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

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Chapter Twenty - You Always Pictured A Night With An Incubus Involving More Getting Stepped On By Heel-Claws... But This Is Good Too [M]
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    • Note: This chapter contains non-explicit sexual content. The relevant passage is beneath a spoiler tag for ease of browsing. This threadmark and all future threadmarks containing such content will be tagged '[M]' for further forewarning.
    "I want that," you blurt out. The wind seems to catch your words and hurl them straight off the cliff, leaving only deafening silence in their wake. Belial slowly turns to look at you and just regards you for a moment, as if searching for something.

    "You want...?" he repeats slowly, expectantly.

    "... don't make me say it," you say with a scowl. He quirks up one eyebrow.

    "We're talking about the start of a -hopefully- healthy active sex life here. Being all blushing bride about it like saying the word 'sex' is naughty isn't really endearing or helpful."

    "(mumblegrumble being all controlling and setting rules)"

    "I mean hey if you don't like how I'm doing things I invite you to stroll into town and ask a guy out," Belial says airily.

    You frown at him with all the force of disapproval you can muster. He tries so hard to suppress a snigger at the sight -why is no one intimidated by your glare of fury!?- and gently elbows you in the arm.

    "Just tell me what you want and mean it, it's... really that simple," he says more seriously.

    "I want to have sex with you," you angrily enunciate.

    "There you are," he says. "Doesn't that feel a lot better?"

    "Y-yeah(mnehwellmumblegrumblereddumbass)" you trail off petulantly, hunching forward to practice your scowl at the passing fish far down below. The wind whistles softly, flowing between the jagged spars of stone thrust up through the white-foaming seas like broken fangs, promising certain death to any who might lose their footing. Really does have a wonderful ambience, you lucked out and then some to find this place. Tap-tap-tap go your claws on your armoured knees, waiting for the next part of this whole debacle.

    "... well?" you blurt out when you can stand it no longer - that is, about twenty seconds.

    "I'm thinking!" Belial protests. "There's a great deal of ways we could go about this and some of them are a hell of a lot more helpful than others. Just... gimme a second, alright? I'll take care of it, I promise."

    You lapse into anxious silence, stealing sidelong glances at the incubus as he rifles through his thoughts. Your eyes slowly wandering longer and lower, trailing along the contours of scarlet-skinned brawn and the shape of the hips only barely hidden by the- o-oh dear your heart's quite picking up the pace this is not a good look for you. Glad that a dragon can't blush you force your eyes forward, clenched fists pressed against your thighs.

    Belial snaps his fingers, freeing you from your reverie. "Got it." He glances at you to make sure you're paying attention - and boy are you hanging on his every word right now. "You ever bunked in Söfnun for a night or two? Have any favourites out of the places you used?"

    "Uh... oh, the Hafhim-Inn," you reply, haltingly at first. "I don't use beds if I can help it most of the time but when I've been forced to on occasion I bunk there. The rooms are good and the staff know how to leave you alone."

    "Perfect. You head there and- oh hang on." He pauses mid-gesture. "Dooo you want me to cover for you? I kind of assumed but that wasn't great of me."

    "Oh. Oh, no that... that was considerate. I'd like this to be private too."

    "Sure, sure. So you head there, get us a room and wait up. I'll hang around and tell the others you're in to talk to some contractors about sprucing the place up. I'll hitch a ride in someone's dreams and meet you there, then when we're done you actually go talk to those contractors and we head back. Sound good?"

    "That... does," you reply. "Yes. Very good planning."

    Belial plants his tar-coated hands against the grassy cliff edge as if to lift himself up and go about his business, but pauses once more. He holds you near spellbound in his gaze - they really are pretty, aren't they? Such a vibrant red they seem to pop even against his skin tone, some would call them offputting but you, you find them s-so... ahem. You really are just going to pieces right now.

    "This isn't set in stone, y'know," he says. "I just want you to know that before we split up. If you get nervous while you're waiting and by the time I show up you don't want to any more - that's alright too. Understand?"

    "No self-respecting dragon would ever be so unsure and wishy-washy as to go back on a decision made in all confidence," you say proudly, almost literally puffing your chest out. "I haven't second-guessed myself once before in all my years!"

    The corner of his mouth curls up. "You're the boss." He hoists himself up with a little 'hup', heel-claws clicking on the solid stone beneath the stubborn grass, and flicks two talons from his temple to you in a lazy mock-salute. "Seeya there, Eldingar."

    He leaves, off to go give Jun-ho and Makram your cover story.

    You immediately second-guess yourself, then third- and fourth-guess for good measure. You raise your hands high either side of your head and make silent screaming motions because you don't want to alert anyone but it makes you feel even slightly better. What is the matter with you? Why are you like this? Why do you suddenly feel all hormonal and needy? This is exactly what a few solid years of utterly unspeakable events in the privacy of your own cave were meant to get out of your system! You even burned the relevant materials to remove the temptation and yet here they remain, stamped indelibly onto your mind, surging to the surface at the knowledge that Belial just frankly and casually offered to take your virginity. And every time the voice in the front of your mind tells you this is stupid and foolish and you need to call it off, that other voice speaks up. The one caged in the back, feared and fed scraps just like he said, that growls its dissent. Vehemently, intensely, telling you that if you turn down this gift-wrapped silver-platter opportunity now it will never ever ever fucking forgive you even if you should self-flagellate so hard something vital falls off.

    You eventually settle on jumping off the cliff. You're pretty confident that was the best course of action.

    You straighten out like a bright blue arrow and soar over the rocks, slicing through the foaming surface of the water over one of the deeper parts and scream as hard as you can into the deep. Bubbles full of crackling electricity erupt from your fanged maw and stream to the surface, no doubt creating quite the lightshow if anyone were observing as you kick furiously onward. The chill starts seeping in through your scales, the sound of the sea a dull roar as invisible hands gently slap at your flank. You gather yourself up and let yourself sink until you feel your foot-talons drag through the sand, coiling and springing with lung-scouring yell. You rise from a sizzling geyser of electrified water in your true form, water streaming from your scales and your outstretched wings as you catch an air current, wheel around, and go soaring off in the direction of Söfnun.

    You feel better. Slightly.

    You make great time, flapping rather harder and more often than you usually do on this particular trip. You're puffing and out of breath by the time you're inside the city in your Lord Elding guise. Wealth comes with certain privileges, such that no one asks any awkward or prying questions once you arrive red-faced to a bank-teller asking for a cash withdrawal, or when you arrive in a different and more generic guise to the front desk of the Hafhim-Inn needing a room. You seesaw wildly between feeling like a criminal on the run and feeling like an utter fool for doing so and back again. By the time you get your room key to work, lock the door behind you and flop down on the irritatingly soft bed you're about ready for a nap - but that would just bring Belial sooner.

    It's nice. It's even slightly close to your standards. There's a red and black Sultanate carpet, a writing desk, a window with a view that isn't a few inches of empty air and then the side of another building, its own attached bathroom and shower - shower, yes, one of those would be a good idea, you should do that.

    Indoor plumbing and hot water, the two things that make pretending to be a mortal worthwhile. The most wondrous inventions of this age or any other. Once you step into the spray of steaming hot water you groan in abject relief, raking your claws over your scalp and down the back of your neck as it flows and drips down the contours of your overlapping scales. If anything the way your elemental nature reacts to the water is an added bonus, a little electrical 'sweat' sizzling all the way up and down your body like a little private massage. You scrub yourself so hard the washcloth you're using rends itself to tatters against your scales then finish the rest barehanded, scrubbing and scratching at times shocking amounts of accumulated grime free. And all the while your nervously swaying tail smacks and slaps wetly against every wall of the shower, like it's forgotten what it's supposed to do with itself. When you finally emerge and set careful foot upon the tiled floor you feel like you're truly clean for the first time in a hundred-odd years. You drape one of the towels around your shoulders and step back into the room.

    Only to squeak in a very high-pitched and shameful fashion when you find Belial already sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for you. At least he hasn't already stripped naked and posed like something out of an illicit magazine like you fantasised feared. You tear the towel from your shoulders and wrap it around your waist even though there's nothing to see yet.

    "Hey," he says with a smile. "All cleaned up just for me? You look good."

    "... thank you," you reply, glancing between him and the locked door and back again.

    "Getting into bedrooms is kinda part of the job," he says with a wry look. "Speaking of which, thought about it any more? Changed your mind, just not sure, ready to go? Talk to me."

    "I wish you'd stop being so calm about everything," you grumble, flouncing across the room and sitting down beside him. "You make me feel so melodramatic."

    "You kind of are," he says.

    "Silence!" you demand. He silences. And he just keeps on being silenced as he waits for you to say something else which makes you realise the inherent flaw in said demand. You angrily fiddle your claws while you try to think of a follow-up to that. The problem with trying to tell someone all about how you can't think straight, you swiftly discover, is that it's hard to think of how to put into words that you can't think, so you're just experiencing double the frustration for none of the resolution.

    "Is it alright if I try something?" Belial asks.

    "Yes please do!" you blurt out.

    He kisses you.

    That makes it sound a lot more sudden and shocking than it really is, but it's all your mind can really process for a few solid seconds at first. The way he reaches out and cradles your cheek, gently turning your head to face his with a practised gesture as his eyes drift shut and he leans in close. Ebony talons resting against your scales, not even pinpricks of pressure through the armour, as he presses his soft black lips to yours. Your heart flutters deep in your chest, a jolt so like and yet so unlike the leashed lightning that flows through your body like blood shooting up your spine as you feel him, taste him, smell him. So warm that it even bleeds through the scales, a faint hint of spice to the kiss, his scent as heady as perfume. He kisses you and you lean into it, into him, before you can even think of stopping your rebellious body. You don't know where you should be putting your hands so you hedge your bets, one behind his head and the other at the small of his back. You feel a tremor run through him at your touch - is it uncomfortable? Is it pain?

    He breaks the kiss and you remember how to breathe again. He leaves his hand at your cheek and you leave yours on him, swallowing awkwardly in a vain attempt to wet your bone-dry throat.

    "How do you feel now?" he asks.

    You take a long, slow, deep breath. Your chest shudders halfway through. "I want you, Belial," you say, and you mean it more than anything you can remember.

    He smiles at you, this rugged incubus gone soft around the middle that seemed about as confident that this would go anywhere as you were at first. Stroking a taloned thumb back and forth along the line of your cheekbone, smooth one way, catching against each scale the other. You're leaning into it, if only slightly. You notice and so does he.

    "Remember," he says softly as he guides you down. "You can still ask me to stop."

    You don't.

    It's not like your fantasies. Belial explains to you, evenly and seriously, every part of what you're about to do that's smoothed over or just not an issue because he's an incubus, and how to manage it with someone who isn't. You're tense and nervous, your body instinctively rebelling against it. He doesn't force it. It's not supposed to hurt, he says. Unless you want it to, but that sort of thing is for much later. Instead he trains you, just a little at a time, teaching your body until the pain is down to a distant ache you can easily ignore.

    You cling to him so tight you must be hurting him, but his worst complaint is a soft grunt to ease up on the claws. His bare skin against you, his weight on top of you, the rhythmic rock of his movements and the warmth of his breath against your neck, it's almost more than you can bear. He has to go so slowly for you, so achingly slow it's maddening, but if there's one virtue he has above all others it's patience. Night falls, shadow slowly rippling across your entwined bodies like a dark blanket, and still you're learning.

    You barely have a coherent word in your head the whole way through. Just soft gasps, needy whines that slip through no matter how hard you try to bite them back, and soft grunts of pain that always make Belial stop and do something different, try some other angle or just let you adjust. Hah, gods it feels like it takes an hour just to finish one thrust but hearing him murmur that you've made it all the way to the bottom makes you proud in some shamefully intense way you've never felt before.

    You bury your face in the crook of his neck, his perfume-sweet scent filling your nose. It's inaccurate to say that you 'let it happen' the rest of the time but you know whatever you're contributing in the movement department isn't exactly experienced or particularly helpful. But you don't care. You don't give a shit about so many things right now. All you care about is the way you feel it build, at once familiar and almost frighteningly new. Your breath growing harsher and quicker and shallower as you cling to him.

    The noise you make when it's done is absolutely shameful. A shuddering, hitching, high-pitched mewl-thing, disgustingly needy for all that you feel as drained as a freshly wrung-out sponge. You chest shudders as it rises and falls, each new breath hitching beneath the armour as you struggle to recover. It's almost as gratifying to hear him puffing too, the big brawny incubus perhaps not so much the boundless ocean of sexual stamina any more. He's even all sweaty. It's still not enough to make you let go.

    The two of you lay there for what feels like an age, pounding hearts beating like drums against each other's sternums, flushed with heat inside and out - okay only out in his case. You silently beg him not to let go and he doesn't.

    "S'it hurting?" he pants at last.

    "A little," you reply. "But don't... you dare... take it out."

    "Hah... sir yes sir."

    It might be the first time you've ever slept soundly in a bed.

    You awaken on your side, weak morning sunlight filtering through the window before your sleep-heavy eyes. For a moment, just one heartstopping moment, you think it was dream. Not just a dream but a dream-dream, as in completely original fantasy, and Belial never really did all that for you and you never had that conversation by the cliff and you're obviously in town on completely different and...

    ... and you feel his arms around you. His weight and warmth pressing against your back. He has you held tight in his arms and his horned brow pressed against the back of your neck, breathing the slow, deep breaths of a dreamer in his own right. You cast your eyes around as far as you can, scarcely daring to breathe, much less move a muscle. The sheets are all bunched up at the foot of the bed, kicked to the floor of kicked to tattered shreds or both. The incubus was all the warmth you needed in the night.

    You blink blearily and squint at the light. You came here to do something else. Talk to contractors or something?

    ... it can wait. You're comfy.

    And moving would disturb Belial.

    That'd just be... a travesty...

    When you awaken again the sunlight is stronger, more harshly angled. Closer to noon than anything else. You're being less 'shaken' awake and more gently jiggled, Belial's top hand pressed flat against your chest.

    "Hey, sleepyhead," he murmurs in your ear. "Loathe as I am to be doing this, we can't stay in bed all day."

    "mneh who says," you grumble, shielding your eyes with one arm. He gingerly tugs your arm out of the way and leans over, locking eyes with you upside-down.

    "C'mon you big blue baby, I want something to sit on back at the spire that isn't a rock."

    You grumble ambiguously and stay right where you are. He looks at you in silence for a moment.

    "Wow, you really didn't jump on that?" he remarks.

    "Nah, s'your job."

    " 'eyyyy." He carefully extricates himself from you, his warmth lingering a few moments more as he shuffles his way down to the foot of the bed and stretches out his back, striding over to the window as he raises his arms above his head and stretches them in turn. You stay right where you are, cheek on your hand as you watch him go. He looks healthier somehow, like his skin's a shade or two brighter or clearer. The tar-stuff on his limbs definitely grew in the night - when once it barely reached his elbows now his arms are coated to the mid-bicep, and the stuff on his legs is reaching up towards his hips in long, gummy, half-liquid tendrils. There's an unmistakable sway to his hips as he walks, a certain way they 'pop' each time the heel-claws strike the floorboards with an audible clack. It looks ingrained, unconscious and yet selfconscious, like he's walked like that for so long he can't stop even now he's let himself go a little, let alone how odd it looks on someone with his build.

    He pauses mid-movement, noticing you notice out of the corner of his eye. "Something up?" he asks, his tone edged in something you can't quite place.

    "Nothing, just... heh. You look great today."

    "Oh." For a moment, just a moment, he's disarmed. He lowers his arms and looks down at himself, no more than a glance. One half-curled hand hovering by his chin as a smile slowly spreads across his face. "Thank you."

    Then he scoops a pillow up off the floor and smacks you in the face. "Now get in the shower and git, you."

    "Mmmnneeeeeehhhhhhh!"

    But he does manage to drag you out of bed and into the shower. Alone that is, more out of space concerns than any actual resistance to the idea of being trapped in close quarters with the incubus while steaming hot water cascades down your naked bodies. He takes the time to deal with the shredded sheets and whatever awkward questions may arise from such, leaving you alone to your thoughts. It shouldn't be too hard to find what you need in Söfnun, craftsman and labourers are among the many things the merchant house you run apparently trades in. The question is more in what you want of this first-and-certainly-only-no-ifs-ands-or-buts home renovation job. Especially with your current hoard situation.

    [ ] Just furniture. Dirt-cheap to the point to where you doubt you'll even notice the loss, and the bare minimum to appease the men living in your spire. Somethingsomething it's like camping or whatever Abzu said.
    [ ] An outbuilding. Just throw up a nice, roomy apartment-style thing behind the spire where your current lair-mates can have all the space and privacy they need with room to expand for the other five. Pocket-change, really.
    [ ] Spire excavation. If sprucing the place up is part of Mother's stipulations, you might as well kill two birds with one accurately-thrown chisel. Knock through that front door she's always nagging you about and get tunnelling, hollow out some rooms and nooks for everyone. This is where the cost gets noticeable.
    [ ] Wizardly bullshit. After that encounter with Abzu's living arrangements and the power they displayed, you're starting to get some ideas. If you can contract out some of that space-folding bullshit then everyone could have exactly what they want without infringing on your precious lair-space. Probably so expensive you will have an actual anxiety attack if you don't immediately replenish your hoard somehow.
    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 18, 2018 at 8:31 PM, finished with 1473 posts and 33 votes.
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    • Interlude One - The Dragonslayer
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    • Life was good in the Plutocracy if you knew the right people or were the right people, and it was hard to get righter than Paxton Cyrus. That wasn't his real name of course, but it was the name most knew him by, a name that carried power and privilege wherever he took it. He looked as good as his name, a giant among dwarves at a comfortable five feet and some change with an athletic build to match, brilliant pearly white teeth and not so much as a single hair gone despite the big 1-0-0 birthday bash coming up. Great breeding and healthy living they all nattered in the rags, their salaries riding on puffing him like no one had ever puffed before.

    He was in the middle of an argument on his sending stone. Just a small one for his own use, a finely-engraved stone disc the size of a bottlecap that slotted easily between his thumb and forefinger. This model in particular was emitting a ghostly blue-tinted replica of his nephew from the waist up and the absolute buffoon was trying to feed Paxton some excuse or another.

    "-I'm just saying, Paxton, that charity dinners generally look better when they're attached to a charity that actually exists."

    "Oh don't give me that, Frank. You peddle enough fiction to turn that shack you call a news guild into a bookstore, and it'd sell better too." Paxton stubbed out his cigar in the ashtray beside him. "You want 'real' charity? Fine, take a hundred gold in petty cash and go spread it around to the street bums asking for handouts. More'n the ingrates that read your paper do. Knowing that someone, somewhere, is doing something vaguely 'nice' is enough for 'em. It's enough of a pain in my ass to figure out the seating arrangements - some of the new in-laws are real old-school if you get my meaning."

    "I guess I can spin that as 'homeless outreach'. Now, I really think you should hear me out about this 'repeat cave-ins' story that keeps cropping up, I don't think-"

    "Bury it. Same as usual." Paxton paused, eyeing his nephew's illusory stand-in with a predatory gleam as he slowly ground the cigar in a few twists more. "If I didn't know any better I'd say you were starting to get soft on me."

    "No, not at all, not at all! I just-"

    "Just what."

    The illusion swallowed. "Just worry about you. It's like every year since it happened you've been, I don't know, slipping and-"

    "And look at that, my stop's coming up," Paxton said loudly, drowning out his nephew. "Driver, left up here - slowly, this isn't some street race."

    "Yes sir," the automaton up front said tonelessly, taking the car around and down the winding road into Paxton's property. It had all been a little treat really, a birthday present from him to him - the cutting edge in transportation, powered by a bound fire elemental up in front under the hood, and a matching construct driver to keep the little shit under control. It even had a flat-cap on like it was people.

    "So what's that you were saying there, sport?" Paxton asked.

    "That... I hope the catering's as good as their word for the big day this weekend."

    "Attaboy," he replied, smiling with far too many teeth. "Seeya 'round."

    The illusion collapsed with a soft electrical sizzle and Paxton relaxed in his padded leather seat, letting his eyes drift shut as the car rolled on beneath the carefully cultivated boughs of the trees lining the road. He kept on dozing like a lizard in the sun as the car pulled through the great wrought-iron front gates and around the driveway.

    It was like its own little castle-town, vibrant and idyllic compared to the company town down the road. Brilliant, exhaustively-cultivated emerald-green lawn almost as far as the eye could see, a greenhouse full of all the exotic plants he could ever want, a servant's quarters big enough to barracks a small army, water features in every bit of spare space since that's just sort of what you do with spare space when you have the money isn't it? The main building an elegant, opulent fusion of castle and mansion, five floors with more rooms than he knew what to do with, and a ballroom with space and change for every one of the thousand guests he had slated for the weekend.

    He stayed right where he was, feeling the car rock as the construct shifted its weight and slipped out of the driver's seat. Heavy iron feet clomp-clomp-clomping across the gravel as it rounded to his side and delicately opened the door for him. Paxton stretched, swung his legs free, and strode up to the front doors without so much as a backwards glance. The construct would remain right there come rain, hail or shine until he returned or saw fit to dismiss it.

    He pushed through the double-doors and into the chaos beyond, near every servant he had running themselves ragged, hurrying to and fro across every room of every floor hoping to adequately prepare for the coming party. There had to be two dozen in the entrance hall alone, frantically dusting everything in arm's reach, all the while nearly white-faced with the strain of leaving no marks. At first some of them thought they could get away with sloppy work. Knock over a bust, leave a fingerprint on a painting, it's only the fourth guest bedroom in the third floor east wing, he won't know.

    Paxton always knew. Those ones didn't last long.

    He made his way to his office, maids and manservants practically clambering over each other as they scurried to get out of his way. Well-dressed black-and-white mice that thought they were people, as far as he was concerned. When he spoke it was only to grab one of the lesser butlers as he hurried past, to impress upon him in no uncertain terms that he would take his snack in the office and he would not be disturbed for the rest of the evening.

    His office was the highest room in the entire mansion - he'd had it elevated about a foot to make sure it was the undisputed peak. Centre-stage in the top floor, perfectly overlooking the driveway through a circular steel-inlaid window. Magically-reinforced of course, just in case someone decided to do something silly like try and assassinate him with a trebuchet while he was doing the crossword. His desk itself rested atop an elevated platform, accessible by a pair of staircases that curved around the walls either side, leading down to a surprisingly large and empty space. No couches or chairs to entertain company, not so much as a coffee table. Enough empty space you could fit a couple wagons in there. Or something a little bigger.

    Paxton was halfway through penning a cease and desist letter to one of his many business rivals in which he promised to burn down the whorehouse from which the bastard in question had sprung when there was a quiet knock on the door. He stilled almost instantly, nostrils flaring as he sucked in a deep, hungry breath. Yes... it was quite the spicy, exotic morsel on the other side of that door indeed.

    "Come in," he said, the very picture of a calm and collected businessman, setting his pen down and rising from his seat. The snack let themselves in, shut the door behind them - and just as he had instructed, the butler in the corridor quietly locked them in their wake.

    "I... was told this was about a performance review?" the snack asked. He was a bit of an odd sort, it took Paxton a moment to realise he was a man - a bit more chewy, but he didn't discriminate. Just about smack-dab average in terms of height, bit on the lanky side although that wasn't to say there was no muscle on those bones. The black-and-white servant's uniform made for an appealing wrapper, white gloves and all. Skin an appealing golden-caramel brown, definitely a foreigner - perhaps even illegal? Oh yes that would do nicely, the less people to raise a fuss the better. He was fine-featured, milk-chocolate eyes, hair... eh it didn't matter, it was all under his flat-cap anyway.

    "Of course, of course." Paxton put on his best winning smile, the one he usually saved for the adoring public, as he descended the stairs. He let his hand trail down the bannister as he had so many times before. "No need to alarm yourself, son. I just like to exercise a personal touch as far as staff goes. And if you're in this office, I assure you, you have been handpicked."

    "And it's a prestigious hand that picked me," the snack replied politely, even bowing his head slightly. Oh it was absolutely perfect. Paxton could hardly keep from salivating as he crossed the richly-stained hardwood floor, each footfall of his handmade leather shoes echoing in just the right way to cap it all off. One, two, three, four steps was all he needed and he was standing face-to-face with whateverhisnamewas, reaching up to pat him on the shoulder in an almost fatherly fashion.

    "You're a lucky boy," he said. "You truly are. And that deserves recognition."

    His favourite part was seeing their reactions. Some of them noticed as early as when he started to grow taller, bones lengthening and reshaping like clay beneath the skin as he shot up a foot. Some noticed as the daggerlike black arcs of his talons punched through his fingertips, curling and biting deep to keep them from fleeing. And some only saw right at the end, as his cheeks split apart and his mouth opened into the yawning, fanged maw of a dragon about to sample its latest tribute. Unfortunately whatsisname went and spoiled it - his eyes were averted low enough that he didn't even notice as the dragon's jaws bit down-

    "ghnrk"

    The boy's fingers wrapped around Cyranax's throat and squeezed with such impossible force that the dragon stopped dead. His eyes boggled, wide as dinnerplates, as the very same boy slowly lifted him clear off his feet, peering up at him with a faintly evaluating eye.

    "And you should really screen your help better," he said.

    Cyranax kicked and struggled in his fury, tail lashing madly. His claws raked and ripped at the boy's arm, tearing the sleeve to ribbons, flensing the flesh beneath down to the bone. Only they didn't because what lay beneath was toughened, blued steel that hummed with cloaked power.

    "You were looking for this one."

    Which was when the boy's right arm whipped up, his balled fist colliding with Cyranax's face like a runaway train and hurling him clear across the office. The dragon felt wood splinter and crumple beneath his armoured back as he landed half-embedded in the siding of his desk platform. Cyranax ripped himself free of the wreckage, huffing and blowing like an enraged bull as his wings shook off the worst of the splinters. That arrogant upstart of a boy hadn't even deigned to press the advantage! He was just standing there, bold as brass, practically daring him to impress.

    Cyranax rose with a mighty downbeat of his wings and a roar of fury, chest and throat glowing beautifully as he called upon the greatest and most terrible of his fire. It erupted from him like a geyser, like a rolling tsunami of dancing golden-orange flame, flickering and licking at everything within reach as it utterly consumed the suicidal boy that thought he could kill a dragon with nothing but a fancy prosthetic arm.

    The prosthetic arm was fancier than Cyranax had realised. He watched with dawning horror as the forearm casing drew back and his flames were simply... pulled into it, sucked away like so much dust, feeding the hungering crystal housed within. The boy held up his steel palm like a shield, offering not so much as a grunt of pain even as the overwhelming heat would suffocate any ordinary man, even as the excess flame took hold in his coat and set his cap aflame. When Cyranax had no more breath to give and the conflagration ended, the worst he had done was turn the crystal a luminous cherry red.

    The boy twisted the golden ring at the wrist joint and some kind of focusing lens array shifted. He raised his palm to Cyranax once more, but now what light he could see through the palm was ice-blue.

    "That's not fair-" Cyranax started, before a glacier-wind hit him like a battering-ram in the gut and sent him flying out of the air. He landed with a heavy crunch right in the middle of his desk, splitting the lovely thing completely in two, spilling ink and paper besides. He lay stunned in the wreckage for what felt like only a moment but could have been a lifetime, blood-red scales rimed with frost and the leathery membranes of his wings seizing helplessly. He coughed, flame sparking past his fangs, groaning as he sought some sort of purchase to rise.

    He heard his assailant climb to meet him, step by slow, heavy step. Dragging something else. Something heavy. Something that scored the wood as it passed, thunk-thunk-thunk up the stairs as it trailed in his assailant's wake. The boy crested the top of the stairs and... and Cyranax finally saw that it was no boy at all. With the burning cap discarded along with the scorched jacket, her long silver-white hair flowing free, there could be no mistaking it. This was Xiomara, the world's strongest hero, and the invincible dragonslayer.

    ... shit.

    He redoubled his efforts, scrambling his way out of the wreckage and springing to his feet as Xiomara simply hefted her signature weapon, cradling the 'blade' in her steel hand. Not even something honest like a proper longsword but some... thing, apparently they called it a macuahuitl. A longsword-shaped club carved out of a single full-grown dragon's bone, carefully set with chips of obsidian all around to form a single unbroken edge. They said it was already soaked in the blood of a hundred dragons - he had always wondered how she got the bone to make it in the first place then, but that question seemed rather moot at present.

    "... I can give you anything you want," he said.

    "I don't want anything," she said. She strode closer and he backed away, claws raised defensively. Sketching a long, slow circuit around the ruined desk. All the while what fire she hadn't managed to absorb spread on the level below, hungrily licking across the floorboards and devouring the walls.

    "Money!"

    "No."

    "Power!"

    "No."

    "Men! Women?"

    "No. No."

    "A mansion in the tropics!"

    "No."

    He was in front of the window now. His eyes flicked left and right, trying to gauge which way she would move next. She just stepped over the desk this time. He waved his claws desperately, backing up step by furtive step.

    "Waitwaitwaitwait names! Names I-I can give you names!" he blurted out as fast as he could. She paused.

    "Names?"

    "Names, yes, names!" He viciously racked his brain, mind racing, thoughts whirling. "I-I can give you the guest list! Yes, that's right! The guest-list for the party! I can give you everyone who's a dragon! You can hunt them instead! If you leave me alive I can-"

    He bumped into the window, tail curled down and between his legs just to fit. Xiomara drew closer.

    "And my nephew!" he shouted. "He turned, he's a dragon too! He hides it, hides it better than any of us I swear to you!"

    Xiomara's expression softened. To Cyranax's utter disbelief she lowered her weapon, gingerly setting it down propped against the wall. She drew closer, defenceless, vulnerable without surprise or her legendary invincible armour on her side. This time it was her turn to pat him comfortingly on the shoulder.

    "Oh Paxton," she said with a smile. "Who do you think sold you out?"

    He opened his mouth to roar, to scream, to breathe more fire. Xiomara took him by the horns like nothing more than a baby bull, turned him around, and put him through the window.

    It was, as previously stated, magically reinforced. It took six tries. She was the patient sort.

    The splintering, fracturing glass finally shattered and all of Cyranax's desperate struggling, his clawing and kicking and biting and lashing with his tail came to naught. He fell every last one of those five stories and landed with an earth-shattering thud flat on his back in a crater of his own making, neatly bisecting the white-paved stone path between his front door and the driveway. He felt like a tentpeg, hammered deep into the earth, weak as some... some pet-shop lizard.

    She climbed through the window, pursued by flickering tongues of the spreading fire in his office, and leapt after him. When she fell it was like a javelin, straight and true, landing flat-footed on the unbroken tile before him with an earsplitting crack. Unharmed. Unharmed. It was the only thought in his head as his eyes flicked over every inch of her, every vicious claw-mark he'd put in her disguise, every place where he should have disembowelled her. The binder she'd used to hide her breasts was sagging, cleaved nearly in two, and yet the flesh beneath was unmarked. She had her macuahuitl in hand once more.

    "You're... you're like us," he wheezed as she stood over him. "Half-dragon. Killing your own blood!"

    "Sure."

    She raised the weapon high. He raised his hands to defend himself. The macuahuitl chopped easily through his neck and both forearms besides in one easy, practised swing. The severed appendages flew free in a spray of boiling vermilion blood, small spot-fires springing up in the immaculate grass everywhere so much as a drop of it fell. Smoke rose from the body in thick, curling, off-white plumes. Xiomara splayed out the fingers of her false hand, letting the gem in the palm recall her macuahuitl to its hidden space for safekeeping.

    The car, and the construct driver it came with, were still right where they were when Cyranax came home. Xiomara scooped the dragon's severed head up by one horn and underhand tossed it to the construct as she passed.

    "Put that somewhere noticeable," she said, climbing into the driver's seat. The construct looked between the head, her, and back again. It was hot enough to be scalding an ordinary man's hands, and the boiling blood had already scorched its cufflinks on the way down to the sizzling, smoking pool at its feet.

    "Do you have a preference for your final resting place, sir?" the driver asked.

    The head's jaw hung slack, long pink tongue lolling free over ivory fangs.

    "Excellent choice, sir."

    The dragonslayer was gone with his brand new car, and his house was burning down. As far as Cyranax's decapitated head was concerned, stuck atop the peak of the driveway fountain like a grisly winter solstice ornament, it was the worst birthday ever.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty-One: Lord Elding And The Terrible Horrible No-Good Very Bad Fiscal Year
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    • You don't like it. You really don't like it. The thought of other people rummaging around inside your spire cracking the stone and ruining everything makes your scales crawl, let alone having to pay them for the privilege, eughhhh. But... it is one of the demands Mother made of you, and it is more for the others than her on top of that. And to be honest you're in an especially sanguine mood after your night with Belial so, well, might as well make the most of it.

    You step out of the cubicle, steam billowing out in your wake as the hot water continues to fall, pointing over your shoulder with a thumb. "Still hot for you. I have contractors to talk to."

    Belial steps in close, and isn't that still just the most thrilling thing ever? Getting to see that handsome face of his up close and personal, that familiar scent returning to grace your nose. You're close enough to kiss again.

    "You sure you don't want to wait for me?" he asks. "I won't be long."

    "No no, take as much time as you need," you reply, waving your hand dismissively. "It'll be nothing but book-keeping and negotiating today, very boring. I assure you I'll be fine. You can amuse yourself here in town however you'd like - I assume you were planning to hitch a ride back in someone's dreams too?"

    "Mm. Probably Makram. Take a gander at what he dreams of." Belial curls his talons around your scaly chin and tugs you in closer for another kiss, soft and sweet and practically chaste. You've never had a 'good morning' kiss before but if they're all like that then you have been missing out. You're still blinking when he breaks the kiss and lets you lean back. "Good luck out there, Eldingar. See you back at the spire."

    "See you..." you say, somewhat dazed, as Belial climbs into the recently-vacated shower. You are very sorely tempted to stick around and take a look but that would be both overly indulgent given last night and at least a little suspect, even for you. You leave Belial to his own devices and return to the front desk to check out, assuming your generic merchant disguise the minute you leave the bathroom.

    You check out easily and spend most of your trip out the door and down the street agonising over how exactly you're supposed to do this. Paying exorbitant amounts of money so nobody asks any questions is one thing, but by necessity these people will have to walk right up to and come inside your home. Even with multiple people there to keep them honest, that's still pretty fucking hard to sweep away. 'Yes hello I am respected businessman, eligible bachelor and all-around enviable man of mystery Lord Elding, I want you to take my money and improve this obvious dragon's lair'. There is always Mother's suggestion of a speciality Plutocracy team that knows how to keep their mouths shut about obvious dragon patrons but for one they'll be even more expensive and for another... well you really don't want to do something Mother told you to even if it is the best option.

    Somewhat reluctantly re-assuming your Lord Elding guise, you go trawling the Plutocracy's quarter of things in search of your quarry. Even if they had no space to themselves and were left scattered all around Söfnun trying to attract the old-fashioned way it'd still be easy to tell Plutocracy types apart from the others. There's this certain angular gloss (whatever the fuck that means) to them, the way they sell themselves. Like they understand spending money to make money on a level that other mortals can only dream at. You of course understand it on no levels because you have the fiscal sense of a haddock and your biggest personal acquisitions are made via the bargaining position of possessing very sharp teeth and claws and the ability to breathe lightning. In any case you find a place that looks promising in short order and head inside to negotiate things.

    Logically you know you should probably spend the rest of the day shopping around and collecting quotes like a dragon collects shiny things and sifting through them all, taking second or third visits to try and see how low everyone will get, but honestly that sounds exhausting and you don't want to drain this good mood completely dry before you get home so you settle, fast. Even the boss person you talk to - a sun-baked woman named Mahi with surprisingly intricate markings made in black ink on her lips and chin, probably from the islands far southeast - seems a little surprised at the speed with which you cave.

    "How soon can you start?" you ask. "I'd just prefer this done with the maximum speed and minimum of fuss."

    "No worries sir, 'no fuss' is our slogan," she replies. "We pride ourselves on always being ready to serve clients of your ah, pedigree. Especially when they're needing to make a few changes in a hurry, eh?"

    "I don't-" you cut yourself off, eyes narrowing to electric blue slits as you stare suspiciously at the tattooed woman. A thousand thoughts rush through your head but most of them are just some variant of screaming 'MOTHERRRRRR!' accusingly to the sky so you choose to say nothing at all. Instead you sign what she tells you to sign where she tells you to sign it and walk out of there with your receipt, confident that you at least managed to get something done like a normal dragon with their life completely in order.

    Then you see the amount on the receipt in question and have a minor heart palpitation. You're left slumped against the side of the building, one hand clutching your chest and the other holding the receipt out like the bloody dagger you just wrenched from it. This is... ffffine, this is fine. It's fine, you tell yourself as you stand up straight and fold the receipt down. It's fine, everything's fine. You make money, you can make the money back to cover the costs, just given a little time. In unrelated matters you suddenly feel like you should head into your house's headquarters and check the books a little, just to refresh your memory on exactly what your dividends are and when the money accumulates. No stress, no issue, you tell yourself as you power-walk across the city.

    You find yourself in your office for probably the first time in eight-to-ten months, a very heavy and important ledger being dumped open on your desk in front of you.

    "Here are the figures you requested, sir," says the dumper in question, a grey-white and black bird-woman with a halo of longer black feathers splayed out behind her head like some kind of fashion statement and several gold rings stacked up around her throat.

    You look down at the book, then double-take as the woman registers in your mind. "And- who are you?"

    "Amina. Your new secretary?"

    Your brow furrows. "And why do I have a new secretary?"

    "Because Marco fled the country with quite a few house assets in tow," she explains patiently, as if to a child. "And since he's understandably not coming into work any more, here I am."

    Your brow furrows deeper. "Who?"

    "Your... old secretary," she replies. "The one who worked for you for twelve years." She gestures illustratively, one taloned hand reaching as high up as she can manage. "Orc? Quiet, didn't complain, you made him work through his son's birthday?"

    You give it a moment's more thought. "I'll take your word for it," you say, pulling the ledger closer. "Now, on to the important business. What's my personal income and how can I boost it quickly?"

    "Well," she says with a deep breath, in much the same tone one would use to prepare to tell a child their dog was run over by a carriage. "Your personal income is currently 'nothing' because Marco did a little merchant espionage on the side to cover his tracks and now the house is tanking." She drops a sheet of parchment in front of you with an elegant flick of her wrist. It's a letter from those bastards the Rosso twins. "We're currently the lowest-rated in all of Söfnun and haemorrhaging money and looking at a buyout. So if it's more money in your pocket you're looking for... well, their door's open."

    You freeze utterly. Hands flat on the table, fingers spread, neck aching from the strain of locking in place as you stare down at the hard, numerical truth of your situation. You make a noise, something like a strangled squawk and a gurgle and a squeak, deep in the back of your throat.

    "Are... are you alright sir?" Amina asks.

    "Hm? What? No. Fine. Everything's fine." You purse your lips to the limits of pursing that mortal lips are capable of and start scratching your beard, scratch-scratch-scratch until it almost seems as if the magical skinsuit will peel and you'll just tear away the elven disguise in great bloodless chunks to expose the panicking blue dragon beneath. "In fact I think you should take the rest of the day off, I'm so relaxed I just need a couple days to think all this through properly."

    "But the deadline is next week."

    "(ohandthere'sadeadlinethat'sgreat)" You stand up all of a sudden, chair scraping so hard and loud across the floor that you probably left gouges. "And also I just recalled I have a Thing that I need to deal with so I really must leave at once enjoy the rest of your day Damina-"

    "Amina."

    "-whatever, I really must dash."

    Perhaps not literally but oh do you ever double-time it out of the House Elding enclave, shouldering men and women out of the way in your panicked fugue state, employed or just visiting alike. You give thought to using the main exit but you rapidly realise there's no way you'll make it that far. Instead you hang a hard left and barge through the kitchens and out the back door amid many a confused "s-sir?" and "Lord Elding?". You finally burst free of that wretched hellprison in a small, private back alley with no currently-unloading wagons or anything else to disturb you. You slam the door shut behind you with a crack, hang a right, storm down the rest of the way into a dead end stone wall and- and-

    Remember at the last second that there's still a pretty hard limit to what you can get away with venting inside the city limits. Even now you can see lightning crackle and arch between your fingers, the nails darkening as the talons hidden beneath threaten to punch through at any second. Your back aches, intangible wings shifting anxiously beneath the false muscle. Instead you make a noise something like a boiling teakettle, vigorously punch at nothing, scream very silently through clenched teeth, and wildly shake your fists in the air as if roughly milking a gigantic cow.

    "Rough day at the office huh?"

    You whirl around so fast your vision blurs, clutching at your heart as you collapse against the wall behind you. "don'tdothat!" you wheeze, balling your free hand into a fist and smacking the solid stone beside you in some small act of vengeance.

    "D'aww. Sorry sweet thing, didn't mean to frighten you."

    There's a woman standing before you, a woman you know for damn sure was not in this alleyway when you came in. She's tall, graceful, fetching if you're into that sort of thing. The wavy locks of raven-black hair that fall past her shoulders seem at once both exhaustively styled and completely carefree, her pale and fine-featured face free of makeup save the striking shade of purple she chose for her lips. To match her canted eyes you see, upon closer inspection. Bright as amethyst and inviting as anything, sparkling with intelligence and amusement. She's from the east, the same as Jun-ho's homeland maybe, and dresses like it to boot - not that that's any shock in Söfnun. The crowds come with such a visible culture-clash in dress alone that you doubt you'd even notice her silk-robe-and-sash thing at all - soft pink with white trim and lavender designs cut through with red at the waist, folded left over right to cover her more-than-ample chest (how does it even stay on like that?) - were she not alone in an alleyway with you. It seems much too precious and delicate a thing to even risk in a back alley or on the street.

    "You did not frighten me," you snap, straightening up. "I was startled, that is all. Now-" you take a moment to catch your breath and straighten your hair a little "-what business do you have back here?"

    "I heard you were having a little money-trouble."

    Your eyes widen. How does everyone know about this before you!? As if to capitalise on your vulnerability and shock, the woman begins to approach. Her strides are slow and measured, smooth as anything, each step marked by the soft 'clack' of sandal on stone. You certainly feel no urge to back away, which is good because there's a solid wall behind you so you can't either way.

    "How do you-"

    "Shhhhh enough of that." She raises a finger to her lips briefly. "Now is the time to be pretty and silent."

    For a moment, just one utterly horrifying moment, you wonder if this is the guise that Mother's taken to blend in in Söfnun. You thankfully discard it a moment later - she's much too proud to have chosen the form of some beautiful twentysomething, and probably would've opened with a lot more mocking you for being brainless and easy to dupe. If you didn't know any better you'd say this woman is trying to seduce you.

    The woman in question stops just short of you, maybe three more strides in all. She delicately reaches into one sleeve of her robe and withdraws a small, rolled-up scroll, letting it dangle loosely between her fingers.

    "I've been here for a little while already, you see," she says. "And in my wanderings here and there, nothing down the little whispers I listen to, I've found out a few rather interesting things. Business dealings. Financial details. Bank secrets~"

    "And why bring them to me?" you ask. "What do you stand to gain from this?"

    "I want to steal from very rich people, sweet thing."

    "Like me?" you say suspiciously. She just laughs. "Hey now-"

    "You? Darling you don't have anything to steal," she giggles, resting the tip of the scroll against her chin. "Quite the opposite. I'd like you to help me. And then we can go our separate ways, both much wealthier and very... satisfied~"

    The pause before 'satisfied' leaves you deeply, deeply uncomfortable but you have more important questions than asking her to clarify. "But why me then?" you ask instead. "If I'm so beneath your notice then why approach me with an opportunity like this?"

    "Look," she says, striding across that last little gap between you. You shrink against the wall unconsciously but she gets right up in your personal space all the same, practically pressing against you. You're close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to hear her breathing. She tilts her wrist and taps the scroll against your chin this time. "Let's not do this dance of transparent lies any longer than we have to. We both know that you're a man of certain... shall we say exotic talents. And I'm a woman with more than a few talents of her own. I'd say there's quite a lot we can do for each other~"

    You swallow, hard. You get the feeling she takes your reaction the wrong way, trailing the scroll-end down to rest in the hollow of your throat.

    "Your rivals, the Rossos. Their vaults in particular are quite recently full with cold, hard cash and other such valuables after their ah... lucrative behind-the-scenes dealings with your former secretary, among other things. Just think about all that gold, all that wealth that's rightfully yours. Prime for the taking if the two of us work together. Don't you want to get your own back, 'Lord Elding'?"

    More than anything you just want this moment to end.

    But... much as it pains you to say, her offer is tempting. Very, very tempting. Your instincts are rapidly gathering strength somewhere buried deep in your gut, that visceral, hateful urge to just take wing and hatefuck the House Rosso headquarters with lightning for daring to cross a dragon, even unwittingly. But that wouldn't be even slightly constructive and would still leave you with your existing problem of everything you've worked so mildly hard to build in Söfnun coming crashing down around your ears. If you steal enough from them then you can save your House, and it's only merchant espionage if you get caught. Which you won't because you have infinite disguises and you only just met your accomplice. And you have no idea what you're supposed to do to save your finances if you don't do this.

    But on the other hand this woman has no idea what personal space is and seems to have completely the wrong idea about you and you might wind up needing to have multiple conversations about that before your theoretical partnership is through. And she's vaguely threatening of course, but that's kind of normal for you. You may have leapt before you looked on the spire job but you didn't spend everything, you could still potentially scrape something together.

    [ ] Take the woman's offer. Get your own back and rob those Rosso bastards blind.
    [ ] Reject the woman's offer. You'll come up with your own plan to save the House and your dwindling coffers with a lower chance of backfiring - hopefully.
    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 21, 2018 at 7:47 PM, finished with 84 posts and 47 votes.
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    • Chapter Twenty-Two: You Were Not Prepared For This Level Of Innuendo And Frankly You Question Your Ability To Function As A Team Because Of It
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    • "... I'm in," you say at last.

    "Exquisite~" the mystery-woman breathes, rising to her tip-toes as if to reach your lips as she leans in even closer.

    "But before we go any closer I really have to mention that I'm gay!" you blurt out as quickly as you can. She stills mid-movement, studying your face, your panicked eyes, clearly searching for the truth in your outburst. Slowly pushing back again, hand on your shoulder, until she's flat-footed again.

    "Oh," she says.

    And then her breasts deflate with the short, sharp pop of a pair of balloons being pierced. You stare, wide-eyed, blinking rapidly as your gaze flicks down to her now-flat chest and up to her face and back again.

    She rolls her eyes. "Really darling, you're a dragon. A shapeshifter shouldn't shock you this badly."

    "I am not shocked I just need a few moments to adjust!" you protest. You pause, shooting her one more dubious look. "So you're... not a woman?"

    "Nope."

    One more beat of silence and it clicks together in the back of your head. "And not a man, either?"

    Her -their- perfectly-plucked eyebrows slowly arch up. "Ohhh, we've got a conscientious one~" They pat you delicately on the shoulder. "In all honesty I don't much mind how you think of me, I slide this way and that as the mood takes me. But points for observation, dear."

    "I met a wizard the other day and they mentioned not being either before they inspected my magic map that points to potential boyfriends," you say a lot more matter-of-factly than you feel. "So-" you sniff "-you know, horizons have been broadening quite a bit recently."

    "Quite the dragon of mystery," they say in a tone that's just impressed and just teasing enough that you can't quite tell which they're actually intending. You just frown.

    "And I fail to see how you discovered my true nature."

    "Sweetheart..." They shift their hand down and pat your chest, just over your heart as they lower their voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "(Your true name is Eldingar and your elf disguise is named Lord Elding. Everyone in the city knows.)"

    You make a face like they just pried your ribs open and took a shit inside of your chest. You helplessly splutter out a few false starts to a sentence you don't know the end or middle of.

    "And mine's Takara," the mystery person says with a grin as if you weren't currently trying to bug your eyes right out of your skull. "Now let's go back to my place and plan us a heist."

    You've never taken part in heists before, so you wouldn't know for certain, but Takara seems to have planned this out pretty well before bringing you on-board. Still reeling from what they said about your primary guise you assume a different one that no one will bother you in - a native Arosan orc, seven feet of silver-blue-skinned brawn and ivory tusks - and follow them back to their hideout, a disused townhouse on the water they broke into and made themselves comfy in while the owner was away. The minute they're inside they kick off their sandals and sprawl shamelessly across the couch, leaving you to awkwardly sink down into an armchair too small for your chosen form. Your pride prevents you from picking a third, smaller one, so you stay perched uncomfortably in your seat like the true thug you've become.

    "So," says Takara, whipping out a scroll and unfurling it dramatically across the coffee table. It appears to be a copy of publicly-accessible plans of the House Rosso enclave with some shockingly well-drawn additions, no doubt based on what they've been able to piece together in their investigations. They produce an engraved gold fountain pen that almost certainly belongs to yet another business rival and sketch out guard patrol patterns on the plans in a confident hand, neat little circle-people with arrows pointing to and fro. "I've been doing my homework for a while, watching the guards, pumping them for information-"

    "Must you emphasise 'pumping' like that," you interject.

    "-yes-" they wink "-and I'm certain I can get us to the vault. It'll have a slew of magical defences no doubt, but I can handle those no problem. It's the mechanical ones that are bugging me - they really spare no expense protecting their loot, and I haven't the first idea how to deal with electricity-powered things beyond brute-forcing it. However, if I were to by happenstance befriend that one blue dragon that lives nearby and has been seen multiple times intercepting strikes over the northern lightning farms..."

    "That... may be me, possibly, yes," you say reluctantly, still smarting over the whole identity debacle.

    "Which means I just need to get you to the lightning junction so you can suck it dry-"

    "Stop that."

    "-and plunge the whole thing into chaos. We slip by in the confusion, and we're in the vault," they snap their fingers, "just like that."

    "I see," you say. You look down at the plans and try to seem thoughtful, being a rank amateur at doing crimes. Once you judge you've spent enough time seemingly thinking things through with your keen analytical mind, you nod. "Alright then. Which way are we entering the complex?"

    A wide smile slowly spreads across their face.

    "... what?"

    Approximately twelve hours later you find yourself flying high above the rooftops of Söfnun with Takara clutched tight in your arms, following the shadow of a cloud as it passes across the moon.

    "Prepare for aerial insertion!" Takara declares proudly.

    "Stop. It."

    The wind whistles as it rushes past, forcing you to spit out locks of Takara's hair each time an errant gust blows it up between your jaws. It's already uncomfortable enough having to cuddle up to them like a weird ambiguous teddy-bear, you're stressed out keeping on high alert thanks to the rather cramped conditions up near the overhanging cliff faces that surround the city, and on top of everything else you're uncomfortably crammed into the 'sneaking suit' they prepared for you (suspiciously in advance). There are still lights on down below of course, the city never truly sleeps, but at this hour it's more like a sleepy dog - ready to wake and bark up a storm, but stay light on your feet and you can get away with murder.

    Takara taps your crossed arms to remind you that, yes, the innuendo was also an order, and you slowly dip into a dive. The wind rushes past faster and faster, practically howling in your ears, fit to blind anyone not built for such conditions, the cold alone fit to chill any mortal man to the bone. After a moment the speed begins to worry even you. There's only a limited window until the darkest shadow passes but slamming headfirst into the roof will probably give away your position a lot more, so you pull up early and flare out your wings into a gentler glide.

    "Going soft this early?" Takara asks.

    "I will drop you," you retort.

    It gets close. Very close. So close that you find yourself making a constipated 'hnnnnnnnngggggg' sound of tension and effort as you angle your glide and try to hit the main building roof before the moonlight reveals you. You can practically feel the silver rays dance across your flicking tail but you touch down, tiles clacking softly beneath your feet as you stumble to a stop and set Takara down. They immediately motion for you to crouch and you do so, trimming your wings and folding them tight against your back - gods your heart's already hammering and you've barely started, if things ramp up any further you're likely to pass out. Slowly slowly Takara creeps down the sloped rows of ceramic tile to the edge of the roof and you follow close behind, peering furtively over their shoulder. Your hunched movements are a lot more restricted and involve a lot more quiet, rubbery squeaking.

    "(May I ask why these suits again?)" you whisper.

    "(Well for starters, no proper thief would ever be caught dead outside their proper attire,)" Takara replies. "(And for another, you're already sweating like a hooker in church. If it weren't for all that rubber insulating you you'd be sparkling like a firework.)"

    You lapse into a momentary stubborn silence as you register the wisdom of their words. "(But... then why the navel-length plunging necklines?)" you ask.

    "(Ventilation! Very crucial. This material really does not breathe well.)"

    "(And the heels?)"

    "(Absolutely essential aesthetic touches!)" Takara glances at you and gestures down at your feet as if slowly karate-chopping the air. "(Which you are... shockingly natural at moving in, what is your secret?)"

    "(I... walk digitigrade in this form anyway,)" you answer with a shrug. "(It's really a sideways step if anything.)"

    "(Lucky. Anyway, back on task.)" Takara points to several places along the exterior wall, and then the small fenced-in power station nestled inside the northeast corner in the shadow of a guard tower. "(There are four guards within sight of there we'll need to take care of before we cut the power and not a lot of shadow to work with.)"

    "(We might've been less noticeable if you'd polished these 'sneaking suits' less,)" you grumble.

    "(Shush. You need to hear the plan.)"

    "(Which is?)"

    "(Wait here and watch, then glide down and meet me once I've taken out all four guards by myself.)"

    You pause, then give them a thumbs-up. "(Excellent plan.)"

    "(Good boy. Now watch me work~)"

    Takara just seems to flip over the edge of the roof and vanish all at once, momentarily startling you before you lurch forward and catch sight of them rapidly scrambling down the side of the building. The minute they reach ground level they're off like a shot, swarming across the interior space on all fours with almost disturbing familiarity, their lowered profile easily concealing them behind low walls and shrubbery. They hit the exterior wall and just swarm up the side, gloved hands flying across every inch of stone within reach, bare fingers hooking into handholds that you can't even see from this distance even with your enhanced sight. They reach the top and ascend via some kind of... slow-motion front-flip type thing, incredibly sinuous and graceful, a product of insane core strength, and unmistakably another show-off moment just for you. You have to admit the 'sneaking suit' really does phenomenally compliment their-

    No, bad Eldingar. No getting distracted just because they don't have breasts any more, you are not that easy to please. You are a classy and distinguishing dragon of wealth and taste and you will not salivate over any half-masculine rear in sight even if it is vacuum-sealed in rubber.

    You pay attention to what Takara's doing again. They appear to have just gotten done with some kind of elaborate acrobatic knockout throw to the first guard and are now sitting astride the second's shoulders, suffocating him with their thighs.

    This is... not how heists are meant to go but a part of you is so very far from complaining and it is a shameful pervert part that should go away immediately. Definitely. No good at all. You blame Belial honestly.

    You think you zone out again because when you return to your senses with a start Takara is standing in front of the power station, waving their arms and jumping up and down. You guiltily lurch into action, unfurling your wings from the special-cut slits in the back of your suit and glide down beside them.

    "(Enjoying the show-?)"

    "(Shuttup.)" You're already moving past them, mind focused on nothing but the task. Your suit leaves your talons free and you put them to good use, slicing through the thin steel fencing like paper and casually peeling the split spars apart. You step through - careful, careful, the thing you're wearing'll probably burst like a balloon if you snag on something even slightly pointy - and approach the machinery in question. It's something very complicated with lots of tubes and wires and blinky lights that you absolutely cannot make heads or tails of.

    "Problems?" Takara asks, one eye on the rest of the darkened complex for any signs of alarm or investigating guards.

    "Uh..."

    Well... it's all lightning in the end, so...

    You just plunge your talons straight through the casing and into the bunches of wires beneath. It shears like foil and an entire enclave's worth of lightning leaps into your body through your hand. Your eyes fly wide open with a barely-stifled "(whoaheynow)" as your markings shine bright even through the suit, horns glowing like lightning rods as you draw every last spark inside yourself. The rest of the panel explodes outwards in one last dying blast of blinding white-hot sparks and darkness falls like a thick, cloying blanket. You gingerly extract your hand from the ruined console and wiggle your talons, blinking as your greyscale night-vision kicks in.

    "... nope?" you finally finish.

    "Exquisite," Takara replies, their amethyst eyes not lost a drop of their vibrant colour as the pupils lengthen into wide, sharp-edged ovals that shine with a reflected inner light.

    It's absolute bedlam inside without the supply of lightning. It seems in their pride at the extensive and expensive system of power wired throughout the complex the Rossos and their associates neglected to adequately prepare their people for an emergency should that system go down. The people are scrambling to get so much as an oil lamp lit, so blind it's almost too easy for even the likes of you to thread your way between them all. Takara makes sure to lean over and blow out someone's match along the way, eliciting the kind of terrified scream that almost certainly comes hand-in-hand with the utter ruination of one's trousers.

    In no time at all you're descending the long flight of stairs to the vault ("Really, your first time in heels?" "I think you're missing the essential point of 'my feet naturally bend like this'.") side by side with Takara. The door itself remains stubbornly shut before you at the landing, flanked by a pair of security constructs that remained studiously at their posts even in all the panic. Their eye-crystals shine a bright warning-amber that pierces even the darkness and they ready themselves, sweeping their long House-colour cloaks aside and readying their shock-staves. Child's play.

    Takara produces a long slip of paper from gods-knows-where and hurls it at the construct on the left, the projectile adhering itself to the thing's chestplate with an audible sticky smack. A moment later it erupts with the glassy keening of crystallising moisture as ice sprouts from every inch of their target, freezing the steel guard in its own little glacier. Takara crosses the remaining distance with a lazy leap and kicks the block of ice square in the middle, impressively shattering it and the construct along with it.

    You, you just walk right up to yours. The smack it aims at your cheek is dulled to nothing by your scales, the hungering elemental furnace inside you swiftly draining away the shock it was meant to deliver. You reach up and repay the favour, clasping the construct by its faceplate and send the charge right back into it. The guard seizes almost like a real person, twitching and and jerking as its joints lock up and it simply topples over with an almighty crash. You dust off your hands, feeling very much pleased with yourself.

    "How do you throw paper like that?" you ask, following Takara to the vault door. "Any time I've tried it just flops over all useless."

    "It's wonderful of you to set me up like that but I really must concentrate right now," Takara replies, kneeling by the tumbler and twiddling their fingers in a discomfortingly dexterous fashion. "I need all my concentration to work a different sort of magic right now." They press their ear to the metal and begin to turn, listening intently for the mechanism within. "But practice, my dear. Lots and lots of practice."

    You shift your weight awkwardly from foot to foot, waiting for Takara's latest show of 'magic' to kick in. They seem happily dead to the world, sticking the tip of their tongue out as they gently caress the locks. Just as you sarcastically think something about whispering sweet nothings to them too, they start doing exactly that. This heist has made you feel a lot of very weird things and you'd like to go home now.

    Click. "Aha!" Takara withdraws with a triumphant grin. "Now my dear, feast your eyes~"

    The vault door swings inwards. You start forward immediately, crossing the threshold before you even have time to consider anything heartstopping like 'oh no what if they lock me in here and run'. But no, despite the stab of fear, you whirl only to find Takara stepping in and shutting the door behind you, ensuring you won't be disturbed. They flash you another grin, silently shooing you away to go enjoy your spoils. You remain stubbornly still for exactly five seconds, a true feat of will worthy of the highest echelons of dragonkind, before whirling back around and sprinting into the heart of the vault to take a look.

    Oh it's just wonderful, an absolute treasure such that you'll even forgive yourself for the pun. Someone in the upper echelons has some real taste, willing to compromise between keeping everything nice and orderly for ease of cataloguing and just letting it all spill out on the floor like any self-respecting hoard should. There's enough clear space to walk around but every disused corner is coated in sweeping mounds of gold and jewels, every spare bit of space you check has shelves of priceless art, crates of rare materials, boxes of the finest spices, cases of jewels cut to mouth-watering perfection, the list goes on. You can even smell magic lingering in the various corners of this playground of wealth. You dig your way through one pile in particular, tossing some kind of cowskull fertility idol and the deeds to some plot of land in the western Beyond for ship lumber, before finally finding a diamond big enough you need both hands to hold it.

    "Ohhhh this is good this is very very good," you say with barely-contained glee, practically jiggling as you turn around to face Takara again. "Ohhh I had no idea this heist thing was so fun, I'd have started doing it sooner."

    "There's the attitude I was looking for," Takara replies playfully, producing a pair of leather bags before tossing one to you. "Here, Bag of Holding but it's only a cheap one and we don't have forever in here. My advice? Pick something nice and high-value and transportable, like those bearer bonds."

    They point and you follow their finger, spying a box full of yellow-brown papers with very large numbers on them. You grimace in distaste.

    "But paper money is awful," you grumble. "It doesn't shine and it gets crushed if you lie down on it."

    "Paper money's good enough to save your House, sweetie," they point out.

    "... mrgh."

    They're right. Not about the paper money thing, it's an affront to nature and you'd eradicate it from the world if you could. About the needing to move quick thing. Much as you'd like to literally clean this place out so they know never to fuck with a dragon again, expedience is for the best and there's a limit to what you can carry. So what should you burgle?

    [ ] The art. You've always wanted to feel a bit more like a refined dragon of wealth and taste, and art is a refined and distinguished sort of thing. And worth lots.
    [ ] The magic items. Sniff it out with that beautiful dragon nose of yours and stuff it all in the bag. What's valuable will be worth a lot and what's not will at least entertain you with its gimmicks.
    [ ] The jewels. The shiniest of shinies, the only reason you don't have more already is that you can have too much of a good thing and coin-to-jewel balance is utterly essential in good hoard-building.
    [ ] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
    [ ] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 22, 2018 at 12:34 PM, finished with 48 posts and 25 votes.
    • [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      [X] The magic items. Sniff it out with that beautiful dragon nose of yours and stuff it all in the bag. What's valuable will be worth a lot and what's not will at least entertain you with its gimmicks.
      [X] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
      [X] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
      --[X] Write-in: Roll around in the gold before anybody takes it
      [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      -[X] Find one particularly interesting magic item too, just because. Oh, and this glorious diamond!
    Click to expand...

    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 23, 2018 at 12:41 AM, finished with 104 posts and 48 votes.
    • [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      [X] The magic items. Sniff it out with that beautiful dragon nose of yours and stuff it all in the bag. What's valuable will be worth a lot and what's not will at least entertain you with its gimmicks.
      [X] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
      [X] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
      --[X] Write-in: Roll around in the gold before anybody takes it
      [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      -[X] Find one particularly interesting magic item too, just because. Oh, and this glorious diamond!
      [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      -[X] Seriously, it wouldn't take that long to grab every paper in sight - we can grab a few jewels and items on the way out.
      [X] Take it all.
      --[X] Oh wait. Everyone knows Lord Eldrigar is a Dragon.
      ---[X] Use our wish to transport the vault to our lair.
    Click to expand...

    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 23, 2018 at 1:03 PM, finished with 113 posts and 49 votes.
    • [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      [X] The magic items. Sniff it out with that beautiful dragon nose of yours and stuff it all in the bag. What's valuable will be worth a lot and what's not will at least entertain you with its gimmicks.
      [X] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
      [X] The gold. Fuck it. Just start grabbing dripping clawfuls and shoving them in the bag, you're a thief for a night so you will abscond with a literal sackful of money!
      --[X] Write-in: Roll around in the gold before anybody takes it
      [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      -[X] Find one particularly interesting magic item too, just because. Oh, and this glorious diamond!
      [x] The bearer bonds. The idea disgusts you as a dragon on every conceivable level, but Takara does have a point that it's more value per pound, and by design you can use them for whatever the fuck you want by virtue of holding them in your hand.
      -[X] Seriously, it wouldn't take that long to grab every paper in sight - we can grab a few jewels and items on the way out.
      [X] Take it all.
      --[X] Oh wait. Everyone knows Lord Elding is a Dragon.
      ---[X] Use our wish to transport the vault to our lair.
    Click to expand...
     
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    • Chapter Twenty-Three: Everyone Likes The Idea Of Having Yes-Men Until You Realise You've Been Embarrassing Yourself For About Forty Years And Nobody Told You
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    • It's-

    eugh gods-

    guhhh deep breaths Eldingar deep breaths deep deep- hrgnk

    Takara, alarmed by the strange noises you're making, turns to find you roughly shoving fistfuls of bearer-bonds into your bag as enthusiastically as one would rotting mouse-corpses. It's enough to give even them pause in whatever it is they're doing.

    "Are... are you okay-?"

    "DON'T LOOK AT ME"

    Takara whips right back around and you concentrate on not letting the tears fall as you clean out the vault of every last scrap of the hateful paper wealth. You just keep stuffing the bag with more and more and more, your astonishment at how much can fit matched only by your deep disgust and shame at yourself for stooping to this level. It's almost a relief when finally the bag can take no more and you prod the last protruding pieces of paper down past the neck and pull the drawstring tight. Okay... okay you managed that. You may never feel clean again but you managed it, and you deserve a little something for powering through.

    You fall flat on your back in the gold with a heavy metallic thunk and wriggle around on the pile. You can't feel it as much as you'd like through the suit, but really it's the principle of the thing. You've been inside the Rossos' hoard and rolled around on top of it, if they were dragons they'd be shamed for life. The thought's enough to make you smile even after everything.

    You glance over at Takara and notice them, rather than burgling more loot, cracking open some egg-shaped thing and dumping the contents into their cupped palm. You crane your neck up.

    "What's that?" you ask.

    They turn, tilting their had to give you a better look. Nestled in their palm is what appears to be some kind of beetle made entirely of gold, mandibles flexing eagerly as its antenna sway this way and that.

    "It's a goldbug," they explain with unabashed glee. "Bred by wizards to fuck with their rivals. When you release one it eats all the gold it can find and lays mimic-eggs in its wake - and when someone touches them? They all hatch into tiny bitey mites."

    Your jaw slowly drops in abject horror. "Wizards are monsters," you breathe.

    "Yeah they are," Takara replies with a wicked, fanged grin as they tip their hand and let the goldbug fall. You watch it glitter and gleam as it falls, turning one complete revolution and landing on its many feet atop a small peak in the mound of gold. For one heartstopping second it remains motionless.

    And then it eats.

    It's like something out of a nightmare to watch. The goldbug's just shovelling coins into its maw faster than it should be able to chew, faster than you've ever eaten even in your hungriest moments. Past a certain point it just seems to be absorbing the gold in a vaguely face-shaped direction, letting it pass straight through to almost instantly become an identical egg. Coins fly up like arterial spray as the hungering beast dives down beneath the surface, precious metal rattling and rumbling as muted chewing filters up through the gold.

    "You should probably move," Takara prompts you. You leap up from the gold as if burnt and hurry to the safe space in the middle of the room, almost crowding Takara as they rummage around for yet another trinket. You, you're too emotionally confused to figure out whether Takara is a monster of the highest order or the greatest heist-partner who ever lived for the ruinous humiliation they've consigned your rivals to. You settle on changing the subject instead.

    "Howww are we getting out?" you ask, keeping one eye nervously on the ominous ripples of the goldbug chewing its way through the hoard. "By now the worst of the chaos must be done with."

    "You see that ring of warding runes around the wall?"

    "No I ah... wasn't paying attention," you admit.

    "Yes, well, you should probably start, sweetie." Takara produces another paper tag between their fingers, inscribed with characters you don't have time to register before they hurl it. Smack goes the tag against the solid band of runes, neat ink-strokes glowing with an inner light as the circuit breaks. You can even hear a glassy shattering sound as whatever magic was at work fades.

    "Anti-teleportation," they go on. "Used to stop anyone just portalling in or out. In our case -arm around mine dear- we are going to be going..."

    You lock arms with Takara, eager to do anything if it means not being stuck in an enclosed space with a gold-eating abomination. Takara whips their arm around in an over-theatrical-even-for-you gesture and crisply snaps their fingers. All at once the world seems to distort and draw in on itself as if seen through a lens, all the air in the room bearing down on you all at once and squeezing you as if through a straw as you're crushed down into a tiny mixed marble of people and-

    -pop out the other side in the cool night air, somewhere along the southwest docks you think.

    "... out!" Takara finishes, tapping the wall beside another paper tag they must have left earlier in the day. Now that you have time to take a proper look the characters spell out something along the lines of 'retreat, anchor, recall'. "Good for short distances mostly, but-" they shrug "-I got a little lazy at the end there, what can ya do."

    You're decently far from the scene of your crime now, the docks quiet and still as a graveyard at this time of night, but you can still faintly hear the House Rosso enclave losing its mind in the distance. You raise one talon and open your mouth to ask further questions, but anything you might have otherwise said soon dies on your lips because now that the rush of theft has worn off you realise how very tired you are. So you mostly just blink blearily and look like you've forgotten how to function for a minute.

    "Looks like the big blue baby's sleepy~" Takara teases.

    "Am not," you mumble petulantly. "I could stay up for days if I so chose."

    "Mhm." Takara snickers to themselves. "C'mon, I'll let you back into my place big guy. You can crash there 'til the heat dies down while I fence my half."

    You glare at them suspiciously. "And let you steal my half while I sleep? Hah. I'm no fool."

    "Oh please." They hold their hand over their heart. "I swear to you that your share is yours alone. I won't so much as touch the bag. May you curse me with every drop of your draconic power should I break that oath."

    Your eyes narrow to slits, studying their face for any sign of deception and playing back their words for any obvious loopholes.

    "Fine. Show me sleep." You pause. "Place. Show me a place to sleep, (fuck)."

    Getting back to Takara's safehouse is mostly a blur of lumbering along through the dead of night, navigating some stairs, the sound of keys clicking in the lock and the sensation of collapsing. Before you know it you've blinked and suddenly you're lying on your back, sprawled across the couch like a cat determined to take up as much space as possible, staring up at the ceiling through a dusty shaft of light courtesy of the window behind you. You blink sluggishly a few times, shifting slightly on the couch, ears peeled for any sign of Takara moving around in the other rooms, but there's nothing. You're all alone in the townhouse and -you snap to attention and check- still in possession of your ill-gotten gains. It seems all's well that ended well, at least so far.

    There's a knock on the door.

    "... what?" you call, more bewildered than anything else.

    "Lord Elding?" your secretary's voice -Bertrina you think?- filters through the door, slightly muffled. "I thought it best to speak to you about recent events at your earliest convenience."

    "Ah, I see. I just need a moment to-"

    CRACK goes the wood as her foot drives through the lock, splintering and shattering as the ruined door almost sheepishly swings inward to admit her. She strides in as if nothing were out of the ordinary, cradling a thick leather-bound notebook.

    "-(stay right here I suppose)," you finish under your breath.

    "Apologies," she says. "I had no key. I'll arrange for the House to buy the building when we leave. On to the matter at hand - you are aware of the ruinous attack on the House Rosso enclave and their vault, yes?"

    You look down at yourself. You didn't change forms or clothes before you slept. You are still a bipedal blue dragon in a sneaking suit.

    "... I know of it, yes," you say seriously, folding your claws around the bag full of bearer bonds balanced on your belly with a rubbery creak.

    "House Rosso representatives were understandably difficult to reach, but I believe I was able to adequately convey to them that House Elding is still willing to discuss the terms of a buyout come the week's end, albeit perhaps not in the direction they were expecting," she recites coolly, amber eyes flicking between you and her notebook and back again. "Additionally I took the liberty of arranging a board meeting - if you would like to attend and personally restore faith in your leadership, I'm sure it would be much appreciated. If you get changed now and follow my planned route you can make it with time to spare and breakfast in your choice of three cuisines."

    You blink once. "How were you not promoted sooner?"

    "There was competition," she replies flatly.

    You pause a moment, eyes narrowing slightly. "What kind of competition?"

    "No one was killed. Your schedule?"

    "Oh. Yes. Wait for me outside."

    Waiting outside, Amina thankfully gets to miss the worst of the grunting and squirming and creaking and squeaking as you try to free yourself from the prison Takara left you in and make yourself presentable. It feels like an eternity until you emerge in a presentable state, Lord Elding guise slightly more hasty and dishevelled than usual, having to quicken your pace just to keep up with her almost mechanically tireless gait. You get a quick breakfast of street food in the form of a meat skewer, which you surreptitiously snap in half and eat whole, and before you know it you're striding back into your House headquarters like a new man.

    You quicken your pace slightly and pull ahead, Amina settling into your wake as you lead the way and dramatically throw open the double-doors to the second floor meeting room. All heads turn to see you enter, half a dozen men in all from all corners of the land, united -or so you once thought- by faith in your leadership. They watch in silence, whatever it is they thought to say dying on their lips as you wordlessly round the long table and stride to your proper place at its head, right where the biggest and fanciest chair sits. You pause beside it, free hand resting on the carved oak armrest, and upend your Bag of Holding on the table. An entire pile of creased, bent or otherwise lightly-crumpled bearer bonds come flooding out, each one of them elaborately decorated with Arosan knot borders and runic letterheading that proudly declares the bearer's entitlement to A Great Deal Of Money. For several long moments the only sound in the room is the soft papery rustling of the pile settling. A few fell on the floor but it's just paper money, you don't care. You feel the overwhelming urge to extend a middle-finger or two but that would be inappropriate in this context so you try something else.

    "Any rumours of a buyout were greatly exaggerated," you say. The room immediately comes alive in a storm of gratitude and praise and various assenting noises before slowly transitioning into all six members clapping. Ordinarily you'd take the well-deserved praise for what it is and move on, but meeting Takara has changed things. Your eyes narrow as you slowly scan the room, inspecting each man in turn.

    "And on the subject of rumours," you add, to an immediate reduction in volume and enthusiasm, "none of you would put any stock in the rumour I have been made aware of that I am a dragon... would you?"

    Immediately the furor returns in the other direction, every man present enthusiastically expressing that no of course not they would never believe a word of such falsehoods and to assume otherwise for even a moment would just be absurd ha ha ha ha ha. You remain undeterred, electric-blue eyes focused. Watching as the Sultanate elf you at least partially based your primary guise on swallows nervously, as two beads of sweat roll down the bald, dark-skinned human's temple, as the first Arosan orc glances at his fellows for help when he doesn't think you're looking and the other clasps his hands so tightly the knuckles turn white. You watch and you listen, and the only person in the room not clearly nervous is Amina.

    CRACK go your hands as you bring them down on the table. "I am not an IDIOT!" you shout at the top of your lungs, the echoing rumble of thunder rattling the windows in their frames and shaking the glass tumblers dangerously in the drinks cabinet as the board members nervously clutch at the edge of the table for support. You know even before you lift your hands that you've shifted back, but at this point you just don't care. "I did not hire you all to be my brainless yes-men!"

    "Of course not sir!" the dwarf agrees eagerly.

    "Shut it!" you jab your talon at him in particular, arcs of lighting popping off the tip threateningly. He shuts up. You return to shouting in more general terms. "I have always done my best not to micromanage this House and leave you all to your own devices but this deception is unacceptable! I should throw you all out on the street for this! I could! And I would be right to do so!"

    You pause again, eyes flicking left and right across the spread of men seated before you. You can't quite fathom the air of their reactions - many of them look relieved as much as they do contrite, albeit they visibly tense as they feel your gaze upon them. You breathe harder and harder, hot jets of air huffing from your nose as you feel your markings half-flicker to life. You raise one crooked talon to dispense your judgement, whatever judgement in particular it is that you spit out when the time comes because your brain is much too preoccupied being furious to think that far ahead at the moment.

    "Sir?" Amina interjects.

    You double-take, craning your neck slightly as if to peer at her. "Y- yes, what is it?"

    "Might I humbly suggest that you table any discussion of executive-level restructuring for now?" she says. "It has been a greatly trying time for this House and its management given the recent dramatic fluctuations in finances. Perhaps take a few personal days?"

    You take a long, slow breath and point at her for good measure. "That... sounds... like an excellent idea. I will do that. And you-" you swing your talon around to point at the board one last time "-should all reassess the way you wish to work within my organisation."

    You shift back down into your Elding guise, mostly so you have a collar that you can angrily adjust as an emphatic full-stop to your ultimatum. You stride quickly and purposefully from the meeting room, Amina falling neatly in step as you pass, and head straight up to your office where almost the moment you have the door shut you're leaning heavily in your desk, head in your hands and meaningfully eyeing your own personal drinks cabinet in the corner. Amina, on the other hand, does an impression of a very regal statue so well that you nearly forget she's there.

    "Yes?" you say waspishly at last.

    "Just one last matter before I leave you to your own devices, sir," she replies, delicately turning to a fresh page in her notebook with one extended talon. "Some matters will of course need attending to while you take your personal days. If you had any particular points or desires you wished to discuss, I would be happy to make note of them."

    You get up out of your chair with a groan and walk to the window instead, leaning heavily against the frame as you gaze out into the street and across the rooftops beyond. There was already so much to do that having to run your House on top of that just seems downright unfair. Sure you saved its finances but what about yours? You need gold! And you have Mother wherever the hell she is, perched like a vulture somewhere in the city waiting for updates about your living situation- augh and the living situation! Everyone back at the spire! How quickly have the contractors been at work? Will the others be annoyed when you finally get back? You grind the heel of your palm into the centre of your brow. What you wouldn't give for a return to the good old days.

    [ ] Go update Mother on recent events. Doing so voluntarily is as appealing as pulling teeth, but showing 'willingness' may leave her more inclined to be charitable. As to where to find her, well, you're certain you just have to follow the sounds of ultimate suffering.
    [ ] Speak with Amina about what the House will be focusing on during your short vacation. She's probably not going to burn it down or rob you while you're away like the last secretary, but maybe what little useful input you have to offer will mean something.
    [ ] Head to the Adventurers Guild in town and arrange for an expedition with your new influx of funds. You're in a Mood and the only cure is gold, jewels and magic trinkets - and the Beyond is the best place to get all three of those quick.
    [ ] Buy a gift or two for the others back at the spire (and a few for you) before you go home. You're sure you can make... ffffairly good guesses as to what they would like, even at this early stage. Retail therapy still works when it's to impress someone else.
    --[ ] Write-in any suggestions or predictions as to who would like what.
    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 24, 2018 at 10:53 PM, finished with 77 posts and 43 votes.
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    • Interlude Two - The Homewrecking Fox
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    • The first red flag was that Eldingar didn't flit to and fro all around his lair checking everything the contractors had chopped and changed. He just walked straight in through the new front door and made a beeline for his hoard.

    He'd paid for quick and the Plutocracy labourers had given him quick - they'd made it out to the spire in record time and laid into it immediately, a pair of earth elementals tunnelling straight through the front of the rocky edifice as if it were soft cheese before their shovel-like hands. The gargantuan workers turned the raw stone as malleable as mud with but a touch, and they performed the larger-scale parts with almost breathtaking efficiency. The mortals followed closely behind, carving away and smoothing over the excess before the contact magic wore off, fearlessly pursuing the stony titans down into the freshly-excavated depths. Jun-ho watched it all from his scaly coils with open interest. Makram just floated away to find a less noisy place to nap. Belial only showed up later, once the work was starting to wrap up. That Eldingar was the last one home seemed curious. That he didn't come home all night was almost worrying.

    "Oh, hey!" Belial waved at Eldingar as he passed. "I was just wondering what... kept you." His hand slowly lowered as the dragon nearly passed him without so much as a backwards glance.

    "Mm? Oh, nothing much. Had to deal with a few financial wrinkles," Eldingar replied, waving his hand dismissively. "Nothing to worry about."

    "Hey! You're back!" Jun-ho launched himself forward and half-slid, half-skidded to a stop beside his strangely-still-bipedal blue dragon host. "You should really check the rooms they added! They're still kinda basic at this point but the layout's all there and there's some furniture so it almost feels like a castle now!"

    "That's nice," Eldingar replied, and the second red flag was that he was disinterested in entirely the wrong way. Granted he certainly sounded a little irritated and long-suffering which was very him, but there was a note of feigned interest and that was certainly a new companion of Eldingar's. "Look I'm mostly just in and out, I came to grab the map and take another look at the lay of the land, so to speak. I'll be back when the job's done properly so there's a finished lair to look at."

    "Okay," Jun-ho replied, a little dejected, and slumped down with his chin on his crossed forelegs. Eldingar walked on, crouched down beside the hoard and started to dig through in search of the map tube. The lair was quiet for a spell, filled chiefly with naught but the jingle of coin rattling against jewels and cascading down and around a pair of scaly forearms thrust almost elbow-deep into the pile.

    "Having a senior moment already?" Makram remarked, reclining on his cloud not far from Eldingar shoulder. "How tragic. Kicking in at a fresh young century and change - what will you be like when you get older? I do hope for all our sakes you remain continent."

    "Not now, ifrit," Eldingar grumbled, searching through the gold with increasing irritation. Makram's eyes slowly narrowed, his head slowly rising off its lazy perch on his hand.

    "Are you looking for this?" he asked loftily. Producing, the moment Eldingar turned his head and looked, a tightly-furled scroll half hanging from a travel-worn leather case. A few trickles of gold dust wormed their way between his fingers as he took hold of it, wiggling it for emphasis.

    Eldingar scowled. "Give that back to me. I don't have time nor am I in the mood for any games right now."

    Makram slowly lifted his eyebrows. "Hm. I see." He glanced at the map-scroll in his hand, then back at Eldingar.

    And immolated the blue dragon in an instant golden pyre.

    "MAKRAM!" Jun-ho leapt to his feet in shock as the unnatural conflagration climbed higher and higher, throwing bright light and darker shadows madly across the contours of the cavern walls. Belial started forward in the background, Jun-ho mostly paralysed with in decision, and all the while Makram kept his hand raised to sustain the fire.

    "Are you new at this or do you just take no pride in your work?" Makram asked over the roar of the flames, dismissing the random map back to where he'd found it. "I'm definitely going to kill you either way, I just wanted to know for my own interests."

    Something shifted within the pillar of golden flame, forcing even Makram to sit something close to upright. There was a flash of heat, movement as quick and sharp as a sword-slash, and all at once the magic was simply cancelled. Flames cut like stalks of barley, severed at the root only to fade away. The shape within, not even close to Eldingar any more, settled into a much more relaxed stance.

    It wasn't a mortal either, that much was plain as day. Oh it was person-shaped enough, sufficient to pass at a glance - but in these conditions, allowing itself to be studied like a work of art, the differences were striking. Though its features marked it as native to the land across the sea, not Jun-ho's homeland but close enough to be lumped in by the casual viewer, its skin was an impossible milk-white, so flawless it barely seemed to have pores. Its long, flowing locks of hair were the same colour and glossy as silk, easily reaching its waist - and perched atop its skull, emerging from its hair like those of an arctic fox tentatively peeking through fresh snowfall, were a pair of triangular vulpine ears. A pair of slit-pupilled amethyst eyes stared out at the assembled three 'tenants' of the spire, the lips of matching colour below quirked up into an all-too-confident smirk that exposed a pair of almost dainty fangs. All over its face it bore bright scarlet markings, made too crisply and too exactly to be makeup; eyes highlighted as if by thick, winged eyeliner; a circular red mark adorning its forehead flanked by a pair of curves with a single solid line rising up beyond the hairline; and one more set of lines that conformed to and highlighted the contours of its cheeks, almost like whiskers.

    Its actual garb seemed almost inconsequential, but it bore noting for its sheer opulence. It had the air of something once simple and sacred that had been altered, gaudily and mockingly. A pair of loose-fitting pleated pants in rich indigo, the pure white folded jacket trimmed with the same, a rigid purple choker sealed around its neck. Its feet, barely visible beneath the hems, were bare and black as ink, each toe tipped in a short, curved claw. No prizes for guessing then, even before it produced a paper talisman from within its voluminous hanging sleeves to cradle like a dagger, that its hands were similarly black and clawed. And then, the finishing piece - the fox tail swaying free from its tailbone, golden-white and bushy as a paintbrush.

    "Be nice," Takara said sweetly. "I'm only here for the map. I won't touch the rest of the gold even for a souvenir."

    "What did you do to Eldingar!?" Jun-ho demanded.

    "What? Oh, the real him." Takara tittered to themselves. "Oh nothing. Just a little prick to the tongue while he slept - nowhere else to draw blood, you see. A simple spell. And temporary, as you can see."

    "Well, I'd like it to be made perfectly clear - I absolutely do not care," Makram said. "He's not going to let you live either way once he finds out you tried to steal from him, and you're annoying, so-"

    And then with a snap of his fingers he attempted to immolate Takara again. The foxperson was quicker, hurling the paper tag to the stony floor where it promptly erupted into a vast, crystalline wall of quick-growing ice. Boiling water splashed across the ground and thick columns of steam rose as fire met ice, but the infiltrator was unharmed. They darted around the ice, aiming for a better angle on Makram only to run afoul of Belial. The middle-aged demon seemed to just lurch into 'combat' out of simple reflex, eschewing whatever spells he may or may not have had in favour of trying to tackle Takara and restrain them with his superior brawn. Takara was much too quick, in physical speed and willingness to commit violence both. They raked their claws across Belial's exposed chest with the speed of a snake's lunge and moved on, ignoring the incubus as he fell to his knees with a cry of pain entirely disproportionate to the seriousness of his wounds.

    Their next opponent was both a dragon and an ifrit at once. Seemingly insurmountable odds - but they were hardly working together. Also unwilling to try and roast them alive Jun-ho was forced to just loop and coil all around the cavern, snatching and grasping uselessly at Takara as they slipped free again and again and again. A stream of curses in languages both contemporary and ancient spewed forth from Makram's lips as he shouted at Jun-ho for blocking his firing line with his gigantic, long, scaly ass. Takara made the best of the chaos, hurling down a pair of tags to occupy Makram with a sudden gust of wind that seemed to comfortably occupy the dead space between dust devil and full-blown city-wrecking tornado.

    "Hah! Being of fire and air, imbecile!" Makram called triumphantly, cancelling the spell with naught but a wave of his hand and an audible shattering sound. "Give me a challenge or not at all!"

    Takara was in view once more, but far from idle. They were running down the length of Jun-ho's spine, perfectly balanced, bare feet slapping against the armoured scales accompanied only by the meaty adhesive smack of paper talismans sticking to the same. Jun-ho practically tied himself into knots trying to chase them, the incessant squirming and serpentine wriggling eliciting yet more curses from Makram as he struggled to draw a bead on the fox-spirit.

    "I got!" Jun-ho called the whole time, desperately grasping at nothing. "I got it I got it I got it I-"

    BZZZZZZTTTTT

    Each talisman came alive at once, their identical characters shining as one. Violet energy arced between each tag, enmeshing Jun-ho in a tightening net of tainted lightning that bore him down as quickly and easily as being tripped. Relegated to the background, squirming and writhing, calling upon every ounce of strength in his body to break free and defeat the intruder before Eldingar - the real one - could come home. His struggles were in vain.

    It was Makram's tun to be arrogant and infuriating. Takara pursued him the length and breadth of the cavern and all the while he couldn't help but scoff at the upstart creature, casually teleporting beyond its reach at every turn, easily deflecting or countering any of its 'serious' curses. Even when they attached the tags to hurled knives in an attempt to change things up and catch the ifrit off-guard he still recovered easily, evading them without so much as a scratch.

    "Do tell me when you plan to unleash some real power," he called over the din of spells being hurled and teleportation ravaging the air. "My patience is nearly at its end!"

    "So's mine, sweet thing," Takara replied, squatting atop a boulder that had rolled away from the wall during the fight. "You might want to look down."

    And look down Makram did. What he discovered was a seemingly random assortment of 'missed' tags and knives stuck to and embedded in the stone floor beneath, all shining in concert as they sketched out a shape in their own right - an inverted pentagram, contained by a circle. Thunder rumbled, lightning flashed, as crackling bolts of violet energy sprang forth from every point in the star and speared Makram straight through. He let out a sharp cry of pain, pitched roughly to the hard stone floor below as his dust cloud vanished. When he looked up it was just in time to see Takara blow Eldingar's diminished treasurepile apart with a similar outpouring of force, sending gold and jewels flying wildly all across the room like precious shrapnel as only the crystal-inlaid map tube was left in its proper place.

    "Now that looks more like a magic map," Takara said victoriously, crisply scooping it up and tucking it away inside one of their sleeves, pausing just long enough to set down a piece of paper in its place, And with that they turned and began to walk out, a spring in their step and a hum threatening to break out. They paused only by Makram's side, long enough to pat him on the head. "D'aww, it's alright sweet thing. You did really really well, given the circumstances. If I'd had more time I might've even shown you a little more tail~"

    "I will slit you open mouth-to-anus and turn you into a scarf, fox," Makram spat.

    "Not really my style but you do you, byyeeee~"

    Takara strolled back out of Eldingar's thoroughly-trashed lair, so high-energy as to be nearly skipping as they left the recently-renovated gloom of the blue dragon's lair and entered the steely lack of sunlight characteristic of the area. It was only when they were out of sight that they slowed and dialled it down a few notches, almost sombre by comparison as they skirted the rocky outer perimeter of the spire for some privacy and rummaged around in their sleeve for the map case. At last they retrieved it with a soft sigh, something like relief mixed with a great deal of anticipation. They firmly grasped the cap and twisted-

    "You might want to rethink this."

    Takara jumped, shoving the cap back on and glaring instinctively at the man responsible. It was Issachar, standing with his back against a tall stone spar jutting out of the earth just in front of the main spire itself, like some lesser tooth pushed aside by the genuine article. Completely unknown to the fox-beast on a personal level at that point of course, yet still there was a certain something about the unarmed, unarmoured man that made Takara narrow their slitted eyes and sniff suspiciously, bushy tail flicking in frustration.

    "Can a fox not enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace?" they grumbled.

    "No, no they may not," Issachar said patiently. "I may not know of your kind in any specific fashion, but I do know people, and I know people like you just fine. More than enough to tell you, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this path will lead to no peace. Even this fresh triumph of yours will turn to ashes sooner than you think. Just to send you off in search of another, and another, and another, as all victories built off the backs of selfishness and self-delusion poison their fruits like sour-"

    Takara hurled a pellet at their feet, releasing a thick cloud of cloying dark grey smoke. Once it finally cleared they were gone without a trace, not so much as footprints or bent grass to prove that they were ever there. Issachar just remained silent and still, lips still parted as if ready to continue his lecture if Takara came back. Slowly, thoughtfully, he raised one hand and scratched at the short stubble on his jaw.

    "Well," he said. "Did not maintain control of that situation."
     
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    • Chapter Twenty-Four: Now Is A Time For Reflection, Introspection, And Great Personal Growth. You Hate It And Want It To Stop Immediately.
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    • You shake your head with a soft sigh. "No, no. I'm sure you wouldn't."

    "Beg your pardon?" Amina replies, and damn is she ever good at sounding like she doesn't know exactly what you mean.

    "You already know exactly what's best and anything I say will only modify it slightly if at all and I'm just..." you grind the heel of your palm against your eyes, as if you could grind the vibrant electric blue right out of them and make this disguise you used to be so quietly proud of actually do its fucking job. "Sick of it. The runaround. Thinking I understand when I don't because nobody will tell me."

    You half-turn to face Amina properly, one hand lingering on the window frame. "I need those personal days and I need them right now. I just need to take care of something at the Adventurer's Guild and then I'm needed back at the es-" you sigh as you catch yourself in that stupid, useless, rote like "-at my lair."

    "Of course, sir. Shall I arrange transportation?"

    "No, no I... need the walk."

    The walk doesn't calm you at all. It wasn't really supposed to. You go in your Lord Elding disguise and every step of the way you're staring at people, studying their faces as they pass, as they look at you and quickly look away when they notice you noticing. Men, women, children, from the tallest orc to the most diminutive dwarf, hell you even find yourself scrutinising the stationary constructs like their gemstone eyes will betray any sort of hidden truth. How many of them know? Is it just the upper echelons, a kind of secret-open-secret? Or is it just like Takara said? Are you the entire city's pet dragon, allowed to live in his own little fantasy bubble out of convenience? Thought so defanged that your rivals, your own secretary, would knowingly cross you? It was supposed to mean something dammit and now you're...

    You wanted to think 'just like them' but that's not true either. Your whole world thinks you're a joke, some kind of cruel twist on the king's new clothes where everyone was humouring him out of amusement rather than fear. You're a rich, scaly jester and even then the first part of that has been repeatedly in jeopardy the past week. You cannot even put into words how much you want to go home to your freshly-renovated spire and sleep, possibly for three days straight, you'll see how you feel.

    The Adventurer's Guild is a grand old hunting-lodge-type affair, situated right on the wharf with its own personal dock for ease of accessing the Beyond. There's usually a fairly steady trickle of people coming to and fro, no end of fans willing to hang around the attached open-air restaurant hoping to catch some higher-profile pioneers taking a load off before or fresh off some expedition or another. Others hanging around the claim boards to speculate on finds, whether for fun or for some cold hard cash on the side. You're the sort that gambles for keeps, officially - as such the front desk lets you in immediately and before you know it you're off to one of the VIP rooms, reclining in a plush leather chair with a roaring fire beside you. No taxidermy kills thankfully, those are a bit tacky these days.

    "Lovely to see you again, Lord Elding!" One half of the proprietors enters and takes a seat opposite you - Ilyana al-Mullaqati, took the place over with her husband Uptil two years ago and you've seen plenty of her since. You don't quite recall what got them out of the game on a fieldwork level, something about a hydra, you never asked and they never told. She's small and lean like a whipcord, the archer type back in the day and you doubt she's let it all go to rust, twin blonde braids framing a face that still hasn't lost its deep explorer's tan. "All well?"

    You try to dial down the look you shoot her from 'filthy' to 'neutral'. "Mm," you say diplomatically. She seems to get the hint and hands you your personal ledger, leaving you to sit back and crack the spine.

    It's well-kept as ever, claims that may be of interest to you based on your previous dealings recorded neatly within the pages and progressively crossed off as more interested buyers finally take precedence over waiting and hoping you'll foot the bill. It's a system so simple it's almost prehistoric, but when it works it works - the Beyond only re-seeds itself once it's no longer observed, and the easiest way to keep it observed is to just leave a person or three there. Certainly more cost-effective than Abzu's setup. Trained survivalists like a guild adventurer can keep a particularly juicy claim locked down for months or more, the proverbial guardian at the gates. Sometimes literally, when the claim includes a first-civilisation ruin. Those in the 'biz' usually call claims 'dungeons' for whatever reason.

    "What's this one?" you ask, tapping the one messily-written entry. Ilyana cranes her neck to read it upside-down.

    "Oh, that. That one's up north, above the cloud layer. The Sending we received was a bit garbled by the distance and for the life of us no one could rightly say if our pioneer was saying it was an 'infinite cloud maze' or an 'infinite clown maze'."

    You shudder, deeply and viscerally, at the mere prospect of the latter. "No thank you."

    "Yeah no one, (no one is willing to risk that one)," Ilyana mutters.

    There's the space to write in your own desired 'dig site' as it were based on whatever information you may be privy to that the Guild is not, but you don't bother with that. Only madmen with money to burn roll the dice like that. No you're much more in the mood for a semi-guaranteed return today, so you settle on one marked as the likeliest to contain no-frills treasure. Gold, jewels, any precious metal really, if it's shiny and it's worth more than its weight in scrap you want it. You do all the necessary signatures in their proper places and the funding is figuratively speaking already in Ilyana's pocket.

    "We'll get our best on it right away!" Ilyana says cheerily. You don't know how she keeps up that constant energy level - maybe it's just a natural counterbalance to having such a quiet husband. You bump into the man on the way out, speaking with someone about something or other at the front desk. He's an orc from the Sultanate lowlands, more on the orange side than the local silver-blue, pointed canines rather than full-blown tusks but the same pointed ears, bearded in the way that makes you feel like a twelve-year-old growing his very first chin-hair. You can recognise him in profile just from the prominent nose and turban alone. He notices you pass out of the corner of his eye and raises a hand in greeting, flashing you a smile. You nod in kind, politely curling up the corner of your mouth as you push your way through the doors and back out onto the street.

    It's strange to finally think about. Adventurers stake their living, their very lives, on being adaptable. By definition the threats they face are impossible to predict, only possible to plan for and hope for the best. Yet day in day out they venture out beyond the edge of the map and return only lightly scathed. They're admired for it. You? You had one disruption in your daily routine and everything's just sort of cascaded from that until you wound up blundering into the painted backdrop you've been living your life in front of and found the entire rest of the theatre crew having a party backstage you weren't invited to. It reminds you of the time you took a chance too far and ate a deer carcass you'd left for just a bit too long rather than go looking for something fresher. It's this dull ache in your gut, pulsing and uncomfortable.

    You need that rest and you need it now. You make a beeline straight for the city exit, barely bothering to make it out of sight before shifting back into your true form and winging your way home to the spire. The fly back, now that's halfway relaxing. That's just you, silence, and the wind flowing over your wings. It'd be perfection if there wasn't exercise involved.

    Your spire's looking... good, surprised as you are to say that. Your mother was right (loathe as you are to say that), the Plutocracy know what a dragon wants, and they gave you what you didn't know you wanted. Where once there was naught but rough unworked stone there's now a castle-style gatehouse sunk into the side of the spire, empty for now but you're sure they'll be back with a nice proper gate another day. It's big enough that even in your true form you can clomp your way inside with only a little bit of squeezing. Inside you can tell that the contractors wisely left you as much space in your old lair as possible, doing the majority of the expansion work underground. As you scan the space with your keen eye you can pick out plenty of subtle work, almost on the level of detailing, like a half-finished painting that points to one finished piece - the spire as your castle, with this space as your grand treasure vault and throne room. No one that enters can get anywhere else in the spire without having to gaze upon its magnificence. You'd be a lot more pleased if there was more magnificence to gaze upon but you begrudgingly give them points for effort.

    You find Jun-ho, Makram, Belial and Issachar all lined up in unnatural single-file to await you. Jun-ho is in bipedal form, Makram is actually standing on the ground, Belial has a bandage on his chest and Issachar is... holding a plate with a loaf of banana bread on it.

    "Good... day," you say somewhat suspiciously, voice dynamically loosing bass and reverb as you shrink down to your bipedal form in kind. "Diiiiid I miss something?"

    "N-no, not at all!" Jun-ho says quickly. "Just the contractors coming through! There's even a wine cellar now! For all the wine Makram brought you and everything. They brought it all down there."

    "Mm. I was starting to wonder where I would keep all that." You glance at Belial. "Are you alright? What happened?"

    "Oh, this? Nothing, it's not as bad as it looks," Belial replies. "Or sounded at the time. I was uh... scratching my chest while walking and I tripped. Claws slipped. I've got hypersensitive skin for obvious reasons so... yeah."

    You make to move on, but catch yourself at the last second when something clicks. "So that means when...?"

    He waves his hand. "No no, no it's really alright sometimes, especially when I'm ready for it. It's just that if I get caught off-guard I can, hah I can be a real baby about pain."

    "He'll be fine, I fixed him up good as new," Issachar joins in. He lifts up the plate. "I was just coming by to give you this when I saw the renovations. It really is starting to look good, isn't it? Another day or two and you'll have a real palace on your hands."

    Your eyes slowly narrow to slits. "Why are you all being so eager and nice to me?" you ask suspiciously. "And Makram why haven't you said anything insulting or crass yet?"

    "I'm not always on," Markam says snidely. "Sometimes I sleep."

    Belial scoffs. "I've seen your dreams, that doesn't count."

    "Now don't you start-!"

    You take advantage of the commotion to push through between Makram and Belial, double-timing it across your cavern as the argument turns to suddenly-too-anxious questions about why you feel such an overpowering need to check your hoard when there's certainly nothing wrong with it no need to alarm yourself no siree. You do a complete circuit of it, eyes flicking to and fro as you scan every gem, every coin, every crown and pearl, mentally comparing it to the crisp and perfect image in your memory of how you left it.

    You stop at the end of your revolution. You slowly drop to your knees and leeeeeean in close, one eye shut and the other peering intently at a single seemingly-unimportant emerald, identical to all the others if you're just a mortal. You think you can actually hear the others sweating behind you, still hoping against hope that you can't tell something was touched.

    "This gem is in the wrong place," you say softly. "It's been swapped with the one six inches up and to the right." You slowly straighten up and turn to face them, still standing in that unnatural straight line as if awaiting a firing squad. "Who touched my hoard?"

    "It's a long story," Issachar says. "You see-"

    "Afoxpersoncameindisguisedasyouandsaidtheymetyouandbeatusallupthenblewupyourtreasurepiletofindthemagicmapandleftandissacharcameintohelpusputitallbacktogetheragainhopingyouwouldn'tnoticewhilewefiguredoutwhattodo," Jun-ho blurts out at blinding speed.

    "And now it's a short story," Makram comments.

    "Andleftanoteforyou," Jun-ho adds explosively. He glances at the other three. "(I'm sorry I don't like lying.)"

    You don't quite know how you feel yet. Emotionally speaking you're balanced on a knife's edge, just waiting for a good hard knock to tip you over one side or the other. The only thing is, you're not quite sure what side means what. You silently hold out your hand, beckoning for the note, and after a moment's hesitation Makram hands it over. You stretch it out between your talons - it looks to be repurposed from the same paper Takara used for their talismans, written with the same brush in the same deft hand.

    'Heya! It's yours truly, the terrible Takara! I'm sure you're horribly upset right now, but I'd just like to remind you that I even kept to the spirit of that oath I swore to you rather than just the letter. I didn't take so much as a tin penny from your hoard with me, just the map - and hey, fair's fair, right? I helped save your House, and if what you said about this map is true you just helped me save my love life. And from the size of the tussle I got into trying to grab it, you've already got boyfriends to spare, ya hog.

    Don't try and find me, or you'll find out this cute foxie's got claws and fangs just as sharp as yours when it's cornered. Lots of love~

    Takara'

    The note ends with a cutesy, stylised painting of Takara's fox-eared head blowing you a kiss. You set your lips in a perfectly straight line, jaw clenched, as you stare down at that little ink reproduction of the energetic trickster burglar that both saved your finances and ruined the sanctity of your hoard, again, all within the same twelve-hour period. Slowly, deliberately, you roll it up into a nice neat little scroll and pinch it between two talontips.

    "We're all really sorry," says Jun-ho. "We tried our best to stop it, we really did. We only hid it because we knew you'd be upset."

    " 'Upset'?" you repeat. "No no. I am far from upset right now. D'you want to know what I am right now? It's-"

    A portal opens in mid-air and Abzu leaps through, landing crouched with a wand in each fist, the magical weapons raised over their be-hatted head like clubs. They can't scream a warcry but they've done the best they can, affixing an [AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA] sign to the front of their hat in preparation for their heroic rescue.


    (( art by @Camellia ))

    They freeze mid-motion as they catch sight of the situation they just barged into. Slowly, slowly, they straighten up and lower the wands, glancing at the lineup of men to one side and you just about to make a dramatic point to the other.

    [I may have been a little late] they sign, eyes turning to white '>>'s of awkwardness. A moment later they snatch the warcry sign off their hat and throw it away.

    "What, were you in the shower?" Makram needles.

    [Yes!]

    "I- ugh, nevermind."

    "Abzu, hi, nice to see you again," you say flatly.

    [Hello Eldingar! Your place looks nice!]

    "Yes, thank you Abzu. As I was saying," you pick up the thread, wagging the rolled-up note like your own wand to emphasise the point. "I am not upset. What I am is completely unsurprised, because honestly? This is just about typical for how the past week's been. It's like everywhere I look I find out that all this time, people have been thinking I'm just some easily-fooled idiot they can dance around to their heart's content because they know me and they know how I work."

    You pause. Everyone seems to be listening to you with bated breath. Waiting for you to shout. To scream. To cry and blubber and complain and get so worked up that you become utterly useless. To run off to your gold and hunker down and wait for the bad feelings to pass, maybe take off and go eat them away instead. Everything that you always do and have been doing for a hundred years.

    "So I'm not going to get angry," you say. "Fuck it. Fuck it, right? You saw that note, Takara's expecting me to come chasing after them because I'm a dragon and I'm me and I should already be tearing off out that door roaring my head off. But I won't. They have the map now?" You shrug, hands slapping against your scaly thighs as they fall. "Fuck it. They're welcome to whatever it shows them, I've got the five of you already and five places left to check, three of which haven't been moving around the past few days. I don't need it."

    "Is this the real Eldingar I see before me, or another shapeshifter?" Makram asks.

    "Fuck off," you snap, jabbing a talon at him.

    "I stand corrected; it really is you, my beautiful baby-blue prince," he replies laconically.

    "Then what will you do instead?" Issachar asks. "Bearing in mind that they-" he indicates Jun-ho, Makram and Belial with an inclination of his head "-won't be eager to do anything strenuous in the near future."

    [ ] Check the abandoned mansion in the forest you remember being on the map.
    [ ] Check the island off the Republic coast you remember being on the map.
    [ ] Check Söfnun again which you remember being on the map.
    [ ] Check the vague area you remember that one roaming spot near the border being last and try to work from there.
    [ ] Check vague area you remember that one roaming spot in the Plutocracy being last and try to work from there.
    [ ] Leave it alone for now and try to relax. Take someone out on a date-type thing.
    [ ] Forget the whole thing and just have a housewarming party right here, all six of you. You won't be able to pay attention to one of them in particular.

    And then there's the question of who you do what with, especially considering that the map was still attuned to you when Takara took it so any spot you pursue from memory could bring you into conflict either accidentally or on purpose.

    [ ] Makram. Too worn out from fighting Takara to follow you to a map-spot.
    [ ] Jun-ho. Too worn out from fighting Takara to follow you to a map-spot.
    [ ] Belial. Not so much 'too worn out' from fighting Takara as pretty much useless in a fight given his sensitivity.
    [ ] Abzu. Friendly and quite the powerful wizard, even if the muteness is a bit of an impediment there. You're unsure how they'll do in public. Available to pursue a map-spot.
    [ ] Issachar. Still pretending he's just some friendly neighbour but you know damn well there's some secret shit in there that'll invariably come out if you make him tag along somewhere. Available to pursue a map-spot.
     
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    • Chapter Twenty-Five: You Know If Anything This Curse Is More Boon Than Bane, Really Drives The Market Price Down For A Property That's High On Aesthetics And Low On People To Bother You
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    • "I need to get out of the spire," you say. "Look for another map point while it's still fresh in my mind. Issachar, feel like coming with me to check an abandoned mansion hidden deep in the forest, or do you have crucial farming to do?"

    Issachar gestures dismissively as best he can while still holding a plate of banana bread. "It's mostly a hands-off job, you try to be there to fix the rod if it breaks down and swap out the casks when they fill up, but I took care of all that before I left so I should be free for a day or two. I'd be happy to come along."

    "Fantastic." You half-turn to face the gooey wizard. "Abzu, thank you for coming but you can head home now if you'd like. I'm sure you've got experiments cooking or what-have-you."

    [Can I stay a bit, actually?] they sign.

    "Mm?" You arch one brow-ridge.

    [I already met Makram but you've got more friends I haven't yet!] they reply with an enthusiastic little sign-wiggle. [And the renovations look exciting!] [Can I stay and meet everyone and look around?] [Pleeeeeeease?]

    "Oh." You blink. Abzu's energy is as disarming as ever. You feel yourself soften if only slightly - at least they're being polite and actually asking. "Of course. Don't touch my gold but you can all try the wine if you want, Makram brought enough for an army."

    [Yaaaaaay! :D]

    "The only question I would have -(here try some)-" Issachar adds, holding out the plate complete with breadknife for all to take a piece, "is what our travel arrangements are. Are we angling to be teleported there or...?"

    "I don't suppose you might have any ideas?" you ask pointedly. "Any methods of travelling quickly? Finding the place? Getting us there? No? Not a one?"

    "I am sadly just a humble lightning farmer come bearing gifts of banana bread," Issachar replies coolly, meeting your gaze with such ease you swear you see a flicker of Makram-esque smug within it. "I'm afraid travel plans are best left up to you."

    You narrow your eyes at him. "I'll have to carry you in my claws. It'll be uncomfortable."

    "I can handle discomfort," he says. "Bread?"

    Grumbling under your breath about the various things he can do with his bread you take the offered knife and slice off a piece of the at this point quite heavily diminished loaf. Holding it gingerly in your talons, after a moment's consideration you just toss it into your jaws and snap them shut like a feeding crocodile.

    Your eyes widen as the cinnamon-spiced sweet banana flavour explodes across your tongue. "Mm!" You chew quickly, swallowing the still-warm slice and tonguing the crumbs from between your fangs. "That was... actually fantastic, do you cook often?"

    Issachar smiles, unguarded and genuine in a way you haven't seen from him yet. "Yes, well, I do have a lot of free time and not much else to occupy myself with. So I dabble. I'm pleased to hear you like it." He helpfully lowers it so Abzu can reach, letting the diminutive wizard take the plate off his hands fully.

    "I suppose it's acceptable for ah, 'rustic' cooking," Makram interjects in his very Makram way. "But really if we're talking about skill at the culinary arts you should look no further than my own considerable talents. Give me an hour and I could whip up a seven-course banquet fit for a king, as I often did back in my day, you see the style of the time was-"

    "I'd love to see you in action one of these days if you're free," Belial says, completely ignoring the ifrit as he continues talking about what you think is some kind of gold-leaf dish with live doves living in it. "I dabbled a bit in the day but I kinda dropped off, might think about getting back into it."

    "Ooh can I watch?" Jun-ho asks. "Haven't so much as tried cooking toast before so honestly cooking is basically magic to me."

    [The true magic is in the act of creation] Abzu signs earnestly.

    Makram makes a face like he wants to vomit violently all over everyone in the room. You... don't know how you feel to be honest, there's a sort of funny flutter in the pit of your stomach and you scratch the back of your neck to try and cover for it. The scrape of talons on armoured scales draws Issachar's attention and he seems to get the gist of things.

    "We'll pencil it in when we get back," he says. "But for now; Eldingar, shall we?"

    "Better hope you're not afraid of heights," you reply.

    Issachar is indeed not afraid of heights because the man seems to be wholly dedicated to cultivating the images of an unflappable humble wise man and it irritates you to the core. He doesn't so much as scream once you wrap one all-encompassing foreclaw around him, carrying him as easily as a child might carry a tin soldier, and swoop off up into the sky with all the terrifying force and acceleration an adult dragon is capable of. Carrying a mortal like this while flying is a new experience and an awkward one at that, but equally infuriatingly Issachar offers not a word of complaint as you gingerly try to adjust your grip to a level that's comfortable in the long term without just dropping him.

    Over an hour straight of flying and Issachar is silent, seemingly content to just watch the world pass him by from a view usually reserved for the gods and those equally impressive as them like dragons. Or... birds, really. While you admit that anyone would be awed in his position, he's him and you're still in a bad mood and suspicious as hell so it just grates at you until you can stand the silence no more.

    "It's... not hurting you, is it? You're alright?" you ask awkwardly. Nailed it.

    "Mm! I really am fine!" he calls back, having to shout just to be heard over the air itself at this height. "And you?"

    "What's that supposed to mean?" You of course have the kind of deep, bassy voice that men can only dream of in this form, so he can probably hear the vibrations of your words in his bones at this range.

    "You know what I mean! How are you feeling? I haven't seen you in a while and it seems like a lot's happened in the intervening time!"

    You sigh heavily, your breath charging a low-hanging cloud as you pass. You crane your neck to look at him properly. "Honestly my life is figuratively speaking about as much of a mess as my hoard was when you showed up in my lair. Except every time I pick up a coin and put it back someone runs in and kicks over five more."

    "Really?" Issachar leans against your top talon, arms folded on top of the scaly surface. You'd think he were leaning on a desk, not terrifyingly high up in the sky in the clutches of a dragon. "Because from where I'm standing things seem better than ever!"

    "That so?" you say bitterly. "Then you should probably be standing way closer."

    "Well may I?" he asks.

    "Wh- y-" You eye him suspiciously, let out a huffy breath, and lift your eyes to navigate properly. "Hmf. I already have four strangers with easy access to my home, might as well make it five. You certainly ingratiated yourself with that bread."

    "You know the offer to visit still stands too!" he reminds you. "If you liked the bread there's plenty more where that came from! And if you need anything else, my door is always open!"

    "Yeah yeah..." you say somewhat petulantly, and focus on navigating. While your memories of the map are already hazy and threatening to blur even further by the day, the general area of the mansion is pretty hard to miss. It's a vast sprawling forest, as ancient and storied as the world itself and a teeming habitat for all sorts of wildlife both magical and mundane. You think it was declared a conservation site at some point in recent history, recent enough that the mansion in question predates it. Perhaps the wealthy family that had such an estate built eventually succumbed to a curse of some kind? Probably nature-related, curses have a way of working out in just the right fashion for the victim to cry 'my hubris!' in their final moments. Really the most surprising part is how they didn't manage to hire some adventurers to break it in time.

    You're sidetracking yourself. You're bored and letting your head stay in the clouds figuratively as well as literally. You angle your wings and take yourself into a gentle descent, the landscape below resolving itself clearer and clearer as you pass the forest limits and glide over an endless sea of unbroken leafy green canopy, dappled gold by the steadily setting sun. Your shadow ripples across the undulating waves of green a little to your left like a silent companion.

    "Weird," you say. "You'd think a mansion would be visible for miles around from the air."

    "Could be magic," Issachar suggests, no longer forced to yell to be heard at this altitude. "If it's been cursed to be swallowed by the forest forever then it might not 'exist' from the air."

    "Mm. Point." You let yourself glide a little lower, skipping the very tips of the treetops with your trailing hindclaws and tail, squinting to try and peer through the forest's protective shell. "Any ideas?"

    "Try setting down right here, dead ahead, I think there's a straightaway under us."

    You comply, for lack of any other plans. You shift your grip on Issachar as best you can, trying to keep ahold of him even as you shrink down and he seems to rapidly expand out of your grip. You hold out one transforming foreclaw as you breach the canopy layer, staving off the worst of the whipping boughs and breaking branches as you descend into the shade. By the time you're through the worst of it you're down to bipedal form, clutching Issachar in an underarm grip like a child clinging to a particularly big cat. You grunt softly, easing off the throttle with a few rapid flaps, before finally setting the two of you down on the forest floor below in a stumbling but otherwise relatively soft landing.

    "Hah! There." You brush yourself down, tugging out a few twigs that got caught between the points of your horns. "Flawless execution."

    "Was that your first time carrying someone?" Issachar asks. "If so you were surprisingly good at it - you've got a very light touch."

    "Myeah, well, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what hurts a squishy mortal and what doesn't," you brush him off, taking in your surroundings properly now that you're not in danger of dropping him. As an immortal dragon against whom even armies are insufficient of course you aren't intimidated by the oppressive curtain of shadow the canopy casts or the immense towering height of every broad, pillar-like tree, such that even in your true form you could comfortably move around. It's just fairly noteworthy is all. Nothing to let bother you. There's faded remnants of a path beneath your feet, perhaps even paved once, now all but completely reclaimed by the forest. It ripples and undulates like a serpent underfoot, shot through with roots the thickness of your arm or greater, a single dashed lifeline of civilisation winding its way through the forest and towards the great wrought-iron gate beyond, topped in a crest you don't recognise.

    "Well would you look at that," you say. "You got us right to the front door. How curious."

    "It was quite the lucky break wasn't it?" he replies guilelessly.

    "Yes. Very." You're not in the mood to pursue this outside. Maybe once you've found whoever it is that's secreted themselves away in this mansion you'll drop all pretence and hound the man to reveal his secrets. You lead the way, muscling the gates open with a long high-pitched whine of protest from the ancient metal.

    What lies beyond is like its own little bubble in time. Despite the disrepair of the road, of the gate, the crumbling outer wall consumed by moss and lichen, within it seems utterly pristine. The lawn is neat and well-kept, so sparkling emerald it seems only freshly watered. There's a fountain in the middle of the grounds, a multi-tiered thing of marble so perfect not even the water has managed to darken it yet. On this side of the perimeter the wall is as strong as the day it was built, high and uniform, tipped with gleaming steel spikes. To the left you see a greenhouse, massive glass panes fogged by condensation, turning whatever lies within to vague blurs even to your keen eyes. To the right you see an honest-to-goodness hedge maze just like you've always secretly wanted, the dense bushy green 'walls' so high you'd have to fly to cheat. Straight head is of course the main building, and you must admit it's a fine building by mortal standards. It's a three storey villa, surrounded in all sides by perfectly-kept hedgerows and flower gardens, the sort of thing you'd need an army of groundskeepers to get that good-looking. It's big, it's tall, it's broad, it's opulent, it's everything you could want in a home. And best of all it's completely em-

    Your eyes flicker back to one window in particular, third from the right on the second floor.

    "See something?" Issachar asks.

    "I thought I saw a light on," you reply. "Probably just a ghost."

    As if it weren't obvious enough by the extreme contrast, not a drop more natural light falls upon the estate compared to the road you just left behind. The forest arches up overhead like a thousand gnarled, grasping fingers, closing tight over the estate and dragging it down into its leafy darkness. The branches actually seem to have directly grown into knots, clinging to each other in solidarity to ensure that the sun can never truly shine upon this place again. And then, just to cap it all off, if you crane your neck you think you can spy the edge of a family graveyard off past the main building on the other side of the grounds.

    "This does seem very cursed doesn't it?" Issachar observes.

    "Oh yeah. So cursed I already feel all greasy," you say as you walk towards the front door anyway. "And it's been what, twenty seconds?"

    "Most definitely cursed," he agrees, following you.

    The sun was already starting to set by the time you got here, but the deepening shadow only bothers you in the vague sense that seeing in greyscale is annoying. There's Issachar to consider but also fuck him he probably has special eyes, the magical liar. The two of you skirt the fountain and walk right up to the front door in comfortable silence, casting your eyes all about for some sign of a thread to start unravelling the mystery at play here. Issachar draws ahead, giving the handle a good jiggle.

    "Locked," he says. "It seems like there's a-"

    You pick up a rock and hurl it through the adjacent window with a deafening crash. Almost before you can even move the curse blatantly takes hold - the very sound itself reverses with an uncomfortable high-pitched glassy keening as the rock leaps off the floor inside and comes hurling back through the healing window straight at your face.

    Bonk. It bounces off your scales harmlessly and lands by your foot.

    "It was worth a shot," you say. Issachar has his eyebrows raised as high as they'll go but he refrains from commenting, only shuffles over to make room as you approach to inspect the doors beside him. You stretch out your hand, tracing the shapes of the locking mechanism with your talontips.

    "The house crest, it looks like," you murmur, mostly for your own benefit. "A three-headed dragon I think. But the emblem's incomplete. See?" You tap the shaped hollows. "We have to find the missing dragon heads."

    He looks at you like you're the one with the three heads. "But why would you lock your front door with three keys that are still accessible from outside the locked door?" he asks, so bewildered it's precious. "That seems more like a lock designed to annoy the owner than keep anyone out-"

    "Shhhh shhh shh shh Issachar," you shush him. You pres one daggerlike talon to his lips and he goes crosseyed looking down at it. You pull it away again. "If basic puzzle etiquette is this new to you then I invite you to please shush. Obviously the lair has to be locked, but it's a rubbish lair that nobody can actually get into. So you tease an adventurer's brain by putting them through a series of progressively more difficult trials to wear them down and then slowly funnel them towards your personal chambers!"

    "... hm. I suppose this would be your area of expertise," he replies.

    "Check under the welcome mat, sometimes you leave one in a really obvious place as a fakeout."

    He kicks the mat away. No key.

    "Well worth a shot too." You turn in a quick circle. "Maze, greenhouse, cemetary out the back. One key each, probably with their own lesser puzzles or bound monsters guarding them, gather them all up and we're in! Simple."

    Issachar glances up at the great leafy dome high above, squinting at the fading rays of sunlight that filter through at increasingly slanted angles. "That might take a while. And it might not be safe to be caught outside come nightfall in a place as cursed as this."

    You shrug. "If speed is your problem we can always split up."

    Now it's his turn to look at you like you're a moron.

    "... what?"

    "Nothing, I'm sure it'll be fine."

    He wanders away from the door and you follow, the pair of you pausing a couple metres from the porch to take one more look at the sub-challenges to come. He looks at you expectantly, letting you make the decisions. Smart guy, no wonder he's made it this far. But he is right, there's always the chance that something annoying or more overtly evil might happen if you're not in the mansion by sundown. But you're a dragon and he's an [indeterminate] so it's unlikely to be an issue. Perhaps this could even be an opportunity...

    [ ] Go with Issachar to each location in order. You'll have time to chat, but he'll probably make you do all the work, and you might not beat the sunset.
    [ ] Split up. Go to the maze while he goes to the greenhouse, reconvene at the cemetary. You'll definitely make it before sunset with no possible downsides.
    [ ] Split up then follow him in secret. He might start using the secret powers you know he has while he thinks you're not around to see, so what better chance to catch him in the act?
     
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    • Chapter Twenty-Six: You Aren't Familiar But Based On All Mortal Chatter You've Overheard Discussing Religion Usually Goes Much Worse Than This
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    • Oooh you're tempted, you are so very tempted to send him off on his own and creep after him like some thieving fox, watching and waiting for a moment of weakness when he reveals his true colours. But honestly you want to spend time with him and do these puzzles right more, so instead you point to the maze.

    "Shall we?" you ask.

    "You are the expert," he says with a flourish of his arm, "so lead on."

    Well he's right. So lead on you do, chest puffed out self-importantly as you march to the hedge-maze in question.

    It's just as beautiful up close as it is far away, the hedges so perfectly thick and trimmed and angular they almost seem to have been constructed brick by leafy green brick in a series of impenetrable walls rather than merely 'grown'. You take to the air for a better look at the whole thing, to better appreciate it of course, and discover that it's just as fancy on the inside too. There must be half a dozen iron gates complete with levers to raise and lower them, sometimes multiple at a time just to bend your brain, all in order to reach the emblem's resting place in the heart of the maze. You notice, as you do one last pass of the puzzle area, a surprising number of carven stone statues of beautiful winged mortals with weapons and exquisitely-cut topiary animals.

    "Hey," you call down. "Wanna bet the topiaries and angel statues come alive and try to kill you? I've got 100 on 'yes'."

    "No deal, I'm afraid!" he calls back up. "I like to pick and choose my bets a little better than that!"

    "Aww! You're no fun!"

    "That's me, no-fun Issachar!" And without further ado he steps across the threshold, striding purposefully onward even as the entrance seals over with leafy green boughs like a wound behind him. "Now, how does this work? I've never used a hedge maze before."

    "They're deceptively simple, just put one hand on one wall and follow it." You perch atop one of the hedge walls - it's thick and tough enough to take even your weight. "There's some switches and gates too but I'll tell you which ones seem to be opening and shutting what."

    "Aren't I lucky to have such a puzzle expert on my side!"

    You preen with a wide, smug grin. "Damn right you're lucky to have a bona fide expert on your side. Okay now you've got two switches on this side of the gate coming up so I think you have to throw them in order so both gates actually stay down, try-"

    It goes on in that sort of fashion for a while, you fluttering from perch to perch like a giant scaly songbird of thunder and death to advise Issachar as to the effects of his actions on the maze as a whole while he patiently follows your instructions. He even manages to figure out 'my left or your left' without being told once! He truly is the greatest partner a puzzler could have.

    And then, just as he pulls his fifth switch, one of the angelic statues leaps from its pedestal and comes charging at him through the newly-opened gate. He mostly just seems confused and annoyed as he turns to face it, barely flinching as you obligingly blast it to smithereens with a bolt of lightning.

    "Told you," you singsong.

    "I indeed bow before your foresight." Issachar stoops to pick up its stone mace, pausing to gaze at the rubble and mentally piece it back together. "You said these were angel statues?" he calls up.

    "Yeah, why?"

    "They seem remarkably... pedestrian, as far as visions of heavenly warriors go," he comments, shouldering the stolen stone bludgeon and proceeding on ahead. You shadow him from above, finding a much closer perch as he comes to a set of three switches.

    "Why, what're they supposed to look like?" you ask. "Flip them all back and forth, I wanna see what they do."

    "This is very basic stuff," Issachar replies, flipping the switches in sequence as you suggested. "What would you say your current religious education or background is?"

    "Ah... slim to none?" you say, trying not to sound too uncertain. "Try right-centre-left-right-centre."

    "You've really gone this long learning so little about the faiths of the world?" Issachar asks with barely-restrained astonishment, going through the sequence practically unconsciously as he focuses his attention on you. "For someone operating in a major cultural exchange city like Söfnun for so long I honestly expected you to be a little more... well worldly."

    "I like my privacy!" you say defensively as the next series of gates all descend. The mark of progress is an alarm bell for the guardians of the maze, as every statue climbs down from its perch and every topiary unroots itself in order to pursue Issachar. "Run, maze wants to kill you."

    He breaks into what can only be described as a light jog, entirely unconcerned with the small army of stone and nature baying for his blood at his heels. You swoop down once they've passed and flip one of the switches back, spoiling the solution and raising three gates again. The mob of monsters are trapped within, stuck stupidly walking against the iron bars and making menacing noises in impotence possibly for the rest of time. You take off again, skimming along the spiralling wall of the home stretch and alighting right over the plinth containing the first emblem piece to wait for Issachar.

    "Got it," he says, snatching it out of its housing with a brief flash of satisfied flair. He cranes his neck to meet your gaze. "So what happens now?"

    You take a quick look around. "Uhh... looks like it wants you to backtrack," you say.

    "Mm." He shades his eyes. "What do you think?"

    "I think we gave it its fair shot," you say.

    "I think we gave it its fair shot," he agrees, obligingly spreading his arms out for you. You swoop down and deftly snatch him off his feet, claws wrapped tight around his biceps as you wheel around and bear the dangling man safely back down to the grassy ground. He raises the dragon-head emblem and wiggles it proudly, as if to say 'one down already'. You appreciate him trying to get into the spirit of it all.

    "So why not explain things to me?" you ask as the pair of you move on counterclockwise to the next puzzle. The cemetery is wreathed in its own little sea of mist, seeming to absorb what little light manages to claw its way through the unnatural canopy overhead. Issachar's breath begins to steam as the pair of you draw up to the rickety, creaking old gate but if the cold bothers him he refrains from complaining.

    "I would be happy to," he explains in a tone so genuine it's almost disarming. But first he gestures to the rows of tombstones around you, stretching out like a sea of broken stone teeth in the mist. You approach one at random, kneeling down to read the inscription.

    Suddenly the earth beneath you buckles and shifts, a low moan slowly rising with the abomiantion making it as the zombie interred within the despoiled ground claws its way to the surface. It reaches up to you with a half-rotted hand, fingers locked like curled claws in rigor mortis, its eyeless sagging face staring accusingly up at you as its lipless maw opens wide-

    "Shhhh." You place your hand against its skull and gently yet firmly shove it back down into the ground. The zombie lets out a confused moan - you continue to make soft shushing noises as you read the rest of the inscription, holding its head under even as it struggles and squirms, as if drowning it. You make a half-interested noise as the surname in particular seems to swim before your eyes, resolving itself multiple different ways. "Hmm. It looks like this place belonged to the Douglas house, but the name is constructed with two words from an older dialect basically meaning 'dark river'."

    "Think it's relevant?" Issachar asks.

    "I don't know! I think it's interesting and I don't get many opportunities to flex the gift of tongues," you say, somewhat petulantly. "Anyway, it seems like this son of the line died fairly young, Severe anaemia he never managed to recover from, I think. There's a symbol on his headstone."

    You straighten up. The zombie resumes clawing its way to the surface, sounding somewhat more upset now that its big entrance has been ruined. Issachar smacks it back down again with his stolen mace, and this time it doesn't get back up. You turn your attention to something more productive and scan the rows of tombs, the shape of a mausoleum sluggishly resolving itself from the mist.

    "Let's take a look at some headstones," you say, ignoring the shambling shapes of more zombies emerging from the mist. "I think I've heard of this kind of puzzle before, there should be some kind of pattern in the deaths and then we combine all the sigils in their headstones into a sort of key-glyph."

    "Sounds like a plan. Would you like me to tell you some of what I know?" Issachar asks.

    "Oh please do, this sounds like a time-consuming one and gods know zombies can't carry the interest there."

    And so the two of you frolic gaily through the mist-wreathed rows of melancholy memorials to faded glory, occasionally swatting down the more persistently irritating zombies as they approach.

    "This one was killed in a bar over unpaid tabs. Seems too mundane." Crunch goes a zombie skull as Issachar looks at you. "Where shall we start?"

    "This one had some unspecified 'disease of the blood', somehow I think that's closer to the right track than bar bills." Whap goes your tail as you swat an encroaching zombie away. You make a mental note of the sigil on the man's tombstone, 'drawing' it on your palm with a talon to help you remember. "Why not start with Arosa? I live there and all."

    "Fair enough. The Arosan faith is what's known as 'henotheistic', which- " splat "-is defined as a faith which venerates one divine figure or concept without denying the existence of others. One of the reasons I was so surprised you didn't know that-" splurtch "-is because the figure in question is Tiamat. You know, the salt sea of life from which even dragons sprang?"

    "That sounds... familiar," you say, desperately covering your ass. Whack, and a zombie's head goes sailing straight off its body. "This one died from getting blood in an open wound while hunting, I think it counts."

    "Mark it down. So you might say that recognising other gods as existing as a little 'obvious', but-" wallop "-the idea is to recognise them as what the Arosa believe them to be, the children of Tiamat who've stepped up to take her place maintaining balance in nature in her absence. They're more like... merchant houses, I suppose? Powerful, and worthy of respect, but only if they actually do their jobs. You give, they give back."

    "Makes sense," you say. "Let's go check the mausoleum, I think we're deep enough in this 'blood' connection to crack it by now."

    You indeed have all the information you need, the only question is execution. There's a crustal set in the door of the mausoleum and you obviously need to make the combined key glyph appear within it - you scratch the accumulated glyphs and your best guess of what the combination would look like in the stone beside as a guide - but the input method itself is some fiddly thing involving buttons that you just can't fathom no matter how hard you try. Eventually you let Issachar take over, venting your frustrations by batting zombies over the fence with your tail as they approach. In no time flat you hear a click and a rumble as the door descends into the earth, the mausoleum laid bare before you. Rather than a sarcophagus you find only a second plinth, the centre head of the dragon awaiting. Issachar grabs it.

    "So, shall we escape?" he asks.

    "Let's go."

    You escape the horde by moving at a brisk walk and shut the gate behind you. They're still walking into the bars, outstretched arms waving uselessly in the empty space between, as you round the main building and make for the greenhouse.

    "So what's the Sulatanate faith like then?" you ask. "I certainly didn't miss the wars, at least the tail end, and I know there was some religious motives there."

    "It is, at least for now, polytheistic," he replies. "One major holy city for each of the gods. The good news was that they worshipped Tiamat as well. The bad news is that they didn't worship her enough and negotiations broke down while trying to secure an open border policy for pilgrims. The war ground on for years and years and years, the city changing hands multiple times, and all the while Sultanate lands burned. Your kind may be some of the few left that remember some places were ever green at all."

    "Well that's stupid," you say with all the ironclad certainty of someone who was only made aware of the entire topic this evening. "That's mortals for you, even when they agree they figure out a way to start fighting over it."

    Issachar shrugs, sanguine. "History is a tangled web of perspectives and agendas, even with hindsight it can be difficult to extract a linear chain of cause and effect. And you might be surprised how easy it is for people to hate something familiar." He opens the north door to the greenhouse with a soft metallic 'click' and motions. "After you."

    The greenhouse is an opulent two-story thing, all delicate wrought iron and spiral staircases and hanging plants festooning every unclaimed fixture. No common plants here, only the finest herbs and spices and medicinal growths imported from all over the world and left in their perfect growing conditions to be cultivated. The sun has set in earnest by now, plunging the estate into a night darker than any you've ever experienced, but your night vision kicks in immediately and you hear no complaint from Issachar - that's right, because you can see just fine, can't you you bastard. You quickly scan the surroundings, easily picking out puzzle-relevant pieces of the environment with speed only seasoned adventurers could hope to match. You only need the open journal lying on a table near the door and the vague shape of the massive plant growing in the centre of the room to piece it together.

    "Ah, easy one. We have to mix a special type of weed killer to rot away the plant and find the third emblem inside I bet," you explain quickly. "You see the numbers all tallying up and some of them have '+0' for no reason? You get alchemical solutions from those numbered stations and mix them with plain water, and then once you mix them all together in the right order you probably-"

    The air hisses, something long and tentacular lashing out from the darkness, scattering planters like leaves on the wind as it grasps for the pair of you. The two of you dart away, presenting a divided target, but it's no use - more pseudopods lash out, hissing and whipping and cracking loud enough to rattle all the glass in its housing as the mutant plant in the middle of the room keeps up its punishing assault. Your brow furrows as you duck and dodge back and forth, waving your arms about to fend off its grasp.

    "What's this all about!?" you exclaim, offended. "It's not even letting us move from the door, how are we supposed to mix all the chemicals?"

    "I think it's the darkness!" Issachar replies, grunting softly with effort as he tries not to let the vines back him into a corner. "Nightfall must have made it more aggressive!"

    "Yes well, there's 'more aggressive' and then there's 'unwinnable'!" you protest. "This is a complete breach of puzzle etiquette, and right when we were through doing the others completely fair and square!"

    "I'm sure -ngh- you can take it up -hah- with the management," Issachar comments.

    "You know what, I'll do just that!"

    You step out into the centre of the room and stand stock-still. A lashing vine wraps around your midsection and the plant seems to pause a moment, as if shocked that you would just hand yourself over like that. A moment later it decides you must just be stupid and wraps the rest of its vines around you like thick fibrous ropes, arms and legs and throat, all squeezing as tight as it can as it slowly begins to drag you in. Details become clearer as you're pulled forward, talons scraping across the stone floor. The beast's immense flowerbud-like eyeless head seems to split completely open, revealing a rounded wetly-glistening fang-lined maw. You wonder if its fangs would leave a mark on you. Maybe chewing on you would just lead to a dental emergency. You're too upset to stick around and find out. Instead you tense your muscles, draw your head back, and breathe a sizzling bolt of blue-white lighting straight down its throat.

    BZZZT. A tremor runs through the vines wrapped around you as the plantbeast freezes completely in place - you imagine it'd be blinking if it had eyes. It opens its maw again to let out a dry, wheezing cough, expelling a puff of smoke.

    BZZZZT. You hit it again, right between the jaws. Its vines fall slack from your body like unknotted rope, each landing limp with a quiet slap as the main body sags back on its roots, punch-drunk. You stomp your way over to its side, crouch down, and lift with all the might in your body. For just a moment you fear that your draconic strength won't be enough and the beast will embarrass you one last time in front of your sort-of-date, but sure enough you feel the root system slowly begin to give way, snapping free of the earth one grasping tendril at a time as you tear the whole thing free and dump it unceremoniously to the floor.

    You give it a kick for good measure. It lets out a bassy, distorted dog-whimper of a screech and spits up the third emblem, the brass dragon-head ringing and clattering as it falls to the ground beside it. You stoop and scoop it up, pausing just a moment longer beside the defeating plant.

    "And let that be a lesson to you," you say. It lets out a low, hungover rumble and lies still. Satisfied, you turn and walk away.

    "It seems there is some truth to the stories about a dragon's power," Issachar remarks playfully as you return to his side, gold-flecked black eyes twinkling in the darkness. "The challenges that still remain in our path had best pray that they remain fair lest they awaken your rage once more."

    "Yeah yeah mneh mneh," you mock him, unlocking the other greenhouse door from the inside and leading the way back to the locked door that started it all. It's as close to pitch black as anything can get, the main building little more than an ominous silhouette painted in greyscale tones, every window cold and dead. "You saw it, it wasn't playing fair, and we still got the third emblem. So now we can get inside and solve whatever puzzles are in there, then probably unlock another area underground where we may not have to complete the rule of three with a couple more puzzles before we get to the treasure vault and/or whoever it was the map was pointing to here."

    "You are quite the knowledgeable one," he observes. "What a pair we make, covering each other's weaknesses so well."

    You scowl in the darkness. You're 99% sure he's teasing you for not knowing anything about religion, which is perfectly understandable really I mean who has time to learn about all the various silly cults mortals form in their spare time when everyone already knows dragons exist? He thinks all this puzzle stuff is silly too, the tosser. Shows what he knows. As far as what you know...

    [ ] Impress Issachar by saying you know the story behind the three-headed dragon in the emblem you're assembling. Super secret dragon lore, no mortals allowed. You just uh, hope your memory is actually correct here.
    [ ] Ask Issachar flat-out if he's an angel and if so in service to what god. He's so obviously something more than human and being passive-aggressive about it clearly won't work so it's time to rumble him good and proper.
    [ ] Ask Issachar what it is he believes. Well... you don't actually know and you're curious. He seems to open up the most when you ask about him only semi-solicited or less, and it's got less chance of backfiring than trying to one-up him.
    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 29, 2018 at 9:59 PM, finished with 39 posts and 32 votes.
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    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 30, 2018 at 3:33 AM, finished with 2077 posts and 37 votes.
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    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 30, 2018 at 9:39 AM, finished with 2082 posts and 40 votes.
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    • Chapter Twenty-Seven: You Brought Your Date To A Haunted Mansion And It Was The Best Decision Ever
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    • Well... it hasn't steered you wrong so far. "What is it that you believe in, then?" you ask, taking the dragon-head pieces to handle the slotting process.

    He seems surprised you bothered to ask. Pleasantly so, in a genuine way you can't really bring yourself to be angry at. He leans against the doorframe with folded arms, putting himself in your field of view.

    "I grew up in the Sultanate," he says. "Not Utu's holy city itself but one of the neighbouring settlements - nice place, had its own library. I apprenticed there and I remember the owner, he was a priest too. One day I asked him how he had time to take care of all the books and adhere to his faith, but he told me they were one and the same thing."

    "Your gods want you to read books?" you ask.

    He chuckles. "You know that's not really inaccurate," he says. "Or, not them specifically, I'm sure they'd be very much pleased to be the eternal centre of mankind's attention, but in general. I mentioned before that the Sultanate is polytheistic 'for now', and that's because the wars halted - temporarily, I pray - a shift in thinking. Somewhat similar to the Arosa respecting gods without revering them utterly, but beyond even that. They have found their god but we are still looking for ours."

    You pause, the second head slotting in with a click, and look at him. "How can you be 'looking' for a god?" you ask. "Either they're around smiting people or they aren't."

    "Yes, well, you understand why this reform has been a bit slow-going," he says. You're not entirely sure whether he's agreeing with you that it's a hard sell or teasing you for being resistant. Maybe both. "If I wanted to be a little inaccurate yet pithy about it, I'd say that the thing people like me venerate is knowledge. Learning about the world we live in just one little piece at a time. Setting our sights higher than gods to the hows, the whys, to an even greater power and intelligence than them should one exist. Opening yourself to understand more, making your world just that little bit bigger, is the most admirable thing a person can do."

    "(S'all well and good for you,)" you grumble softly, rattling the third head around in its slot as you try to find the right seating. "(I can't even figure out when I'm the town laughingstock.)"

    "What," says Issachar, "you think trying to understand people doesn't count?"

    Click. The three-headed dragon emblem is complete, turning a full revolution in its housing to an even deeper click of the double doors unlocking. You immediately race inside to focus on something very relevant to your interests and skillset instead of uncharted territory with a high likelihood of making you look like a buffoon. Thankfully Issachar seems to take the hint, following you into the grand entrance hall as the doors automatically swing shut behind you and the chandelier above slowly springs to life of its own accord, lamp by guttering gaslamp.

    It's exactly what you expected from the outside, all lush carpeting and wood panelling and marble flooring, a sumptuously-carved oak staircase rising from the centre of the hall and splitting off in a T-junction at the first landing, the house crest reproduced in gold engraving on the otherwise blank wall at the split. You glance down at the floor beneath your feet and see the design yet again, golden linework that might just be real gold surrounding a subtle divot in the stonework. You experimentally tap at the edges with one toe-talon.

    "Secret door behind the crest," you say instantly "We find what goes in here-" you tap the divot again "-and that-" you point at the wall at the top of the first flight of stairs "-goes up or down to reveal the path."

    "You really do know your stuff," Issachar says.

    "No need to act surprised about it every single time!" you grumble. "I spent a lot of time in my youth designing fantasy lairs, every wyrmling does it! I'm not on trial here!"

    He nods, glancing at the doors either side that lead to the east and west wings. "Split into two?" he suggests. "One puzzle in the west wing for half, one in the east for half."

    "Eyyyyy now you're catching on!" you say, mood immediately lifting. "Let's try the west wing first, we went right first when we showed up outside and sometimes these things try to punish you if you do the same obvious thing too much."

    He gestures for you to lead the way and you do so gladly, throwing the doors open and striding down the long hallway beyond like you own the place. Thunder rumbles in the darkness outside, the gloomy corridor briefly lit by flashes of brilliant white light from the lightning strikes outside. Wonderfully atmospheric, even if it does the exact opposite of unsettle you for obvious reasons you can't rightly dock it points for that. The two of you make sure to try every door along the way - all locked, probably to save on wasted exploring time with only a certain puzzle-budget. It's when you make it to the main dining hall that you hit puzzle paydirt.

    It's as opulent as anything else on the grounds, the long table seemingly carved from the trunk of a single mighty tree, no latitude for mistakes and yet the finished product is flawlessly detailed. There's room for fourteen people, each place neatly set with not a fork or a napkin out of place, and yet only one plate is actually full. The one at the head of the table, right in front of the ever-burning fireplace, succulent roast meat and golden-brown potatoes dusted with spiced salt crystals, vegetables swimming in a sauce that makes your mouth water from a single whiff. The plate seems to have been made only moments before the two of you entered, still steaming, the crystal glass of wine beside it smelling as if it were only just poured from a fresh cask.

    "Eating that seems like a bad idea," Issachar comments.

    "I wasn't going to!" you exclaim defensively. The thought had most definitely crossed your mind. Instead you focus on the surroundings to save face, checking for puzzle-hints. You find one almost immediately, a landscape-style oil painting of the dinner table as it should be, jam-packed with members of the Douglas house sitting down for a meal together. Of course they all look miserable and put-upon but that's accurate to both family paintings and real life so it passes by you with scarcely a notice. What you do notice is the brass plaque on the bottom of the frame, giving the names of each member of the family according to their place in clockwise order, along with the inscription 'A Feast For Those Who Remain'. The patriarch himself, the serious-faced and dark-eyed Éamon, is seated at the far left of the painting, the firelight playing across his broad shoulders.

    "Alright, looks like we just have to... clean up the table so he's the only place set?" you suggest, taking one porcelain plate off the table as you speak. Almost immediately it leaps out of your hand, not so much flying back to its plate as reversing through time itself, just like the window. You twiddle your talons. "Okay not that."

    "In the order that they died?" Issachar suggests. "We did have to read all those tombstones just to get in, maybe we were supposed to make note of the dates of death too?"

    "Mmmnnnnnrrghhhh I hate the ones where you have to backtrack," you whine. "Puzzle hints and items should always be in or around the puzzle area in question or naturally attained while you explore! This is just sloppy right here."

    Issachar pats you comfortingly on the shoulder. It has the exact opposite effect but at least this time you only tense up. "Tell you what, let's just brute-force it. There's only so many combinations it can want with thirteen places and it instantly lets us know when we pick a wrong one. It'll go quick if it's both of us doing it."

    "That's... not a bad idea actually, let's get to it."

    It's the kind of job that's slowest to start but rapidly picks up speed. Seemingly only the plates themselves count as 'places' at the table, which is a mercy, and have to be all stored safely in the nearby cabinet to complete the puzzle. Picking up a wrong plate immediately teleports all plates back to their proper order even if they've been placed in the cabinet, so you quickly learn not to bother. Past a certain point you've got the first six or so down like clockwork, blazing through combinations in a sort of peacefully intense silence. At last you're slotting the thirteenth dish away inside the glass dinnerware cabinet with a shared 'eyyyyy' of triumph.

    You turn to find a ghostly image of Éamon at the dinner table, his translucent form almost completely obscured by a haze of ever-shifting white mist. He sits in silence at the head of the table, staring at each empty place in turn, before looking down at the rich feast before him as if it were as appealing as a plate of ashes. He pushes his chair out and stands up from the table, wrapping phantom fingers around the wineglass as he rises. He rounds his chair and goes to the fireplace, hunched against the stone, arm raised over his head. Staring into the flames as if they will offer him some answer, some solace. If it does, he's dissatisfied - he hurls the contents of his glass into the flames and vanishes, the empty glass shattering on the floor a moment later. The wine goes up in a flash of heat and the fire along with it, burning itself out in one last fireball. There in the ashes lies half of the nonspecific crest you need for the next stage.

    "Well," you say. "That was a bit of a downer."

    You immediately shoot Issachar a look. He meets your gaze. "What?"

    "You know 'what'," you say. "You were just about to launch into some lesson about how all the wealth in the world can't substitute for company and companionship."

    "And yet by bringing it up first you've only proven that I don't need to teach that particular lesson," he replies with a playful glint in his eye.

    "Mmrrrrgghhhh you," you grumble. "Let's go check the second floor before we move on to the east wing, might be some keys or something up there."

    More lonely antique corridors, lit only by a few low-burning gas lamps and the flickering light of the storm raging outside. With every step the mansion seems to groan softly, whispering to you in the way it creaks and settles, warning you that you don't belong, that fleeing now is the only way to escape alive. You're much too busy jiggling locked door-handles just in case there's something important hiding in the twelfth guest bedroom or something - and to your smug validation, you're right. Sheet music of some kind using unfamiliar notation, kept in an ornate box on the nightstand. You get Issachar to pocket it since you lack any... clothes, for starters, and lead the way back down the corridor and into the east wing - might as well work your way down since you're already here.

    This proves to be yet another stroke of good fortune as your next goal is indeed on the second floor and not the first - the east wing is dominated almost completely by a grand ballroom, walls lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, floor clear of all furniture and polished to such a mirror sheen you can practically see your reflection from up on the balcony. A chandelier hangs overhead but not like the one in the entry hall - this one has finely-cut crystals in the place of lamps or bulbs or candles, and here on the balcony you find some sort of control panel for it full of switches and buttons. These ones turn the entire chandelier, these ones rotate certain crystals, these ones swap certain crystals, and these ones engage the light emitters set high in the walls of the ballroom. When the focused beams strike the crystal chandelier they emit pure, high-pitched notes - aha, the sheet music.

    "Want me to take this one?" you offer.

    "No no, I'd like to play around with this some," Issachar says. "It's quite fascinating - such a shame it has to sit here gathering dust. Figuratively speaking."

    His hands fly deftly across the controls, poking and prodding and experimenting, eyes flicking up to the sheet music balanced on top of the controls and back down again. Even the false starts sound beautiful, the crystals humming and resonating even in the brief moments that the light beams pass through them. You lean against the railing, watching that look of calm concentration on his face as he puzzles it out. Hah, he really meant what he said - he's not really the type wears their feelings on their sleeve, but even to you it's clear he's having the time of his life figuring out how the crystal display works.

    "And... there," he says, smacking the big red 'on' button.

    The ballroom comes alive with colour and noise. The supplementary lamps all along the walls flare up to their fullest extent, bathing the dance floor in warm orange-golden undertone to compliment the dancing kaleidoscopic highlights of the chandelier at work. A host of spectral dancers appear all at once in a single synchronous flash of white light, taking their places with almost eager precision as the music begins to play in earnest. Lords and ladies in finery made of mist, their faces featureless blurs of fog and light, their hands seeming to fuse into singular undefined masses as they come together in dance. You and Issachar watch in silence - when you get past the fact that it's ghosts doing it, there really is a certain beauty and charm to the steps. The spectral display is enough to make you think wistfully of what it must have been like in its prime, what a treat it would have been to watch it all from this lofty perch with pride.

    And then, as quickly as it came, the music is gone. The chandelier stops dead, the lamps wink out, and the ghosts vanish. The ballroom is plunged into silent, cold darkness broken only by the loud, ringing clatter of the second crest half falling from its hiding place in the chandelier and bouncing on the floor below.

    "Shame," Issachar says. He glances at you. "Shortcut?"

    "What- oh, right."

    You hoist him up and glide down to the dance floor so he can reunite the two crest pieces. You take a gander and the design doesn't seem to hold any new hidden meaning - probably blew the significance budget on the main door emblem. In any case you and Issachar make your way back to the entrance hall, checking all the doors on your way back just for thoroughness' sake. You find two ghosts in a bedroom, one in a dog mask, but whatever they're doing is their business so you just shut the door again and go on your way.

    Back in the entrance hall, surprise surprise, your instincts are proven correct. Once Issachar slots the completed crest into its floor-divot you feel a rumble through the floor as some hidden mechanism turns over, stone grinding against stone as the secret door halfway up the stairs sinks down and out of sight. The tunnel beyond seems to be yet another staircase, descending down and down and down again into the darkness. You being a dragon and Issachar being Issachar, the pair of you descend without a second thought.

    The way is dark and cramped, the tunnel low enough that you have to duck your head not to constantly scrape your horns along the arched ceiling. There's nowhere near enough room to walk side-by-side so you go first, talons clicking on every stone step, letting your hand trail along the wall beside you just in case there's something to find on the way down. For the longest time everything is infuriatingly grey and lightless, and you swear your eyes are starting to hurt from all the straining you've been doing, but then at last you see the bottom. And then you see something at the bottom that makes you triple-time it the rest of the way and burst into the hidden crypt.

    It's a treasure vault. It's money. It's all the accumulated riches of the Douglas household hidden behind all the puzzles and monsters and curses and now you've found it and it's yours! You hop up and down in unmitigated glee, tail lashing happily as your eyes dart all around the room to look at the piles upon piles of treasure. It's a big room, big enough to be some kind of secret underground chapel, complete with its own chandelier (they do like their elaborate chandeliers), drapes emblazoned with the house heraldry hanging at all four corners. There's gold, there's jewels, there's jewellery, there's paintings, oh there's everything a dragon could want and it's all yours! It's all yours by right of you bloody well found it and you can finally have a proper hoard again!

    "Come look come look!" you exclaim. "Issachar look look, my money! The map was pointing to some treasure after all!"

    "Eldingar, I think-"

    And then the lid of the sarcophagus you missed amid all the wealth grinds open. A shape slowly rises from within, not just climbing out but levitating, righting itself from a sleeping position to something more upright as it turns to face you. It's a man, a sleeping one at that, completely swathed in a long black cloak that hangs down to his ankles. He's beautiful in his own way, with an angular jaw and high cheekbones, but... wrong. You think he's of mixed heritage but whatever natural colour he had has been drained away, replaced by a grey-white pallor of undeath. Thin black veins pulse beneath the flawlessly smooth flesh, most visible in the thinner skin of his pointed ears. His hair is long and glossy-black as the night and his eyes, as they finally, slowly open, remind you of Belial's eyes. Rings of unearthly yellow-gold swimming in pools of glistening ink.

    "... so-" you start.

    He flings his cloak open in a dramatic flourish and you completely forget whatever it was you were going to say next. For starters he's shirtless, and even with his complexion you cannot deny that it is one fantastic chest he's baring to the world. He's lean and athletic, carrying the sort of whipcord strength - and what he lacks in pure bulk he makes up for with tone so carefully calculated it seems downright artistic, good lord you wonder how one man can seem so soft and beautiful while still seeming like he doesn't have a spoonful of spare fat in his body. He wears a pair of glossy black gloves so long they go all the way to the shoulder, clinging to his arms as if painted on, conforming even to the curved claws you spy at the tip of each finger. His pants ride low enough to cause a stir all on their own, a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen, so tight you wonder how he can even stand it but you can't bring yourself to complain because those polished curves are exceedingly easy on the eyes. He plants his long, high-heeled boots firmly on the edge of his coffin and stares down at you - his gaze seems to capture you all over again and good gods now that you look at it is that makeup? It has to be. Black gloss to highlight the natural darkness of his lips, eyeshadow and eyeliner to emphasise his already alien and otherworldly gaze. This man knows presentation.

    "... (Eldingar?)" Issachar prompts you, nudging you in the small of your back.

    "(sh-shut up)"

    You were too lost in the moment to appreciate it at first, but with renewed focus you realise that the lights have come on. The chandelier is burning bright, what must be two dozen candles set in the heavy brass thing even as it creaks ominously with every sway. Twin jets of flame burst from something or other hidden behind his coffin, framing his monochrome form with a burning 'V' of heat and light and sparks, as from all around the room music begins to play. You notice Issachar check behind one of the drapes out of the corner of your eye, taking a surreptitious sniff to doublecheck - enchanted gramophones, all playing his accompaniment in synch.

    "Who is it that dares enter my lair uninvited?" he asks. His lips slowly peel back in a predatory smile, exposing far too many pearly-white teeth. Two in particular - his pointed, daggerlike fangs. "A dragon? Well... rare company indeed~"

    "I-"

    "If you thought that this cursed mansion was all you need overcome to claim its ancestral treasure, you will find you are sorely mistaken." He makes a deft gesture with his clawed fingers, beckoning his sword - on he has a swordbelt you completely missed that due to... distraction - into his hand by will alone. A thin-bladed rapier, suited more for thrusting and duelling than hacking through armour and flesh. He deliberately folds one arm behind his back, shifting his stance despite his precarious place atop the edge of the coffin, and presents his sword-arm. "May I have this dance, burglar?"

    It occurs to you that this opponent in particular is unlikely to be as much of a pushover as the other mansion residents. It also occurs to you that this opponent is almost certainly a potential boyfriend and that seems grounds enough to try and avoid a fight. It then finally occurs to you that he seems to have worked very hard setting all this up and it's possible he won't appreciate attempts to negate all that work.

    That in mind, you decide to...

    [ ] Fight him. Well he did ask.
    --[ ] Drop the chandelier on his head. It's big and obvious, and in the context of this mansion it seems to all but scream to be used.
    --[ ] Dig through the treasure for some kind of magic weapon. Maybe you'll get lucky and find something that counters whatever kind of undead he is.
    --[ ] Break the magic gramophones. It might throw him off his rhythm, make him vulnerable to a quick knockout.
    [ ] Push Issachar into the proverbial ring to fight him for you. Maybe this way you'll get him to show his stuff.
    [ ] Try to negotiate a peaceful resolution to all this. After all, he is your future boyfriend. A magic map told you so.
    [ ] Compliment him for his choice in accompaniment because this battle music really is quite catchy.
    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 30, 2018 at 8:47 PM, finished with 2144 posts and 41 votes.
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    Adhoc vote count started by ZerbanDaGreat on May 31, 2018 at 11:30 PM, finished with 2171 posts and 50 votes.
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