Here's the second (and last) post that went from 'KOFtober Prompt' to a 'December dump'. It was already like halfway finished before I gave up on trying to upload it in October, but since I've barely felt motivated to write lately, it took weeks to finally decide to finish.
Even though it's less than a thousand words long. Yeah.


The Illusion had closed up for the night already, except for one person that King needed for some private matters – a little bit of 'preparation for the future'...

"First off, you're leaning a bit too deep; you look like you're about to flip and fall right over..."

Yuri was looking at King's pose and she felt there was still some things that needed to be corrected.

She approached, preferring to get hands-on in trying to adjust King's positioning – and was almost immediately buzzed off.
"I know what I'm doing," King retorted. "I'm not some Barbie doll, I don't need you bending me around."

This 'session', as Yuri would prefer to call it, was going on for 20 minutes now...

What King wanted out of this, was some 'Instagram-worthy' snapshots for the bar's (along with her own) social media presence...
Keeping her online profile on the up-and-up was a stress-test on her already heavy workload; there was a reason she trusted Yuri to lifting even just a little bit of the weight of this off her shoulders, but it felt like that was still more than what the karate-girl bargained, based on how long King was forcing herself to hold the pose, gut and chest pressed over the bar-table as her upper-body curved over, compared to the moments-long hesitation on Yuri's part.

"Yuri, you want me to get scoliosis or something?" the blonde bar-runner said. "Just let me know if you get the shot already..."

From Yuri's position, her friend's proclamations were hard to not listen to, and yet she wasn't quite paying full attention where necessary – her eyes directly upon King's well-positioned form... perhaps too well-positioned to be able to focus... imagine what it would be like to be positioned right behind her—

"Uh, Yuri?"
"Hmm?"
Yuri's eyes made contact with King's – after so long spent on parts of King that definitely weren't the eyes.

The bartender had an unpleased glare in her eyes...
"Yuri, be honest. Are you still trying to take pictures, or are you just busy checking me out?"

"Uhhhhhhhh," The youthful Sakazaki droned, completely empty in words she could respond with.
It wasn't enough to stop King from preparing to see her friend out. "Y'know what, I think I'll just deal with this myself..."

"Waitwaitwait," Yuri stammered. "I know it seems rough right now but... you wouldn't mind if I had another idea, would you?"

"I would, if it meant you'd be spending more time staring than actually helping.
"I know what I'm doing!"
"I don't think you have a clue."
"N-no, trust me, King – we'll try one more thing, and if it doesn't work, maybe we'll figure out how to do this another way."

"As long as it doesn't get any weirder..."


It got weirder somehow.

King was no longer curving her body over the railing of the bar table like some well-shaped noodle – in fact, she wasn't exactly curving over anything other than the floor.

Her chest and arms pressed down against the floor, her head almost sideways from how she tried to recline it in the most 'comfortable' way possible – her legs spread far too wide to look like conventional posture, and her butt was lifted the highest off the ground out of any other part of her body. (aka, the Jack-O' pose, several months late to the party)

Yuri had the framing of the photo well-focused in her mind, her phone lifted in portrait mode to capture the prime parts of the pose from cheeks to head.
That eventually turned into the moment where she lowered the framing in defeat.
"Yeah. You're right. This is really stupid. Geez, how does Mai do it?"

All the while – just after Yuri's motivation to go on with the photoshoot slipped away from her, so did King's posture as the lower-half of herself rearing upwards towards the lights eventually came back down to equal-level on the floor with the rest of her.
The rough sensation of her pelvis hitting the floor was some sour icing on the cake on King's mood. "Well, there's your problem – I'm not Mai."

She climbed to her feet, and crossed her arms not long after.

"Yuri, tell me – you happen to be doing this 'photoshoot' stuff with Mai, too, right?"
"Y-yeah, a little..."
"Including the eye-fucking?"
"I wasn't doing that! P-please, I swear, it's not supposed to be like that!"

"You can tell me it's a Robert thing, Yuri. I know he's involved in some of your photos on your socials."
Yuri's face fell to a pinkish-red color as King's body leaned against hers.
"And I know he's into butt-stuff almost as much as you are."
Then King bumped hips with the karate girl, and that was the prompt for Yuri to make her awkward exit.

"I gotta go."
Within milliseconds, she was sprinting her way out the doors of the Illusion, and she was yards away from the establishment before long.

All who was left in the bar at that point was the woman who ran the place; after closing the doors, King called up a fellow friend on her phone – one who was, for sure, less likely to create such an awkward atmosphere.

"It didn't work out, Mai. … Yep, couldn't keep her eyes off me."