. Now she had oil-black skin across her entire form - even her once-pale upper half was black as midnight - and with a huge thorax bulging out from behind her. It was round and swollen and kinds of wrong, and she could literally feel the spider-silk being formed inside of it. Upon the back of her massive abdomen was a thick red line, like that of a redback spider from Australia, the one she’d seen images of when she’d travelled there with David. It matched her new hair, which was long enough to go down to the small of her back, and was a vibrant red as well. Not ginger, mind, but actually red. A deep crimson red that now matched her eight eyes.

The drider pulled to a stop as she came to a pond. She examined her reflection in it and gasped, cringing at the sight of her arachnid lower half. She didn’t have any bristles or hair, at least, but the sight of her was truly strange. She had two normal eyes, albeit ones that were entirely red with black pupils in the center, and then six smaller red dot-like eyes around them. Her vision was indeed marvellous, but the fact that she could look in several directions at once was still deeply weird. All of it was, right down to having so many limbs, and a massive lower half.

“God, my ass is so big. A big black spider butt. What will Strongborn think? Is there a way to cure it?”

She sagged a little, and her breasts jostled. That was another thing; her skirt had ripped apart but her chest wrap had stayed together. Only now it was straining to contain her chest, which were large black teardrop mounds, each feeling almost the size of her own head in size. They were topped with large grey nipples, and she badly needed something else to wear. Not that she could cover her lower half. She was pretty sure her vagina was way back behind her spider abdomen at this point anyway.

“This is so weird!” she whined, curling all eight legs in agitation. “Too many limbs. Too much butt. Too many eyes. Too much . . . spider! Ugh! It doesn’t get any stranger than this!”

As if daring reality to defy her expectations, an ethereal and transparent figure suddenly emerged right out of the ground on the other side of the pond, moving through the ground without disturbing a single pebble. Naralae leapt back, her breasts nearly ripping through the chestwrap, her thorax bending. It squeezed, and she gasped at a sudden release as a thick web shot forth from it right at the ghostly figure, which was tinged a pale green.

“Agh!” she cried. “Get back!”

But the web passed straight through the spirit, who cried out in turn, flying to one side. 

“Monster!” the ghost screamed, putting out her hands as if ready to fight using some supernatural power. Sure enough, they glowed green, illuminating the figure. She was a woman, one wearing a noblewoman’s dress, beautiful and elegant, with a corset underneath to push up her somewhat ample chest. Her hair was long and pretty, her face petite and young, perhaps in her early twenties, and despite the fear Naralae felt, she had to admit the woman was deeply beautiful. Still, she grabbed a sharp stick from the ground after lowering herself on her eight legs, then raised it at the spirit.

“Get back!” Naralae repeated. “I warn you, my husband is a dwarven cleric! He’ll be here any moment and banish you back to the underworld!”

The ghost woman paused in the air. Her face was not violent or scary, but just shocked. She looked like a sweet young thing, more sympathetic than hostile.

“N-Naralae?” she said in an enchanting English accent. “Is that really you? You’ve become a drider?”

The spider woman gasped. She stared at the ghost girl, who slowly floated closer.

“Strongborn?” she stammered. “David!?”

The ghostly beauty looked over herself. She looked like a beautiful Victorian woman, albeit one who had died and become an entrancing spirit.

“Um, I think I might need a new name now, sweetie.”

To Be Continued . . .