CHAPTER FIVE - ELIMINATION
Our Story Thus Far:
Zack 'Zip' Zilch, the biggest loser in wealthy San Cajetan High School, has discovered he has the ability to control women's clothing with his mind. At the beginning of book 2 he managed to worm his way into accompanying the school's women's gymnastics team to a crucial meet. In the last couple of chapters, the team got settled in and Zip had a late-night encounter with Summer, the team captain. Now, the meet proper begins.
Notes:
this is a short, comparatively non-erotic chapter bridging us into the next major sex scene; as such it was submitted into Novels as is my usual policy for such chapters. While not much sexual happens in this episode, it is still worth noting that no characters appearing in this work are under the age of eighteen.
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The next morning Zip dragged himself out of bed, and met up with the girls at the university dining hall for breakfast. Pre-competition nerves kept the conversation quiet. It was a slightly chilly morning so the ladies were mostly covered up in school-branded athletic suits. Or at least, the rich ones were - the poorer teams just wore sweats. Regardless, Zip didn't get quite as much of a show as he hoped.
Zip kept anticipating a reaction from Summer. But she didn't say a word to him, barely even looked at him. He immediately got the impression she was keen to keep the places her lips had been a complete secret - and he went ahead and followed suit.
But there were a few signs of what they had been up to, if you knew to look for them.
For example, when they were in the line for breakfast Zip, two trays behind her, saw Summer reach out and grab a banana. Her fingers alighted upon it - and then paused. Slowly, they caressed down it, and her face briefly became lost. Then she let out a little gasp. Taking her hand off it, she grabbed up an apple instead and then hurriedly scooted her butt further down the line.
At another point, while they all sat at a big table and ate in mostly silence, she lifted a glass of milk to her lips and began to sip. Then, suddenly, they locked eyes across the table. She stared at him, and her lips quivered - as a steady stream of pearly white fluid flowed between them. For a moment, it almost looked like she was going to giggle. Then, she broke off, turned her head, and suddenly seemed to find something just fascinating outside the window.
But if Coach Swan or any of the others noticed any of these little clues, they gave no sign of it. And soon enough they were all tramping into the competition space so that the grand purpose of the entire exercise could get underway.
The competition itself was to take place in a large gymnasium. Bleachers ran down both of the long sides. One, behind them, was reserved for competitors. The other, on the far side, was for spectators - but was currently only sparsely populated.
In the center of the gymnasium, there had been set up one of each of the critical pieces of apparatus for the girls to do their thing: a set of parallel bars, a balance beam, a vault and landing area, and a specially prepared and marked area where the floor routines would take place. A large bench, overlooking all of them from the north wall, held the judges; of whom there were three.
After some brief opening ceremonies, the teams all ascended up into the bleachers. Each selected an invisible space upon the bleachers within which they would camp, with a decent separation between them - forming little islands of girls spaced out across bleachers designed to accommodate about twenty times their number. San Caj ended up occupying a few rows at or just above floor level at one corner - and Playa the highest seats, looking down from above, at the very opposite end.
Then after some short opening ceremonies, the competition began.
What followed was every single girl from every team doing each of the four events. This was not without visual interest for Zip. Over and over again he got to watch one pretty girl after another descend to the floor level, strip down to a skimpy and sparkly leotard, and then go put her superbly svelte body through a fascinating series of acrobatic motions. This, repeated many many times over, occasionally interrupted by one of 'his' girls suddenly asking him to fetch something - water, say, or a spare jacket - describes the vast majority of Zip's day.
Zip was still hardly an expert, but he had absorbed enough to see that all the top teams performed almost exactly to expectations - not significantly better, but neither significantly worse. Xiao Xiao did accomplish a spectacularly perfect rendition of her vault routine, but then stumbled very slightly on her landing - making Coach Swan wince visibly as she imagined the deducted points. Two of Playa's girls had major hesitations at beam, which allowed San Caj to briefly pull ahead - but then a couple of missed maneuvers on bars pulled them back into second again. When it came time for floor, Summer seemed to be in the zone, flowing through her routine in an exceptionally smooth fashion, and got high points from two of the three judges for artistry - but put one foot out of bounds after a sequence of flips, which brought her back down to Earth, especially with the third judge. It was Zip's turn to wince, and he hoped that wasn't due to him - but when she came back Summer put blame on no one but herself for the literal mis-step.
Speaking of the judges, this was an area that Zip was absorbing for the first time. There were three, and as the girls themselves apparently long since had, he quickly divided them up into two groups: the 'fair' ones, and the 'bad' one. The first two were Judge Fukuda, the head of the gymnastics department at the college playing host to the meet; and Judge Butler, a woman who based on Zip's brief wikipedia digging during a moment of downtime had once been in contention for but never made it onto the U.S. National Gymnastics team, married into money, and now seemed to devote her time to officiating events exactly like this one and giving private lessons down-state.
The third judge was named Alicia Morgan, and all Zip seemed to be able to find about her was that she was some mid-tier official in the state gymnastics association.
"What's her deal?" he asked Rylee and Haley, after he watched the third consecutive instance of Morgan's numbers coming in slightly lower than the other two for a San Caj girl - Xiao Xiao on bars, in this case - and right in line with the other two for the Playa girl who came after her.
"Tell us about it," Haley growled.
"She can justify every last one of those rulings," Rylee admitted. "But... come on."
"What's up with her?" he asked.
Haley rolled her eyes. "She and Playa's coach went to the same all-girls private school, when they were our age," she said.
"Oh," Zip said. "Shouldn't that be enough to disqualify her?"
"Apparently not," Haley said.
"It was for, like, a year, and they were two years apart," Rylee said. "No one can prove a thing, but you know what I think?" She turned her head and covered up her lips with her hand, and then did, to Zip's limited experience to date, a pretty dead-on imitation of a tongue eating out a pussy.
As it happened, Coach Swan was walking right behind them at that instant. Doing a quick back-step, she bent down rapidly beside them.
"You cut that out right now," she hissed to her two girls - and, peripherally, to Zip. "All our judges are consummate professionals, with way more experience in the sport than you, and their rulings are clear and just. And you will not say one word to the contrary to anyone, ever. Do I make myself clear?"
The two girls blanched, and quickly nodded - shifting their bodies back into as perfect an image of two well-behaved young ladies as they were capable of.
She straightened back up. But Zip, with less reflexive fear of her, was still not quite convinced.
"But..." he said, as he saw the same pattern seem to start to repeat itself, this time for Ileana.
"You don't have a clue what you're talking about it," Coach Swan hissed to him. "She values technical precision over artistry, but that is a justifiable rubric." For a moment, he saw a flicker of anger on her face, that did not seem to be directed at him - but she suppressed it quickly. "If you have any opinions to the contrary," she informed him, "you are welcome to bring them up once we are on the bus and going home."
With that, she turned and stalked away.
At the end of the day's competition, things were more or less as the girls had expected and feared going in: Playa was in first, San Caj trailed behind. Which meant they would come back to face their rivals the next day - but would do so from the significant underdog position. If the scoring didn't radically change, the result wouldn't either.
The only significant deviation from the pattern was in the race for Top Individual Overall - here, Summer and Heidi were neck and neck. But, though potentially a significant honor if she did manage to claim it, it wouldn't get his Emotional Support Girlfriend to State if her team didn't get over the top with her.
That they were doing their best to fight against this exact analysis themselves was visible on every last one of the girls' faces as they trudged back to their dorm. There had been hope on their faces the night before. There still was some - but less of it, and the conversations were significantly less animated.
Once they were back in the dorm, Coach Swan called her girls together for a pep talk in the hallway - and a thorough dissection of what they would have to do differently if they wanted to make up the deficit the next day.
In the midst of all of this stern-faced deliberation, Zip seemed to almost have been forgotten. After all, while he had fulfilled his menial duties well, he would hardly have anything to contribute to a discussion on the finest points of athletic technique and strategy. And, with all of her girls right in front of her, it wasn't as if he could get into any mischief with any of them.
This, of course, was a significant tactical error on her part.
Zip, left to his own devices in the entryway, could not help but notice that the Coach had left her door wide open. He sidled over next to it. Then, he glanced down the hall. Coach Swan stood with her fit and curvy backside to him. Her girls, arrayed before her, were all looking up at her intently. Their view was, in any case, mostly obscured by her own body.
He took a few steps closer. He was not almost entirely invisible, around the corner. He waited a few more seconds - and still heard no reaction, nor saw Coach Swan turn around to chastise him. So then he went through the door, and into her room.
Just inside the door, he paused for several seconds. He waited, listening intently for the sound of one of the girls, calling him out. If they did, he could still probably summon up an excuse - like that he had seen a mouse, maybe. The building seemed old enough.
But, no verbal warning from any of the girls came. After about a half a minute, Zip judged himself to be in the clear. And so, still bathed in the drone of her voice from down the hallway, he began to explore the Coach's unattended room.
A couple of casual observations previously had led him to assume - and a quick peek into the drawers of the built in dresser, finding them empty, quickly confirmed - that Coach Swan had not moved in, in favor of living out of her luggage. In the corner, a mesh bag held her dirty clothes from the previous day. Besides that, as far as he could tell, all the belongings not currently on her person were in the large duffel bag she had brought, which was currently lying on her bed.
Striding over Zip seized the zipper. He silently unzipped it. Keeping a close ear turned towards the door, to make sure Coach Swan's voice was still droning on, he began to rifle through her bag.
