Ride of the Last Dwarf&Company (CasualVelociraptor/Mim)

[Madam Mim]

A warm wind blew out over the bay, carrying the scent of salt and sand off of of the harbor. Mersong drifted across town on the breeze. Travelers and tourists were beginning to converge on Port Mazanca in anticipation of the solstice, but the Merfolk had started early. They always did. Tamsyn smirked; the Merfolk knew how to have a good party, and more than once she'd snuck out to the pier in the middle of the night to follow what her father only half-jokingly called the "siren song." He would be keeping a closer watch on her until after the solstice and for that reason alone she highly suspected that Julen knew of her adventures.

She wiped the sweat off her brow and glanced sullenly up at the sun, then wiped again. She had stepped out of the stuffy mechanic's bay to get some air, but not even the breeze had cooled her despite the early hour. With a sigh Tamsyn began to turn back toward the shop, but paused as an aeroship began docking. She scowled at it for a moment before turning her head to call inside.

"Hey Pa!" While she waited she never took her eyes off of the ship. "Whad'ya think?" she asked as Julen emerged. "Some sorta Confederation junker?" She folded her arms across her chest as they watched.

Tamsyn bore no physical resemblance to her mother; Minette--long since passed--had been wide-hipped, with soft curves and soft chestnut eyes and hair and a voice like nightwaves. Nor did she bear resemblance to her father, tall and broad Julen with thick forearms and strong shoulders, with hair black where it wasn't gray and his piercing gaze. They had never discussed the fact that she was adopted, but she knew it for a fact nonetheless. Twiggy, freckle-faced Tamsyn whose only notable curves came from the ripe blossom of womanhood--and those only average--whose vulpine coloring always made her easy to find in a town like this, had known from a young age that anyone would have to be blind or stupid not to see that her mother had not birthed her. But as they stood at the bay of their garage in nearly identical stances, arms folded the same way, chins tilted up, eyes squinting against the sun, there could be no doubt whose daughter she was. As they watched the new ship, a stranger in a port which saw few of those, she nudged Julen with her elbow and pointed.

"That figurehead, hey?"

It was difficult to spot from here, but those with sharp eyes might be able to make out the flowing, maned figurehead of a dragon. The newcomers were recklessly brave, fools, or dangerous. Or some combination of the three.

"What'd you figure they want?"

 

[CasualVelociraptor]

“Why don’t you come up with a hypothesis about what they might want with Maza Mechanical, and then we’ll test it by asking Lady Nyrissa?” Julen grinned in that sly but reserved way that he had whenever he knew the answer to something but didn’t want to tell Tamsyn, as he watched the Gudarian airship adorned with Confederate trimming with a mixture of awe and wariness.

Almost from the time Tamsyn could walk and talk, she’d wanted to help out where she could in the shop and handling anything she touched intuitively, in either sense of the word. Julen and Minette recognized that she was a bright, precocious girl as a result, and neither of them had seen any reason to reign her in, an agreement Julen kept even after he became all she had. Even when she was about to touch something hot, or sharp, or otherwise dangerous, all Julen had to do was tell her to breathe, observe, and think, and think her way out of the problem she would.

Sometimes Julen wondered whether she was too young to be asking about the root causes of racially motivated revolutions in the Kingdom of Midvadir, or the political and economic motivations behind the Caledorian Empire’s invasion of Surabamba in 1865 during the Goliath War. And sometimes he had to shove her out the door just to get her interacting with people her own age, or at least anyone but him or a customer.

But then he’d see her curled up by the fire, voraciously reading Alice Guthrie pulp novels about the world renowned scientist and adventurer, or four different newspapers each from one of the different nations represented in their large, amazing bay, all of which were past his comprehension, and he’d smile.

Wherever she was now, he knew Minette was smiling too.

Still, as the colossal ship landed in the water, Julen didn’t know what to think. He’d woken in the middle of the night from the chirping of his scroll copier and had stayed up all night rereading the special request from this Lady Nyrissa that he’d never met before and didn’t know how he was going to handle given the sheer size of the job. Plus, something like this arriving here was bound to stir up some chatter...and not all of it was good.

 

[Madam Mim]

"Lady Nyrissa, huh?" Tamsyn continued to squint up at the ship as it berthed. "Welp, something tells me that wherever she's lady of, they don't know she's here. Where better to get something fixed or manufactured when you want to keep it a secret than somewhere like Port Mazanca?" With a sniff and a shake of her head, she rolled up her sleeves, pulled her goggles back down over her eyes, and headed back into the garage bay. "Whatever you agreed to do for her Pa, I sure hope you know what you're getting into."

~*~

"Widget darling, this is no time for games. We're already late as it is." Lady Nyrissa wasn't actual nobility; far from it. But Madame Nyrissa had always seemed too crass, too on-the-nose for her tastes. She pushed the back onto her earring and glanced in the mirror at the gyndroid. "I realize your programming has told you that it's appropriate for midmorning but we really must work on your discernment. Do put some clothes on please."

Widget frowned slightly and tilted her head. "But it is 10:15," she pointed out. "You always have need of me at 10:15."

"Nearly always," she corrected, smoothing down her skirts. "Sometimes our routines are interrupted, dear. And for the last time, put on some clothes. I won't parade you naked down the street like that." She gestured vaguely to the automaton, whose dress lay pooled around its feet. "It isn't respectable, and you know my feelings on respectability."

This was the primary reason they had come to Port Mazanca. Nyrissa had asked around for a mechanic who knew what they were doing, but who was also subtle. That had led them to this little nowhere tourist town and to Maza Mechanical. Widget had, in addition to a few physical issues, been questioning and second-guessing. It was irritating at best, but it had also meant that she'd had to take her out of port rotation until the issue was fixed. It wouldn't do, after all, for it to get around that Lady Nyrissa had a disobedient automaton who questioned her customers. She was losing money now with Widget out of the equation but it would be bad for business in the long run if she allowed the defect to continue in front of patrons. Once the bot was finally dressed Nyrissa strode briskly across the room and took her hand, opening the door impatiently with the other and almost immediately nearly tripping.

"Gwenner." She raised her eyebrows in mild surprised and looked down at the dwarf. "You're coming assure with us?"

Gwenner shrugged. "Is Solstice." This seemed to be enough explanation for her.

The Last Dwarf in existence was in general a woman of few words, at least without copious amounts of alcohol to pry her open. She also seemed to struggle with grasping Common, even after five years out of the ice which had preserved her, but what could you do? Language changed a lot in 12,000 years. Her face was generally a facade of craggy stone, and watching her moved to expression was a bit like watching water trickle along a mountain face, carving rivulets and canyons across eons. Even now as Nyrissa watched she thought she saw a fractional upturn of the corner of Gwenner's lips, perhaps a dull sparkle of excitement in her slate-colored eyes, but one could never be certain.

~*~

"So what exactly do you plan to do for Solstice?" Nyrissa inquired as they moved through the crowd. People stared at Widget, but she hadn't the capacity to care and Nyrissa had long since grown accustomed to it.

Gwenner shrugged. "Eat. Drink. Bed strange mens end be kicking out of them in mornink." She looked up at Nyrissa. "Is still how Solstice is of doing, yes?"

She inclined her head briefly. "Generally. Here, this is it."

Maza Mechanical Garage and Repair wasn't a large operation by any means, but it looked like they had their fair share of business. An airship was docked in one bay while in the other a security bot waited for attention. They really did do all sorts, didn't they? Nyrissa closed her parasol hooking it over one wrist and taking Widget by the hand with the other as they stepped into the mechanics bay where it was shadier but no cooler. With instructions to the robot to stay, she carefully stepped over to a pair of legs sticking out from under the airship and tapped them gently so as not to startle the mechanic. To her surprise a girl rolled out, no more than seventeen, and pushed her goggles up onto her forehead.

"Help you?"

"Yes, I'm looking for Julen minCarlile?"

"You Lady Nyrissa?" At a nod, the girl tilted her head back and her chest inflated before bellowing, "PA!! Lady Nyrissa's here!" The call echoed in the high rafters of the garage. With a grunt she sat up, then pushed herself to her feet and wiped off her hands. "Tamsyn monJulen," she said, sticking out her hand to shake. Widget provided a handkerchief once Nyrissa had done so. Tamsyn turned and looked down, and her eyes went wide. "You're a dwarf!"

"The Lest Dorf," Gwenner confirmed, shaking her hand firmly. "End you are gorrel."

Tamsyn nodded. That was fair enough. "The only girl," she returned, "here, anyway. And you are...?" She stuck her hand out to the pale woman.

"I am Widget." The answer was somewhat stilted and Tamsyn thought she caught a glimpse of displeasure in Lady Nyrissa's expression. Widget shook her hand. "Pleased to meet you." The smile was unsettlingly stiff, and she didn't blink. Her eyes seemed to glow slightly, but surely that was just a trick of the light coming into the bay of the dim garage.

How many posh ladies does it take to visit a mechanic? The opening of the joke made Tamsyn's lip quirk a little in amusement, and though she was quick to hide it she suspected Lady Nyrissa had caught it. The Lady's dress with its coppery-iridescent sheen put her in mind of a bug. Maybe something in the beetle family, Tamsyn mused, or a grasshopper.

"Widget is why we are here," Lady Nyrissa informed her in a very businesslike manner. "But I think it best if we wait for your father." The information was met with raised eyebrows, which was as much as Nyrissa had expected. A town like this she didn't imagine saw many pleasure bots, and certainly none as sophisticated as Widget. Nyrissa had built her herself, after all; a better, more advanced gynoid. She had a few of the cheap, mass-produced Xen bots lying around...but they weren't as lifelike and they broke easily. You got what you paid for. Widget was her primary moneymaker, usually even outearning her flesh-and-blood girls.

"She's very advanced," Tamsyn said, stepping forward to get a better look. "I mean, I've never seen one in real life before, but I've seen pictures of the Xen line. One of the guys had a calendar up in the office." She blushed a little. Julen had told Garreth to take it down because he didn't want his daughter seeing "that trash" in the shared office, but it was one of the few sources of ideal feminine beauty she had seen. "But you can still tell they're bots, even in pictures. It's in the eyes, and they hold themselves too stiff. May I...?" She gestured to the tiny nick in synthetic skin at the nape of Widget's neck. Without a mechanic's eye, no one would have seen it if they hadn't already known it was there.

Nyrissa nodded. Carefully Tamsyn removed the hair and peeled back the synthetic skin, revealing smooth musclework held together and functioning by thousands of tiny gears. Gradually she peeled back more and more, down to Widget's waist, and as she uncovered the skull she found the multifunction; pleasure bot, weapon, fixer. Tamsyn breathed in sharply as she counted all the functions in the skull alone.

"She's beautiful," she murmured, admiring the gearwork.

"Thank you." The voice was the same, but it was disturbing to watch her talk without lips to form the words.

Tamsyn looked up at Nyrissa, pausing as she circled Widget. "Steam?"

She inclined her head slightly. "And a bit of magic."

"So what's--Pa!" She stood on her toes to look over Widget's shoulder as Julen appeared. "You didn't tell me it was a bot like this!"

 

[CasualVelociraptor]

“That’s because I didn’t know it was a bot like this either, my little jumping bean,” Julen said. “Forgive me, my Lady, but in the scroll you sent me last night, you did not mention that this remarkable creation of yours was so lifelike. All with just a bit of magic, eh? What was it? A pinch? A tablespoon?” the weathered grease monkey chuckled, somewhat in disbelief.

Yet he was running out of skepticism. Walking metal beasts called Goliaths that towered over all the buildings patrolled Westgate on the Imperial side of the bay. Whaling trawlers fouled up the air with fumes and the futile cries of their doomed cargo. Aeroplanes circled colossal dragons a little too closely for his liking, almost goading each other into battle. Around town, supernatural powers could be bought and drunk from bottles called philters. He’d barely wrapped his head around getting an automatic security bot before his brain was swamped around wheeled horns moving by themselves and shouting slogans everywhere.

What’s more, he’d heard rumors from trade magazines about massive new copiers that could print entire books, magazines and newspapers at home and knew Tamsyn would love that (and so was starting to save up for it); music blared over the very air; ever bigger flying machines that could carry thousands around the world; and more besides. Many of them were being showcased at the Royal Artistic Industrial and Scientific Exposition today on the other side of the world in Radiant, the capital of Caledoria.

More and more each day, Julen felt as if the world was leaving his rusty old ass behind. But then he’d crack his stiff back, knuckle down and get to work...that always kept him focused, aside from his daughter. But boy did he ever have his work cut out for him.

Still, after looking around, he gave his verdict. “You were right- there’s definitely some sort of liquid gunking up the microdampfsteel actuators for the eyelids, which is making them counterrotate and jam, and her vocorder modulation strings have rust on them. I can see why you used these as opposed to a vocorder box, but strings tend to attract a lot of dust and other particulates; that combined with repeated use rusts them very quickly. Those two things I can fix for you today. As for the, uh, disobedience...consult a magician for that.”

Then he rose from his chair with some effort and turned to Tamsyn. “Could you find the microscraper and string lubricant? Meanwhile, I’ll look at the eyes a little closer,” he muttered, sitting back down and peering through his trusty if slightly off trend dialfocals.

Instead of seeing the problem, however, Julen smelled it and began hacking and covering his mouth with his nose. “Oh, oh...it’s a, er clear liquid with white blobs in it?” Then he paused with realization. “I...do I have to say it?” He might not have been university educated or anything, but as a man himself, he knew coagulated semen when he saw it.

 

[Madam Mim]

"Pa!" Tamsyn flushed at the pet name. She wasn't a kid anymore!

Nyrissa ignored it and merely stared at the mechanic as he made his joke, pressing her lips into a thin line and arching a well-groomed eyebrow. She had heard enough magic jokes from humans to last several lifetimes, and never bothered to even pretend to find them funny anymore. In truth they wore on her, like water slowly dripping onto a stone. Gwenner chuckled, though. When it came to "the mejik," she was nearly as bad as humans in that regard. Nyrissa listened patiently and nodded as Julen examined Widget, trying not to bristle at the accusations of disrepair.

"There is no other magician skilled enough to consult," she insisted through gritted teeth. "I know every inch of her, every spell, every component magical and mundane. I've looked her over five times and there is nothing magical wrong with her. It has to be mechanical, something I don't have the tools to catch."

"Begging your pardon, m'lady," Tamsyn interjected, not looking up from what might be considered Widget's brain, "but I don't see anything." She had saved up for nearly a year for a pair of new E6000 Pentafocus Goggles with dial-in irises and welding lens and jewelers loop attachments. While she enjoyed vehicle mechanics, and was good at it, her true passion was micromechanics. She was usually the one to handle bots and gadgets that came in, anything with cogs less than an inch diameter and in need of small hands and a sharp brain. The effect, however, was that of a particularly queer-looking bug or a mad scientist when she looked up at the customer. "She's got a few springs that could do with some oiling, but nothing that would cause behavior modification."

"Then look again," Nyrissa shot back tersely. "I can assure you, it's nothing magical in nature." She resisted the urge to snatch the girl up by the hair at the irreverent shrug before going to fetch the tools her father had requested. The elf was accustomed to being obeyed without question by her bot, her crew, and her conquests. "Are you insinuating that I don't keep my equipment clean, sir?"

Gwenner could be heard muttering "Hoh boys" under her breath.

"If I may, Mistress?" Widget interjected. "While all orifices are immaculately maintained, there are certain circumstances under which my occular receptors may need to be removed for maintenance. External cleaning may not be sufficient."

Her nostrils flared in irritation. "Shall we wait here or ought we come back later?"

 

[CasualVelociraptor]

“You should wait here. This should only take thirty minutes, tops,” Julen said calmly. He tended to find that the way to deal with angry people (and despite her pointed ears marking her as an elf and therefore an animal to be avoided to many folk here, he still considered her people) was to be calm with them. Unless they had murderous intent for some reason (which rarely followed the even tempered Mazani man), that usually de-escalated things.

“It also bears consideration that anything that can be built breaks eventually. All we can do as fellow craftspeople is repair as much as possible. You should therefore be proud that Widget has so few faults that need fixing right now, and those that do exist are easily remedied. Aside from having independent thought, something that I’m not convinced is a flaw given that the most advanced automatons in the Empire are still running on wax cylinder multifunction cores with incredibly slow instruction needles and so are probably decades if not a century from true intelligence, and you appear to have her powered by some kind of...crystal...that gives off completely clean steam. Anyway, my compliments. And the same goes to the dwarves for inventing clockwork in the first place, which we mere mortals have only resurrected, and is a lost art aside from bots.”

He nodded in the direction of both Nyrissa and Gwenner; it was surprising for him to see the latter, but he was not surprised to be surprised. His head was hurting and so he went back to work.

As he said this, an audience gathered around the elder repairman and his charge. First, a ship as opulent and refined as The Night’s Fire was bound to attract attention, especially once people heard about the, well, entertainment it offered- which thankfully was legal on both the Imperial and Alliance sides of the bay and only nominally prohibited by the Confederation and the Olsea Kingdom. Second, no one had seen a bot remotely like Widget before. And third, Tamsyn- a girl mechanic- was a sight to behold this side of Teergragia. That all meant free advertising for the business, a windfall which Julen was grateful to receive.

He was also grateful that he wasn’t a young man any more, as he was better able to hide any evidence of arousal by looking at both of the tall, slender ladies opposite him. It had been so long since he’d lain with anyone and if he had any money he would have contracted for Widget’s services. And he had never been simultaneously intimidated and turned on by a woman quite like Nyrissa.

 

[Madam Mim]

Nyrissa sniffed, mostly ameliorated. "She was not programmed to have independent thought." Pride prevented her from apologizing, but she found it reasonable not to look for further reason to snark at him. Even if he had questioned her maintenance, he had complimented her craftsmanship to make up for it. She glanced down at Gwenner, who radiated more than emoted an awkward, embarrassed sort of confusion at the mention of the dwarvish invention of clockwork.

"Eh...Thanks?" She shrugged.

She had not been there, after all, when clockwork had been invented. Gwenner didn't remember much from her time before the ice-in, but she knew that she wasn't an inventor. For one, she wasn't particularly book smart. Beyond basic function--language, motor skills, and muscle memory--she mostly remembered Aman, the god of peace and serenity, coming to her to tell her to stop fighting. Her destiny wasn't in the fighting pits, but in manufacturing a better world. She supposed she had listened, since there were no fighting pits on the glaciers she had been found in, and from what she had read (once she had learned Common well enough to read) the northern natives had protected the site of her burial as a shrine for nearly nine thousand years before getting wiped out. But she still couldn't remember what she had been doing in the ice to begin with. Random flashes of memory occasionally came to her, or dreams, but between those and her scars all she really knew about herself was that she had been a world champion prize fighter, then had given it up. Several people she'd met in her travels had mentioned the ingenuity of dwarves, and she always felt awkward taking compliments for it.

What Gwenner had learned since coming out of the ice, however, was that she was good for drawing attention. After boarding Nyrissa's ship three years ago they had struck a deal that she would get a cut of profits from whatever clients she brought in. It was typically an easy feat since between her and Widget folks had enough to oggle at. As people came and went out of the garage bay and small crowds waxed and waned around the mechanic and his daughter, Gwenner took notice of those who seemed to have a keen below-the-neck interest in Widget, or in Nyrissa for that matter--Not that they would get Nyrissa--and pulled them aside as they started to leave. With a smile and a wink she would hand them an embossed card and give them directions to the ship ("three night only") before sending them on their way. Those cards were hers specifically, and would tell Nyrissa just how much of the night's pull she should take.

"Mind if I take these out and clean them?" With her skin back on, Tamsyn felt a little weirder about just taking someone's eyes. With Widget's consent she carefully removed first one, then the other, and secured them gently but firmly in a clamp before taking a microblade to them while Julen worked on the sockets and strings. Carefully she scraped the dried-on crust before taking a firm toothbrush with cleaning solution to them. She was young, but she wasn't naive; she knew what Widget was for and what it was likely she was cleaning, so she handled them gingerly, trying not to touch it. "Want me to work on the blink timing sequence, Pa?" Without waiting, she opened the skull back up and started tinkering with the gears.

One of the many remarkable things about Widget was the attention to detail when it came to touch. Other bots were cold and you could feel the metal lurking just beneath the skin, but Widget had a bit of padding to her skin that made her feel lifelike. If Julen were to manually open her mouth he would notice that it was just as wet as a real mouth, though her external orifice lubricating fluids were mineral oil for a smoother glide. Her breasts were also soft silicone, filled with a colloidal fluid to mimic the feeling of real breasts. Nyrissa had even thought to imprint the silicone covering her hands with nonsense fingerprints and palm lines, and had as a joke once asked a gypsy fortune teller outside Fort Anankan to read her fortune. Much to their surprise and amusement, Widget was due to meet the love of her life within the next five years and bear him six healthy sons.

Nearly half an hour had passed when Tamsyn retrieved the eyes to replace them in the sockets. While her back was turned, Gwenner silently tucked a card into Julen's breast pocket with a nod and a wink. Once everything was put back together the pair stood back to admire their handiwork. Widget's stare was no longer unnerving as she blinked at irregular intervals, and upon testing her voice it no longer sounded so stilted. Once she had been pronounced "good as new" and tested to Nyrissa's satisfaction, the elf paid before taking the bot by the arm and leading her out of the bay.

"Heppy Solstice!" the dwarf called over her shoulder with a wave.

 

[CasualVelociraptor]

Heppy Solstice indeed! As the binary suns of Emada set after hanging in the sky for longer than usual, a long lost sexual fertility ritual that was coopted by the Caledorian Church of Solstice into a day of somber reflection and then coopted again into a drinking, partying and shopping spree by corporations and youth of all ages as well as people of all religious persuasions and none was beginning. Restaurant doors were thrown open, gift shops sold buckets of tacky metallic souvenirs, and the booze and psychedelic sweetgrass flowed freely. There was much dismay among the few Knights and Supplicants of the Church who roamed the streets pleading with people to use this occasion to turn back from the anger of Father Vitalis (the name of the larger sun) and the sorrow of Daughter Luminas (the name of the smaller sun) at the public displays of partial nudity, drunken bawdiness, and even- GASP!- homosexual affection. But from behind their traditional Solstice Suns & Moon Masks, empowered people of all species, races and lacking sobriety levels told them to fuck off and reveled in the light of the moon, Brother Nefaris.

As the party gained momentum, Charles “Chuck” Poidien, a plumber’s son from the southern Alliance island nation of Kampaya who had just finished (more like barely put in the effort to coast through) his freshman year at Four Nations Bay Technical College, was already on his second dragonsbane shot and third pipe of sweetgrass at the tacky Whale of a Time bar. With these injections of chemical stimulation and courage, and all inhibition or common sense draining from his head, he began pursuing his main goal in life...

Getting. All of. The VAG!

He’d lost his virginity here barely a year ago, just before starting school. Compared to Kampaya where there were hardly any caves to pillage (there was one cute girl in her 20s he’d given the side eye to when she came to visit who told him she wasn’t a cradle robber and ran off with a minotaur), Port Mazanca was paradise. He’d probably goliathed (also known as liathed or stomped) at least a hundred women at last count. Caledorian, Bamban, Gudarian, High Elf, mermaid, nymph, vampiress (that was a close one!), succubus- if it had tits and a vagina he’d been inside it. Usually with a home brewed cocktail of contraceptives and anti-venereals in his system rather than a warding cloth because there was no better feeling than colonizing fresh new lands with an entire army of cum.

And then, for the past month or so, he’d been getting sly looks from a ROYAL redhead who he’d thought was a Caledorian but upon further inspection realized was a local, maybe a couple years younger than him but with the hills and valleys of a far older woman. Then it’d escalated into hilarious flirting, nose pokes, butt pinches, and even the occasional tickle. Sure, she was dancing across from a real dried stump of a girl, and a tiny girl to boot, but he recognized her behind the mask by her proportions, and tonight was the night he’d celebrate Solstice by worshipping her with his cock. He lowered his mask over his face, tossed the few remaining droplets of his drink over his right shoulder for luck, and strode confidently over.

Upon reaching his prize, Chuck reached around to cup her breasts over her shirt and used his powerful muscles to pull her back against his bare abs and her ass against the military formation in his trousers.

“Remember me, Tamsy baby?” Chuck purred against her right ear and then nibbled on it, beginning to pump his powerful hips against the back of her dress, purposefully trying to hike it so he could see her unmentionables.

Meanwhile, Julen, having sent his daughter out with the clear warning not to get pregnant, finished compiling approximately 50,000 in Alliance alltender, and headed over to The Night’s Fire. (This was the equivalent of 5,000 Imperial notes due to the Empire’s massive purchasing power and an outbreak of inflation caused by Alliance infighting.) It was supposed to be for a vacation somewhere for him, Minette and Tamsyn, but they never could decide where, and things changed obviously. He just hoped it would be enough for him to get a night with, if not Widget, then someone as he knocked on the door to Lady Nyrissa’s office.

 

[Madam Mim]

Solstice was a riot of color and sound. The smell of liquor, sour beer, and bodies was stiflingly thick and the haze of sweetgrass was cloying...but the room was dark, the music was loud, and colored lights flashed dimly, hung from hooks in the ceiling. Thudding, rhythmic music blasted from multiple speakers placed strategically around the room, which Tamsyn had once earned a bit of side-money tinkering with to play in tandem so that revelers were surrounded by sound, overwhelmed by it.

The Whale was well-known locally as a tourist dive with a bad reputation for fighting, prostitution, and general debauchery, underage drinking among that long list of crimes, which was precisely why Tamsyn had spent Summer Solstice here every year since she was fourteen. Not that Julen knew that (or so she hoped, anyway). She had long ago lost herself in the music, feeling it vibrate through her shoes and rise from her feet to her chest where the bass had replaced her heartbeat. With her arms up and her eyes closed she had let the pleasant dizziness of intoxication lead the way. She looked different in a dress than she had in her mechanic's coveralls, but that was the point wasn't it? To be someone else? She had grinned and laughed from behind her mask at stupid jokes and clumsy drunks. She had spent the night dancing with strangers and ignoring the watchful eye of the dwarf seated at the bar with a man on each of the bar stools flanking her. It was therefore not an unpleasant surprise when she felt someone come up behind her, pulling her against his bare body and pressing his erection against the small of her back.

"Chuck!" Tamsyn turned with a grin, her pupils pinpricks behind her mask, and wrapped her arms around his neck, grinding against him. "Did you save a Solstice dance just for me?" She grinned and giggled, pressing her body against his.

While she generally had a good head on her shoulders, the girl had an admitted weakness for older men, and older men tended to have a weakness for her. She was therefore not unfamiliar with their touch and their anatomy, and had learned quickly what men like Chuck liked. She was still a virgin, and had never found herself entirely naked in front of a man, not because she was "saving herself for marriage" or anything but because there was always something that didn't feel right about the men in whose company she found herself. Chuck was just such a man and she knew it, had always known it...but that wasn't going to stop her from having fun with him anyway. He seemed to like the attention just as much as she did, after all.

~*~

In a cooler and altogether much quieter part of town, Nyrissa sat in her office tallying the take so far and apportioning Gwenner's share. It had been a decent night so far, with a steady stream of clientele coming and going, more arriving as word of mouth spread. A familiar pattern, and the night was far from over. She looked up at the soft but confident knock at her door with a slight frown. Despite being the madame, Nyrissa had a generally soft-touch managerial approach and had the girls take turns as front-of-house hostess unless she was needed...or got nostalgic and felt like plying her trade. Quietly she withdrew a pistol from her garter and aimed it at the door under her desk. It was small, but powerful enough to do its job. She liked this desk, but it wouldn't be the first one she would have had to replace.

"Enter," she called, then relaxed her shoulders when Julen entered. "Mr. minCarlile. I thought we had concluded our business. Unless you had other thoughts about my bot?" Subtly she tucked the gun back into the garter which kept it strapped to her thigh, then stood. Her silk robe clung to her strong, lithe frame as she stood and walked around the desk to sit on the front corner of it. "Please, have a seat." As she gestured to the chair nearest her, the robe slid to expose one long leg nearly to the hip, and the garter which held her silk stockings in place. Nyrissa knew exactly what she was doing.

 

[CasualVelociraptor]

"Of course, mia anjada," Chuck grinned after grinding together with Tamsyn, throwing in a little Kampayi. "My angel," he explained in her ear, the opening act to what he hoped would be his final move to capture her heart and thusly her panties for his collection. The music drowned out anything, so he could afford to be a little growly rather than whispering, and he knew that would make any girl melt.

The toned, tanned, powerful man wasted no time in biting the left side of her neck, just enough to send pleasure and an equally delicious amount of pain through all her nerves. That gave him an opening to finally, finally reach his left hand around the back of Tamsyn's dress and grab a handful of her plump right ass cheek with all his might. That wasn't all, however; he also spanked the perky and thick derriere and groaned at the way it begged.

"I know we've been dancing around each other for a while," he said to her as he seized her head with his free hand and sucked on her left ear. "But Tamsyn," he added, "I love you, and I want to help you celebrate in Solstice in style." After a wink, he rubbed a meaty finger over her underwear, finding to his delight that she was soaked. "It looks like you might want to already. Shall we have a private dance, m'lady?"

~*~

Meanwhile, back at the airship, Julen sweated internally and wondered how best to play this while fiddling with the llamaskin condoms in his pocket. His instinct, the one that had won Minette's heart, was to be nice, sweet, perhaps a bit milquetoast, and request a good time with Widget. But when Nyrissa leaned back and purposefully showed him her thigh, a rumbling within him that he'd suppressed for years, a very male instinct to fuck this sexy elf and make her scream his name. Something told him that she would be the one to fuck him, but that was a situation he didn't mind either, and it had been a long time since he'd had anything but his hand, so he was desperate in the pit of his lonely heart for whatever the situation may be if this goddess granted him an audience.

"You are quite perceptive, my Lady," Julen grinned and bowed his head in deference, assertion but not cockiness in his voice. Then he took a deep breath and continued, "I did in fact come here-" (at this point he put the cash on the table) "-to admire the craftsmanship of the lovely Widget more intricately. And perhaps I will another time. However...earlier today I met a woman who works here, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about her. She came to my shop and my breath was taken away. And how could the sight of her and every impactful word out of her mouth not make me want her?"

"She's an elf, with hair dark as midnight in the Great Mazanca Desert, full, rosy lips, and a body that's overall a work of art," he said quickly before he ended up droning on. She already knew she was sexy, so he didn't need to remind her, and thankfully he managed to stop himself. "But that's not what has gotten me so...enamored of her." He leaned forward, smiling as he closed the distance to her, and added, "She's brilliant, confident, and oh so very strong...and while everyone knows of her strength from a distance, I wish-" (said as he planted his elbows on the table with determination) "-not to plunder it, or merely worship it with empty words, but to see and feel her exert it over me, while I do my best to keep up." Again, confident, but not acting superior, or so he felt- he had been out of the game for a while, and hoped it didn't show. "Move for move."

Julen was now inches away from kissing her, but let his intentions hang over them both for a moment before sitting back in his chair.

"So, Lady Nyrissa, what do you say? Shall we conduct new business?"

 

[Madam Mim]

Men...didn't often do it for Nyrissa. Certainly she had come up in the world by pleasuring men, catering to them, making their fantasies come true, but that was very likely the precise reason she had come over the years to prefer the company of the fairer sex. While women could be as demanding as men, they were often more generous and more patient, likely as a result of having been made victim to men's desires themselves, by force or otherwise. Julen didn't seem that common type of man. But she had done her research: widowed, never remarried, which meant that he had gotten off with the dockside whores...or no one at all. After this performance the latter seemed far more likely. Poor man was under the impression that every woman wanted to feel loved, that if he told her what he thought she wanted to hear he would get what he wanted as well. Ah, summer child, this was not how the game was played. Not her game, anyway.

Still, he was reasonably attractive. And the look on his face alone would be worth it; the look when he realized that volunteering the pretty words, the deferential actions wasn't enough for her. She was going to make him mean it. As he leaned over her, his hands on her desk on either side of her thighs, a small smirk played at Nyrissa's lips while she played along, glancing down at his lips before he withdrew and sat back down.

"Words." She dismissed him with a wave of her hand and a smirk, looking imperiously down at him. "You think me a common Mazancan whore who blushes at pretty words, who prostitutes herself because she has no self-worth and must be told by her clientele in hopes of a discount." She snickered before sliding off the desk and moving forward, straddling his knees but still standing. "But you see, the difference between a dock whore and a courtesan is that I ply my trade for the opposite reason." Nyrissa slid her knees into the chair on either side of Julen's thighs. One hand gripped the back of the chair while the other ran along his scalp, through his hair, before gripping it at the base of his skull. Slowly she moved against his lap, able to feel his thick erection against the inside of her upper thigh even hovering as she was over him that he might only barely be able to feel her against him.

"You tell me I'm beautiful. I know this." Slowly she moved her hips as though to grind against him, though there was barely a whisper of touch between them. Her voice was a low murmur, like that of a lover. "You tell me that I'm brilliant, that I'm strong, that I'm fierce. I know all of these things too." Her hips moved faster, finally gracing him with a slightly firmer contact. "But your pivotal mistake is that you ask to worship me, never realizing that if I wanted your worship you would have no choice." She leaned her forehead against his, staring intensely into his eyes and gripping his hair tighter to ensure he couldn't look away. "You don't think I wouldn't make you? My body is an altar for a hungry goddess. You think I wouldn't demand more than your everything? That I wouldn't ride you to the very edge of that precipice only to leave you in agony just to listen to you beg? That you wouldn't be left shaking and weak and craving more but overwhelmed by the slightest touch and all at the same time willing to crawl over broken glass just for the privilege of begging me to do it again? Do you think--" here she leaned away a little so that he could focus more sharply on stern eyes as she redoubled her grip on his hair "--that what you ask for is all that I would give?"

This time it was her turn. Their lips were fractions of an inch away from one another, so close that Julen could feel the heat of her skin. Then all at once he was alone in his chair, untouched, unheld, unsatisfied. Nyrissa folded her arms across her chest as she leaned against her desk. "So I'll give you one more opportunity to show me that you really, truly understand what it is you want, Mister minCarlile. Because this," she held up the wad of cash, "is enough for some time with Widget. I, however, am far more expensive. I need you to prove that you'll be worth my time."

~*~

Tamsyn shivered when he spoke Kampayi and translated in her ear. Hot and cultured! She grinned and gently scraped her teeth against his chest as they danced together, swaying and grinding. She squealed and jumped when he spanked her, jumping closer, pressing against his body and clinging to his shoulders. The girl was surprised at how good it had felt, being spanked like that. Chills ran down her spine and raised goosebumps on her arms as he sucked on her ear, melting into his touch.

Her ears perked up at his confession of love. Tamsyn was naive in many ways, but she knew that that was just words: they barely even knew each other! And even if he was the type to fall in love with every pretty face he met, she was not. But the way he rubbed her made it so very hard to think clearly. She groaned and leaned her forehead against Chuck's chest, but gradually shook her head 'no.'

"Maybe later," she tried to offer. "I'm having fun." She wanted to have fun in other ways, too; she was wet and needy and wanted to feel his thick fingers inside her, wanted to push him against a wall and get down on her knees for him, or to kneel over his face while she sucked him off. These were things she had done before, things she had felt safe doing...but he wasn't the one to give her virginity to, she knew that much. She wasn't completely clueless: she knew that a night with Chuck would probably be a quick and dirty fuck against an alley wall and that would be the end of it. God forbid she wind up pregnant.

"C'mon." Tamsyn pulled him down and kissed him deeply, steadying herself on his shoulders as she stood on her toes to reach him. "Buy me another drink and maybe I'll sit in your lap some more." She grinned and winked, laughing and tugging on his hand. "Come on Chucky, you know you wanna..."

 

[CasualVelociraptor]

Julen had always considered men who demanded that women prostrate themselves before them and fawn over their every need- in other words, who wanted toys, not people- to be boorish. A woman was a goddess, period. Capable of bringing life into the world after men barely contributed to its conception, vital in sustaining a life afterwards, and more than able in any field a man felt entitled to work in. Men, he felt, should be lucky that women had any need of them at all.

So while he had never directly worshipped a woman like this since Tamsyn’s late mother, it wasn’t out of his wheelhouse. He’d made a lot of assumptions, said a lot of things, and if he wanted to get her table scraps of attention, he needed to rectify that.

And so, Julen minCarlile spoke not a whit. Instead, he kissed. But not her face. Instead, his lips supplicated her left shoulder, then went across her collar bone to her right shoulder. Up and down each arm. He kissed each of her fingers like he was kissing the rings of a queen. Then Julen didn’t dare presume to put his lips anywhere near her breasts or crotch, instead leaving a trail of kisses down her abdomen before skipping to her calves, knees, shins...

...and finally feet. He had been drawn instantly to her feet, but he also hoped this was the kind of supplication, the kind of devotion that she wanted out of him. And so Julen continued kneeling at and kissing each of her feet. He didn’t stop, not until she would either grant him relief or cast him out.

*****

“Alright, alright, anything for my best girl,” Chuck grinned as he lifted Tamsyn onto his lap. Then he barked, “Barkeep! Two Green Goliaths- one for each of us.” Meanwhile, he playfully kissed her neck and groped one of her ass cheeks, and she could feel Chuck’s hard cock poking her crotch.

Like its namesake machine, a Green Goliath was tall- 370 milliliters tall to be precise- and contained rum, lime, salt on the rim, bitters, and cucumber. He was definitely hoping to get Tamsyn drunk enough to get in her pants with this, as he sipped his own monstrous drink.