Dragon Harem Quest - Or: Saying You Were Gay Wasn't The Conversation-Ender You Hoped For

First thing's first, a quick little pick-me-up to get you in the mood for a day on the town. You lift yourself off your hoard, jewelled chalices and endless streams of golden coins jangling and rattling together so pleasingly as your shifting weight sends them cascading down the pile. A few more strops of your talons on the bare stone floor for good measure, armoured tail smacking carelessly against either wall as you shake the kinks out of it before you start your climb.

You make it out into the light via a convenient you-sized hole in the towering stone spire - it's a little bit tighter of a fit than it used to be, you could always widen it but you've been putting it off as long as you can. Around and around and around the narrowing circumference of the spire you go as you rise, talons like boarding-hooks biting deep into age-old stone that already bears its fair share of identical marks. Stormclouds rumble and roll above, the pleasing scent of rain and thunder soon to come heavy on the air. You sit back on your hind legs at the summit and slowly stretch up, wings like great leathery sails slowly spreading as you close your eyes and await the moment.

KRA-KOOOMMM. Lightning strikes, the jagged bolt forking in two as it strikes the tips of your crystalline horns. Blue-white sparks popping off the surface like firecrackers as the molten charge thrums across your skull, splits into myriad subchannels that spread across your azure scales like a fine mesh. The thin membranes of your wings come alive in blazing geometric designs, trapping the lightning in a work of art that only you are privy to as the sharp, metallic scent of post-strike air floods your flared nostrils. You take a moment to cast your gaze across your lands as the rolling thunder echoes away into the distance, idly shaking your wings 'dry' to vent a few excess booming aftershocks. The seas are lovely this time of day, grey as iron and churning themselves white against the rocks, whipped up into towering peaks and plummeting valleys by the wind. Off in the distance yet more brilliant bolts strike the sea, splitting the sky with blazing glory for a single perfect instant. If you could only catch them all... but that sounds like a lot of work, and you like the very tall tip of your lair.

To the north lies a natural bridge of weather-worn stone, one last tenuous connecting tissue tying you to the mainland. Beyond that, mostly forests and plains, a peninsula that steadily widens as it goes to meet the mainland. And beyond that, over the horizon? Your favourite haunt, nestled somewhere you might fly straight over (like you've done more times than you'll ever admit) if you didn't know where and how to look. A place where you can hopefully forget all about what a miserable nightmare your weekend is looking to become.

You take wing from your high perch, gliding gracefully down from the tip of the spire as you focus your energies. You shrink down mid-flight, proportions adjusting, your entire bone structure smoothly shifting as you hit your 'draconic humanoid' form and blow right past it. Wings bearing you aloft just those few moments more even as they shrink away completely into your shoulder blades, you hit the ground walking and keep on doing so as the rest of your disguise magically forms around you. Just a simple thing you threw together over an afternoon for now, some traveller in a ratty old cloak that won't get looked at too hard as you come wandering in from the wilderness. The real guise is for later.

It's a bit of a walk without wings, but you're used to being two-legged and ground-bound by this point and you appreciate the time alone with your thoughts. It's bracing really, in exactly the sort of way that'll make it reeeeeeally satisfying when you get back to your hoard and flop down to sleep. You pass a few lightning farms on the way in, great obelisks of silver and copper that call down the lion's share of the storm's fury, trapping the snarling bolts in specially-prepared casks for shipment up to the city. You'd be angrier that they're taking your lightning, but you made sure to burn down every farm they tried to build within a few miles of your spire until they got the message, so as far as you're concerned you're square. Still, you salivate a little as you picture hurling the sad little workers with their goggles and their overalls aside like flotsam as you snatch up all the lightning casks you can carry and abscond into the wilderness.

Maybe on the way back. If you've been a very good boy.

Söfnun is like an iceburg someone pressed down on hard with their foot until even less of it was visible above the surface. It's practically invisible tucked away in its cove, protected from storms by high cliffs and higher trees, accessible by land by only a few densely-trafficked highways but patronised by practically every single ship from fishing dinghy to grandest trading vessel in need of a stop-over. Every voyage is an adventure but the mortals keep doing it, day in day out, because those spices won't transport their own damn selves the length and breadth of four different nations now will they? And if they follow these routes they stop over in Söfnun, and so the city's thrived. You'd like to brag about seeing it rise from a fishing hamlet but honestly it's been big ever since you were old enough to claim your lair, all you can say is that you got to see it get a little bit bigger and wealthier. Which you had a hand in too, of course.

It's about as loud as the storm itself once you're inside, so many different voices calling out in as many languages and a couple insane mixtures of them besides. Always with the crowds as they jostle and sidle into what little space is available, walking the narrow paths over and around the carved canals and channels in the exhaustively-shaped cove. What once might've looked like a dingy damp quarry is now a vibrant city, half-underground and half open-air, more traditional preserved architecture seamlessly giving way to brass-filigree-overload of the Sultanate Quarter or the steel and glass of more modern Plutocracy aesthetic sensibilities or the gilded marble of the Republic enclave. Everywhere so many people with so many different silly dreams in their heads and things to buy or sell that they probably wouldn't notice even if you changed shapes in the middle of the street. But you don't because that would be silly. You make like a robber or an enthusiast for sex in adventurous places and do it in an alleyway.

You emerge in your merchant prince guise, tall and regal with the flowing shoulder-length hair and full beard to match, plus blue eyes so vibrant and piercing you should need a license for them. You crook your arm beneath your half-cape, boots softly splashing in the thin film of rain beneath your heels as you stride forward in search of one of your stooges. You are accosted by one in three paces.

"I apologise Lord Elding, I didn't hear you had returned," he says, scurrying along at your side. Did he teleport in or was he just spawned fully-formed from thin air to serve you? Much of a muchness really, they rotate in and out with such frequency it's completely impossible to keep track of them all.

"I was at my estate, of course. In need of some rest and recuperation. Particularly lean year we just had I hear," you reply, your accent naturally dropping into a sort of flattened-out yet still cultured arrangement from every continent.

"Of course sir, it must have been an incredible strain for you sir."

"And how are the books looking today?"

"Very good sir absolutely nothing to concern yourself with sir."

"Excellent!"

You take six more strides, and the stooge keeps following you. You halt.

"... leave," you prompt him. He nods furiously and vanishes back into the crowd, gone in an instant if you cared to look for him. Instead you simply stare out across the hustle and bustle, into the middle distance, and ponder. Mortals really are a submissive lot. You've gone entire years with little more than mail correspondence to prove that you're still alive and yet the merchant house continues to send you free money. It's insane.

Right, now that that taxing bookkeeping is squared away, you can really have some fun. Söfnun can be quite the adult playground if you know all the right nooks and crannies to check, and you happen to have spent quite a while checking out nooks and crannies. Plus you're extremely rich and in need of something to numb the pain, two qualities in the face of which precious few doors will not open. So you set out planning to

[ ] Hit the bar and get very drunk. You get to complain about your problems that ordinarily nobody would care about, and even if your lips loosen enough to start telling everyone you're a dragon nobody will believe you.
[ ] Scope out if any adventuring parties have washed in recently looking to get shirty and fuck with them. It's usually best to defuse such situations before they can waddle up to your front door like comically-ticking time-bombs. Or better yet, turn them around and watch them blow someone else up.
[ ] Fuck with another dragon. Spread some rumours, whether true or not, about various treasures and weaknesses possessed by So-and-so of the Blazing Fang squirrelled away in Icepick Mountain. It makes for fun stories, and you always get a nice little chortle out of hearing someone else's hoard has been diminished.
[ ] Gamble your heart out. If you win, you get an unearned rush of accomplishment and expand your hoard even more. If you don't, it's not like it's really your money anyway!
[ ] Assume a rowdier guise and seek out a fight-pit. You're in the mood to punch somebody and it's just not the same if you do it while blind drunk.
[ ] Do some shopping. Every time you're here on other business you forget and then by the time you remember you're back home and you can't be bothered to make another trip so you put it off for another day and it's just a nightmare. And you really need more spices. You may be a many-ton scaly lightning-breathing magical predator that hunts live game but you're not an animal.