I had been at the Grand Temple, as an Archmage with a plus twenty on top of [Learning, Level 14], for a little over a month and a half. I'd mostly been studying void spellcasting, and magical theory, and generally shoring up my foundations, whenever I wasn't specifically practicing my mechanics with Kara, and getting vital lessons in theory that I lacked and really needed if I was going to reach the greatest heights.

As such, I now had a pretty good understanding of how my heavily-enchanted chambers worked, and the underlying spellcraft involved in creating self-contained tactile illusions that behaved just like the real thing. It was impractical for anything with moving parts, and so it really only got used for furniture and bedsheets, but it served in those roles quite admirably.

I say all this so that when I complain about needing to get a bigger bed, you can properly understand that I am, in fact, just whining, rather than expressing an actual, legitimate complaint.

"She is warm," Kara murmured as she woke up, as it had been her night on Volex-snuggling duty.

See, Volex was lonely and insecure. She wanted to be around people all the time, having been alone more than enough in her life. So naturally, when she wanted to stay in my chambers, she was not content with the offer of her own room with her own bed. No. She wanted to sleep in our bed, with us, and I didn't have the heart to tell her no.

Despite the week she'd spent sharing a bed with us, cuddling someone to sleep every night-

"I'm sorry I was rude to you about your alchemy skill," Kara apologized. "I had thought that the Grand Temple was the pinnacle of all knowledge, and that anyone claiming to know more was a charlatan. That was unfair to you, and to every other talented scholar outside these walls."

"Apology accepted," Volex said, pulling Kara into a tight, squeezing hug.

-she still was not part of the polycule, and none of us had kissed her yet. I'm guessing that Kara and Rachel were content to follow my lead, and I... well, for all that Volex is a twenty nine year old woman with an amazingly hot body, she's also basically feral and insufficiently socialized, and I'd feel like I was taking advantage of her if I took things any further.

"Yeah, she's like that," I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. "Aside from that, how did you sleep?"

"Very well, honestly," Kara murmured, still lying atop the slumbering dragon. "Hers may not be as big as yours, but they are still amazing pillows."

I grunted, and carefully climbed out of bed. With Volex adding a fourth body to the mix, we'd had to experiment some more with finding comfortable cuddling arrangements, and arrived at the conclusion that, while our previous three-person arrangement could be increased by having the fourth person lay down atop the central person- i.e., me- the better solution was to simply have two adjacent snuggling pairs, with the makeup of each pair being rotated every three days.

The first three days had given Rachel some opportunities to cuddle with Kara on her own, without me in the mix, and the next three days had given Rachel opportunities to cuddle with Volex, and work out, with first-hand experience, how she really felt about beta exemplars. And starting with last night, Rachel would be getting three nights of good, old-fashioned solo cuddles with her main girl Lucy.

Of course, Rachel still woke up earlier than any of us and did her morning exercises before breakfast, so it wasn't completely idyllic, but I was used to this, and I wasn't about to ask her to change her morning routine just so we could talk about dumb shit in bed for five minutes every morning. We did enough of that every evening.

I walked out into the main room, where Rachel was doing magically-enhanced calisthenics, and walked over to the kitchen to get breakfast. The kitchen was real, and fully-stocked; they had a surprisingly modern-seeming stove-oven combo that was enchanted with fire magic, and I was told that, in places where enchantment was too expensive, manually-fired stoves made of iron or sometimes stone or ceramic were used instead. However, despite all of that, it was also a highly magical place connected to the central kitchen of the Grand Temple, and it could open portals. Four plates of something rather similar to french toast, coming right up.

Soon enough, possibly awoken by the smell of food, Volex trudged blearily out of the bedroom, Kara trailing behind her, mildly bemused.

"Morning, sunshine," I said, setting the plates out on the table and sitting down. "How was your first week at the Grand Temple of Kotor?"

Volex, instead of answering, simply zeroed in on the food and scarfed it down greedily, her eyes still more or less shut.

"Well, alright then," I said, digging into my own food.

We ate in relative silence, with Rachel's exercises coming to an end just in time for her to display table manners to rival Volex's own, stuffing an entire slice of crispy, custardy bread into her mouth at a time, and barely bothering to chew, letting us all finish at more or less the same time.

"God, this is amazing..." Volex muttered, blinking her eyes open and then yawning. "Sorry, you said words?"

"I asked how your first week at the Grand Temple of Kotor was," I said.

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"Oh!" Volex perked up. "It's been amazing! I've had more sex in this last week than in the past five years!"

Kara choked on her toast, and needed a few good thumps on the back from Lucy to dislodge it.

"Didn't you live in the wilderness?" I asked. "Who exactly were you having sex with before you came to Kotor?"

"Well, you know, I ran into other travelers on my foraging trips," Volex said. "It wasn't just the elf. We'd stop, chat, trade stories and little bits and bobs, and sometimes, if I liked the look of them, we'd fuck."

"...Okay, so, this whole week I've been worrying about how you'd accustom yourself to socializing with others, and learning about more complicated and deeper layers of interaction, but..." I trailed off. "I mean, you seem to be doing just fine."

"Eyup!" Volex said.

"So, are you going to invite her to join the polycule now?" Kara asked.

"I mean, fuck, might as well," I said, shrugging.

"Polycule?" Volex asked.

"The tangle of polyamorous romantic relationships that exists between myself, Kara, and Rachel," I said.

"Which we are inviting you to join," Rachel said. "A bit of a formality, considering we've all been sharing a bed for the past week, and every single one of us has had her face stuffed enthusiastically between your boobs, but a formality worth observing nonetheless."

"Hrm..." Volex tapped her chin. "...Trying to remember from the stories I've heard. Romance means commitment, right? And commitment means not having sex with whoever I feel like?"

"That's... more or less the general expectation, yes," I said. "But, polyamory is inherently nonstandard, and there's room for negotiation. Especially since you seem to like having sex, and we... aren't doing any of that."

"Do you not know how?" Volex asked. "I can teach you, it's rea-"

"We're good, thank you," Rachel said. "We don't do that because I prefer to take things slowly, and as we are all sharing a single bed, it would be dreadfully awkward for anyone else to do anything."

"Hrm..." Volex tapped her chin. "...I'm going to be honest, you three are the most interesting people in the whole temple, and I want to keep spending time with you. Lucy is also the hottest person in the temple, and I'd really like to fuck her someday. Everyone else is nice and all, but... Well, I can be patient. Besides, after the week I've had, I honestly think I'm a little fucked out. I'm ready for a break."

"This'll be a long-term arrangement, you know," I said. "And we may not always be with the Grand Temple."

Volex shrugged. "I want to live with people I like more than I want to live in a building. I can live on the road, as long as it's with you."

"Well, that's sweet," Kara said.

"Alright, well, welcome to the team, Volex," I said. "I guess... we should talk to Amelia about us taking a few days journey to find the elf who taught you, and see what she can teach us. Might as well, right?"

"I think you're leaving out something important," Kara said.

"Oh, right," I said. "Okay, Volex, I met you because I summoned the angel Lucifer Morningstar, and asked her where I could find the Teapot of Eternity, so that I could return to Manor Nukem with the lost bastard of the previous heir apparent in tow and dethrone the old Duke who has alienated her vassals. Lucifer, instead of telling me where the Teapot itself is, told me I wasn't yet ready to find the Teapot and accomplish my goals, and so handed me a very vague nudge in the right direction that led me to seek you out."

"...Huh," Volex said.

"Her last words were, if I recall correctly," Rachel began, before clearing her throat. "Make friends, touch grass, and spread your wings."

"You don't have wings, though, I do," Volex said. "...Ooooh, that's how the nudge led you to me, isn't it?"

"Eyup," I said, nodding. "Anyhow, if you can teach us the dragon transformation spell that the elf taught you, then we can probably fly out, find the elf in a day or so, and be done with this in a flash."

"I... don't know how to teach you the spell," Volex said.

"...Okay, then if you could carry us-" I began.

"I'm not very big as a dragon," Volex said. "I couldn't carry even one of you."

I sighed. "Okay, well, if it was only three of us, we could have you fly overhead, while two of us take my motorcycle, but..."

"But, there's not three of us, and you're leery of leaving anyone behind," Kara said. "Me because I know the motorcycle better than you do, and know how to fix it, and Rachel because she's a knight and really good at hitting things with a sword."

"I mean, probably," I said. "I've never seen her so much as hold a sword, if I'm being honest."

"You don't watch me practice, do you?" Rachel asked.

"I do not," I said. "Alright, well, new plan, gang! We're going to scrounge up the materials for a flying vehicle, starting with a fuckload of aluminum."

"What is aluminum?" Kara asked.

"Shit."

"Atomic number 13," Volex recited. "With thirteen protons, thirteen electrons, and fourteen neutrons in the most stable and common isotope. Aluminum is a fairly lightweight metal that does not rust, but is not as strong as iron. It is very common, but only very rarely found as native aluminum, the rest being found as oxides that are difficult to refine into pure, usable metal."

"Hell yeah," I said. "Okay, Volex, do you know how to refine aluminum from its native oxide form? And, I suppose, how to find the aluminum oxide-rich rocks we need?"

"I'm an alchemist, not a geologist," Volex said, shaking her head. "However, I am an alchemist. If we can get our hands on a lot of silicon, which should be much easier, I know how we can transmute all that into aluminum!"

"Silicon... so, like, silica sand, right?" I said.

"Yeah, exactly! We'll need more weight in sand than we'll get out weight in aluminum, but sand shouldn't be hard to get near the ocean."

"It should be easy," I agreed, nodding. "Well, shit, unless anyone else has anything better to do today, let's go get ourselves some fucking sand and build an airplane out of it, huh?"