“Alright.” Mason eased the half naked nymph away from his back and turned. “I have questions.”
“Of course, druid.” Thea pulled away looking the picture of innocence. “You’ve brought life back to the great forest for centuries. I would do anything I could to assist you. Within reason.”
This last bit she said with a different, much more opportunistic tone, and Mason frowned.
“Play your cards right and you might get a donation. First I want to know why you keep calling the elves ‘moon daughters’ and all this nonsense about ‘slights’ and insults. Explain it all.”
“I have no ‘cards’, druid. But, as you wish.” Thea sighed and grew some kind of flower-chair from the ground. She sat and played with a stem like a cat. “The elves were once Gaia’s children. You might think of them as my…distant relatives.”
Mason went to sit on the ground before Thea grew him his own flower—very close and across from hers, and smiled. He sat, aware he was still completely naked.
“Elves are curious, willful creatures. Much like humans.” She gave him a little eyebrow raise and lifted a foot, moving it up his flower. “They sought to understand the world on their own. To travel the planes. To wield new magic. It took them away from my mistress, to forbidden, dangerous, and…unclean things. To the gods of the stars.”
“The moon goddess,” Mason said, and Thea nodded. Her foot was running up his leg now, but he was still completely hard and didn’t have much interest in stopping it. His eyes were mostly on Thea’s bare leg and breast. “OK. So Gaia didn’t like that. The elves did it anyway. Now they’re the black sheep however many thousands of years later?”
Thea shook her brown curls, biting her lip as her foot reached Mason’s thigh.
“It’s more complex, druid. But yes, most elves fell out of mother earth’s favor. There are still those who live by her laws, some in the fey, some in the prime. But those who stray too far…are punished,” she said. “They are cursed.”
Mason nodded. “The infertility. The elves of Shariss live in a city that reeked of arcane magic.”
“They mocked my mistress,” Thea said with a final shrug. “They tried to live in the fey as mortal creatures in an immortal world. To have their cake and eat it too.” She smiled as her toes touched Mason’s shaft, then pulled away with a giggle when he twitched. “There are rules.”
There are rules, little wolf, Cerebus’ voice echoed in Mason’s mind.
He grabbed both of Thea’s feet and put them to his manhood, enjoying her surprised gasp as she started to stroke. He wasn’t really a ‘foot guy’, but he still had to admit this was hot. And he had more questions.
“Alright,” he said. “So now a druid brings them to Gaia’s pool, bangs their brains out, and poof, all is forgiven? How’s that work, exactly?”
Thea smiled and settled back in her chair as she rubbed.
“You are Blessed by Gaia, druid. By Cerebus. By the Stag. You have restored the great forest, won mighty Cerebus honor enough to return him to the fey…”
“I thought your mistress and Cerebus didn’t get along.”
Thea laughed like this was ridiculous, then shrugged like it was also true.
“They are male and female. Spring and Fall. Predator and prey. How can we hope to understand the gods? I know only they are two sides of the same coin, and will always be. Cerebus would kill anything that truly threatened my mistress. And she will always cheer his victories. Already he returns order to the fey.”
“What else did my winning that tournament do for Cerebus?”
Thea rolled her neck and opened the front of her dress as she kept rubbing.
“It raised his standing. Gave him advantage in the great game.”
The great game.
Mason blinked and nearly stopped the nymph’s efforts. Had any of roboGod’s ‘fictional’ creatures ever called it that?
“What did you say?”
Thea looked confused before she answered.
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“The endless competition of the gods, druid. They fight for position. For power. For influence on the prime. It is the only plane they can affect besides their own.”
Mason grinned, lust-filled mind turning a few gears as he tried to process that. Was she saying the real game wasn’t between men, but between gods? Were people just some kind of pawn? Maybe Mason ‘won’ by making Cerebus win. Maybe the interactions between players were less important than they all thought.
When Mason looked up, Thea seemed a bit disappointed. He was still rock hard from her efforts (and probably without them), but she wasn’t the sort of woman used to being ignored.
Not that she needed to worry. Mason was enjoying himself, but he was coming to the end of the teasing stage.
“Still want that donation?”
Thea smiled and crept forward like a cat, eyes locked on her prize. He was still slick with elven juices, but that only seemed to excite the nymph more. A few seconds later she was sucking his soul from his body.
Mason sat back and enjoyed, glancing occasionally at the elven women fast asleep on their bed, still struggling to accept his new reality. If everything Thea said was true, unless he found another way, it meant he had to bring literally every elven woman here to somehow get a similar treatment.
It was a confusing, vaguely overwhelming thought. He couldn’t turn them all into concubines. First, they probably wouldn’t agree. Second, he’d have some kind of revolt from the men of Nassau.
It wasn’t like any of them were hurting for female companionship, but there was something unique and exotic about the elves. Hoarding them would make Mason seem like an unreasonable, greedy tyrant.
So what did he do? He supposed he could do it all in secret—bring them one by one and bang them like the loyal soldier he was. But then what, swear them to silence? Then marry them off?
It was unacceptable to whatever morality he still had left, but it was also the only thing he could think of. Though, to be fair, his brain didn’t have much blood. He gave Thea her first donation, eyes rolling as she gulped and swallowed with a series of blissful groans, taking him deeper and longer down her throat than any human was capable.
He held her hair and reminded himself to visit the nymphs more often.
When he still didn’t go down, Thea didn’t even pause to start again. Mason put a hand to his face and was about to ask for water before some lifted up on another leaf-like plant servant. He toasted it and chugged.
So. There was the elf problem, which was a pretty fucking good problem as problems went. At least in the short term. Then there was the ‘introducing his new concubine to his girls’ problem, which he mostly hoped Haley and a separate room would solve. But who really knew.
Then there was the whole ‘evil emperor trying to destroy him and everything he loved’ problem, festering somewhere in the east, with who knew what rule changes looming on the horizon. In any kind of sane world this would be the main and maybe only problem. But here he was.
To start dealing with this Mason needed to recruit every western player he could. And every eastern player he could, for that matter, except he didn’t know how. At least he’d probably recruited Chinua and his merry band of outlaws. If Mason could cross the sea, find them, and teleport them over.
Back in the world-wide tournament pretty much no Western players had actually revealed themselves, so Mason had no idea who they were, or where to find them, with the exception of ‘mushroom girl’ (Demi). Who, oh by the way, Mason was pretty sure he was on the path to fucking.
“Jesus,” he mumbled, thinking of something Blake said to him in the Neutral Zone, with a glance down at Thea working hard. “I really am a legendary manwhore.”
“What’s that, druid?” Thea looked up from her mission with a face covered in spit.
“Nothing.” He pushed her back down with a hand on her head, letting his mind roam.
Whatever his problems, he really had ‘a good run’, as his brother said. He knew most men would give their left nut for a woman like Thea, and Mason had practically forgotten about her.
Fucking Blake, he thought, mind jumping all over the place.
Because there was another problem had hadn’t dealt with. Though it was a problem Mason had no real expectation to ever deal with permanently. And maybe he didn’t have to.
The events of the tournament were one thing, but after they cooled down and were apart long enough, Mason expected they’d get over that easy enough. Except Blake was making his own decisions, deciding his own fate. He’d committed to creating this orc (and goblin) alliance, possibly uniting other ‘humanoids’ in this new world.
To Mason it all seemed like madness. For his part, he intended to keep building a force of players strong enough to resist any threat. Blake was free to join it, or not, as long as he kept out of the way.
So they were on separate paths, with no reunion in sight except maybe some dumb orc wedding for a day. It wasn’t what Mason wanted. But it would never mean they weren’t brothers.
For now, it was just how things were.
“Christ.” Mason groaned as his problems yet again drained into Thea’s mouth. Not that it shrunk the problem, no matter how pleasurable it had been.
“Druid, what have you been eating?” Thea panted and licked her lips. “This seems…unnatural. Even for you.”
“Elf food,” he said, eyes rolling as he reached for more water.
It didn’t take long before Thea was at it again, the nymph as relentless as he was. It was like an unstoppable force sucking an immovable object.
More problems filtered through Mason’s mind. He still had dreams of walking corpses and demonic monsters. He needed to explore the continent and probably fight more dragons. He had to get his players more powerful without getting them killed.
But for a moment, at least, it all vanished with the slurping, moaning sound of a Greek-goddess on her knees, draining him like it was the most important task in the world. And, he supposed, for her it was.
It was a hard thought even for Mason to turn into a negative. Though it reminded him of his final problem, never to be forgotten, never to be forgiven—the underlying purpose of Mason’s existence in the ‘great game’. Or whatever the hell you called it.
After everything else was said and done, when all the nonsense of the new world was sorted out, and the final reckoning came—Mason was somehow going to put an end to ‘roboGod’. He was going to give mankind its revenge.
Unless Thea killed him, first…