Chapter 49.2

Mia hummed with a tinge of disappointment.  “As… you wish.”

Another handful of seconds passed.  Whether they passed awkwardly or not, I did not know.  Sucking oxygen into an increasingly starved pair of lungs has a way of pulling one’s attention away from social mores.

Mia did not have that problem.

“I suppose there’s no harm in admitting,” she said finally, “the various tiers of proficiency are not anything particularly special.  They mean specific things, of course, but they were only ever intended to be a little badge to let you know you’re doing well.  And She-that-I-was usually includes a report on how the skill is evolving under your care.”

I missed a step.  “You mean I don’t get bonuses for achieving them?”

“Bonuses?!”  She made a disgruntled little sound.  “No, no.  That is a frustrating misconception.  It implies an external force working on the skill, but that is not the case, at all!  It is only your own Will continually working to push the skill in a direction you find most suitable for your needs.”

“For example… Efficacy in the Gloom, your accuracy spell—”

“I remember.”

She clucked at the interruption.  “Yes, well.  You requested that information be on the card, and since someone doesn’t want to be distracted—”

“Sorry, sorry… go on.”

“Anyway, you just managed to get it to level 20 during your most recent battle.  You’ve been quite satisfied with it overall, so it has not evolved much.  The only thing I’ve written here is a note about the slight improvement to the skill’s potency.  By contrast, Windfall of the Thrall…”  She paused expectantly.

“My luck aura,” I filled in.

She made a pleased sound.  “Just so.  It has recently ticked over to level 43—putting it within the range of Competent.  However, despite your literal request on gaining the skill for it to continually push at your companions’ libidos, you have only ever been frustrated by this feature.”

“Because I can’t turn it off!” I growled.  “Besides, at the time, Arx gained power from that sort of thing.”

“She still does,” Mia countered.  “Both of your Dolilim feed from all the emotions around them.  Not just your own.  Jax, in particular, gains strength from this arousal.  So despite the inconvenience, it is to the benefit of all.”

I groaned.  It was a sound argument, but that did not meant I had to like it.

“Yes, okay.  Fine.  In my defense, living with three girls who are constantly horny is exhausting.  Worse, I feel like I’m letting them down whenever I’m not in the mood.  And I should be allowed to not be in the mood!  For that matter, so should they!”

“Well, there’s not much you can do about that now.  Both of your bonded companions have chosen to remove that state of being from themselves.  Not being in the mood is no longer in their natures.”

She paused for a moment to rifle through some papers then began to scratch something down.

“If you really feel like you’re letting them down,” she mused over the sounds of her writing, “I could craft you a skill to change your own nature accordingly.  It would have to be secondary to the skill’s primary function, however.  We wouldn’t want the arousal to worsen with skill improvement.  So perhaps as a negative side-effect?  Yes… that would work to strengthen the ability.”

I made a pained sound in my throat.  While it could be argued that I was becoming something like an incubus already, deliberately doing that to myself was going to be a tough pill to swallow.

“You would have to come up with one hell of a skill…”

“Oh, I’m sure I can,” she murmured.  I could just imagine the Cheshire grin spreading across her face. “Better than Lust resistance, that’s certain.”

“Hey, now.  That’s a much needed skill around these parts.”

“Naturally,” she agreed off-handedly, returning the pencil to her desk with a click.  I assumed.  “In any event, because of your continued distaste, your aura has not been having quite the pronounced effect it once had.  While the Luck it provides has continued to ramp up as normal, the arousal side-effect has deteriorated markedly.  It would now take well over a day to reduce one of your non-resistant companions into a quivering ball of need.”

That explained a few things.  Lynnria had definitely been frisky earlier, but a quivering ball she was not.  And from the merry chase her charm had sent us on, my luck aura had had plenty of time to work on her.

“A bit of good news, for once,” I remarked, pleased.  “Anything else of significance?”

“Well, the various skills related to your sexual prowess have—”

“Of significance!”

“Fiiine,” she groaned.  “Let’s see…”

A prolonged series of fwipping noises—accompanied by quite a lot of polite swearing—sounded in my ear, and I realized with a guilty start that Mia must have been thumbing through a substantial pile of notes.  A lot of effort had been expended to assemble all that data, and here I was brushing it off as an inconvenience.

“Well… I suppose there is one thing,” she announced finally, defeated.  “You have learned to Write.”

I frowned in confusion.  “I already knew how to write.”

“No, my lord,” she said, almost flippantly, yet somehow still with a slight edge of significance.  “You did not.”

Whatever she had meant by that, my attention was quickly pulled away.  It seemed the rest of my party had finally stopped and were currently going through the throes of their post-marathon recovery.

The coin, I noticed on drawing even with them, had rolled to a stop—heads up—in front of an innocuous-looking door.  The signboard swinging overhead bore the likeness of a hand, liberally bandaged and with a thimble on its pinky.  The unfortunate needler?

It seemed like a bit of a stretch, but with the thimble, this might have been the shop of a seamstress or some such.  They used needles.  And with the bandages…?

Still, while I could not recall the details of each and every door we had passed, I was pretty sure we had not encountered this signboard.  Which made no sense.  But here we were.

Lynnria pointed a wavering claw at me.  “You… cheater!  You… you started jogging!”

I shrugged.  “Mia wanted to go over my skill-ups.”

There was a collective groan.

“The lot of you can sodomize yourselves with a splintered broom handle,” Mia announced dismissively.

Arx and Lynnria both snorted with barely restrained mirth at that, but Jax seemed a little lost.

“What’s that mean?”

“Sodomy?  It refers to the act of—fuck you!  Fuck your tits!  Fuck your father’s tits!”  She cleared her throat loudly.  “Yes… well, that.  But anally.”

“Oh.”  Jax pondered it for a moment, apparently with some seriousness.  “I ain’t sure I like the sound of that… lessen the Master had two dicks.  That could be fun.  Might hurt, though.”

Slowly, her eyebrows began to climb upward.

I clapped my hands together sharply.

“Well!  This seems to be our door.”  I scooped up the coin, and brandished it like a bell on a stick for a bunch of cats.  “Heads, we go in.  That was the deal.  Right?”

Arx hummed a few notes under her breath.  “I’m not getting any negative vibes from it.”

“Good enough for me.”