…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.
lol “jacked off to your face…twice”
Missing content?
OOOOK!!!
Almost forgot this thing was here to OOK on.
Arf!
I love that Jamie admits to being bisexual.
Something missing here:
..being the less macho one, [] was not as broadly built or muscular as I was,..
“Now, here we come to one of the more curious elements of lore the study of lore:”
One too many lore?
Now, here we come to one of the more curious elements of lore the study of lore
Get rid of that first lore.
And gaaah! You make anticipation look so good, AE.
Whew. I’m definately liking this “I’m cool with myself” main character… who is still somehow not quite as “cool” as he would have himself believe. it’s fine to be with boys… as long as they’re elves… and nobody knows about it… Oh it’s just to good, AE’s done it again! Giving us a nuerotic character who is so utterly sure they are normal they spend all thier time thinking about how normal they are, excpet when they are ranking people on an extremely rigid and racist body-ideal scale. I also find it very telling that he judges women by the elven standard and men by the human standard. And how he has all this inernalised homophobia and racism(a double dose even!).
Wow, it’s just great. Keep up the great work, and Ook!
Wow, only 6 comments? The chapter must have just gone up.
I have to say, while it could be easy to compare this chapter to some of Mack’s in a very general, bland, “Spent the chapter thinking about sex,” (not all her chapters, obviously, but the ones relevant to the point), you do the separation of characters very well. I could put this chapter side-by-side by the content-similar Sooni-fantasies chapter from MU, and even though they would have nearly-identical bullet-point summaries (X goes to class, X thinks about sex occasionally interrupted by lecture, X thinks more about sex), you have developed the voices, personalities, and obviously kinks and preferences, well enough they don’t feel redundant. That’s impressive, especially since you have to switch-off writing the two narrators. Do you ever have trouble getting into the right narrator’s head when you sit down to write a chapter for MU or MOARMU?
Well, crap. I found a typo earlier, but I didn’t copy it to paste down here cuz I figured someone else would find it. Now that I’m down here, no one else has found it, but neither can I.
Who wants to bet there’s a hole in the bottom of that box through which an elven dick is sticking out?
A gift box on his lap, huh? Are we to expect a Justin Timberlake number?
@ahatwaterrhodes: Not really. It’s just something that I do. I couldn’t imagine sitting down to write without having a character in my head. That’s why even my third-person writing is all either highly idiosyncratic or limited to one character’s viewpoint.
Is it his dick in a box? If Iason starts singing I will die laughing.
I think the road lead to no sex tonight and a talk about Jamie’s sexuality and the importance about being true to oneself.
Excellent twist. I love how pushy Iason is, haha.
“The textbook for the survey class was actually the same monster of a book used in most the one hundred and two hundred level lore classes”
This doesn’t read right to me, maybe there should be an ‘of’ after most
methinks Iason has a dick in a box
@ Khazidea 13:
Thank you. You found the one I was trying to find again. Though now that I think on it, there was something similar in ToMU once. The point was made that the “of” was not needed, which I think could apply here. Though I think that either the “of” is needed, or that the “the” should be taken out.
Heterodoxy—
Fertile imaginations
Are better when ploughed
Daydreams may be fired
By a quaint and curious
Volume of True Lore
Whatever happened
To the famed elf subtlety?
Nice package, Iason!
@Andy: That was in the phrase “couple of”, not in general. Of is absolutely needed where it’s needed, but the “couple apples” construction is as valid as “couple of the apples”, in the same way that “two apples” and “two of the apples” are both valid.
AE; I love it as always. I’m also hoping for some fan-pictures of Iason.
Zathras, your haiku are epic as always.
Mmmmmm am I liking this story.
I’m being a good girl and clicking advert links! Can has sex scene now?
Wow, that lore class sounds like fun. I love how many of the classes at MU are about learning how to think about things, not just learning facts. I wish more of my classes had been like that.
“Ummm, excuse me, o shirtless one, but beat it… I gots a girl coming over.”
*smirk*
“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… Maybe if I’d been in the pre-lore program, but I didn’t really feature myself sitting the bard exam in seven years.”
That was physically painful, logically sound, and allegorically solid. Congratulations on the Trifecta.
Reactions:
“Lore Play”: *snicker, snicker*
“Stag Rider”: *snicker, more snickering at later pun*
“Iason with a box”: *facepalm*
Now, are we headed for a threesome, a “hey Elfyboy, leave now”, or a “hey Missy, sorry but I’m currently… occupied >.>”?
Woo, this will be fun
@The Golux:
Thanks. That was actually the first time I ever vetted a pun with somebody else before deciding to leave it in. Glad to see it was appreciated.
If we see an MU version of “Dick on a Box”, I might lose it =P
And here we get some more insight into just how deep the cultural-differences between ‘faint’ and ‘deep’ elves goes in some cases, wonder if this has anything to do with what started/exacerbated the original elvish civil-war or was just one of many things both groups strongly disagreed about.
Man! Where can I find an Iason of my own!? >_> Good writing, sexy stuff, interesting characters, I’m loving this so far. If only it came with a side of complementary elf ;p
Looking forward to seeing all these characters and relationships develop.
“you could chose to use a” – chose = choose
Loving this story, AE. Really looking forward to getting a different perspective on the Harlowe antics.
I too appreciated the “bard exam” pun. And the timing, since law school in the US is undergrad plus 3.
Although I will tell you from the other side, it’s no laughing matter.
Mook!
hmmm, since faint elves don’t seem to have a third gender, and the third gender happens to be, err, men-with-breasts, physically, (don’t shoot! I don’t mean it bad!), it could have something to do with the reason the two split up :-p
“Breasts excited me. Not to sound like a ten-year-old boy, but they did.”
Sheesh. It’s not 10-year-old, it’s just pretty much every man, ever. Except those who are into asses :-p
And I got to take the “familiar terrain” quite a while before my girlfriend allowed me to put it between her breasts o_O
I think most men who are primarily ass men also enjoy breasts. I’m much more into asses and hips than breasts, and I tend to prefer C cup and smaller, but you will not see me neglecting them in any way; they are soft, fun to squeeze and are tasty.
James might be rigid in thought and somewhat racist, but he’s still better balanced mentally than Mackenzie.
And Iason! Wow, he moves fast, doesn’t he? Maybe it’s just a present, maybe it’s something else, but it’ll be interesting to see.
Hmm..
Deep-Elf society is, more or less, female-dominated. It would be reasonable to assume (though I could be very, very wrong.) that Faint-Elf society is, more or less, male-dominated. Both societies appear to play much looser with things like sexuality and gender-roles than we might be used to though.. however.
In Faint-Elf society, women bind their breasts to appear ‘sexy’. In Deep-elf society, men undergo divine-empowered transformation rituals to grow lushly lavish lactating love-lumps (yes I am going to hell, thank you.), possibly for the same reason.
It’s interesting that the Deep-Elves consider large bosoms so attractive, until now I’d (falsely) assumed that the willowy-fae body-type stereotypical of Elves was typical of the ‘Dark-Elves’ of the MUniverse as well.. and that such things as the description of Deshah’s ample endowments was largely the exception rather than the rule, likely because of hyr status as a wet-nurse.
I suppose it makes sense given the way that a substantial bosom often comes to represent motherhood in many cultures and how the Deep-Elves revere mothers and motherhood, but it still managed to catch me a bit by surprise. The ‘common wisdom’ of (Straw)Feminism is that it’s only men… it’s only Guys (sexist, mouth-breathing, Neanderthal, misogynistic, dedicated to the sexual-objectification and oppression of Womyn so they’ll Stay in the Kitchen and make them some Pie! GUYS!) who have a desire For large breasts, and that any desire To Have large breasts is obviously just pandering to The Patriarchy.
That’s one of the things I like about Erin’s writing, her ability to take what you Think you know and MUnkey with it.
Was it ever mentioned in Mack’s story that the world spins the opposite direction of ours? In our world, the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west. According to the dragon story it is safe to travel on the west side of his mountain in the morning because the sun is there, meaning that the sun rises in the west. Interesting to note.
And yes Heph, every “Ass Man” I know won’t pass up boobs. They may get more excited by a nice ass compared to a nice rack, but they still enjoy the rack.
@ Heph
Your girlfriend let you do her in the ass before you could titty-fuck her? Weird.
I’ve been lurking on here for a while, and I really enjoy both this and Tales of MU, but I finally decided to comment because this story is so amazing so far. I think that I actually like MOARMU better than Tales of MU…
I just wanted to say that I am really looking forward to reading more of this, and that I really admire your writing. Thanks for such regular updates too.
I am very curious to see what happens next here.
Adrienne Etienne Houseman
I hope he doesn’t sleep with Iason first. That’d just piss me off as he has a prior engagement with Missy. I’m all for the gay sex, but when you say you’re gonna sleep with someone, they get priority. Even if you CAN cum over and over again.
p.s. MOARMU doesn’t have the whole icon thing going on that MU does (in the address bar)
@Kitabare: No, I’m just lousy with directions and frequently get east and west flipped around in my head… hence “West Campus” initially being labeled as “East Campus” when the first chapter about it first went up.
I got it right in the first paragraph where Fysaskerath was introduced, then got it messed up in the next one. Fixing it now.
Far be it from me to give directions, but:
You know where North is.
N
W E
S
WE is a word.
EW – disgustingly wrong.
I still need to think WE when I work out East and West.
@ AEH 36:
I have to agree with you. It’s a lot easier for me to identify with the characters in MOArMU and I facepalm a lot less when reading their actions.
@ MistyCat 40:
Something I find works for me is to remember a building in town (namely my house) and remember what direction that faces. I then take the direction of the building or street in question in relation to my original building to help figure it out. (Of course, my mom would claim that guys just have an ingrained sense of direction, but I have my doubts on the matter)
@ M-F 32:
Eh? How is James a racist? I’m really not seeing it?
…unless you’re going from the way he compares human females to elven.
I for some reason go back to the old rhyme I was taught, Never Eat Shreded Wheat, aka North East South West clockwise.
For E vs W, I actually go back to Oregon trail and remember which way my wagon was heading to remember that way is west.
Let’s see… If I were to camp on some lass’ door like that, I would assume she would kick me to the curb in short order…
Of course, every so often she would drag me into her room just to get me out of sight. No may be painful, but just one yes can balance a lot of them.
Still, I’d deem this an unwise tactic, and unlikely to work here.
I’ve got it easy here in Vancouver when it comes to directions…North, you eventually run into water, but can see land on the other side, West is toward the ocean, East is the rest of Canada, and South..well, there’s nothing very important to the South..(kidding! I was born in the US, don’t flame me!)
@ David:
I kinda expect Jamie to try that, only to be asked “Well, can I wait a few minutes for things to calm down?” And for Iason to look meaningfully at the box. BTW, have you tried doing so with a box of chocolate on your lap? It may work better than just a gift box.
And as much as I fully expect a dick-in-a-box gag, I also fully expect it to be some actual gift. AE seems to like making us think in the wrong direction.
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.
Okay, I wasn’t sure for awhile, but I am now: I Love Jamie.
I’m wondering if Iason has a better or worse grasp than Jamie on the extent to which human male homophobia is likely to be a danger. I’m hoping Jamie’s just paranoid, but I’d really hate to see him get hurt.
Directions is hard, i always mix them up, even though I know how to reason them out. But it does take a LOT of thinking.
Well, I really liked this, and I’m glad you were able to get so many chapters done this week.
Oh, and I think I’m going to steal the table idea for a story I’m writing (well, not really steal, but borrow the premise, since my character has a Kindle)