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

Mmmmnnnrrrrgggghhhhhh. No, no you can't really leap off to go searching the continent for whatever treasures this map is pointing to. Nor can you really justify staying in Söfnun and double-checking every nook and cranny in search of you-don't-even-know-what-it-is. You've got shopping to take home and a cave to prepare for when -ugh- mother arrives. You roll the map back up into its tube and stuff it in the bag with the other magic trinkets, fuming. They say that sometimes grumpy enough people look like they have their own personal stormclouds but for you that can actually be true, so you double-time it back out of the city before your frustration becomes more visible than it already is.

The guards at the gate greet you by name with well-wishes for your weekend plans. Acting enthused for them is a truly heroic feat of willpower, but you manage it all the same, and soon enough you're retracing your steps through the winding ravine pass that brings landbound trade to and from Söfnun. Halfway along you smoothly switch back into your ratty traveller guise as you come around a bend, all at once going from something to be gawked at jealously to just another body on the road, perhaps turned away at the gates and off in search of fortune elsewhere. You turn left at the fork and head down the road less travelled, growing more antsy by the second to be on two legs, until finally you reach the delivery point. There beneath the gnarled old tree that never seems to fully rot nor spring to life again lie two covered wagons full of the provisions you ordered, reliable as clockwork. More actually, clocks are fiddly and easy to break and you've never been able to put up with having one in your hoard for long.

It feels like a nice, long, languid stretch to shift back into your true form, massive skeins of muscle flexing beneath azure scales, tail carelessly smacking an ancient tree hard enough to shake half the leaves from its boughs. You pinch the strap of your bag delicately between two talontips and poke it into one of the wagons for safekeeping, then scoop the both of them up as easily as toys and take flight. The great downbeat of your wings shakes many more leaves loose, a visible ring of dust expanding from your take-off point as you sail into the stormy skies and set a course home.

You make sure to fly over one of the lightning farms to steal a strike before it lands. It's more to assert dominance than anything else but isn't that as good a reason to do something as anything? Crackling arcs of power bring the light back into your wings and sink deep into your massive frame, going some ways to lift the foul mood that suddenly descended. You're almost content as you swoop back down to meet your familiar spire, worming your forelegs through the opening and carefully dropping the wagons somewhere secure before you properly squirm through yourself. There. You were in and out before you could give mother a chance to show up unannounced, and you even remembered to buy everything you needed!

... you should've- shit you should've bought wine, she loves mortal wine. You could've got her the special kind, a bottle unearthed from the Beyond with the label in the language nobody knows. A suckup move to be sure but flattery gets you everywhere in dragon circles and- ugh no, no, you're not going out on a second trip you have committed now and besides it'd look strange for Lord Elding to suddenly pop back in for a bottle of wine like some commoner when he could send people for it but you don't have people because you don't have a country estate to have it delivered to and-

You flomp down flat on your back on top of your gold, loose coins rising all at once like glittering, jingling dust in your wake. A crown topples down the slope of the hoard and goes rolling off towards the wall, slowly losing momentum, tipping over and swerving into a melodiously-ringing spiral. You stare straight up at the ceiling, limbs all askew.

The weekend is going to be awful. Just a complete trainwreck. And not the fun kind of trainwreck where two trains just plough straight into each other head-on which has sadly never actually happened outside of your imagination. The kind where some magical beastie's gnawed on a section of track too badly and it hasn't been reported in time so one wheel leaves the rail and the whole thing just kind of slowly, inexorably, flops over on its side and lies still because its mother was right and it really wouldn't ever amount to anything.

Thunder rumbles in the distance, the distant crash of waves on the jagged rocks below your lofty rainreaved perch a somewhat soothing white noise. Somewhere in your lair water slowly drip-drip-drips, not on your gold but nearby. That'll probably be a problem too. And why? Honestly in your book every lair needs a bit of dankness to be a proper dragon lair.

You should start cleaning up. You don't know how or where or to what ultimate end but it's a Thing you should Do because otherwise what else can you do with your time? So you roll off your gold in slow-motion, every degree of rotation an enormous effort, letting out a single long, low groan as do. One eternity later you're back on all fours. Right. Right, time to get to work. Pack everything away and sort through it all and probably dust the cave while you're at it and find something to plug that leak and do something about all the talon-marks where you just stropped away and-

Flomp you go again, forelegs crossing and buckling as your heavy, angular jaw lands on them with a thump. You're very good at performative misery at this point, you imagine there's some invisible audience watching your every move and feeling your every thought. 'Feel bad for me', you tell that invisible audience up in the nosebleeds. 'Oh woe is me for I am sad and the little people should shut up and let me talk about it at great length.'

And as you lie there in misery and torment fit for the greatest of bardic tragedies, you're in the perfect position to spy the strap of your knicknack-bag hanging free of one of the wagons. Hm... there was that one marked spot right here in your cavern. And if the attached compass doesn't point north, then surely it points to the closest of the treasures, right? It only makes sense!

You push yourself up and forward, shifting as you go. You lose most of your mass but not your draconic glory, simply arching up to a bipedal yet digitigrade stance, wrapping your wings around your scaly shoulders like a cloak finer than any money could buy - maps were not made to be operated by scaly quadrupeds the size of a building. You retrieve the bag and rifle through its contents, claws wrapping around the protective tube, and retrieve it without bumping the deadly mayonnaise-fountain-in-waiting. Twist off the cap, shake the vellum roll free, unfurl it and take a look- yes! The compass is pointing through you, straight at the treasure-pile, and continues to do so even as you perform all manner of contortions that would otherwise make it point elsewhere. You have a lead!

You approach the pile and drop to one knee, electric-blue gaze flicking between the map and the gold and back again. How should you be doing this? Well... you can pretty safely discount the actual gold pieces. No one of them is truly unique among the pile (you've checked, twice), and they're more there as filler to look nice. Neutral colour in the bouquet that is any respectable hoard. No, you should definitely just check all the larger pieces first. If you weigh down the map with some little stones and bring whatever you dig free over to check if the needle moves, that should serve your needs just fine!

And so you set to work.

Before you know it it's nightfall but you get to look at all your treasure again so honestly you're having the time of your life.

Twelve magic swords (magic weaponmakers really do prefer swords don't they?). Magic axe. Couple of magic daggers. Magic helmet. Magic circlet. Magic chainmail shirt. Magic ring. A few magic necklaces and a smattering of other assorted jewellery. An entire suit of fullplate made of magically-reinforced gold that you assemble piece-by-piece over the course of your searches, sinking arm-deep in the gold and rummaging around grasping for bigger bits among the chaff. A few sceptres, lots of crowns (you run off to grab the one that rolled away earlier), a rubber dragon bath-toy you forgot was even in there-

Aha. At last you've drawn the item that the compass responds to, following it no matter where you hold it.

What you clutch in your claws is not the bath-toy but in fact a lamp. A lamp that you're certain you already knew was magical when you threw it on the pile, but as with all items you find rather than buy you never really bothered to figure out what it does. Just being Magic is enough. Or shiny. Regardless when you take a closer look at the lamp, hooking it onto one clawtip and holding it aloft at eye level, you find plenty to see. It's arguably more of a lantern, a hexagonal thing that tapers to a point at the bottom and rounds off in a dome at the top where the chain it now dangles from is attached. Similar to Sultanate work, what with all the intricate brass sculpting, but a connoisseur of fine arts such as yourself can pick out all the subtleties that set it apart. Where the Sultanate prefer finely-detailed meshes with plenty of curves, this is more on the angular side, preferring sharp right or forty-five-degree angles much like your wing markings. There's an air of brutalism about it but almost subversive, as if finding the beauty in the ugly harshness of the shapes. Is this from the Beyond? Did you just not notice before you threw it on the pile?

The glass is enchanted to be unbreakable of course (it'd have to be if it survived this long near the bottom of the pile), but it's so smoky and tinted you can hardly see a thing inside. Hm... perfect place to hide something small yet valuable. Perhaps an even rarer and more precious artefact from a bygone age? Hidden away who-knows-how-long, only to be discovered by yours truly with the aid of a magic map? Ohoho you're practically -no not practically, literally- salivating at the prospect, cobalt-blue tongue flickering past your fangs to catch the words bits of drool before they fall from your jaws.


(( art by @Camellia ))

Carefully, carefully, you pinch the latch between two clawtips and open it with a minor application of force.

The lamp explodes open with a rushing torrent of pure golden fire that sends you sprawling flat on your back with a startled "wah!", flinging the offending object clear across your lair in retaliation. It sketches a brilliant blazing arc of aurelian flame like a comet-tail, twisting and coiling and spiralling through the air until it's almost a little blazing tornado. The lamp, finally empty, lands with a loud clang and bounces twice but you barely even notice. All you can do is watch as the fire coalesces into... a person.

The figure's reclining in mid-air, carelessly slouched across a near-horizontal bed of glittering golden sand that occasionally flickers with tongues of flame. Perhaps at first glance the ignorant could mistake it for an ordinary man, but even then not for long. He's perfectly formed in every way, flawless sun-dark skin stretched taut over planes of muscle so carefully toned they seem almost purposefully shaped rather than naturally earned. He might be about as tall as you were he deigning to set his bare feet on the same cold stone as you, his dark brown hair streaked with gold carelessly slicked back but for a few almost deliberately-chosen strands that hang forward, drawing the eye. His own half-lidded eyes are like pools of molten gold, literally glowing with power and unearthly light. And speaking of molten gold... he's covered in it. It's as if he put on every last piece of his finest jewellery and simply walked through a furnace, letting it melt and dribble down the planes and contours of his body and cool where it lay. Bonding it to his skin like rippling, gleaming tattoos of precious metal. Bands of it around his arms, his wrists, his calves, his ankles, half-liquid piercings at his ears and chest, his throat is practically solid gold. His fingers and toes, perhaps backed in decorative nail-guards once, are now lustrous gold claws that seem to dance with sparks of the fire he could so easily command to rise again. The only actual clothing he's wearing is a a pure white skirt that barely comes to the knee. It's a good thing he's lying perpendicular to you or you'd be seeing even more.

"So," he says languidly, checking his nails rather than deign to look at you. "Who dares release me from my lamp after all these years?"

You've heard about these. Never had cause to seek one out yourself but there's nobody that doesn't at least know the basic story of djinn in bottles and lamps. You can do a little better than those fools - you know this is an ifrit, an ancient and capriciously powerful entity. Almost as impressive as a dragon even.

And this one is extremely distracting, it's getting hard to think straight.

[ ] Ask him where he's from. You've heard plenty of rumours about where various stripes of djinn come from but you've never had a chance to ask one yourself.
[ ] Ask what he plans to do if releasing him from his lamp is "who dares" territory. If he thinks he can intimidate a dragon he's got another thing coming.
[ ] Ask why he'd be showing up on a magic map you bought in an underground market, and why he'd be lumped in with six other destinations besides.
[ ] Ask if you can get your three wishes now.
[ ] Ask him to leave because you really should get to cleaning up and Mother will have Questions if she finds this scantily-clad ifrit in your den.
[ ] Ask him to please put on a shirt. Maybe some pants too.