Unsurprisingly, Kassandra teased us.
She didn’t tease us about the fact that Rieka and I had finally hooked up. That actually got an ‘about damn time’ from the redheaded dwarf lamia. No, Kassandra decided she was going to tease us about just how loud Rieka had gotten.
“I mean, I know what you are like, Liam. But seriously! Someone might be coming up the mountain looking to see who was getting murdered,” Kassandra said with a wicked smirk.
My dwarf lamia hadn’t bothered to dress beyond throwing on the shirt of mine that she’d stolen days before to act as a dress and slipping her glasses on.
Rieka decided to mirror her, claiming one of the shirts that the girls had bought me and draping it over her shoulders. She didn’t bother to button it closed, letting it hang open to her mid-thigh. Her tail continued to wiggle happily and I would occasionally catch sight of her beautiful form when the open shirt would billow in the breeze.
“You are just jealous,” Rieka huffed at her friend. Only a faint blush colored her cheeks now, despite Kassandra’s attempts.
“Damn right I am! I’ve been holding off because you said ‘no mischief in the tent’,” Kassandra pouted.
“Well, you are welcome to entertain our Liam out in the grass, or down in the lake again.” Rieka’s smirk told me she knew exactly what Kassandra would think of another dalliance in the lake.
Kassandra was cold-blooded, so even the pleasantly cool water of the lake was something she tried to avoid. It was dangerous for her if her body temperature dropped too much. Though bathing wouldn’t necessarily harm her, bathing in cold water was still a risk she did not like taking. This was on top of the fact it was just not comfortable for her.
“As much as I would enjoy that, I think I’d rather go from your example and just spread a blanket out in the sun. You don’t mind, do you?” Kassandra’s slitted brown eyes twinkled with amusement.
“As long as you don’t mind if I watch,” Rieka replied quickly. “I want to know if it looks as sexy from the side as it does in the midst of it.”
“Sure. Not like it’s the first time you’ve seen me naked.” Kassandra shrugged nonchalantly and Rieka grinned.
“Do I get a vote in this?” I asked with a smirk, more curious to what they’d say than actually in protest. They shared a look for a moment before looking at me with twin smiles.
“Of course you do, Liam,” both my girls chorused in eerie sync and I winced.
“We’d never take advantage of you,” Kassandra chirped happily.
“You know that, Liam,” finished Rieka.
“Okay, stop. That’s just eerie when you finish each other’s sentences.” I waved my hands in surrender and both girls giggled.
“Mother used to say the same thing when we were little,” Rieka giggled, her tail whipping back and forth behind her.
“Yes, it was quite a bit of fun to freak the queen out when we were young enough to get away with that kind of thing. We’d just get in trouble now.”
“The perils of being old enough to ‘know better’,” I empathized and stroked Kassandra’s hair gently. She chirped happily and nuzzled into the hand.
Rieka and I were still seated on the blanket in the sun, with her leaning into my left side. Kassandra sprawled in a large circle around us on her back, tummy exposed to the sun by the open front of her stolen night-shirt. My dwarf lamia had her head in my lap and was smirking up at me.
The fact that I was the only one still naked should have been uncomfortable. I should have felt self-conscious right now.
But I didn’t.
The girl’s open affection made it easy to disregard, as I had realized earlier that morning when I chased Rieka out of the tent. That and we had not seen anyone else on this mountainside in the time that the three of us had been up here, nor any sign that anyone was likely to come up here.
“You know, Kass? If you keep teasing Liam, he might not be willing to go fill the cauldron up for you so that you can get a hot bath. I know you don’t like being wet and cold, but personally? The grime I can feel sticking to my skin from down in the tunnels is finally starting to bother me through the afterglow,” Rieka said after we sat there for several more minutes.
I immediately agreed with her summation of it being time for a bath. We’d been so tired the night before that the idea of stopping to wash before getting to sleep had been impossible. We’d barely bothered to get the tent set up. Now that the sexual tension between Rieka and I was relieved, the gritty sensation of the ancient dust, sweat, and old blood clinging to my skin was driving me crazy.
“Liaaaaam…” Kassandra gave me her best pouty face. Her bottom lip protruded, and her brown eyes were wide and pitiful behind those large spectacles of hers. I swear I even saw crocodile tears in her eyes.
I smirked down at Kassandra, about to repay some of her teasing when she gripped the front of her shirt with both hands and flapped it open, flashing her pale, freckled chest at me.
“Cheater!” Rieka laughed loudly, lightly smacking Kassandra on the shoulder.
“I’ll cheat however I have to! Besides, Liam wouldn’t hold it against me. Would you, Liam?”
“Nope. Might tease you a bit to make sure you earn it, nugget. But I’d never hold it against you,” I replied with a smile only partially motivated by those pale acres of flesh.
Kassandra grinned up at me before carefully uncoiling and rising up to press a kiss to my lips. Her red curls haloed around us in a russet-red sea that smelled just like her.
When the lip-lock finished, Kassandra nuzzled into my jawline and pressed a kiss into the pulse point on my throat.
“Mm, you smell like Rieka, Liam,” she giggled before poking me in the chest. “Why don’t you two go wash really quickly, then bring back the cauldron to heat?”
“You just want to monopolize the hot water!” Rieka snorted, shifting to stand upright on shaky legs, I reached up to help steady her since it was partially my fault.
“Yes, and?” Kassandra replied primly. “It’s not a bad idea. If you two wash by the lake, then that will take care of the worst of the sweat and dirt. Then you can finish up when the cauldron is heated. I’ll get the fire started and built up while you two do that. I won’t even comment if you decide to get up to a bit more mischief down by the lake.”
Rieka looked like she wanted to protest again, but she caught my eyes and another faint blush colored her cheeks. Through the material of my shirt she was wearing, I could see the peaks of her breasts harden as her imagination ran away with her.
“Come on then, my princess,” I said at last, gently pushing Kassandra back so I could get to my feet. “Let’s go wash up while Kass does something useful.”
The last teasing comment at my dwarf lamia might have offended her slightly. The big clue to this was the open-palmed smack she gave my bare ass as I led Rieka past her.
<><><>
Despite the warmth of the afternoon, the lake was rather cold still, and we did not linger.
Rieka stopped by the tent long enough to get a cake of her traveling soap, washing cloths, and a hairbrush. She slung the leather belt and holster with her spell rod around her hips under the shirt too, after casting the familiar contraceptive spell over herself. I didn’t comment on it; she was blushing enough already.
Helping Rieka wash herself was the sort of gentle, affectionate attention that I really enjoyed. Just some time spent with one of my girls without something either fighting with us, getting struck by lightning, or me losing my eyebrows to a fire.
Rieka had to teach me how to use the brush on her tail and hair. But, once I got the hang of it, the action was soothing. Rieka’s hair and the tail were smooth and soft to the touch.
Lugging the cauldron up the hill to the campsite again while it was full of water was another matter entirely.
I had managed to avoid stepping on anything sharp on the way down, but on the way back up with my arms full? I think I stepped on four different sticks and a sharp rock. Rieka, of course, managed to avoid anything with her dainty feet.
It wasn’t until I stepped on the third stick that I remembered I had cosmic powers and used Shape-Shifting to thicken the soles of my feet. Rieka poked fun at me for the rest of the walk up.
Kassandra hadn’t wasted time while we were bathing. She’d built the fire up nice and hot, to the point where it was a bit uncomfortable for us to sit too close to it in the warmth of the morning. She’d also taken the opportunity to cook us a breakfast of sausages, trail bread, and eggs in an iron frying pan she’d taken out of Rieka’s bag.
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The fact that my dwarf lamia knew how to cook despite being a noble had surprised me at first, but I reminded myself that this wasn’t the first time she’d cooked for me. Apparently, her parents—as well as Rieka’s—were quite progressive and wanted their daughters to be self-sufficient regardless of the situation.
I was a bit sad when Rieka dressed once more, pulling her pants on over those firm hips of hers and buttoning the hole around her tail so that the fluffy appendage wouldn’t be in the way.
Rieka caught my disappointed expression and grinned. Rather than putting on one of her regular tops, she kept my shirt and just knotted it beneath her breasts. The combination was a loose and breezy top that still held that mysterious allure of a woman wearing her man’s shirt the day after a hookup.
Kassandra was as brazen as ever, stripping naked as soon as the water in the cauldron was steaming and using a clean cloth to wash herself down. She only had to make pouty faces at me a few times before I caved and helped her scrub her scales clean.
Such struggles, I know. Woe is me, I had to help a beautiful, sexy redhead wash herself.
While we were out in the wilderness like this, I knew it was pointless to expect to stay clean, but both my girls looked much happier after getting a chance to clean up. Both Rieka and I used the hot water for a second quick wash to make sure we were as clean as we could be, but all three of us knew that it wouldn’t last. Camping was dirty work, after all.
“So, what’s next?” Rieka asked after we had finished washing and dumped the cauldron out once more.
Since the area around the fire was too hot, the three of us had gone back to the blanket in the grass.
Kassandra was curled around us, draping her body over Rieka’s tummy so her head could rest on my chest while Rieka took up what was becoming ‘her spot’ tucked under my right arm. This allowed my right hand to gently stroke her ears, drawing happy murmurs from my wolf-eared princess. My other hand softly caressed Kassandra’s mane of curls as it dried after her bath and fluffed up once more.
“Well, Cari told me that the DSR are investigating the ruins now. Apparently, that monster we killed at the end was something that shouldn’t have made it to this plane at all. They have to remove the traces of it. Apparently, blood and bones aren’t supposed to just dissolve reality where they fall,” I said after a moment of thought.
“How do we know that it was actually from… well, wherever they are afraid it was from?” Kassandra asked, shifting so that she had her little chin propped up on my chest.
“We don’t, but I had enough suspicion that I sent the message to her. And if I know Cerebaton, that’s Cari’s boss, he won’t take chances. I expect that I’ll get a message from them when it’s all clear. But do you girls really want to go back into those caves?”
My question made both of my girls shiver slightly. I would have missed it if the two of them weren’t pressed into me at the moment. But since they were so close, I didn’t miss it.
“I know we should go back in,” Rieka said with a gusty sigh through her cute nose. “But I think that we have more than enough to go off of for now. I need to start documenting all that we saw for my report on humans. Kass?”
“Same. There is a lot of information to go over and ensure that we have it all properly recorded. I know there are parts of the complex that we haven’t explored yet because of the collapsed ceiling blocking them off, but I think we have more than enough right now. I’ll need to properly research what we found, compile it all, and then present it to my professor. Or at least the parts that I’m willing and ready to share right now…” my dwarf lamia said with a sigh.
“Probably best not to mention the summoning circles yet. I’ll touch bases with Cari if that’s something we need to keep to ourselves,” I said gently and Kassandra nodded, a thoughtful look glimmering behind her silver-rimmed spectacles.
“Makes sense,” she grumbled a moment later while puffing out her cheeks. Kassandra shifted to look at Rieka through one eye. “We are going to have to hold off on giving those to your mother.”
“Those?” Rieka’s ears twitched in confusion.
Kassandra gave her a pointed look and then tapped the spell rod that hung from her hip meaningfully. Rieka stared at her a moment before her eyes widened and she groaned. Her pointed ears folded back over my hand in irritation, but she nodded a moment later.
“You are right. If we try to sell her those, then she will need to know where they come from. But if we have to wait to explore the rest of the ruins, then we can’t forfeit control of it to the crown. I know she’ll claim it, and then the entire discovery will go to whatever noble she has to appease,” Rieka said in annoyance. She knew why her mother had to do things the way she did to rule the country, but Rieka didn’t like it.
“Still, between the samoflange, the crystals, and the other bits and pieces of valuable material, we have plenty that we can sell. That much imbued silver from the samoflange will still fetch quite a price. We’ll have more than enough mana to keep summoning Liam without having to worry. Which is good, as we do have that end-of-term competition coming up.” Kassandra’s words were simple and to the point, which got a resigned nod from Rieka.
“It just sucks that we have something so valuable, but we can’t even talk about it. We could easily get enchanted equipment for ourselves and Liam for even just one coin…”
“It’s only for now. Think of it as a guarantee for the future. You know that you have it. The only trick is going to be keeping it a secret. Keeping silent on that is going to be safest for now, they can’t be stolen if no one knows of them,” I said gently, turning to kiss the edge of one of Rieka’s ears. She sighed contentedly and snuggled in closer to me.
“You are right, Liam. It’s not like we need the coin right now. We have gotten by just fine without it. And, if things get dire, we can still take it to Mother. I won’t risk either of your lives over potential gains from the rest of the ruins,” Rieka said a moment later.
“Agreed,” Kassandra added her two cents. “But that doesn’t resolve the immediate problems for our Liam. You still need to find a source of income back home to support yourself. I haven’t pried at it because that is your own business, but I wanted to ask if you’ve made any progress?”
I sighed, the action bouncing Kassandra on my chest and making her giggle sweetly.
“Not yet. I was more focused on getting ready for this trip with you girls. I’ll start looking for ways to make money in earnest when I get back. I don’t want to take a traditional job if I can help it though. There has to be a way that I can make some money with these powers on the sly,” I said at last. “I don’t need a ton, but I also don’t want to end up committed to a regular job schedule. I’d rather be available for you girls to call me whenever and be able to practice more.”
“And your world doesn’t have magic, so it isn’t as if you can hire yourself out to help construct buildings and the like?” Rieka asked after a moment of thought and I blinked before turning to look down at her. Her icy-blue eyes stared up at me curiously, and I turned over the idea in my head.
“General construction… there’d be too much visibility to really work it. But I might be able to get contract work on stuff like landscaping or general repair. I haven’t tried to manipulate stuff like concrete. But, if I can mold it like I did the stone down there, I could seal up damaged basements and help ensure foundations are set up right. How to spin it though…” I lost myself in thought for several moments before Rieka poked me in the side.
“Liam? Kass asked you something,” my wolf-eared princess whispered into my ear.
I blinked and locked eyes with Kassandra, who was smiling down at me from her spot on my chest.
“Sorry, I got distracted there, nugget. What was that?”
“I was thinking, Liam,” Kassandra began slowly, tracing circles on my chest with her fingertips. “You said before you could exchange the points that the System gives you for money in a pinch. Rieka and I talked about it, and we were thinking of ways we can get you more of those. What would you say to taking on another summoner?”
I stared at Kassandra in surprise. I hadn’t even considered adding more summoners to the group that could call me, but it made sense. More summoners meant more work, and more work meant points. The exchange wasn’t great, but it was at least something until I could find a way to make my skills work for me back home.
“I think that would depend on how my girls feel about it, and who you were thinking of? Would they be joining this group, or would I be joining theirs?” I asked after a moment of thought.
“We haven’t decided who to invite into the group, though I am leaning more towards one than another with what we found in the ruins,” Kassandra said, giving Rieka a meaningful look.
My wolf-eared princess looked thoughtful before nodding.
“I have no problem with her. But it’s not like we need to rush at the moment, and we should talk to her first to see if she’s even interested. We have several more days before we need to return to Juneau. I think, after the last day or so, we can relax and just practice our spell work. Liam has earned some actual time off too.” Rieka finished her statement by pressing a kiss just below my ear.
“So Liam, you are interested in increasing the number of pretty women expecting you to protect them?” Kassandra asked, her eyes sparkling with mischief now as the finger rubbing my chest transitioned to an entire hand.
“As long as the women who have already laid claim to my heart are okay with it,” I replied instantly and got happy smiles from my girls.
Kassandra and Rieka took it in turns to kiss me while we lay sprawled out in the warm sun for several more hours, just savoring the safe feeling of the bright day and the blue sky above us. We could worry about the rest of the ruins later, when Cariad got back to me about it.
Thinking about Cariad reminded me of the messages I’d gotten the previous night right before passing out.
While Kassandra and Rieka discussed how they would like to spend the next few days in low voices, I closed my eyes and accessed the System interface.
Checking my message history showed me the last two messages that I’d received before passing out the night before.
Assist your contracted companion, Rieka Coldeye, with her research on humans for her report.
Reward - 400 SP
COMPLETED
Assist your contracted companion, Kassandra Silverscale, with her infiltration and examination of the ruins.
Reward - 400 SP and ???
COMPLETED
Access character sheet to unlock additional reward.
Curious, I thought silently, still stroking my girls’ hair. I accessed my character sheet and the familiar readout popped up. Overlaid on it was another message.
Congratulations, Traveler.
You have completed the necessary feats of strength and personal sacrifices to qualify for the Guardian skill track.
This will show on your Skills page with a secondary tab.
You have been awarded the first skill on the Guardian track. Develop this skill to unlock further options.
Traveler has unlocked Introductory Skill - Contact Contracted Companion
Contact Contracted Companions - By touching the associated bond mark for a long-term contracted summoner, the Traveler can communicate with them across the dimensional barriers. This communication is two-way, as the bonded companion can also reach out to the Traveler by focusing on them. It is up to the Traveler to inform their companions of this. When contacted, the Traveler’s bond mark will react.
“Huh…” I muttered. “That is going to be handy.”