Pichi was the last of us to wake up the next morning, eventually stumbling out of the tent, looking bleary eyed and then fixing me with a smug grin that said nothing so much as, "I sucked your dick real good last night, huh?"
"Good morning, Pichi!" Jutaana said, making Pichi wince like she had a hangover. "I am hoping you were having a good time blowing Mmmy husband!" She giggled a bit at that. "Husband, husband, husba~and," she sang-song. She'd cooled down the giddiness that the tower had somehow inflicted on her the previous night - her current high mood was all Jutaana.
"Yeah. I also hope that," Azanaga said in the coldest deadpan you've ever heard.
"Well I did, so thank you, oh my wonderful co-wife. Also Azanaga," Pichi said, making Azanaga shoot her a scowl.
"Mm..." Whips said, tail idly whipping behind her. "You two should get on better! Since you are both Hob's wives, you should learn to at least tolerate one another. How long have the three of you been married together?"
I answered. "I picked up Azanaga a few days before coming south."
"A whirlwind romance! Oh my, you must have been truly great in the sack."
"Yeah," Azanaga said. "He had me begging for it pretty much right out the gate." She gave me a knowing look about the double meaning, which Whips seemed oblivious to.
"Are we going into the tower again today?" Eshenesra asks. "It was a bit of an endeavor last time, and I don't think we even got halfway up..."
"That is because you did not," Akamarina said. She idly flexed her fingers. "I hope that Hob will cease using me to purposefully trigger traps."
"Unlikely to stop," I said, making Akamarina twitch. "Unlike the rest of us, you don't die if this form is disrupted. Even if Pichi dies, you just lose your anchor and go home to Lake Nadi, no?"
"How many bee stings would you take on behalf of ants?"
"I'll ignore the fact that you compared me to an ant," I said, then turned to Pichi. "Now, girls, let's have Pichi cook us up breakfast and hit the tower," I said.
"Yes, darling," Pichi said, wearing a pleasant smile as she stretched. "Let me just get changed and wash my hands. Jutaana, can you see about finding some meat?"
"Yes, co-wife!" Jutaana said with an eager salute.
* * *
There was no meat in the breakfast because there didn't seem to be actual meat in the forest. Jutaana had run around trying to hunt, but all she'd found was more weird 'animals' like the deer and squirrels we'd seen earlier. She'd killed a rabbit-thing to bring back to Pichi to inspect, but even a cursory inspection of the corpse led to the conclusion that it was definitely not meat, or edible, so we'd decided to bury it outside camp.
Pichi's breakfast was delicious anyway, though, and I was feeling quite comfortably full as I entered the tower alongside the girls and Voasary. Once more, Whips and Azanaga were left outside, though Azanaga seemed more comfortable with Whips by this point - annoyed by her acting like a busybody aunt, maybe, but not afraid of being killed by her any more.
The second floor once more had the leather sack goblins, though fortunately, the next several floors hadn't had any creatures recover, letting us make our way all the way up to the reading room without issue. I did wonder a bit at that - it seemed unlikely that nobody else had ever tried to scale this tower and managed to kill anything past the second floor. Anybody capable of getting past the second floor would slowly attrit the tower, and surely at least the zombie ogre-thing would have been dead? Even if it took days to recover or the like, the three-headed fire-breathing lizard seemed thoroughly decapitated. It was even starting to decay a bit.
I could only frown in confusion at the entire thing, but we continued up, and up, passing into the reading room in short order. The next story up would be the 'black sludge,' to borrow Akamarina's description. "I assume you tried drowning the thing on the next floor when you came up."
"It does not appear to be bothered by water, if that is the intent of your question," Akamarina replied.
"Right." I switched my arm into cannon mode. "Eshenesra, be at the ready with a flame spell." Eshenesra nodded, chanting under her breath, magic slowly gathering around her fingertips. When we came up into the next story, I blasted the sludge, splattering a large hole in it, some of the innards coating a wall, and Eshenesra followed up with a fireball in short order, the sludge proving quite flammable. It didn't wail or writhe like an ordinary thing might - it simply collapsed, the whole mess quietly burning, flickers of fire hitting the splatters I'd made and lighting them up.
It took several minutes to burn, and the smell was thick and acrid - bad enough we went down a floor, out of concern about the possibility of toxicity. Jutaana bounced from foot to foot with impatient energy, humming curiously as she hopped on her soles. "I am wondering about what is after the black sludge! You are being right, husbandine- husband mine!" She corrected. "Being in not knowing because nobody is knowing is fun! I am going to be learning about what is happening next and am one of only people to be doing so!"
"The only problem is the risk of getting killed," Pichi said, an annoyed note to her voice. "I didn't live to be 139 years old by taking lots of stupid risks."
"Ah, it will be being fine, Peaches!"
"Only Hob can call me Peaches," Pichi replied sullenly.
"Ah! I am being sorry, I was hearing the name and thinking it was cute and appropriate, since your most striking feature is also big and round like the peach!"
Pichi just gave her a lazy smile. "Alright. Fine. You can call me Peaches."
"Ah! I am being so happy," Jutaana said, smiling brightly. "This is being because we are good friends, yes?"
"Sure."
"Thank you!" Jutaana gave a cute little bowing motion. "Ah! I was saying that it will be being fine, and since we are friends and ~co-wives~," she singsang that word giddily, "I will be reassuring you. I am being good at fighting, and Hob is being good at fighting, and we will be killing anything that is trying to hurt you, since you are important and have big tits!"
I interrupted their conversation at that point. "Akamarina, go see how the black ooze-creature is doing." I didn't have to relay the order through Pichi that time, with Akamarina heading up the staircase. I glanced at Pichi. "I like you for reasons other than your big tits, Peaches."
"Yeah, because you're a fellatio addict," Pichi said, with a smug look on her face.
Akamarina came down. "The burning has ceased, though I can hardly say that the smell is gone."
It definitely had not. It was even thicker than before. What was left of the sludge was crusty ooze, and I pushed Akamarina up to the next story, where there was a fuck-ugly animal that looked like some twisted chimera. It had eight long, thin legs, but they were vertically arranged, and an excessively long neck. It skittered around the room quickly, but its skin was wrinkled like it had once been fat and bloated but was now starving.
We killed it, naturally. We did the same to the ghostly apparition on the next story (though that required a bit of Light magic from Eshenesra to figure out where it was being projected from), and the thing on the next floor just exploded in meaty chunks pretty much the moment Akamarina got in line of sight of it, its innards blasting apart her form and forcing Pichi to resummon her, the creatures' blood and viscera coating the walls.
At that point, though, either the witch had gotten tired of stocking her tower with monsters, or else she had decided that from there on, the tower was for personal use. There were a couple rooms that were apparently barren - and we creeped across them with great caution, while Akamarina dance-walked ahead, just in case they were trapped - and then came the woman herself's actual "lair."
The first such room was a cozy little kitchen, albeit one where all the food had long since rotted, the water seeming stagnant. It was long enough ago that the scent was more stagnant than anything like rotting - there were no surviving bugs, just chewed-to-the-base cores and the like. Jutaana leaned into me, planting her chin on my shoulder and sniffing at my neck noisily. "I will be covering bad smell with husband's good smell," she explained in a quiet whisper. Leporagi have much better senses of smell than most other races.
Once we moved on upstairs, any bad smell cleared, though Jutaana continued to snuggle into me despite that. The next room was a bathroom, with a clean toilet, shower, and bath, all arranged pleasantly in the room. A sprig of something had rotten where it had been hung on a bar above the shower, but its scent was mild - maybe a bitter mint, but nothing awful.
The next story was the bedroom, the bed here seeming much more plain and spartan. Jutaana actually jumped on it before I could stop her, and I was briefly terrified it was trapped somehow - but she just rolled around giddily. "Mmmy husband, we can be having sex on this bed! It is nice and bouncy! Oooo, we could all be having sex? Eshie, are you wanting to have sex with our husba~and? You are always watching instead of participating!"
Eshenesra turned scarlet at the question, looking around for assistance from anyone else - but my expression was just curious (I really doubted she had no interest, given she'd never tried to leave when I was fucking a girl in front of her), and Pichi's had a certain air of smug curiosity. Even Akamarina gave her a look that said nothing so much as, Well, yes, that is obvious. Eshenesra licked her lips nervously. "It would be dangerous to have sex in here... thank you for the offer, though, uhm, Jutaana."
"Ah, it is being okay. Husband mine! Let's have sex on the bed, mhm! It is much comfier than having sex on outdoors dirt!"
"Jutaana, we're still in an evil witch's house and it could be cursed somehow."
"She would not be cursing her own bed, no?" Jutaana asked, her expression utterly innocent.
Akamarina let out a huff that, in itself, almost made me fuck Jutaana just so I could make her watch. "We should explore up the rest of the tower. There might be more of interest there."
"Ah... if you are saying so."
The next story up was a library. Towering bookshelves arrayed in a circle, text after text, in what looked to be a variety of languages and scripts. Some were even scrolls instead of codices, the thin things laid on top of one another in a pyramid. One bookshelf, rather than being filled with traditional bound books, instead appeared to be just covered in notebooks. I took a couple out, gingerly and carefully removing them before opening them. Each one was filled to the brim with neat little script (which I, admittedly, could not read), and the occasional visual aid - some type of graph or drawing of a sigil or the like - or a doodle done in the margins, portraying a mixture of butterflies, stick figures, umbrellas, and swords.
I frowned as I considered the books. There were so many. They were, undoubtedly, a genuine treasure trove of information. But I couldn't read a single word, and that left me with this aching feeling. I let out a sigh and shook my head, stuffing a couple notebooks which looked promising on first glance into Pichi's pack, in the hopes that they were written in Kitran or some other living language, and I could eventually work out how to read them.
"There's still a staircase up," I said, looking at Akamarina. Akamarina gave me an annoyed huff, but started up the stairs, heading up to the next floor. There was a brief silence, then she spoke up.
"There are no apparent traps or monsters. There is, however, what appears to be a corpse," Akamarina said.
I frowned at that, but went up. It looked like an attic - boxes and chests and whatnot, a few bits and bobs of furniture that were stacked atop each other or cluttered with boxes. There was an opened chest, and what looked to be a human corpse, neck resting against the line of an opened chest, head dipped down low into it. Its clothes looked ordinary enough, but the body itself seemed mummified, skin pulled in and turned brown, peeling here and there.
"Ah! Is that being the witch?" Jutaana asked excitedly.
"Not sure," I said. "Hard to even tell the sex. Akamarina, move the body," I ordered - I wasn't touching it, for risk that it was alive, or trapped, or something else even worse. Akamarina grabbed its ankles and tugged - and the legs simply popped off at the knees, coming away from the body as a whole, which collapsed out of the chest from the force. The head had apparently come free, because the torso was left headless as it flopped down. "Check the pelvis for the sex," I told Akamarina.
"Is that truly necessary?" Akamarina asked.
"She had a fuckden and sex books," I pointed out. "According to Whips, they were heterosexual in content. So if it isn't her, it's highly likely it's one of her sex partners, and her sex partners were probably men."
"Ah! Mmmy husband is being so smart!" Jutaana said. "Can he be breeding smart babies into me, please and thank you?"
"The medicines are still on the ship, Jutaana," I pointed out. I looked at Akamarina expectantly - then at Pichi, when Akamarina didn't respond. "Unless you want to do it, make Akamarina do it."
"Akamarina, pull down the corpse's pants enough to reveal their genitals," Pichi said, sounding very much like she didn't want to say as much - but also clearly having not much choice.
The corpse's genitals were male, as it turned out. Which meant this wasn't the witch herself, but also implied that she hadn't been to this story in a very long time, given the mummified status of the corpse. The rotten food could have been from leaving it there for a month - maybe it was, even - but the mummified corpse was far beyond that level.
I contemplated the room, glancing upwards. "Akamarina, check the next floor," I ordered, and once more she let out an annoyed noise as she was used as a trap-checker once more, but it really was not my problem.
"I believe I have located the witch," Akamarina called out, which gave me some pause. I glanced at the girls, and Akamarina came back down. "She is not doing much of anything at all. Witch! Come down and strike us all down, should you be angry at us!" Jutaana drew her sword, halfway charging to the front of our little group. A few seconds later, after nothing had actually happened - not even the whisper of a spell or a few footfalls - Akamarina spoke again. "You see? There is naught to fear."
While I was hardly happy with the way Akamarina had expressed her confidence, I couldn't deny the evidence she'd presented. I headed up the stairs, both weapon arms at the ready, Jutaana in front of me, Eshenesra nervously muttering under her breath as she followed me up.
The witch herself was quite beautiful, with long, wavy raven-black hair, extremely pale skin, painted black lipstick, a corseted dress in what - to my eyes, at least - looked like a gothic style. Her features were beautiful, and her breasts were pretty big too.
She also was completely unmoving. Two fingers rubbed at one eye, stretching the lid outwards. Her hair was slightly uplifted, as if she had just twisted her head a moment prior, and gravity had not yet taken its toll on the upswing. She was seated in front of what looked like a makeup desk - mirror, various accoutrements of feminine beauty, and so forth. The specific ones weren't those I was familiar with from the north, but it was really hard to imagine it as much else.
"Akamarina, go touch her," I ordered, raising my cannon arm and pointing it at her. Jutaana similarly raised her blade, and Eshenesra just kept whispering spell incantations in preparation for a fireball.
Akamarina simply splattered against an invisible wall, the first inch or so of her body smearing out across it like a popped water balloon. The shape was consistent with something like a large rounded wall, and when she pulled back a moment later, there appeared to be no lost water. "It appears I cannot touch her," Akamarina said mildly. She pushed against it, but there was clear tension there, and when she kept pressing, it simply made her finger distend.
"Jutaana, poke it with your sword," I told her, and she nodded, stepping nervously forward and tapping it - there was a noise like the metal was striking something well beyond its ability to penetrate, but nothing identifiable from the other half of the equation. I could only frown. "What the hell is this?" I asked.
"I am not knowing, husband," Jutaana said, idly poking at it, following the shape of the invisible surface up and down. "Hm, I am thinking the curve is getting bigger as it is getting closer to the witch," she explained, tapping away. "Ah! The curve is getting smaller other way! It is being like cone!" She declared with excitement. "Pointy cone goes back to... this!"
In the bookshelf opposite the makeup desk was a small object, not even a foot long, looking like a rather elaborately decorated rod. Whatever was blocking us from touching the witch was located there... and probably it was also holding her in place.
"That explains a lot," I said, as I considered it. "Jutaana, I want you to tackle her and hold her down. Sword to her throat, don't let her get any spells off, got it?"
"Yes, Mmmy husband!" Jutaana said, moving to the part of the cone closest to the witch and planting one foot well behind her, ready to pounce. I gingerly reached for the rod, and - careful not to let it point at me - flicked it upwards so it hit the roof.
Instantly, the witch moved with a mix of surprise, confusion, and perhaps some panic, but she only had a fraction of a second, and Jutaana had her pinned to the ground, one knee on either arm, sword up against her neck. "What in the world?" She asked, bewildered, in what sounded to my ears like thickly accented Kitran.
"Ah! Husband! Are you being able to understand her?"
"Stay quiet," I barked at her in Kitran, "or Jutaana will cut your throat." She thinned her lips and nodded. "We found you under the effects of this device," I explained with a gesture, and her expression turned sour, eyes tightening. "Speak slowly. No spells."
"Given how... you don't seem to speak the language, I assume it's been quite some time..." I nodded, not letting on that we were from another continent. The witch let out a sigh. "Bastard," she half-spat. "I showed him how that thing works... didn't realize he planned to..." She trailed off. "Thank you. Welcome to my home, kind stranger. Hm. Four women to one man," she said, frowning, her nose crinkling as she looked over my group. "I haven't seen half your races before, and she is the ugliest eruvela I've ever seen, if she is one."
"I don't believe she is, no." The witch nodded. "What is your name?"
"Yaj." That was the answer I had expected, so I only quietly nodded. "And yours?"
"Hob."
"Hob. Given your group is four women to one man... I assume you wouldn't be terribly interested in making sweet, domineering love to this poor benighted witch, whose last lover trapped her in a time bubble for an untold aeon?"
"...You want to fuck first thing?" I was honestly baffled by the offer.
"Mm. Well, I would rather that I not have a knife at my throat... but I was planning to enjoy sex with my lover before he froze me for centuries," she told me. "Ha... I suppose that I simply will not get to have sex."
"What is she being saying, husband? I am not being able to understand her!"
"She's propositioning me," I admitted. Jutaana blinked, and I remembered she didn't have the best grasp of Almerese. "She's asking to fuck."
Pichi laughed at that, while Eshenesra flushed. "Right out the gate?" Pichi asked. "Guess we knew she's pretty horny already, with the fuck den and the smut books and everything."
"Yes, I am sure it is very amusing," Yaj said. "But may I please be released? I can't imagine you plan to keep me at the point of a blade for all time... unless you plan to decapitate me."
"Your tower has a lot of defense mechanisms. Why is that?"
"Home defense. I don't want to be bothered when I'm with my lovers," she explained. "Plus, all these superstitious locals who believe 'magic' is some sort of evil thing, rather than merely a natural force. Judging by your elemental companion and your own modified limbs, you do not believe such gibberish, I presume?"
"I don't," I agreed.
"There you have it, then. May I please stand up?"
I sighed. "Jutaana, let her go, but if she tries to cast any magic without my permission, kill her. Yaj, if you try casting spells, Jutaana will kill you."
"Understood," Yaj said, picking herself up off the floor, wiping herself off. Jutaana kept a close eye on her, hand rolling the sword around and around, keeping it at the ready. "Thank you for saving me," she said again, with a small inclination of her head. "I suppose I can probably find a decent present for you..." She made another jerk of her head, towards the staircase. "May we descend?"
"Go ahead. Akamarina, take the lead, keep an eye on her."
"I am but a loyal slave, sworn to do whatsoever you wish," Akamarina said, her voice dripping with contempt as she stepped down the staircase first. Jutaana followed next, then myself, then Pichi and Eshenesra.
The next story down was, of course, the one where the dead man lay - and Yaj let out a laugh at that. "Serves you right, you fuck," she said, seeing the state of his corpse. "You didn't even get to abscond with your ill-gotten gains. Thus ever to those such as yourself," she said, kicking the corpse in its exposed crotch, making the bit of flesh that was its mummified cock fly off - which only made her cackle all the more loudly. "Oh dear, looks like you lost your only good feature."
"You mentioned a reward?" I prompted her.
"Hmm? Oh, yes," she said, shaking her head. "I have a number of magical items of my own devising here." She stepped forward, idly kicking the chest open the rest of the way, smirking as she saw her dead lover's head where it had rolled in there. "I hope you enjoy getting all those wonderful items," she said, squatting down, then removing what appeared to be a simple silver coin. "This," she explained, "is a very wonderful design, created quite some time ago by an empire that predates even my day." I just frowned at it. "You see, they wanted to cut back on thieving, so if someone tries to steal it - they die. Only if you intentionally give it to another can it be taken without killing them."
"What if you drop it and somebody picks it up to try to return it to you?" I asked.
"Well... yes, it does have that problem," she admitted. She dropped it back into the chest. "Also, the ownership 'expires' with your death, so you can just kill someone before taking it. Still, it proved quite useful in my case, don't you think?"
"I guess. I come from a place very far from here," I admitted. "I wanted to see things that had never been seen. Is there anything in there that's truly rare and special?"
"Oh. Hmm." She tilted her head to one side, rubbing her chin. "I have a few toys made for sex..."
"We definitely have those, thank you."
"Oh!" She rushed towards one particular box, hefting it up and planting it down. "I don't imagine you have this!" She opened the box up, revealing... what looked to be a nine-by-nine game board, and thirty or forty little human-shaped pieces. "I'll explain the rules, and-"
"I don't want to play a board game," I said.
"No, no, you'll see, if you set up all the pieces and speak the proper word, they come to life!" She started hurriedly filling the board. She looked up at me, just the faintest trace of a pout on her painted black lips. "It'll be fun! You can play it with your girls, too?" She suggested, glancing aside as her hands placed the tenth or so piece on the board. She let out a sigh. "Oh, you just want some boring weapon, don't you?" She huffed.
"I just want something that isn't a literal toy."
"There's..." She frowned and thought about it. "Well, there's the thing that was keeping me in stasis." She huffed again, then looked at Jutaana. "He won't fuck me or play board games with me. What sort of man does that? What do you even see in him?"
"Ah? What is she saying to me, husband?" Jutaana asked, not taking her eyes off Yaj.
"Just some mild insult, don't worry about it," I said to Jutaana, then turned my attention back to Yaj. "That thing seems incredibly dangerous."
"You can turn it off," she told me. "There's a simple button on the base you click in or out. It also literally can't hurt anyone - if you're partially caught in its effect, you are frozen entirely and impossible to affect."
"Then that can be my reward."
"So boring," she huffed again.