As I sat in my office the bell above the door rang. In walked a heavyset man in nice clothing. Probably a merchant whose business was doing well. No one active would be more than slightly overweight, no matter how much they loved fine dining, and his clothes meant that he had plenty of money.
“Can I help you sir?”
“Yes, I have a rather...unusual condition that I’d like to talk to you about. Could we go some place private?” He was probably just a homosexual man from the Holy State of Renalt, where sex with others of the same sex was illegal, or had a serious thing for beast girls like Kanta. Here, however, no one cared about the first, and the second would just start rumors. Still, if he was a merchant, reputation would be super important to him.
“Sure, come into my office.” The man followed me back to the office and I closed the door behind us.
He sat on the couch but looked extremely nervous, continuously looking around for several seconds like he thought he was being followed. “Is there any way you can prevent eavesdropping?” he asked. This man really didn’t want anyone to learn his secret. “I’ll pay the secrecy fee.”
I nodded. I had learned the Silence Field spell from the intermediate healer’s manual, as privacy was extremely important in many cases, but it used too much mana to do it all of the time. “Sure.” I said, closing my eyes and releasing the spell at level five. I would need to continuously channel the mana from my necklace to keep the spell up, as it would fail or weaken to level four if my mana pressure dropped below four. “I’ve cast the spell. The sound will get more muffled the further it gets from us, and at five meters we won’t be understandable.” Even at the two meters that separated us I probably sounded like I was slurring my speech. I sat down on the couch across from him. “So, what do you want to talk about.”
“I have a rather… strange desire, sexually. I’ve tried dealing with it, using the brothel, but...” Pretty much what I was expecting. So, was he paying for a bunny girl every few days or did he find a male one willing to not talk? A bunny man? I motioned for him to continue. “I...I’m only interested in young girls. It was fine when I was your age, as my wife looked young for her age, but the older we got, the less attractive I found her. And now that she’s thirty, I just...it doesn’t work down there, no matter what I do. No matter how kinky things get.”
“So you like them a bit young. I assume you mean thirteen or fourteen?” It was technically illegal to have sex with someone more than two years younger than you if they were less than fifteen, but most guards tended to overlook it if the younger one didn’t lodge a complaint.
The man shook his head. “Nine or ten.” I coughed in surprise. I was not expecting that. Yeah, that was definitely a problem. “Even worse, my daughter turned nine a few weeks ago, and now every time I look at her I can’t help but notice how beautiful she is a bit too much.”
“You haven’t...done anything to her, have you?”
“No, of course not. I’m even sleeping at the office so that I’m not tempted. But I can’t avoid my own daughter for too long. A girl needs a father in her life.” I nodded. “So, can you fix me?”
I thought for a moment, trying to remember everything I had learned about pedophilia and sexual attraction and how to treat bizarre sexual attractions. Unfortunately, the only successful methods I had read about were basically brainwashing. What if he brainwashed himself, though? There was one possibility I had read in a book on banned toxins. “I only know of one thing that might work, and it’s going to be very difficult to do.”
“Anything you can do will be welcome. I’ll pay any price.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“That’s not the problem. The ingredient is from the country of Usux, in the southern rain forest. Possession of the plant is considered a high crime, on par with high level poisons. That is because it has a rather unique effect.” I paused for a minute and leaned closer, so that he could hear me better. “It breaks your sexuality.”
The man looked perplexed. “What do you mean ‘breaks’?”
“I mean that as soon as you come under its effects you will be overwhelmingly attracted to the first thing you see that your mind sees as a valid sexual partner. Animals, men, women, children, dolls, even trees if the thought enters your mind. It was banned almost two hundred years ago when an enemy dipped their arrows in the toxin and everyone that was shot tried to rape each other, sometimes to death. After it wears off, however, the attraction will remain, but without the power. Everything you are attracted to after that point will be quite similar to the one thing that fulfilled your desire at that point.”
The man looked shocked that I would suggest such a thing. “Why would I want that?”
“If I mix a weak potion with it, then the power of the attraction will merely be at a level where it is difficult to resist. The aphrodisiac effects shouldn’t be any worse than the standard one I sell.”
The man nodded. “So, you want me to use it with my wife, so that she becomes the only one I’m interested in?”
“Well, in its weaker form, you’ll probably also be attracted to women that look similar to her, but since she is thirty, I doubt you will have any desire for any woman under her mid twenties.”
“That is good enough. How quickly can you get the ingredient?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I do know someone who trades in things that aren’t exactly legal, but I doubt a man whose bread and butter is stolen jewelry will know where to get it. It will take some digging to find someone who does.” I only knew the man because I needed mithril for a few projects, as father wouldn’t provide me what I needed to try and make a better Star Mithril. I hadn’t really succeeded, only finding an alternative formula that cost even more to make, but I still knew where he worked, assuming he hadn’t been arrested and indentured to hard labor somewhere.
The merchant nodded. “In that case, let me get you my information. Please contact me as soon as you have the ingredient. I will pay any price, even if you want my company in exchange.” This man was desperate. It was good for him that I didn’t take advantage of people in desperate situations.
It took a week for my black market contact to locate a member of the Assassin’s Guild who was willing to get me a blue chaos flower. The monster plants were known to grow in one location on the continent, even though there had been several attempts to destroy all of the plants and wipe the species out. Somehow, however, they always seemed to come back in the core of that swamp. No one outside the Guild knew that the true reason for this was the Guild replanting them.
The Assassin’s guild weren’t willing to accept coin, however. They wanted a potion, one that would temporarily boost a person to extreme levels of power at the cost of their own life. It would take a talented alchemist to make the potion. Though it wasn’t a particularly hard potion to make, extracting the essences needed to make it was quite difficult, as they needed to be almost perfectly pure to work. The Guild had learned of my ability to extract Essence of Anti-aging, a comparably difficult essence to extract, and thought that I might be able to do the job. The only concession I could get out of them was that it wouldn’t be used in this country, but it was enough to insure that my actions wouldn’t destroy something I cared about.
So one afternoon, rather than going home to my girlfriend, I stayed at the office, extracting the needed essences. She wouldn’t like that, but it was the only chance I had to cure the merchant. It took an extra five hours of work before I was finished with the extraction, and when I was done I locked up and went home. Samantha hated that it took me so long to get back, but I got her mind off of it quickly when I followed her back to her room.
The next day the Assassins sent by a wounded business man that did business with them to pick up the potion, a man who then sent a servant to leave a special package at a specific nearby dead-drop location. Obviously, the potion had more value for them than the flower. Retrieving the flower that night when I ‘had a drink before going home’ I returned it to my office at the clinic under the guise of needing to use the bathroom after a night of drinking.
The next day I spent several hours carefully extracting the Essence of Sexuality, then, mixing only a single drop into a batch of potions, I put one potion into a special case along with a female aphrodisiac potion and a page detailing exactly how dangerous it was. The rest of the potions and the rest of the essence went into a steel box, then into a hidden compartment in the safe. I definitely didn’t want anyone accidentally using it. Even if the rest of it spoiled before I could use it, that was preferable to a single one of those potions being stolen or misused. I sent a letter to the merchant, informing him that I had made the medicine he requested, and that he should come by.
That night, just before we closed, the merchant showed up. He gave me five gold, despite my insistence that he didn’t owe me that much, and I spent the next hour explaining to him how to properly use it.
The man returned home, where he carefully removed anything person shaped from his bedroom, including mirrors that would let him see himself, and banned all of his servants from coming near that room until he personally met them to rescind that order. His wife then entered and they locked the door before each taking their own potion.
Three hours later, an exhausted man stumbled into the dining room and demanded water and something good to eat, soon to be followed by his equally exhausted wife, demanding the same.