…or, Jamie’s Fertile Imagination
It would have done a lot for my state of mind if I could have taken Missy back to Pelinor to take her up on her offer immediately, but we still had to make it through the rest of the day. The level of anticipation was distracting.
I was trying to be mature about it. There was no “Man, I’m totally gonna score!” commentary running through my head, but all the same, I was going to score. Totally. Man.
I was glad that my first afternoon class, the etherscaping one, went along the lines of “Here’s the syllabus, see you on Wednesday.” I was actually very interested in the subject of weavesite design, but I didn’t exactly want to spend an hour trying to form images in a crystal ball with my brain so firmly and deeply entrenched in the gutter.
I was eighteen years old, with a healthy sexual appetite. I had a girl who was seriously digging on me, to the point where she’d just freaking offered herself to me. I didn’t need to share what was running through my head with an entire ballroom full of people.
So, when the professor announced that class was dismissed, I headed back to my room to take the edge off a bit, so to speak. I pictured Missy’s face while I did it. I was trying my hardest not to imagine her with her clothes off. I’d be seeing that for myself before the day was over. I didn’t want to have a strong image in my head which might end up conflicting with the reality.
I had a small laugh imagining the conversation at dinner.
“How’d your afternoon classes go?”
“Pretty good. Went back to my room and jacked off to your face. Twice.”
What can I say? I was wound up.
I probably could have given into Iason and still had the energy to take on Missy. That was saying something, if I knew his type as well as I thought I did.
The more aggressive elven guys were often called “stag riders”, after the heroes of old, in reference to their preference for plugging away until their lovers were totally spent. Where most of the boys who’d been after me had shown interest in my dick, riders had seen my greater-than-elven stamina as a challenge to be overcome.
I really hadn’t minded. Sometimes I wondered if human men would be less homophobic in general if they knew what a whole afternoon of multiple orgasms felt like. Not the sort of thing I’d want all the time, but every now and then it was worth a little discomfort to get your mind completely blown away with pleasure.
Sex with Missy was going to be nothing like that, obviously, but it was bound to be an experience, all the same. My thinking had gone back and forth several times over the years on the question of whether a human woman’s softer, more pillowy body would be warm and inviting or gross. Now that I was faced with the actual prospect, my body was expressing a clear preference. My cultural expectations were strongly elven, but my dick was human. It was buying what Missy was selling.
My second afternoon class wasn’t so conveniently abbreviated. It was LOR 100, “A General Survey of Lore”. It was the most basic of basic classes, worth full credit but not really contributing towards any larger goal unless you were interested in being a sage or a bard. I wasn’t interested in going on to graduate school, though. My only thought in taking the class had been that it might spark an interest in something more specific later on.
It was held in a regular-sized classroom, with individual desks and chairs. There were twenty-three people in it, including me. Mostly human, though there were three dwarves.
I’d been around dwarves before. They came to Agora to trade, and of course, they came to the tavern. They always spotted my elven features immediately, so there was never any chance of me hustling them. They typically responded to an attempt to engage them in darts or a billiards game by challenging me to arm-wrestling or stone tossing. I’d never gotten any hostility from any of them. Just a bit of a patronizing attitude.
The instructor of the class, Professor Hall, offered no apologies for the fact that he’d be grading on attendance.
“Most of you came here looking for an easy grade,” he said. “The least you can do is show up to receive it.”
He was a white-bearded old man who looked every inch the stereotypical loremaster, down to the ink-stained hands. His desk was so covered with books and scrolls that it looked more like a relief map of a mountain range than a work surface.
The textbook for the survey class was actually the same monster of a book used in most of the one hundred and two hundred level lore classes. A few of my classmates who were probably going on to take more of those had actually sprung for the tablet edition. I would have loved to save myself the strain of carrying the damned thing around, but I couldn’t justify the expense. Maybe if I’d been in the pre-lore program, but I didn’t really feature myself sitting the bard exam in seven years.
Instead, I’d bought a reinforced backpack with slightly expanded dimensions and a light weight reduction spell. It hadn’t been cheap, but it would remain useful long after I’d sold the lore tome back to the bookstore.
Professor Hall began his lecture by explaining that we would be jumping around in the book quite a bit, because the class was an overview and because the things we would be learning about didn’t have to be studied in any particular order to be understood.
“This class will not give you a firm grounding in any one branch of lore,” he explained. “It will perhaps give you several interesting and perhaps useful examples of the sorts of things somebody with such a grounding would be likely to know, but the main things you will learn in this class are memory techniques and methods for distinguishing true lore from false myths and rumors.”
He then had us turn to chapter seventeen of the book, the chapter covering dragon lore.
“There are many facts about dragons which may be learned in the abstract,” he said. “But every dragon is an individual, with its own history and personality. Knowing the hunting radius of an adult fire wyrm might let you avoid traveling through its territory, but knowing that Fysaskerath the Red only hunts on the west side of his mountain at dawn and the east side at dusk because he hates getting the sun in his eyes can help you travel through his domain and live. ‘Fizzy’ being one of eleven greater dragons active in the past two hundred years whose territories fall inside the boundaries of or within fifty miles of the Imperium, and the only ignoble dragon of that number with whom we have never signed a treaty, it is not completely inconceivable that this information could prove useful.
“Now, here we come to one of the more curious elements of the study of lore: the seemingly useless trivia that’s so often more easily recalled than hard facts will often prove the most useful, to those who have a head for it.
“Imagine you had simply been told that the dragon hunts on this side of the mountain at one time and the other side at another. Though your life, in a very real sense, might depend on remembering which is which, it would be quite a simple matter to turn it around in your head. If it were simply something you had heard long ago, you might say to yourself, ‘I know there was something about which side he hunts on, but what was it?’
“However, knowing that the reason is that he cannot stand getting the sun in his eyes, it becomes easy enough to remember that he only hunts when the sun has dipped below the mountain, and thus that it’s not safe to move on the west side in the morning and the east in the evening. You don’t have to remember any concrete detail beyond his dislike of the sun, and the rest flows naturally from that.
“You could, of course, approach it from another way: you could choose to use a mnemonic device like ‘east in the evening’, relying on the alliteration to jog your memory, but what if you forget whether this means he hunts on the east side in the evening, or that the east side is the safe side in the evening?
“On the other hand, if you remember the key detail of the sun, the rest will come back to you naturally. He never flies out of his mountain into the sun, and hunts only when it’s low in the sky on the other side of the mountain. There’s a story behind this bit of lore, of course, and knowing the story can help you to remember it. You’ll find it on page eleven hundred and twenty two of the tome. Fysaskerath the Red and the Knight Who Rode Out of the Sun. This tale concerns an Athanasian paladin who tricked him as a hatchling, back in the days before the dwarf-gods moved the continents into their current configuration. We shall read this story as a class, and then identify the other useful bits of lore that are encapsulated within it.”
I managed to pay enough attention to the story to know where we were when it was my turn to read, but my mind kept wandering off. When I did try to focus on the story, my mind put Iason in the role of the hero—an actual stag rider.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Iason’s appearance when I’d been in a hurry to get to lunch, but the fact was, he’d been pretty hot.
Elves in general are hot, of course, but his bit of human ancestry did the opposite of what my elven side did among humans, making him seem rugged and more masculine by comparison.
It was interesting. The half-elves I’d known existed in their own space in the spectrum between humans and elves. I didn’t look at my grandfather or Steff and see a girly human, or a macho elf. I saw half-elves. Iason looked enough like an elf that his slightly rougher features gave him a reading of “manly”, more so than “humanly.”
Of course, if somebody raised only in the human culture looked at us side by side, they’d probably peg him as being the less macho one. He was not as broadly built or muscular as I was, but my mind was comparing him to the other elves I knew and me to other humans.
When my mind started trying to slot me into the role of the nameless rider’s kidnapped lover, I gave up on focusing on the story and let myself daydream about Missy. Just because I could enjoy a marathon dicking every now and then didn’t mean I was anybody’s distressed damsel.
Despite my earlier resolution, I was picturing her topless. Breasts excited me. Not to sound like a ten-year-old boy, but they did. A woman’s chest was something that had absolutely no equivalent on the male body, and it fascinated me.
This was the one area where the human body aesthetic appealed to me far more than the elven one did. Some elven women went to the point of binding their chests down to better appeal to men who’d had a steady diet of each other, growing up. The fact that drow art typically featured women with large, pendulous breasts was regarded as a sign of their depravity.
I had felt more than a little dirty when I first realized that such images did something for me, but that only lasted until I realized I was a typical human boy in that regard.
In the summation of the story of Fysaskerath, I learned that if I had been paying more attention, I would have learned that dragons hunt by sight more than smell because they prefer to glide silently along with the wind, that a pyramid of stones or skulls is how ogres mark the edges of their territories, and to never hurt or mistreat a stag with a white coat or golden antlers. I’d actually already known the last one.
The other two tales we discussed in the hour had to do with Alakesandra’s Orb of Seeing and the forging of the Bell of Warning during Magisterion’s War. The latter was something everybody had heard going back to elementary school, though Professor Hall dissected it as we went, pointing out the little tidbits of information about things such as orcish society that it contained.
“Of course, ‘orcish society’ might seem to be a contradiction in terms to many people, but if you can avoid a fight by remembering that their war parties rarely stray even fifteen miles from the camp with their women and children, that’s a good thing,” he said. “And, of course, you will want to avoid the example of the old imperial general who, four hundred and seventy-five years before Magisterion’s time, found out why attacking the camp is not a good idea. The losses from the resulting orcish invasion of the Mother Isles were so great that the Unnamable Emperor XXIII had the general’s entire family stricken from the histories. Read the story of the Unknown General and the Orcs for class on Wednesday, and come ready to explain what we can learn from it. Apart from the bit about not inciting the orc tribes to unite.
“We’ll start the class by reviewing the three stories we read today. I’m going to ask you not to re-read or study them in the intervening time. Instead, go over them in your heads. We’ll see what you remember of them, but don’t worry. There won’t be a quiz, and you won’t be graded. The goal of the exercise is to learn how you remember, so you can learn how to do it better. Any questions? No? Class dismissed.”
My little bout of exercise back in my room hadn’t stopped me from being distracted by thoughts of sex, but it did keep me from being embarrassed when it was time to stand up and leave the classroom.
I walked away from the building knowing only a little bit more about the lore of my world. I’d also managed to transform Iason in my head from an annoyingly aggressive suitor into an epic hero of old, and to come up with all kinds of ideas about things I’d like to try with Missy.
They were not necessarily things that were likely to happen, especially not in our first time.
Getting my dick between her tits? Maybe.
Being allowed to stick with familiar territory when it was time to do the deed? Probably not. I had a feeling that “it never hurts to ask” didn’t really apply in this case, too. I’d let her raise the topic if she wanted to.
It would probably be best to follow her lead all around, in fact. I didn’t know what kind of experience level she had, but it wouldn’t have to be much to be higher than mine in the area of heterosexual human relations. At the very least, she’d have a better idea of what she was willing to do. I’d had blowjobs. It wouldn’t kill me if I didn’t get one from her.
If I wanted anything more than she wanted to give, well, she’d suggested she was anything but bothered by the idea of an actively bisexual—which, in the human world, was probably the best descriptor for somebody like me—guy. If she was serious about that, it put a whole new spin on Iason’s interest. It meant it was possible that I could have my cake and eat it, too.
I’d just have to be circumspect about it. I was sharing a floor—and bathrooms—with about three dozen guys I barely knew, most of whom would, statistically, be stronger than me, even if they couldn’t match my reflexes. I didn’t want to give them any reason to be looking at me sideways, wondering if I was looking at them.
I knew that human guys didn’t divide neatly into a line between “tolerant, open-minded queer” and “gay-bashing troglodyte.” I knew that element was there, though, and that it could send me to the healing center or worse if I wasn’t careful.
M.U. might have been a major university, but it was also in a sparsely-populated province in the heartland of the Imperium. Half of the hidden messages in the lore tales I’d just listened to had been about knowing where you were and what dangers the area held.
I was climbing up the stairs to my floor when I made up my mind to keep things on the down-low with everybody but Missy, at least until I knew the lay of the land.
I was turning the corner into my hallway when I realized that wasn’t going to work.
Iason was sitting shirtless with his back against my door, holding a gift box on his lap.
