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Harlot Spotlight - Couchelaxa
🕑 Added 2024-02-20 13:56:10 +0000 UTCTime for another harlot spotlight and this time we'll be moving away from the smotherbuses and looking at the House's strange collection of artificial harlots. First up is the mysterious Couchelaxa.
Couchelaxa is a bit of an enigma within the House. Outside of her room she's only seen in her full 'invisible woman' outfit that covers every inch of her skin. She doesn't talk much, and when she does it's usually babbling about positions and the roles of dominator, epicurean, or supplicant. The other girls don't really know what to make of her. The Elegant Woman gossips that Couchelaxa might have got her brains scrambled after an epic sex session with a greater incubus, but that could just be idle gossip and rumour.
In her room she's finally revealed as a type of slime girl that disguises herself as a bed. When a man lies on her, she creates a more female form, sometimes multiple female forms to have sex with him.
As long as he took his clothes off first...
Couchelaxa does not like anyone getting on top of her 'bed' if they haven't undressed first, and will lash out violently at anyone that does.
What isn't known, and The Doctoress would like to keep it that way, is that Couchelaxa is one of The Doctoress's earlier creations. Inspired by slime girls and experimenting with flexible gels and rubbers for her milking sheathes, The Doctoress hit upon the idea of scaling a semen harvesting device up to the size of a bed, for a more complete and comfortable semen-draining experience. She gave Couchelaxa full sentience, to improve her efficiency, but the resulting personality ended up being a little... scatty.
Despite this, Couchelaxa does diligently harvest semen for her 'producer'. And while she does kill men who don't take their clothes off or by excessive draining should the man lie on his front on top of her, she doesn't do it frequently enough to earn the ire of The Madam.
And now the behind-scenes mechanics and inspiration.
Couchelaxa was originally a slime/jelly girl type of monster girl big enough to also form the bed to have sex on. I quite like this type of monster girl given the number of various 'cushion blobs' I've written.
The original plan for HoHH was to have the scenarios be hidden stat checks and the scenario be a straightforward scene that would flip to good or bad end depending on the stat check. Then with Couchelaxa and others the scenarios started expanding and I added choices for players to make while in the room.
Her mechanics are fairly straightforward. Make sure you take your clothes off and don't lie on your front. She even has an option for an early, safe, exit if the player needs a breather that round.
While I knew Couchelaxa was a bed slime, I thought I'd play up the mystery when the player first encounters and interacts with her outside of the room. Her appearance is intended to be misdirection. She's dressed up like the Invisible Man and the player can't see her when she enters the room. Is she an invisible monster girl? No, she's the bed.
(Maybe I'll add a proper invisible monster girl later).
She was written before the artificial beings had crystallised into an actual faction. I thought she was weird enough that she could be retroactively added to that group and explained as an early experiment. I did ponder about whether to reveal that here as faction affinities will become a major mechanic and having a few harlots where their membership is disguised or unknown adds more ambiguity to runs.
Unfortunately, as much as I love what Marwmellow came up with for the art (especially as it's not the easiest to make sexy), this piece might not make it into the final game. Currently I have a dilemma about when to show the full pinups within the game. In the initial demo it was during the Harlot Presentation stage. However, the more monstrous harlots (arachnes, lamias, etc) hide their true forms with illusion magic during this stage. Showing their pinup then would tip the player off. I don't have the budget to commission separate 'illusion form' and 'true form' pieces and it would be a little weird to show the full pics of some harlots and not of others during this stage. I think the best way to handle it would be to only show the harlot portrait during the presentation stage and then the full pinup when the harlot's true form is revealed in the room. This would also have be a nice game mechanic – if the player wants to see the full art of a harlot, they'd need to pick her and go up to her room.
This leaves Couchelaxa's piece in no-man's land. I don't need the full pinup if I'm only going to show portraits at that stage and her full pinup doesn't really match the in-room scene where she resembles a more typical blue slime girl. I think I'll need to commission an additional piece for that.
This piece is really nice though. I think Marwmellow did a great job on it.
I wrote this spotlight a couple of weeks back when I was queueing up material for future posts. Since then I hit upon the idea of combining the art with short profiles (like MGE) to release and promote the game release. I'll probably still commission an additional piece of Couchelaxa in the room, but it also means this lovely piece of art will also have a use outside of just cropping it for the portrait.
