Kyarako then spent a couple hours explaining the intricacies of beastfolk societies to Ryuji so he wouldn’t be caught off guard again. Her reasoning was that, after his first full moon, he would be able to take the first two forms at will and the second two if he was in shadow or at night. As he would look like a wolf beastfolk, he needed to know about beastfolk culture.
A highlight from the conversation was the reason for not eating raw meat in front of the other races. Namely; the beastfolk had once had a mighty empire with great armies and great feats of wisdom that they then shared with the other races but kept a few things for themselves. The other races had gone to war with the beastfolk to try taking every kind of knowledge from them. During the war, many atrocities were committed on both sides but the beastfolk were known for eating their enemies.
When the other races won the war, it left the beastfolk racially divided and too weakened to resist the changes that were happening. The other races took over the empire the beastfolk built and rewrote history as a tragic parody of the truth. The way history read, the beastfolk were savages who rose against the civilized races and their empire but lost. Only a tiny number of beastfolk ever found out the truth from ancient hidden tomes of history and such. Kyarako’s grandfather had been a mercenary and had found one such ancient tome, a family treasure. Most beastfolk didn’t even know the truth about why they couldn’t eat raw meat in public. Apparently, very few elves were even alive who remembered the reasons, the war was that long ago.
Most beastfolk were able to understand the visual and scent clues of other beastfolk besides just their own kind. Pheromones and tells were very important to the beastfolk society and she explained as many as she could think of. Ryuji was fascinated about the lesson and noticed that Miyako was listening just as intently. As Kya was explaining this, she began trying to demonstrate some of the emotional pheromones of the cat beastfolk.
Ryuji stunned her and made her hide her face in embarrassment when he asked her about a certain pungent, musky smell he was detecting. Kya went quiet and Mia grinned before explaining that that one was the scent of lust. Mia blushed a bit and coughed into her hand turning her head while pointing to his exposed and also enlarged manhood. Ryuji thought he would die of embarrassment before the reactions of both women sunk in and he was left unsure how to act.
He ushered the conversation along and Kya was glad of a change of topic. She then explained some of the cultural aspects of the beastfolk. For one, they had been reduced to poverty for so long that most families couldn’t afford big enough homes to be modest in. The poor were used to bathing together but most of the time the women and children would bathe in the river during the morning hours while the men would bathe after the day was over to wash the grime off.
Ryuji was left feeling like a complete idiot because he had only ever been to the river in the morning. Then he suddenly remembered Karen’s annoyance with him for going to the river to bathe in the morning and it now clicked into place. He was acting like a creep without meaning to. The only bright side of that being that he had saved that one little cat beastfolk girl from drowning. Well that, and his new program for teaching swimming and CPR through the town watch.
The animosity towards the beastfolk was now a lot clearer in Ryuji’s mind. He now knew what he would face to get beastfolk accepted. Knowing what he did now, he realized that he was facing an almost insurmountable issue. Even if he could sway the masses, the nobility and scholars, the ones with something to hide, would fight tooth and nail to keep this movement from gaining traction. But, Ryuji thought, I have some very sharp claws and a nasty bite myself!
After the lessons on the beastfolk were done the conversation drifted to Miyako’s own people and their ancestral relationship with the dwarves. Kyarako began to doze off because she had been up well into the early morning talking and had a full stomach that wanted most of her blood-flow to be diverted away from her brain. Ryuji told her that he would be sure to recount any really interesting parts to her and she grudgingly agreed to sleep for a couple hours.
Mia told him about the way that dwarves and dark elves formed great underground cities in the past. Apparently, the dwarves were very adept at handling the smithing and metalworking. They also excelled at mining which made a great deal of very deep and winding mines. The dark-elves were very good with stone crafting and all the finer points of artistic and engineering endeavors.
The problems arose between these two long-lived races even before the beastfolk war. The cities of antiquity were massive sprawling complexes but were also exquisite works of art. Unfortunately, that’s all they were anymore because a great rift drove the dark-elves and dwarves apart. The division was a matter of personality and worldview, which made the divide fairly inevitable.
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The dwarves were a very industrious and tenacious breed. They would work for days on end in pursuit of a vein of some metal or mineral. They very rapidly expanded their mines deeper and farther, always searching for the bounty of the mountains. Ryuji learned that there were two great mountain ranges in the center of the continent. The larger of them was the border of the Tzho’off kingdom named the Ganos mountains. The smaller was the Silarith mountains.
The dwarves hailed from the Ganos mountains and discovered the dark-elves in the Silarith mountains. The dwarves at first were seen as hostile invaders but soon the dark-elves discovered that they could exploit the abandoned tunnels of the dwarves. When the dwarves realized that the dark-elves could better do the fine crafting of both the stone and the metal products they made, it became a matter of convenience for both races to co-exist.
The dark-elves were mostly settled into the many natural caves and crevasses in the Silarith mountains. Once they were able to move into a lot of deeper tunnels into the mountains, they prospered. The dwarves found the elven artists a bit annoying but handy also. They could find natural faults in the rock that the dwarves would have ignored and shored them up or carved them out. The dark-elves were simply better at many of the more precise aspects of mountain living.
The dark-elves emigrated to the Ganos mountains and once the dwarves there got accustomed to them, the races both prospered. But over time, the two cultures simply clashed too badly to keep cohabitating. The dwarves were ever on the move and wanted the dark-elves to keep pace and keep correcting their reckless dash to progress. The dark-elves however, wanted to settle down in the homes they had begun to build for themselves, not rush off and uproot their families over and over again.
Eventually, the headlong drive of the almost nomadic dwarves clashed too badly with the more long-lived and artistically sedentary lifestyle of the dark-elves. There was no major clash or even a big cold war. In the end, the dwarves just began to move off from the settlements of the dark-elves. The races both felt the sting of loss but both were too stubborn to reconcile the differences and then more of history happened and many of the beautiful cities were lost. Many of the mixed-cultural cities were left half-finished and, in their abandonment, many became dungeons.
This would be the first time Ryuji could ask about dungeons. He had run across the term in some of his reading and was curious. Kya woke up about the tail end of the dwarven/dark-elven history lesson and listened in until then. She told him that she had been to a couple dungeons but nobody knew exactly why or how they formed.
Apparently, dungeons were a type of labyrinth that had sprung to magical life and would begin to change and grow from there. The majority of dungeons formed in deep underground caves or abandoned cities but they would sometimes even be found in large buildings that had been abandoned too long. They were able to take over and to some extent change the design of these places. They could also expand them, usually downward but sometimes they would go up. Mia recounted the great magic tower of the city of Ihnor in the far south of the kingdom. It was a dungeon that expanded upwards and was now so tall that it could be seen for many horz away from the city.
Ryuji was unfamiliar with the term and found it was a unit of standardized measurement. The base measurement of the system was the palm which, contradictively, did not measure across the palm but from the tip of the pinky finger to end of an outstretched thumb. Then eight of those was called a pace, roughly how far you would take in a single long stride. An eight of those would be called a rod and was rather harder to define exactly but was at least standardized throughout the kingdom and the neighboring countries. The next step after that was eight rods that would form a line. Eight lines put end to end would make up a horz which was also a shortened version of horizon. Coincidentally, if you bought a length of rope, it would usually be a line in length or some fraction of one.
Both women decided to take small quests in turns that day so they could go out and get some things. Kyarako needed to get more meat since that was a pretty much daily request from the various vendors and restaurants in the city. It would give her an excuse to kill and bring back more meat and he found he was very grateful for her help.
Miyako would take a city request for extermination or such. This would allow her to go by and tell master Dorn that Ryuji was sick and wouldn’t be there today. He was very grateful to both women and promised to pay each of them for the quests they were doing for him. they reminded him that he was going to take them to get new armor and that would be plenty.
In this way, Ryuji passed the day. Talking as much as he could but taking long naps inbetween. Master Dorn even sent him a book to read while he was sick. Ryuji appreciated the sentiment and even managed to hold and read some of the book but he made a note to tell Dorn that sick people could make items… cursed? Or at least prone to cursing people with sickness. By the late evening, the curse had set in fully and Ryuji could tell that he could transform back.
With great embarrassment, he changed from one form to the next and got used to the feeling of each transformation, all while naked. Finally free of the danger that had been looming over him, he dressed in his change of clothes and exited the cage, a free man… or werewolf?
Ryuji went back to the inn and told Karen that he and his master still hadn’t solved the issues with the enchantment but he was going to study the book Dorn sent him to see if it had an answer. He had a nice dinner with Karen but she still felt something was off even if he did have proof as it were.