Remember how stupid was a fantasy space opera setting where the orcs used teeth as currency, and when someone needed venture capital they would bash some other orc to get more teeth [1]? Well, these gnomes adopted kobold heads as theirs. The auction was about to end as I was about to be sold to a very happy clan that managed to make their pile of trash reach the ceiling. The midhusband was about to declare a winner when two other clans shoved their piles together, causing it to topple and crush dozens of gnomes but they announced they would buy me together.
That’s how I became a timeshare wife in training.
As with everything in this gnome society, that concept needed quite some meditation time to sink in. It was just too absurd.
Talk about adding insult to injury.
Spoiler alert, they weren’t done yet.
Without learning my birth mother’s name, I left my clan and joined the winning bidders. They put me in a gilded cage, together with the other clan women. I shouldn’t complain about the way I was treated. Good food, the least stinky least itchy furs, clothes that were just tenth generation hands-me-down, and education. But a cage was still a cage.
They took me to their clan caves and from what I eavesdropped I would spend a month on each clan growing up. After that, I would become a mother and could come and go between both clans.
A nanny was assigned to me, an old gnome that was too old to “visit the mothers”. Their euphemism for getting it on in the grand orgy that was the mother’s cave. The “guests” would bring treasures and gifts for the mothers in hopes of being invited to the “party”.
The nanny took me to a nursery where about two dozen girls of different ages lounged about, talking and doing nothing productive. They were pampered and cajoled by the nannies and the occasional sugar daddy that bribed the clan enough to come and visit hoping to form a connection with a future mother. These sugar daddies were young gnomes with a great promise because they got a rarer class or as a reward for some achievement.
The younger girls rewarded the sugar daddies with G-rated affection. Just a smile and a few words of appreciation. The older ones who were already displaying minor secondary development traits moved to PG-13 hands-off demure acts but for the sugar daddies just having a Smurfette telling them the time of the day was already a reward. Yes, that’s the metaphor I was trying to find. Smurfs. Steampunk smurfs. We didn’t have blue skin and were taller than three apples (but only a little, maybe five to six apples in height?), though.
It seemed that sometimes gnomes from other clans could visit, bringing mighty gifts. And I was the girl of the hour.
I sat on a crib on the itchy stinky furs as a line of gnomes with piles of rubbish came to visit me. They would come, introduce themselves to the baby, dump their rubbish and leave while the nanny took note of the “value” of the gift and who gifted it.
The other girls were so-not-happy at seeing how much “bling” I was making. As if. The clans split the gifts and took them away to repay the cost of the auction. Their hope was that this tradition could make them break even or even turn a profit by the time I reached sexual maturity.
I was isolated by the other girls out of envy and jealousy. They got fewer gifts but still, they kept more than the fuck all portion the gnome clans left to me. It made me wonder why my original clan auctioned me off. They could very well have kept me and done the same.
A few months later, I learned why. This was a new custom the clans had created to both repay their costs and steal talent from the other clans. Usually, the sugar daddies were from the same clan and this outsider visiting I thought happened seldomly was actually never-ly. Before this, I mean.
One day I heard shouting from outside the nursery. I recognized the midhusband’s booming voice and it sounded he was mad at the clans because some lads from my former clan were bringing back the payment for my auction. Things almost escalated to violence but the commotion scared the spoiled girls and they started to cry. The men quickly moved the fuck away to avoid dire repercussions. Like their “mothers” going on a naughty-time strike.
Politics was inevitable among sentient beings, no matter how deep in their own crap they lived. The girls at least had one of the highest caves, above ground level in our case.
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Where did they get so much junk?
These gnomes were scavengers. They couldn’t grow food in these caves and had to go out in the desert to harvest “Wyxnos Gifts”. It seems that stuff just popped into existence over the sands, and then was slowly absorbed by the sands over the next few days. During this time, they would go out on cars made out of assorted parts. Meaning, whatever they could cobble together. The gnomes that went out to salvage junk were the elite. Their survival rate was abysmal and it was extremely rare for them to return with everyone on board.
The reason for that was the opposition. The kobolds. These desert pests rode on fast raptors and thought the gnomes were intruding on their territory. They would stand in ambush and hunt the gnome vehicles to keep them from obtaining the meat they ate. The only source of food in this forsaken place was the salvage that popped above the sands. Sometimes they got crates of stale fruit and vegetables, most often monster meat and Adventurer’s bodies.
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If not salvaged, items would sink in the sand and vanish forever. And yes, they tried to dig and see if they could find the things that went down. However, that was even more dangerous than riding a runaway vehicle like it was some Red Bull competition while being chased by kobolds riding dinosaurs with webbed duck feet. That was because the sands would claim any living creature in an hour, often immobilizing slower ones within minutes. No living creature was exempted from the sands’ hunger. The raptors had to run all the time to avoid sinking.
Knocking someone out of their ride was a death sentence. Kobold or gnome, whoever shall fall on the sands was as good as dead. People hadn’t even the decency to finish them off, leaving the hapless fool to slowly sink and despair. Not even to kill them for the Exp, which was odd. But if you didn’t have magical healing, any confrontation was a risk.
And yes, there was not a single drop of magic in this place. It was not that magic items or potions didn’t come with the dead Adventurers but that they either ceased to be magical or couldn’t be recognized as such. Potions were just “colored juice” for the gnomes and usually drank immediately by the thirsty salvagers, who discarded the fancy but useless vials in the sand.
And thirst was worst than starvation. This was a fucking desert and one would find fuck all oasis out there. Any and all water came from dead Adventurer’s waterskins. From there, the water was drunk and then recycled in an almost Bear-Grylls way. Everyone did the “number one” on buckets that were carried to a sand and gravel bed that acted as a giant water filter. The warriors would drink the stale water from the salvaged canteens, everyone else drank filtered pee. Even me. I had to admit the filter did a very good job at purifying the water, though. It only had a faint tang of urea, that I could, unfortunately, detect because I had {Chemical Analysis}.
Number two was done several caves away, in the lowest levels. Over the centuries, the gnomes were slowly clogging the cave system with their own crap. A huge colony of dung beetles lived in the lower levels. These beetles valiantly fought to eat away the crap and the beetles were sometimes used as emergency rations by starving gnomes belonging to the lower strata of society. They called these beetle-eating gnomes “crunchers”. Because of the sound they made… yeah.
Fortunately, eating dung beetle was considered the lowest of the low. That put insect monster meat quite low on the food chain and usually given to the lowest strata of gnome society that would never get laid. Which were most of them.
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Everything about this society made me want to kill myself. With one tiny exception. They were matriarchal and did not accept sexual assault. Despite my worst fears, I wasn't bound to rapeville.
How? Let me explain. First, nobody knew who their father was but everyone knew who their mother was and who were their brothers, not that the latter mattered too much. They had no family structure but the clan. The women weren’t gang-raped like I originally thought. No. A prospective male had to woo and get himself invited to the party by the host. Women got the best cuts of rotten monster meat, and sometimes even a fresh waterskin, something akin to a 1965 Special Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon to go with your fancy herb Salisbury steak with vinegar reduction. Very romantic.
They had respect, they had nourishment, they held the keys to reproduction. And nobody had a high level in this place. People seldomly broke the level 40 barrier because there was nothing to kill worth enough Exp in a lifetime to get there. In fact, most of the Exp came from crafting. The females earned Exp for giving birth, for “crafting” a new “shittizen” for this gnomish dumpster. That was the last element. They couldn’t be forced to mate if they didn’t want to.
And any gnome that attempted it would be promptly ganged up upon his peers and brothers, only to earn favor from the mothers and maybe a chance at some sexy-time. Wonderful, if not for biology ruining it.
You see, when a species has such ridiculous gender-ratio dysphoria, the dominant gender usually “evolved” (i.e. the System gave them some advantage) to win at the reproductive lottery. So the Lamias had their pheromone glands with priapism pheromones and could restrict males to mate with them, mermaid pussy was ridiculously good to fuck also they had the “make love to me or I’ll let you drown” angle. Orcs and goblins had to resort to savagery and actual rape.
These gnomes didn't need to descend to the savage level of the greenskins. They had a mechanism very similar to the Lamias and I wondered what would happen if the two species ever met.They would probably die of starvation or thirst because they would fuck until they died. Their wee pee-pees had two glands on the side of their glans [2] that secreted a female-focused aphrodisiac. This secretion was considered a delicacy among the mothers. Rumor had it that the stuff tasted very sweet, which gave the term “sugar daddy” another entirely different and creepy meaning because it also caused severe arousal in the females and made them crave for more.
I’ll make a pause to reflect on that and what it looked like from a civilized XXI century person's viewpoint. Biology and evolution sucked.
Okay, the pause is over.
Did I mention I wanted to exterminate these gnomes? I hated them that much.
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Fast forward seven years of the same crap.
> You gained +2 Strength, +2 Willpower, +1 Soul. Attributes above the cap withheld.
>
> You gained +1 Dexterity, +2 Mind, +1 Ego. Attributes above the cap withheld.
>
> You gained +2 Endurance, +1 Willpower, +1 Magic, +1 Luck. Attributes above the cap withheld.
>
> You gained +2 Strength, +3 Charisma. Attributes above the cap withheld.
>
> You gained +1 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +1 Endurance, +1 Mind, +1 Charisma. Attributes above the cap withheld.
>
> You gained +1 Strength, +1 Willpower, +1 Ego, +2 Luck. Attributes above the cap withheld.
>
> You gained +4 Magic, +1 Ego. Attributes above the cap withheld.
At least {Twinkle Little Star} was working as intended. The bonus Attributes just fed {Surpasser} because of course I started each life with my Attributes capped. Seeing the System notifications was the only thing that let me keep my peace of mind. It meant I could get my Status back once this body reached sexual maturity.
I honestly feared the System didn’t work in this... place.
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[1]: Warhammer 40k
[2]: The head of the... ‘Nuff said.