I finished unwrapping the staff, and then leaned back so that the beautiful drow woman could lay her hands on it. She touched hesitantly at first, with her fingers just brushing against the narrow tip. Then she squeezed along the bottom base of the shaft and ran her hands toward the purple orbs on the other side. Her caress grew more confident as she moved her fingers along the hard bone design, but when she reached the orbs she was cautious again, and traced fine lines with her fingertips across the smooth surface of them.
“This… is… worthy to join the baron’s collection.” The woman whispered after a few more minutes of her caressing the black magic staff. She looked at the green clothed gnome man, and I realized she was doing a very poor job of keeping her poker face.
“Would you like to see the crown?” I asked. The dark-skinned woman, blinked a few times in surprise, and then she lifted her hand from the staff.
“Yes. You may set it down here,” her fingernails were painted the same mint color as her eyes, and she tapped on the table in front of her.
I reached into my pack, pulled out the crown that I had wrapped in a bunch of Artus’ spice bags, and then set it on the table. It was easier to unwrap than the staff, and the drow woman let out a tiny gasp when she saw it.
“Exquisite detail,” she whispered as she picked up the silver circle. Her long fingers traced around the edges of each peak, and I found myself more than a little mesmerized by the stroking motions of her hands.
“Oh, my, Leo Lennox. I will admit that it has been a long time since a man has made me drool. Between your long, thick, and powerful staff, and this beautiful crown, I just don’t know which one I would want. Both are suitable for the baron’s collection, and I can’t tell you which one I desire more.” Her mint colored eyes met mine, and she made a slow show of licking her full lips.
“Sir Lennox, what would you feel would be an appropriate amount for each?” Baron Yinnia asked.
“I was hoping you would be interested in a trade.”
“Trade?” The man’s eyebrows narrowed, and the jeweled beads on the end of his mustache swung like pendulums.
“I heard you’ve got a large collection. I happened to get these items during our exploration, and I know they are worth a lot, but I can’t really use them.”
“How do you know they are worth a lot, hmmm?” The drow woman raised an eyebrow.
“You aren’t the first Mind sage I’ve visited,” I said with a shrug.
“Interesting, I only know of one other in the city that would be able to understand these items, and he is booked for weeks in advance,” she said.
“So you are admitting that they are powerful?” I asked as I shot my smirk at her. I was starting to get used to her good looks, but the strange attraction was still there. Well, it wasn’t really a strange attraction, Lady Feeyaz Tyth was all sorts of hot in all sorts of ways.
“What do you think? Can you come up with a price?” the dark elf asked as she placed the tip of her pointer finger against her lips and spread them a bit. The movement was rather distracting, and I forced myself to turn to the gnome.
“Would you be interested in trading?”
“Not… especially,” the man said as his eyes darted to look at the woman on the other side of the table. “But, do you have any idea of what you would want?”
“Might I see your collection?”
“I have a large collection,” the man chuckled.
“Can you both give me a tour? I can look at your pieces and then let you know if something catches my eye.” I’d seen Sal negotiate enough contracts to know that I was getting some ground on them, but to further push them in the direction I wanted to go, I picked up the crown from the table and began to wrap it up with the spice bags.
“This isn’t a street bazaar, Sir Lennox,” the gnome protested, and the drow woman, cleared her throat slightly when I slipped the crown back in my pack.
“I didn’t say it was, Baron Yinnia. I have the utmost respect for your mansion, and the collection I’ve heard you have, but you both know that some things can not just be bought. I bet that the three of us can come to an agreement on either the crown, or the staff, or both.”
“Hmmm,” the gnome reached up to pull on his beaded goatee.
I picked up the staff from the table and then turned to the gorgeous drow woman, for half a second, I saw an annoyed expression on her face, but then she smiled like a cat and gestured over her shoulder.
“I will don my robe. The sunlight aggravates me some.” She turned to walk away from us, and I did my best not to gawk at her backside. I failed miserably, and imagined touching every square inch of the woman’s calves, thighs, butt cheeks, and stomach with my fingers and tongue. It was a strange, carnal desire that I’d not even felt with Zarra. With the purple-eyed beauty, I had felt a similar attraction, but the desire had not expressed itself as violently in my body as it was now in the game. Feeyaz could have taken off her cape and bodysuit right now, turned to me, and I would have been fucking her before she even offered. If Zarra had taken her clothes off in the same situation, I would have asked if she was feeling alright.
The white-haired woman opened an armoire by the side of her large bed and pulled out a black robe. The garment was large, bulky, and concealed all of her curvy body behind a drapery of shapeless cloth. I was a bit disappointed that she was wearing the thing, but my penis was starting to relax from its painful throbbing, and I reasoned that it was probably better if I negotiated while I wasn’t sexually distracted.
“Let us go to the first showroom,” the dark elf said as she wrapped her left arm through my right. The woman pulled herself close to me as we started to walk, and I felt her right hand squeeze around my bicep suggestively. “I see you looking at me, Leo Lennox. Maybe there is something else you want here?” Her voice was a hot wet whisper in my ear.
“Uhh, I’m not quite sure I understand the relationship between you and Baron Yinnia,” I whispered back in her pointed ear. Her hair smelled faintly of night jasmine, and I felt the suppleness of her perfect body through her thick robe as she pressed against me.
“He is my friend, and business partner. It is challenging for one such as me to live on the surface. The baron had need of someone to help him develop his collection, and I needed a sanctuary.” The woman was no longer whispering, and the gnome turned to nod at us with a half smile.
“Do your people live underground?” I asked cautiously. I didn’t even know if the correct term was “drow” or “Dark elf.”
“Yes, in the underdark. You didn’t seem that surprised to see me. Most humans would have pulled their weapon, attacked first, and then well, you probably would have died.” She laughed, but the sound was somehow closer to a sexy moan than actual mirth.
“I try to keep an open mind about people I meet,” I said, and I felt her fingers squeeze my bicep again. We’d reached the base of the stairs, and started our walk up the twisting steps.
“That is good to hear, Leo Lennox. If you do not mind, I will be leaning on you more once we reach the top of these stairs. This mantle is thick, but the sun is still agonizing, even after all these years.
“How many years have you been on the surface?”
“Oh, I think it has been fifty or sixty years now. It is a bit boring staying in my basement quarters all day, but I have the night for…” she caressed my bicep again, and a bolt of pleasure cascaded through my body. “More interesting hobbies.”
We’d reached the top of the stairs, and the suited green gnome turned around to ensure I was still climbing behind him. The light up in the windowed room was actually painful to me after spending the brief time in the basement below, and I had to blink away some of the pain before my iris could close enough.
“We walked through this room earlier, was there a piece in here that caught your fancy?” the gnome asked. The tone of his words were much lower than I would have guessed for a man his size, and his clothing made me think he would have had a high pitched a
nd Irish accent to his voice.
“Hmmm. I’m not sure, I actually didn’t look that closely at anything. I didn’t know if you would want either of my items, so I tried not to get my hopes up,” I replied to the man.
“I will wait here while you look through this room. It is safer for me in this nook of the stairs,” the drow woman whispered.
It sounded as if she was in a lot of pain, and I felt a bit bad about her coming with us. I almost said something to apologize, but I thought about what Sal would have done. He always told me that we had to maintain position during negotiations. We could be nice, but the man never apologized for demanding that the other party make sacrifices to meet us halfway. Even if that “halfway” was really them coming 95% of the way with our demands and us coming the other 5% to meet their demands.
“Great. I’ll make a quick walkthrough,” I said as I let her hands slip from of my arms. I almost apologized for the hassle, but I bit my tongue, then I found that I was missing her hands on my body terribly, and I almost told her that I didn’t need to bother looking at this room. My brain was feeling kind of drunk from being so near the woman, and I shook my head a bit to clear it when I stepped away from her.
“You have three showrooms?” I asked the gnome as I walked to the first painting on the wall.
“Ayyyeahh,” he said with a prideful smile. “This room is obviously for my traditional art pieces. I have another for arms and armaments. Then a third for interesting magical devices, books, scrolls, and the like.”
“It is a great collection. You must be the envy of the city.”
“Ha. I’m working on it. For my wealth, I’m doing rather well. There are only a few more with a better collection than me.”
I nodded at his words and moved on to another painting. I really had no idea what I was looking for. Zarra hadn’t told me what any of these relics looked like, and I didn’t think that Baron Yinnia would appreciate me laying my hands on any of the pieces so that I could read my UI. So far, none of the paintings had seemed really interesting. Then again, they were mostly landscapes, and my idea of great art was fantasy or sci-fi illustrations. I’d been involved with enough hoity-toity art people through my career to understand that they didn’t really care for the accessibility of the art; they cared mostly for the rarity of the piece. I didn’t blame them, since any sort of collecting hobby involved trying to get the hard to find items for the collection, but I’d just spent my time collecting video game skills and virtual achievements.
I examined each piece for a few moments before moving to the next. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I guessed that I would feel something when I saw the relic, or maybe my UI would alert me, or… damn, I didn’t really know. The realization that I might walk by the relic without knowing that it was the item I was looking for hit me in the stomach like a kick from martial arts trainer Bantog.
“I’m not seeing anything that interests me,” I said after I finished my tour of the showroom. It had taken me a good fifteen minutes to look through everything, even though I only spent a few moments with each piece.
“All this and you don’t like anything?” the gnome’s voice sounded a bit outraged.
“Oh, no. They are beautiful pieces,” I said as I smiled at the man. “But I am an adventurer, and I’m only beginning my career. I don’t have a home grand enough for any of these pieces. Can you show me your arms and armor next?”
“Ayyeahh.” The baron nodded and reached up to pull on the side of his beaded mustache. “Next room is upstairs. We can walk out here through the foyer.”
“Do not forget about me, gentlemen. I require the arm of Leo Lennox to lean upon.” Feeyaz’s voice drifted to us from the other side of the showroom, and a shiver of pleasure ran down my back when she said my name.
I walked back over to the staircase, and gave my arm to the black robed woman. She made a hiss of displeasure as we stepped up again to the main area of the showroom, but she didn’t complain anymore as we walked through the gallery toward the foyer of the mansion.
“I am not too familiar with your people,” I said to the woman as we stepped into the foyer behind the gnome.
“The drow are everything you may have heard, and probably worse,” she laughed lightly.
“You seem much different than the surface elves I’ve met. They are kind of…”
“Ridiculous.” The woman laughed again.
“Yeah. Really into helping people, and making people feel happy with—”
“The dark elves are opposite, in almost every way,” she interrupted me. “Instead of being helpful, we only want to cause chaos around us. Instead of thinking about others first, we only think of ourselves. Take everything that makes surface elves benign, and mirror the qualities so that they are sinister instead. That is the drow.”
“I’m somewhat surprised that you are admitting such things openly,” I said.
“Notice how I am standing with you here, on the surface, and not down in the depths of the underdark with my own kind? Even though I fight against the sun every day, I’d rather be here than back there.”
“So you are a good person then?” I asked.
“Ha. Oh, Leo Lennox, you are so deliciously amusing. Good, bad, these are abstract concepts. Some think of the drow as evil, I don’t. They are that way because of their nature. Just as the bee looks for pollen, my kind thirst for violence and dominance. I did not want that life, so I decided to leave. The journey was not easy, but here I am, and I doubt they will come after me. The sun is too close, and it might be the only thing keeping Ohlavar from falling under their complete dominance. I hate the pain it brings me, but I think of it as my protector.”
We were climbing up the stairs of the foyer, and I saw Baron Yinnia step off of the stairs at the second level.
“These are my arms and armaments. I have a few spare pieces in the next gallery, but those are just parts of suits. These are the full sets,” the man said as we walked down a short hallway from the stairwell. Then we turned a corner and I tried not to gasp with surprise.
There were at least fifty suits of armor in the gallery, and many racks loaded with weapons.
“I cannot see your face, but your body is telling me of your pleasure,” Feeyaz purred in my ear as she pushed her stomach into my hip. Her robe was really thick, but I could still feel the shape of her amazing body against mine. Damn, if all drow women were this hot, male gamers would be pouring in the underdark with hopes that they could make it down to one of the dark elf cities.
Could players start the game off as drow? Could they play dwarves, or surface elves, or half-orcs, or gnomes? I remembered Zarra telling me that they were going to add ways to change the look avatars, but I kind of felt dumb for not even asking her this question. I guessed that a bunch of players would love playing the game as a dark elf and really dig the chaotic life that Feeyaz had described to me.
It seemed that every session of Ohlavar Quest peeled back another layer of the deep game. It was still hard for me to believe that it was just in the alpha phase. It was already so fleshed out.
And there was so much loot already.
“May I examine some of these?” I asked the gnome.
“Of course, take your time,” the man said, but I could tell he was beginning to get a bit annoyed with me. Then again, his eyes kept drifting to the staff that I held in my left hand, and I saw the flickers of his desire. I knew they both wanted the weapon and the crown in their collection.
“There is a spot where I can sit against this wall, I believe,” the woman gestured to the right, and I saw an alcove similar to the one I had waited in on the ground floor. There were two couches inside, and I led the woman to one of them before she released my arm.
“You are a swordsman?” she asked.
“Yes, but I’m not really partial to any particular weapon. The broadsword I wear was a gift from a friend, and the short swords I happened to acquire through my travels.”
“To your lef
t, about halfway down the gallery, is a rack of our swords. Near it we have the more impressive pieces on solo display cases. If you see something you like the look of, you can bring it to me and I will tell you more about it.”
“Thank you,” I said, and the woman made a short nod with her covered head.
I walked a few steps out of the alcove and approached the nearest suit of armor. It was a leather set, with etched horses on the shoulder pieces. Baron Yinnia stood next to me, but he didn’t complain when I rested my hand on the suit.
Leather Armor of Quickness
Armor Rating - 6
Durability - Magical
Br—
Qu+1
In—
Wi—
Pe—
Ch—
Co—
Lu—
The lettering of the armor was green, and I pulled my hand away after I’d studied my UI for a few seconds.
“That is a fine piece, Sir Lennox. Got it from a group of adventurers that explored a dungeon in the valley outside of town a few years ago. The craftsmanship and design of the shoulder pieces are very nice. What sort of armor do you wear while you adventure?”
“I don’t really have any armor yet,” I admitted.
“This will work splendidly for you!” the man said with a beaming smile, and his beaded facial hair swung from his chin.
“I’ll keep looking for a bit. The items I bring are very powerful,” I said as I returned his smile.
I walked to the next suit. It was also leather, well crafted, but still green with only a low stat bonus to Intelligence. I continued my way down the gallery and inspected each suit on my way to the area where the weapons were. There was one blue suit of chainmail:
Chain Armor of the Turtle
Armor Rating - 10
Lion's Quest: Dual Wield: A LitRPG Saga Page 31