An odd question, particularly at this time, but I accepted it. “Sure, come along,” I responded chirpily. We did not have to ask for permission from the teacher, since this was a university course - not some kind of day-care. On our way down the corridors of the Contraptions Branch of Welldark’s campus, we passed many an interesting gadget.

Everything around us moved. Gears were behind the walls, hung under the ceiling, and connected to all kinds of mechanical masterwork about the place. Mechanical force was being transported through the motions of these teethed disks, ringing little bells, powering water fountains, or fulfilling purposes elsewhere entirely. There were also showpieces. The final tests of previous students were displayed, be it a swing that was as close to perpetual motion as anyone around here ever got or an entire, functional airplane.

“Okay, seriously,” Voxxy addressed me, her tone now firmly defensive and bratty. “The fuck is this about? Are you wasting my time for the hell of it or am I actually about to be distracted by a bunch of mediocre guys?”

“I was being completely serious,” I responded and quickly retold the story of what had happened with all the other women in the class. “You can ask around if you want to, I wasn’t part of any of the previous swarms. I figured, if I wanted to have a chance with you, I had to get ahead of the crowd.”

“…and what makes me so special, huh?” she asked, challengingly.

I raised an eyebrow, while openly and lavishly devouring her curves with my eyes. “For the moment, the obvious. Before anyone ruins my opportunity to see if you’re as interesting as you are hot, I decided to go for the bumpy start.”

“Let me guess, you love short girls with big tits?”

“I would never limit myself to such a narrow selection of the various glorious wonders of the female form. An above average interest in women like you, short and stacked above and below, I do admit to.”

“You talk weird.”

“I get that a lot.” We stopped in front of a little sidepath that split towards the end into male and female halves. “Well, we’re here.”

“Great, wait a second,” the goblin hastily walked towards the woman’s bathroom and went inside. I did prepare myself for at least a minute of standing around, but Voxxy returned after less than twenty seconds. Then, she grabbed me by the hand. “Alright, it’s empty, move your ass.”

I pulled my hand free. “You don’t drag me around,” I reprimanded her, using the slightly deeper, more dangerous tone I reserved for domming. It was different from the way in which I would actually threaten people, in various small ways that pretty much every humanoid was capable of picking up.

Voxxy was no exception and she reacted very favourably to this tone. Her ears perked up, her spine straightened, her stare grew a little more interested, and she did not try to grab my hand again.

“Explain what you want to do,” I demanded, looking in both directions to make sure we were in no hurry.

Voxxy’s tone, despite her calmer body language, remained snarky. “I’m weighing my options here. I don’t want to be bothered by a bunch of guys while I work, but I also don’t want to have no guys around. Being part of an Anomalia sounds really hot. So!” she crossed her arms (over her boobs) and stared up at me, her blue eyes hard and demanding. “Since you approached me because I’m hot, it’d only be fair if I got to see if your dick is up to my standards, right?”

When I immediately nodded, she seemed surprised. “Yeah, that logic works for me. So, you want us to go into a stall and for me to get out of my pants, do I get that right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Sure, let’s do it,” I said and gestured for her to go ahead. I was completely fine with revealing myself to this shortstack. Entering the woman’s bathroom ahead of her, that was a line of weirdness I was not willing to cross. Emulating certain mythological creatures, I felt like the doorframe was an impassable barrier, unless I was invited.

The difference between male and female toilets in Welldark was limited to the lack of urinals and addition of a few extra stalls in their place. Quickly, we entered the second closest one. Voxxy closed the lock behind us. “Alright, go ahead,” she demanded, arms crossed (under her boobs).

I took my time, partly because I enjoyed teasing someone who was so eager. “Do you usually do this?” I wondered.

“Do I usually check how ballsy someone who teleports up to me is by asking them to whip their dick out in a bathroom stall? No, not really,” she responded, voice dry with sarcasm.

Considering that was an apt summary of what had happened so far, I forgave her that tone. If she kept it on for the entire rest of the class, I would cross her from my list of interests. I did enjoy myself some sass, but only if it was a front for or a supplement to friendly banter. “That’s good then. To each their own, obviously, but I do not particularly care for women who sleep around a lot…?”

The statement was half a question. A lack of dick inspections did not correlate with other slutty behaviours. Voxxy picked up on that. “I don’t sleep around anymore.”

I had questions about that. Too many with too long answers to do it in a woman’s bathroom stall. Her response had no influence on me obliging her anyway. The logic did truly make sense to me. I had approached her because she was of a body type that I adored, a purely physical matter. Now she wanted to check if I had the kind of dick that could scramble her insides. Another purely physical matter. If that’s what she needed to know if I was worth her time, that was fair.

The fly down, I tugged down my pants and underpants. Semi-erect, my dick flopped out. Voxxy seemed reasonably curious. “Do you usually whip out your dick when girls you don’t know ask you to?” she poked fun at me.

“Depends on why and who is asking. If it were a choice more regularly, I would take it, I suppose. This, however, is the first time I find myself in this situation.” Again, I devoured Voxxy’s curves with my eyes. I could have recalled any number of debaucheries with Esther to get an erection. One of my many guidelines when it came to eroticism was to only think of the girl(s) I was with at the time.

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Intimacy like this was an engagement, an engagement of the body and the mind. I would not sully any entrustment of their attention by turning mine to memories or fantasies of others. Few greater insults, could I think of, than to reduce a woman before me to a toy that I used to get off while another was on my mind. Few graver affronts to the sacredness of a relationship. She who stood before me, this delightfully squishy, short woman of leafy green, she was the sole focus of my lust at this time.

Voxxy smirked upon realizing the intensity of my gaze and leaned against the door of the stall. Grabbing the edge of her shirt, she popped two more buttons open. Her breasts spilled out of the tightly sitting uniform. She was wearing a black bra made of lace and designed for full erotic effect. She did not strip further, instead she squished her round breasts between her upper arms.

They truly seemed to be only a little smaller than Esther’s, DD-cups, on a woman about three heads shorter. Round, smooth, and squishy, the green was pushed together. I could imagine my dick almost vanishing between them.

My erection was forming rapidly at this point and I glanced off her breasts to follow her reaction. At first, her expression spelled out ‘eh, it’ll do’. Then it gradually went to ‘Respectable’, underlined by small little nods. Finally, she wrinkled her forehead and stared in awe. We did not reach the realm of disbelief. Monstrously large, my dick was not. “Okay, stud, you pass this test,” she said. “That’s one suckable cock right there.”

“Do you want to?”

“Yeah…” Voxxy’s nostrils flared as she took a deep breath. The answer pleased and displeased me simultaneously. I loved that her first instinct was to ‘offer’ a blowjob. I knew that I couldn’t take that offer, because that would have been pushing it further than Esther or Aclysia would have been happy with. Lastly, if she did do that to guys she had just met, she was way too loose for my liking. “…but,” she added, “we have other shit to do. Let’s head back.”

‘I shall pry deeper into how easily or not easily these lips and legs do part, with tact and care,’ I pondered, while waiting in the stall. Voxxy was scouting ahead to make sure there was no one who could have seen me coming out of the wrong bathroom. Once we were out, I asked, “If I may inquire, my fellow, albeit little, pervert, what will happen after our return to the classroom?”

“Yeah… okay, so, stud, I’ll give you your chance,” Voxxy said. Her tone had shifted dramatically away from snarky and almost into the realm of the flirtatious. “We get back, we work together. You get to talk to me and I won’t be bothered by all the other guys. That’s our deal?”

“That’s our deal,” I accepted.

When we returned, the twenty guys I was wary of instantly switched their attention to us. I was amused by this. Initially, because it was like a herd of cats all immediately honing in on a moving target. After that, because the remaining ‘sane’ men and annoyed women in the room rolled their eyes.

“Alright, I’ll go get our supplies,” I said out loud, stretching ‘our’ loudly. The reaction was a series of annoyed puffs and scoffs, mostly quiet, with a little grumble mixed in here and there. Three of the guys glared daggers at me. No one raised an actual fuss. ‘They’d wait until after class for that.’

I grabbed one of the crates and brought it back to Voxxy’s workstation. I arrived just in time to see her draw a step out of a compartment under the workbench. It allowed her to stand high enough to work properly on the hardwood tabletop. “You’ll be my assistant for this, stud, since you’ve got so much… reach.”

The sudden uptick in innuendos pleased me almost as much as the fact that I would get to side-eye her cleavage the entire class. I was also rapidly taking to the word ‘stud’. That title was another fairly stereotypical goblin thing. Not all stereotypes were bad. Actually, most stereotypes I operated under were rather positive. I still didn’t hold on to them too firmly. Stereotypes help to orient one’s mind when dealing with strangers. Adhering to them too strongly was just as paralyzing as it was to not have any idea at all.

What was in the crate was soon orderly laid out on the table. I put similar parts in the same corners and Voxxy then categorized them further. Everyone else was already in the drafting, if not the early implementation stage, while we scanned through what we had on offer.

Various different forms of sheet metal, battery-powered motors, gears, wooden and metal staffs, wire, cables, rotational joints, hinges, and a bunch of screws, nails, and other such things. “Pretty varied selection,” I hummed, putting the pieces together in various configurations in my head. “There’ll be a bunch of ways to approach this.”

“Platform A at 40 centimetres, Platform B at 50…” Voxxy mumbled, rapidly drawing representations of them on the graph paper. Free-handed, she drew perfectly straight lines, with only the occasional, inconsequent imperfection here and there. She did not bother writing down the measurements. I followed it all with interest.

“I suppose you were an actual engineer where you came from?”

“Engineer and porn star,” Voxxy responded, grinning at me when she spotted my raised eyebrow. “I only shot solo scenes. Was more a dabbling than an actual career.”

“I suppose that’s when you did your sleeping around too?” I asked, actually curious.

“Yep, yep.” The answer was fast and casual. “Was a fun two years.”

I hummed and looked at the drawing with her. “Want some help visualizing that?” Voxxy nodded wonderingly, as if she was expecting something incredible to happen next. Given that my Artefact was quite unique even among personalized powers, I could deliver. Closing my eyes, I visualized and then manifested the objects of our task.

Voxxy let out a series of enticing noises. By the time I opened my eyes again, Voxxy was holding the first platform I had manifested in her hands. It was just a rectangular block of the necessary dimensions, of translucent energy and silver light. “What is this made from? How did you do that? Can you create whatever you want?”

“My Astrality, with my Artefact, within reason,” I responded rapidly.

“Astrality… Artefact…” Voxxy mumbled, giddy with excitement. “I want to learn so much more about these things.”

I blinked a couple of times. “I take it you are from a world with little in the ways of magic?”

“Yes and no.” She put the platform back and assembled the proper configuration of parts for the task given. “You have probably never heard of it, I’m from Tezzl.” Shaking my head, I confirmed her assumption. “Plenty of artifice over there, few actual mages though. Next to none, really. It's mostly dimensional travellers coming through that cast the traditional way.”

“The universe sure is vast,” I responded, more to show that I was listening than anything else. We paused our chit-chat to concentrate on the actual task at hand. “First question, one of intense import, do you care about 25 Dark?”

Voxxy rubbed her thumbs against her index finger, as if there were paper notes between them. “Who doesn’t care about having more money?”

“Eh, I just need it to buy certain objects for those I do desire.”

“You can spend all of it on me then.”

“I do have a Queen already, actually,” I said and showed the tattoo-like mark around my right ring finger. The kind of ‘huh’ Voxxy let out upon the realization clued me in that she had barely any idea what that meant. That girl really was a recent arrival in Welldark and probably to the Dimensional Truth at large. “To the point, if you do want to serve Mammon, our solution needs to be one of further complexity to fulfil the demands of minimal movement.”