Anna had woken up, the shout of her voice startled me a little in the quiet of the night, and I clapped my ears down. I expected her to sag back to sleep, as was normal for me when I woke up from levelling, I was still tired after all, I could feel the urge to sleep in my bones even now, but she didn’t, instead she just cussed, actually cussed.

“Ow, why the hell did I level up so much, Ugh this sucks.”

“I take it you’re not ok?” I mumbled to her, drawing her eyes to me.

She leaned her head into my hand, and she mumbled, “No,” pouty.

“Well, what's wrong? You got beast magic, that sounds cool. Or is it more than that?” I asked her, my voice quiet in an attempt to soothe.

“It- ow, I feel terrible. I got a class upgrade too. Gods, I feel terrible.”

“Well,” I started, “Let’s get you unwound, and I’ll give you a massage and hear you out, how about that?”

She mumbled in the affirmative, and I got to work, carefully unwrapping the sheets from around her. She smelled of distress, distress and a little like you did when you were sick or slept way too long. A kind of smell that was better described as death than anything else.

She hissed in pain, as I unwound her, and as gentile as I could make it, I tried to be as gentle as I could, but she was seemingly sore all over.

When I got her out of her cloth warp, I rolled her, as gentile as I could on top of me, and let her rest her head on my chest. And flicking the bed sheet over our legs.

“So, talk to me about it,” I told her, moving my hands up to her head, and running my fingers through her hair.

She relaxed into me, bleeding out tension as she nuzzled her neck into my chest.

A part of me wanted to snicker at it, using my breasts as a pillow seemed funny to me, but my concern won out.

“Ugh… I feel terrible. Why does my everything hurt?”

“Let me guess,” I asked gliding my hands through her hair, “It kind of feels like everything is bruised? Like Magic Puberty all over again?”

“Ugh,” She bemoaned in agreement, “Yeh… hells this sucks.”

“I know, I got a bunch of levels a bit ago, remember?”

“Yes, I remember. I hope I’m not out for a week, I have stuff I need to do.”

“I think it's based on the ratio? Is that right? It’s the number of levels you’ve gained in comparison to the levels you have, so like one-fifth or whatever.”

“It’s not a ratio… Well, I suppose you could express it as that levels gained as a ratio of total levels. By the mother of trees, I must be out of it to have to think about math for so long.”

“Indeed,” I told her, finding her weak point and giving her a good rub right where she liked it, “your head is full of new mana, I bet.”

She inhaled, not quite a gasp, but just barely, and breathily replied, “Are you saying I have a swollen head?”

“It’s all those stats you humans get at every level, I bet it makes it harder when you class up.”

“Maybe,” She said, starting to hum a little, “Fat lot of good it does us.”

“What do you mean? Your are all strong and durable and stuff, and you have more of every stat, your skills are all crazy.” I told her, narrowing down on a point of tension on her head and giving it a rub to relax it.

“Yeh, but we are all weak too, every point of strength for one of us is a fraction of what it is for you, the only upside is with skills,”

That was news to me.

When I was growing up, it was always known that humans were stronger, we didn’t get told that, we just knew because we knew they got more stats than us.

I thought back to Sophy talking a while back about trade-offs, about how bandits got more power for things like infamy, people knew they were bad news, knew what they had done. The trade-off was risk and reward, get rich and strong but never have a place to return to.

I wasn’t sure if that was the right answer.

“It was my understanding that Humans were stronger than us, it was one of the reasons we got bossed around, they had more stats.”

“Well, they were lying or had weird builds, we need proficiency to get enough of our stats to be strong. Didn’t you know any humans growing up? Did you never play, like, tag or wrestle one?”

“No, gods, no. I grew up in a compound, I knew some Kobolds, and I met a few humans, but we were considered lesser, we went to different churches, ran different stores, and used old wells. If I punched a Human, I was liable to get beaten. Even as a kid.”

“That’s… Good gods, that’s terrible. That sounds like… Like…”

“Slavery?”

“Worse than slavery,” she told me, “Slaves are a thing, however rare they are. Generally, one gets into slavery by being in debt, you sell yourself into slavery. You’re expected to work to pay back a debt, but there are a great deal of laws around it. That’s a step down from even that. Even Human exceptionalists would blink at a child getting beaten.”

“Well, that’s nice to know, good to see that it’s gone. Do Humans… really not get the full effect of stats?” I asked her, confused.

“No, we get a full effect from skills and whatnot, but in terms of how people get stronger when you gain stats, we get less of that. Most of our strengths we get from skills, proficiency gives you more, and you can get a bunch of those. I have [Social Proficiency] and [Mind Proficiency], but those are from way back, and I have [Intelligence Proficiency] too, but only those three stat proficiencies, and I’m still not all that much smarter than most other people.”

That was Anna being Anna, all humble, and a shock, but it was a shock that I became ever more familiar with. Culture shock, as far as shocks go, wasn’t the greatest of disruptions but the more and more that piled up, the more you started to kind of enter a state of openness. I had made far too many assumptions, and even with all of them getting thrown back in my face, I had kept doing it. I had done it earlier, with Gunther, true name unspoken, when I called her an Elf.

I didn’t even know Wood Elves were a thing before today.

It was a mark that I was starting to take them on the chin, instead of getting lost in the knowledge that the world was not as I had known it to be.

“Your intelligence shows Anna, it shows. Gosh, that’s so weird. Do people just… Know that?”

“Well… Yes?” She told me, “I had assumed you knew. Your strength makes me feel safe, you know? It’s not just the muscles. You could probably arm wrestle Clause, and he has some Physical proficiency he picked up while training with the sword.”

I did smile at that, “So you’re saying you like my arms?”

“Don’t get me into it now, Saphy, it's more than just your arms.”

“I don’t know… Now that I think about it, I remember you swooning over them a little…”

“It's not just those… And you have more muscles than just your arms.”

“Do you have a muscle thing? I have belly muscles too you know.”

“I know… I can feel them right now. It’s not a thing for muscles… It’s more the idea that you’re big, and strong, and can hold me. It’s… Reassuring, I suppose, you have a presence that makes me know I’m safe, that no one else has made me feel before, and… It’s nice.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I took my hands out of her hair, and wrapped them around her, settling them on her belly, cupping around behind her and kissing her head for a moment.

When I pulled back, I looked into her eyes, green like gems even in the grey of the dark and smiled.

“I’m glad you feel safe around me.”

She wiggled, then groaned in discomfort and I let off a bit off my strength, giving her belly a rub instead.

She started to wiggle more, jerky. I had found a weak point, and not the kind used for fighting.

She was ticklish.

I tickled her a little, but only moderately and returned her head and ears.

“I’m guessing there aren’t many people that satisfy your idea of a partner and are muscley?”

“Not many, no. Most women, even the strong ones, aren’t into other women, and even the two I have met don’t know one another. I was surprised when you sprung it on me, it was a little like getting everything I wanted. I mean, I had hoped you were into women, but it’s not like you just ask. That’s how you get rumors told about you.”

Not wanting to get taken off guard, I decided to ask about that.

“Is… being attracted to women… not ok? Not… whats the word… A law, you know what I mean?”

“Illegal? No, it’s not a crime, we can even get married because of a technicality. It is seen as wrong, though. Plenty of people would see it as unnatural, The Church of Fertility declared it that way a long time ago, something like… A field that bears no seed, a field that lays fallow, is unnatural, as it should be thick with grain and life. To leave it fallow is a choice against the natural order and against the future.”

That was not the type of thing that sounded right, it was too hateful for the goddess of fertility I knew and thought of as a good place.

“The same Fertility that’s the patron goddess of [Prostitutes], who claimed they were her greatest worshipers next to her clergy and farmers?”

“Fertility isn’t a goddess,” she mumbled, confused, “There a god, and their church has been protesting the emperor for five generations to ban prostitution as immoral.”

More news, more change. At this point, It started to flow in one ear and out the other.

“Something changed then… We had an old [Cleric of Fertility] that used to heal [Prostitutes] all the time, maybe they were an Epithet? Or the one you know is?”

“I have no clue,” she said, no care in her voice for gods or their secrets, “What’s with you and [Prostitutes]? Should I be worried?”

I rumbled and shrugged, moving down to the base of her head and ears.

“It was a common job for women, especially Kobold women is all. Some professions we straight up couldn’t do. We were banned from some guilds, we had a hard time with farming because we would get swindled and forced to repay debts that would take generations to pay off. Prostitution was one of the ways plenty of women got their daily bread. I wonder what happened.”

“I have no idea, maybe you can figure it out from a history, but if you can, the books are not here, I never really paid attention to history.”

“Maybe I’m more confused about what happened with Fertility. So we can marry on a technicality? That sounds like a dumb thing to limit, Skipseo mentioned that sometimes people couldn’t be with the same sex, but never marriage, that’s the god of union's territory, it was more of a don’t marry between churches thing. Did that change?”

“It did, the first emperor, Emperor Halsian the First, decided he wanted to marry more than one woman. And that’s its own thing, but to do it, he placed forward marriage laws, and when they got refined by the peerage. The idea was that a marriage was more than just the man and the woman, it was all of them as a kind of group were married. so technically the women were married to one another. It was floated again sometime later and two men were outlawed, but it’s been kind of set in stone that if they wanted to outlaw two women marrying, they would have to get rid of being able to marry more than one woman, and to them, the idea didn’t really make sense, because, why would a woman want to be with a woman if she could be with a man, so it’s just… never been changed.”

“That… Is very dumb. It is the most dumb man thing I have ever heard.”

“Here, here. Not all of his laws were so weird though, being a [Mage] gives you a lot of rights because of him, I mean, people have always been weary of mages, but you have more rights than a normal person does. Shoot, I need to hand in papers for that…” She said, mumbling to herself.

“Sounds like a chore, I’ll help if I can.”

“Asking to do my paperwork for me? What a good apprentice, or I suppose you are probably a journeyman or something by now. You do grow fast, you know that?”

“I know. It’s kind of crazy,” I told her, smoothing the last bit of tension from her head, and started on her shoulders, her neck would have been next, but it was a bit covered, so I could get back to that.

“The fact that its just, ‘kind of crazy,’ to you is a bit nutty,” she grumbled, as I got to relieve the tension in her shoulders. Each moment brought her shoulders a release, a calming of her tension as we spent some moments in silence.

“So… You got beast magic?” I asked her, the question genuine.

“Yes… And more than just beast magic. I’m a [Druid of Beasts], I’m now specialized in beast magic.”

I nodded, the lazy fox in my head getting the crane wheel rolling, “And you wanted Plants, or Nature I suppose, you wanted general nature magic, you talked about wanting the proficiency earlier.”

I finished getting the tension out of her shoulders and went back to her head, a small amount of tension returning to her head that I got to riding her of.

“I’ve been trying to get it for a while,” she told me, “I aimed to be a general [Druid], maybe go for plants… But never beasts. It’s my least favorite of the natural magics, and yet, of the four I got beasts.”

I thought it over instead of just spitting out a vapid response. I could have just gone, ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ or, ‘Things don’t always go our way,’ but I didn’t.

Sophia had gotten me thinking about me and Anna. A relationship was about her, her and me, and me. It was about us together as a couple, and apart as people, individuals deserving of effort, not just empty platitudes. Anna went out of her way to answer my questions most of the time.

So I put some effort in.

“What about Nature magic was your favourite? Why did you want it over other mana types?”

“Hmm?” she asked, confused, “my favorite thing about nature magic? I suppose it’s the mixing of all of the mana types; its general, so you get a little of all of them and mix them better, I would have been able to use plant, growth, heat and beasts together. Now I’m on my way to one of those… I suppose I still have [Nature Affinity] at least.”

“And what’s stopping you from getting [Nature Proficiency]? You could grow your herbalism class towards plants too, or growth if I’m understanding those right.”

“Because I got beast magic? I haven’t heard of someone getting a magical specialty and then getting another.”

“My class, just earlier, offered me [Earth Magic Affinity] and [Grave Magic Affinity], I also got [Death Magic Proficiency] and can probably pick up another, I don’t think it’s limited the second you make a choice like that. I bet you might not be able to pick up some other proficiency, fire or something maybe, but you’re still a [Druid] of sorts. That would be like a [Swordsman] being unable to get a [Shield] skill because it’s not a sword.”

She wriggled then, and I pulled my hands back as she weakly spun around to face towards me.

She rested her neck in the same place, and I looked at her, our faces scant inches away from one another.

There was a little hope in her eyes when she asked, “Do you think so? Truly?”

“I can’t promise you, but it seems like the kind of thing that would work.”

She got something from that, something that I couldn’t read on her, but I had to assume it was contentment or maybe reassurance.

I hugged Anna with one arm, my other arm around the back of her head, not pulling her in for a kiss but just to run my fingers through her hair.

It made me feel a sting that reminded me of what I needed to ask her. A sting of my own idiocy.

“Anna, earlier, when I was making you promises… I kind of swept you up in the moment. I didn’t mean to, but I made it all about me instead of about you. I would like to apologize.”

She looked at me, thinking for a moment. I could tell, even in the dark, that her head was spinning up thinking about it.

“I will accept your apology,” she told me, “on one condition.”

“Just say it,” I told her seriously.

“In a week, I’ll be heading down the western side of the valley with Gunther’s caravan. I want you to join me on the trip. I know it’s sudden, in all honesty, it’s more like six days away, but I want you to come with me.”

I stared at her hesitantly, “Is that it?”

“Yes? Saphine, I didn’t exactly dislike your attempts to reassure me. But if you feel guilty about it, that makes it up to me by spending the journey south with me.”

It seemed too easy. To light.

“Anna. You could have asked me just about anything, and I would have said yes. And you’re using it on something I would have done anyway?”

I could feel her flush, as close as we were right now, it was plain as day, the warmth radiating off of her and finding my skin.

“Well. I mean. When you say anything… do you mean anything?”

“I mean, I don’t know…” I told her coyly, “I’ve already agreed to heading south, but if you just want to ask me for something, I’m open to it if you’ll let me ask you something in return,”

“I’m not against that,” she told me.

“What can I do? What can I promise you that will make you less scared? I can’t stand seeing you cry, I don’t like being the person to make you cry, and I don’t like scaring you. So what can I do to try and stop it?”

“That’s a large ask…” she whispered, more to herself than to me.

I answered anyway, “I know, It’s something that you can think about, I just-”

“No, no. It’s alright.” She told me, cutting me off before just lying down, letting go of her weight onto me, “I think I have a few answers for you. One would be to just not get hurt, but I don’t think you will, and if I’m honest, the only way to do it would be to not fight, and I don’t want to stop you from doing good. Another way would just be here and come back, preferably not looking like you were maimed, but I don’t want you to hurt yourself to look less hurt.”

She sighed then, exasperation heavy in it, like rain in a cloud hanging in the sky. The weight of her intention was the calm before a deluge.

“So, I want to come with you. I want in. And that’s the only good answer I can think of.”

Her words carried a finality with them.

“Then, next time, I’ll bring you,” I told her, even though I felt a lead weight in my gut at the idea of bringing Anna into someplace like the monster's den.

It scared me.

But I couldn’t justify not bringing her at the same time. As much as Anna was a cuddly person to be next to, she was also the same person who took down the same squad of [Hunters] that I had just rescued. She could fight all of them, she was stronger than me… even if Humans were apparently weaker than their stats indicated, that didn’t factor in magic, which was all stats all the time from what I could tell.

“I will, as long as you stay safe while you’re with me. Next time, I’ll bring you.”

She hummed to herself in affirmation, an agreement with me agreeing with her, “Ok. So you said I could ask for anything?”

She was leading me, but I walked right into it, “Anything.”

“Well, you made another promise, and you didn’t even kiss me, so-”

I cut her off with another kiss, and when I pulled away, she looked out of breath.

“You know, you don’t need to barter with me for a kiss, right?”

“I would say… It was worth it.”