get this blasted thing to work...Ahah! It is with characteristically impeccable timing that I, Serge, adventurer and musician of great talent and repute set to chronologing my exploits with my companions—the inimitable Kid and the Stoic Magil—on our latest sortie: the heist of Snake Castle and the recovery of Lynx's treasures.\n\nI can already tell that this magical auto-diary was a good purchase, and well worth all the gold that I borrowed from Kid, which she had herself permanently borrowed from passers-by, I'm sure. This wondrous tome shall perfectly record my every thought on our expedition without a moment's hesitation or painstaking candlelight scrawling session as was typical of my other, mundane and moldering tomes.\n\n//[[(onward)|CatForest2]]//

We pass once again by the curiously unguarded and swung-wide-open well-lit and well-appointed oxford-style bay window with faux-brocade trimming along the top and bottom, and inset faux columns running the trim up the left and right.\n\nWe can go east or west.\n\n[[Let's go east|Clock_Store_decide]]\n[[Let's go west|west_hall_1f]]\n

"What about dickless over here? I mean, the man is a stone with a heart of stone. Does his life imitate his art?"\n"Ew, Serge, why would you ask that?" Kid looks grossed out.\n"YES."\n"Oh, uh, I guess I was expecting more of an explanation about it."\n"ABOUT MAGIL'S PENIS."\n"Y-yeah."\n"AND HOW HE DOESN'T HAVE ONE."\n"That's what I had guessed."\n\nSatisfied at the veracity of the information I am collecting from the mirror image of a tristone bust of a goddess with a neutral expression and a voice that rings like a woman singing loud contralto with her thighs squeezing my head, I try to gin up a question more germane to the task at hand.\n\n<<if $vault eq 0>>\nAnd nothing comes to mind.\n\n"We should get moving. There's nothing else here," Magil dictates. I can tell by his neutral expression that I embarrassed him. He'll go on deciding what face to pull because of that for the next decade or so.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<else>>\n\n"Yeah," I turn to the mirror, "Okay, next question: where in this manor can we find the key to that treasure room we came across earlier?"\n\nThe mirror obligingly fades from center to show a vision of a room with books. An unfamiliar goblin places a purple book on the middle shelf. I can see a painting on the wall with purple roses surrounding a woman eating a peach. I take it the book that goblin put away is the one we want.\n\n"BE WARNED, MANY BOOKS LEAD TO PERIL."\n\nI rub my temples. The image of the speaking goddess in the mirror fades away.\n\n"Huh, it's gone," I spout without thinking, my head still throbbing.\n"We may be able to summon the Mouth of Truth somewhere else if we need. It is not bound to this place alone," Magil recites as from a handbook of whizbang magical tchotchkes.\n\nI keep rubbing my temples.\n\n"The key to the treasure room is in a book. I know which."\n"Awright, Serge!" Kid jumps up and smooches me on the cheek. I feel a sudden shock in my pelvic region: a dick too severly strained. The pain is momentary and thrilling.\n<<set $booksee = 1>>\n\n[[We're done here|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>

I pick Kid up with one hand, then join the other hand in one motion, spinning her around me in a helicopter once to get momentum and releasing her in a hammer-throw at the goblin captain.\n\nKid soars through the air past his guard and fixes her hands around his head as she goes. She wrenches her body around his neck and down for the flying reverse bulldog, throwing her weight and momentum into twisting the captain's head. The base of his neck makes a crunching noise and he collapses knees-first to the floor, dropping his mace and his talisman, the latter of which I snatch up without either of my allies notice.\n\nMagil has resumed his search for anything important and Kid is dusting herself off, stretching her springy body and taking great heaving breaths. There's a part of Kid that enjoys hurting people, too. It is at the moment in command of her nipples.\n\n"Whew. Good toss, Serge," Kid thanks me after catching her breath, and before winking at me and reaching a palm around to spank me once, squarely and playfully.\n\n"This leaves us where we started," Magil states, missing no opportunity to hitch our enthusiasm to the post outside our current adventure, "there's nothing here we can use. The goblins didn't have any keys on them. It is strange."\n"Grr, damn you, Lynx," Kid screams clear down to her toes, "I'll bloody your eye an' black your nose before the Sun rises."\n"I think you've got that reversed, Kiddo," I suggest, and quickly back off when I see how she takes it, staring at me as though I might be of greatest help by being punching-bag practice for Lynx.\n\nThere's nothing for it but to move on, several hundred thousand gilders richer from my secret pickings.\n"Let's find that statue mirror lady thing," I offer, "she has some explaining to do."\n<<set $talisman = 1>><<set $mirror = 2>>\n\n[[Back to the hallway|east_hall_1f]]\n

<<if ($triedalready eq 1) and ($statue eq 0)>>\nThe hallway widens as we pass until we're in what might properly be called a room in its own right here in the basement. There are stone arches that run from roots in the floor up to the lofted ceiling to meet at a point, from which hangs a decorative lamp. The columns form slightly shallow areas where gallery pieces hang, alternating paintings. Inside one of the frames is a mirror instead of a painting which reflects a statue on the other side of the room.\n\n<<if $riddel eq 1>>\n"There was a third stone bust, er, waist, thing in Riddel's quarters. I think it would fit back here."\n"Ew, what kind of sick mind would..." Kid shakes her head at the thought, answering her own question before she finishes asking it.<<set $statueknow = 1>>\n\nWe need that missing piece.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_west_landing]]\n[[Continue on through|atrium]]\n<<else>>\n\n"We should keep on the lookout for a stone piece that is neither marble nor granite that could fit in this statue's waiting hole."\n"Brruh, what kind of sick mind would..." Kid shakes her head at the thought, answering her own question before she finishes asking it.\n\nFrom here we can continue on or go back to the hallway.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_west_landing]]\n[[Continue on through|atrium]]\n<<endif>>\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($triedalready eq 0) and ($seekmirror eq 1) and ($statue eq 0)>>\n\nThe hallway widens as we pass until we're in what might properly be called a room in its own right here in the basement. There are stone arches that run from roots in the floor up to the lofted ceiling to meet at a point, from which hangs a decorative lamp. The columns form slightly shallow areas where gallery pieces hang, alternating paintings. Inside one of the frames is a mirror instead of a painting which reflects a statue on the other side of the room.\n\nThe statue itself is of a woman from neck to mid thigh, bent over to more-than even as though crawling, her ample breasts facing the mirror. No arms. Two different kinds of stone. This could be the pairing we're looking for.\n\nI squeeze behind the statue to face the mirror. There's enough room for me back here, but not a generous amount. The mounting pedestal for the statue has a bit of extra space behind her butt. And from this angle I see that she's...uh...'presenting.'\n\nI try to ignore that for the moment and face the mirror. It's a similar make to the one in Lynx's quarters, and there's nothing else even close that we've come across in the rest of the manor. I think Magil's hunch was a good one.\n\nI address the mirror.\n\n"Hey, um, you! Spirit mirror lady, thing. Reveal yourself."\n\nThe mirror begins to cloud from the middle, but then subsides and returns to being a regular mirror.\n\n"Eh? Crap it all!" Kid erupts, "I thought this would work. What gives?" Kid hits the statue with her dexterous fist.\n"There must be something else to the magic," Magil monotones.\n"Guys, I think I know what's missing here," I claim, "this statue lady is expecting a randy visitor."<<set $triedalready = 1>>\n\n<<if $riddel eq 1>>\n"There was a third stone bust, er, waist, thing in Riddel's quarters. I think it would fit back here."\n"Ew, what kind of sick mind would..." Kid shakes her head at the thought, answering her own question before she finishes asking it.<<set $statueknow = 1>>\n\nWe need that missing piece.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_west_landing]]\n[[Continue on through|atrium]]\n<<else>>\n\n"We should keep on the lookout for a stone piece that is neither marble nor granite that could fit in this statue's waiting hole."\n"Brruh, what kind of sick mind would..." Kid shakes her head at the thought, answering her own question before she finishes asking it.\n\nFrom here we can continue on or go back to the hallway.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_west_landing]]\n[[Continue on through|atrium]]\n<<endif>>\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($statue eq 1) and ($mirror neq 3)>>\n\nWe return to the stone archway, erect penis waist statue in hand. I saunter over to the bent-over lady statue facing the mirror, confident that these puzzle pieces fit together just as sure as I'm confident the world turns on what they symbolize.\n\n[[Insert the member|statue_sex]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($statue eq 1) and ($mirror eq 3)>>\n\nWith nothing else of note or import to bother with, we can continue on through the stone archway to the atrium or back to the lower level landing and the goddam stairs.\n\n[[Go to the atrium|atrium]]\n[[Head towards the stairs|bf_west_landing]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($seekmirror eq 0) and ($statue eq 0)>>\nThe hallway widens as we pass until we're in what might properly be called a room in its own right here in the basement. There are stone arches that run from roots in the floor up to the lofted ceiling to meet at a point, from which hangs a decorative lamp. The columns form slightly shallow areas where gallery pieces hang, alternating paintings. Inside one of the frames is a mirror instead of a painting which reflects a statue on the other side of the room.\n\nThe statue itself is of a woman from neck to mid thigh, bent over to more-than even as though crawling. Ample breasts facing the mirror. No arms. Two different kinds of stone. What an odd piece.\n\n"Yeuuk. What an ugly thing. Don't tell me you like that thing, Serge."\n"Nah, I like arms too much. Yours, say."\n"Pfft," Kid eructs. I like class, too.\n\nWith nothing else of note or import to bother with, we can continue on through the stone archway or back to the lower level landing and the goddam stairs.\n\n[[Continue|atrium]]\n[[Turn back|bf_west_landing]]\n<<endif>>

We decide to enter the room that is the only exit at the top of the stone staircase, Kid and Magil out of curiosity and apathy respectively, and myself out of a desire to do anything other than challenge the staircase a second time from a position of greater potential energy.\n\nThe room is exactly what you would expect would abut something so dire as stairs. Plain stone, probably the last wing of the manor built, and certainly the last considered for repair. What looks like mildew grows from every crevice, of which there are many to choose. The room itself is round and tall enough that I can't see the ceiling. The dim light from the hallway and the recessed torches in this room cast light up to at least twice my height.\n<<if ($tower eq 0) and ($swagger eq 0)>>\n\nKid and Magil start examining the room. I stay near the doorway and do the same. There are sluice holes at regular intervals along the wall. The stone is worn smooth in places where the mildew doesn't reach. It doesn't smell like mold. Between that and the recessed torches...\n\n"Oi, come av a look at this," Kid calls.\n\nWe walk to the far end of the room, where barely readable on the wall are words written in mildew, worn away with age. I'm starting to think it isn't mildew.\n\nMagil reads the lettering to the best of his ability:\n\n"\nThere .... ... . woman ...m Choras,\nwh... swain's ears w... alw... .he coldest.\nOn h.s wa. out the d..r he\ngr.bb.d her t...s, to her 'aieee,\n..ose a...'t e...uffs, t...'re my areolas'\n"\n\nBefore I can color in the details with my expert knowledge of both poetry and lechery, I hear a slam from the other end of the room, and see that an additional portcullis has fallen on the inside of the door, barring our egress.\n\nA rumbling noise and the stereotypical "snkt" of blades protruding from a colander-like set of retractable mechanisms sounds overhead. The ceiling is now in view, taking the form of a radial array of spikes slowly de-lofting itself.\n\nKid mutters in panic. I fare no manlier. Magil seems disaffected.\n\n[[Try to stop the ceiling!|tower_ceiling]]\n[[Break through the wall!|tower_busta]]\n[[Ram the door!|tower_ram]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($tower eq 0) and ($swagger eq 1)>>\n\nKid and Magil start examining the room. I stay near the doorway and do the same. There are sluice holes at regular intervals along the wall. The stone is worn smooth in places where the mildew doesn't reach. It doesn't smell like mold. Between that and the recessed torches...\n\n"Oi, come av a look at this," Kid calls.\n\nWe walk to the far end of the room, where barely readable on the wall are words written in mildew, worn away with age. I'm starting to think it isn't mildew.\n\nMagil reads the lettering to the best of his ability:\n\n"\nThere .... ... . woman ...m Choras,\nwh... swain's ears w... alw... .he coldest.\nOn h.s wa. out the d..r he\ngr.bb.d her t...s, to her 'aieee,\n..ose a...'t e...uffs, t...'re my areolas'\n"\n\nBefore I can color in the details with my expert knowledge of both poetry and lechery, I hear a slam from the other end of the room, and see that an additional portcullis has fallen on the inside of the door, barring our egress.\n\nA rumbling noise and the stereotypical "snkt" of blades protruding from a colander-like set of retractable mechanisms sounds overhead. The ceiling is now in view, taking the form of a radial array of spikes slowly de-lofting itself.\n\nKid mutters in panic. I fare no manlier. Magil seems disaffected.\n\nA few ideas occur to me.\n\n[[Stab Swaggerdick into the floor|tower_stab]]\n[[Stab Swaggerdick into the ceiling|tower_complete]]\n[[Ask Magil since he seems to know so much about it|tower_ask]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($tower eq 1) and ($swagger eq 0)>>\nFun as it was the first time, I think the mechanisms have reset and I'm in no mood to challenge them. My companions agree. Or, Kid agrees anyway. If Magil also accedes I have no way of telling by looking at him.\n\n[[Get outta here|torture_stairs_down]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($tower eq 1) and ($swagger eq 1)>>\nI managed to get this god's disused dick up that entire staircase, and I'll be damned if I carry it anywhere else.\n\n"We have to think fast. The mechanisms have been reset," Magil states.\n"Awright. Now what?"\n"Don't look at me, I'm your hunk, not your think tank."\n\nAdding urgency to our situation, the rumbling noise and the stereotypical "snkt" of blades protruding from a colander-like set of retractable mechanisms sounds overhead as before. The ceiling is once again in view, taking the form of a radial array of spikes slowly daring us to do anything about it.\n\nI guess as a failsafe we could leave through the hole we made last time. But still!\n\nA few ideas occur to me.\n\n[[Stab Swaggerdick into the floor|tower_stab]]\n[[Stab Swaggerdick into the ceiling|tower_complete]]\n[[Ask Magil since he seems to know so much about it|tower_ask]]\n<<endif>>

I heroically lean in on the bedecked goblin captain to give Kid an opening to make the snatch with her expert hands. Whereas I might be more well made to mug someone slightly smaller than I, Kid can swiftly snatch from people of all shapes and sizes. I'm giving up my guard to do this, so I'm really counting on her to make this snatch. Not the snatch of hers I'd been counting on up to this point.\n\nAs for giving up my guard, I counterintuitively draw close to the captain's sideways sweep, catching the handle of his holy water sprinkler in the ribs. The shock of the blow could have been worse, but was pretty bad. A wave of pain shoots through my chest and I crumple up around the shaft, locking it from further attack and nursing my injury at the same time. This distracts the captain for long enough for Kid to make her move, and she yanks the captain's talisman off, snapping the leather thong it had been hanging from.\n\nNo sooner is his talisman off then I witness the goblin captain's head evaporate from a blast of shadow magic, leaving a steaming ring around the stump of his neck. His headless body collapses to the ground in a heap, still crackling all over with the residual traces of the dark sorcery that felled him.\n\nI take a knee and clutch my chest. I'm still covered in women's undergarments. In truth I have pains and bruises all over. Magil is of course impervious and untouched. Kid is sweaty and well worked-out, but otherwise visibly okay. I'm wearing all the lumps for the team, which I guess is fine by me if it means Kid's satiny skin stays intact. I'd let Magil borrow a lump or two if I were making this fight to order.\n\n"Whew. We got clear o' that. You okay, mate?" Kid approaches me with a satisfied grin on her face. I attempt to match it with a wink and a grin of my own. It turns into a twitch and a grimace from pain, but you can't have everything.\n\n"Here, mate," Kid hands me the talisman, "it clashes with my outfit, and besides, you earned it taking that knock for me."\n\nI take the talisman from her outstretched hand, which she uses to draw me in for a quick smooch on the cheek. Far too cutesy for my taste, but I stiffen penilly at the approach. Being in such proximity to her glistening body, touching her full lips, smelling her bradford pear. A little less cutesy conversation and a little more action would do my heart good.\n\nI mean my heart!\n\nI tie the talisman around my neck and tuck it into my shirt. I remove all of the unmentionables that are still clinging to me all over, as well as the mentionables that at any rate don't belong as stowaways.\n\n"There's nothing here we need," Magil states icily, "let's repair to the hallway and plan our next move."\n"That statue mirror lady thing has some explaining to do," I offer.\n\n<<set $talisman = 1>><<set $mirror = 2>>\n[[Back to the hallway|east_hall_1f]]\n

I bide my time, waiting for one or more of them to move in on Kid's position so I can make the most of my sneaking. The one in the rear of their formation is my choice of target, and I'm not going to get another, better opportunity than this.\n\nI burst out of the chest covered in spent knickers and panties, trophies of Lord Lynx's various sexual conquests over the years, some sticking to my exposed skin where I had been sweating from the stuffiness, and lunge at the nearest of the goblin squad with my knife, not a good match for his holy water sprinkler, but as he's only the size of a normal big human, I have a mass advantage on him and press it. His trained reflexes are not fast enough for all of Serge Grossfest flying at him covered in panties, and my knife finds a new home at the base of his neck by the collarbone, drenching me in his vital blood and veiling his eyes with darkness.\n\nI cannot be so lucky with the rest of the squad, whose trained reflexes are now training themselves on me.\n\n"That sneaky bastard's killed Liam," cries the captain, "crush him!"\n\nThe captain is a goblin, terrifyingly, about my size, bedecked in bespoked serpentine weave minimail in moire pattern, burnished to a high shine and webbing the fitted, appointed thirteen-point tempered plates of high guard armor that constitute his greaves-to-collar appearance. The tabard frocking his armor has curlicue brocade piping in red and off-red for a depth effect that makes it look more three-dimensional than it is, and bears an emblazoned logo of a coat of arms unique to his squad in my experience. The plates are also trimmed with deburring edges, which are bolted in place with pressed steel skull heads that catch the leftover flux grease to appear darker than the rest of the metal. Each of the goblins wields a braided-end steel holy water sprinkler with triweave oiled leather grip and custom studding to fit their individual hands and styles. They move as a team, attacking and retreating with motions practiced in tandem, and as they reposition their magnificent accoutrements they seem to always strike a pose no matter what they're doing.\n\nThe poses also work in tandem with one another, and it's everything I can do to keep from being crushed and bludgeoned to death by just one of them, let alone the whole squad of five. Or four now, since Liam isn't coming back. Five including the captain, maybe, but he's watching his battles work on me.\n\nDuring these few breaths, Kid has emerged from her crawlspace and composed herself for grappling action. Animal lust serving to increase her ferocity rather than the opposite. She's suggestible in this state, and anyway I think she'd do my bidding no matter what it was on account of my heroic sneak attack. Or maybe because I'm still covered in a collection of women's undergarments. I'm not spending a lot of energy thinking about it while I try not to get crushed.\n\n[["Take on the captain, I'll take these four."|goblin_cap]]\n[["Take one of them off me."|goblin_3]]\n[["Take two of them off me."|goblin_2]]\n[["Distract them, I'll pick one off."|goblin_1]]\n[[Forget about giving Kid orders and run.|goblin_0]]\n

We find ourselves once again at the base of the goddam stairs. We can go west down the hallway, east back to the stone arch, or I suppose challenge the stairs.\n\n[[Go west|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n[[Go east|bf_stone_arch]]\n[[Go back up the stairs|bf_stairs_up]]\n

"Oi, just the person. We're the midnight clock-cleaning team Lynx hired to do a once-over on the tower clock. I could use a hag to point me to the machine access door," Kid lies brazenly.\n<<set $clockstore = 1>>\nA standard-uniform manor hag appears from the shadows. In addition to tick-tock locker and sprocket backpocket, this room is her barracks. And gravity, of a certainty, her enemy.\n\n"That's right, we clean clocks," I clumsily back Kid up.\n\n"A bustier clocksmith the realm has never known in many ticks,\nI suspect this era is no different. Lie again if you wish," the hag replies.\n\n[[Fess up|hag_ask]]\n[[Stick to the story|hag_lie_more]]\n

Radical Dreamers Redux

"Kid, he's too much for us. We have to even the odds," I manage to command.\n"Roight," Kid spits out between coughs, "let's give 'im some room."\n\nIn one motion I grab Kid by the forearm and throw her on me like a backpack, out of the way of the skeleton's next overhead smash. I can feel her boobs and her heart hot against me; cold comfort in the circumstance as we race towards the main hallway and its lower ceiling.\n\nI have a plan half-formed in my mind about him chasing us to where his new size will be a drawback. But inchoate as it is and dizzy as I am, I can't seem to think through the next few seconds. Instinct is taking over as we make it through the passageway and into the tee intersection of the hall.\n\nI dart to the left and set Kid down on the floor.\n\n"Okay, from here we can—" I begin to say to Kid.\n\nThe skeleton reaches out club first and levers it against the wall near me like a ship's boom. I catch his arm at the ulna and hug it to me right after I'm smashed up against the hallway wall. Now I at least have him gripped. Instinct.\n\nKid doesn't miss a beat, and fights through her own pain to leap at the outstretched skull our assailant has poked through the threshold. Swinging around by the jaw and up, Kid puts her legs around the massive neck and tries to fix her grip in preparation for some kind of move.\n\nThe skeleton removes his peering form and I lose my grip on his arm. He reverts to an upright stance in the taller hallway and uses his hands to try and grab at kid, clumsily enough that she can get out of the way.\n\nI clutch my chest in pain and manage to lurch into the hallway after them, preparing to do something that I haven't figured out yet.\n\nKid has her legs around the thing's neck, and flattens herself against him: his spine to her back. She then crunches up and around into a full hurricanrana that snaps the fel monster's neck off at the third cervical vertebra.\n\nI manage to dodge the skull and catch kid from her fall. The skeleton fumbles around, groping for the head he no longer has. I give Kid a weary smile, spared only a second to enjoy the look of her relieved, sweaty, post-combat exerted form in my arms before the damn skeleton gets one last shot in on me.\n\nIn his flailing about, the headless skeleton's massive cock slaps me full in the face, knocking me out cold.\n\n//[[(onward)|big_skeleton_slapped]]//

My manly resolve to impress Kid and also to accomplish the mission we set out to do just barely checks the feeling of crushing opulence every square inch of the first level hallway exudes. Every tile, rug, panel and torch has the well-tended and complete look of a personal touch that makes me feel as if I am in a museum: an abjected reverence in light of the ever present fact that I am in the realm of my superiors.\n\nKid does not check her avaricious heart and has visibly dribbled down her tight cami top from her salivating at the notion of stripping all the wealth from this place and never looking back.\n\nI know the feeling will pass because she eventually stopped stealing from me, too, after I attached messages to the coins in my various pockets. The last of which she returned flush-faced to me and which read "go slower next time" and which I then returned to its previous residence in the neighborhood of my penis.\n\nAt that, I can still feel the thing down there. Maybe Lynx will have a handsome coin purse lying about.\n\nWe reach an old, stately door on the right bearing a handsome presence and but a single mote of dust. A ruin of dilapidation and neglect compared to the hallway leading up to it.\n\n[[Open the door|Clock_Store_Inside]]\n[[Continue East|east_hall_1f]]\n[[Back to the terrace|terrace]]\n

"Kid, just play along." I whisper in the insane hope that only Kid will hear and understand me.\n"Oom, yeah. What stud said. Come with me, kid," the goddess takes Kid's rugged hand in her fine one and leads her back toward the bath. "It's really sweet to meet you. My name's Riddel Viper, what's yours?"\n"K..Kid," Kid stutters.\n"Ooh, don't be shy, kid. That was just my pet name for you because you're so cute. Unless," she turns her silver beams to me, "you're name is Stud I suppose?"\n"Serge. Serge Grossfest. And her name really is Kid Courage."\n"Ooh, well I'm just all kinds of lucky tonight. Come with me, Kid -hnhn- let's get you all cleaned up."\n<<set $riddel = 1>>\n\nRiddel takes Kid into the bath and closes the door. The sounds of running water and gentle splashing tinkle out of the room.\n\nAfter a few minutes, Riddel pokes her head out of the bath. "Hey Se~rge," she lengthens the middle vowel sound to two alluringly, "be a stud and get my green thing out of the top drawer over there."\n\nI can't say no, or anything else for that matter, to those silver eyes, and comply with her command directly. I withdraw the only green garment within, a backless, strapless satin dress that blooms at the knees. Single-thread tailoring. Light as a feather. The lady who has it all.\n\nI hand Riddel the dress. She takes it and blows me a kiss from her full, glossy embouchure. I wish she'd blow something else.\n\nA few more minutes pass, and Riddel comes out of the bath with a worried look on her face, closing the door behind her.\n\n"Hey, uh, Serge?"\n"Yes, kitten?"\n"Don't get ahead of yourself, stud. Anyway shut up for a second. Who is Kid to you?"\n"What, uh, I dunno. I look after her. I'm her meat popsicle."\n"Now's no time to be a prude or a pervert, hunk, tell me straight, are you lovers?"\n\nThe question burns my lungs off. What the hell happened in there? I reply with the first thing that comes to mind:\n\n"Uh..."\n\nSmooth.\n\n"Hopeless. Tch. Just get in here."\n\nRiddel takes my hand in hers and we walk up to the bath door.\n\n"Kid, sweetie, we're coming in," Riddel coos.\n"No!" Kid shrieks. I've never heard her so upset. My heart sinks. My balls retreat.\n"I'm bringing Serge in, Kid. He needs to see."\n"...please...no..." Kid sobs, small and pathetic.\n\nRiddel opens the door. A waft of steamy, sweet smelling air splashes my face. Through the mist I see Kid in Riddel's dress with her other clothes on the floor. She's bathed and her hair is all smooth and combed. She sobs into her hands, hunched over turned away from me. The dress does nothing to cover up her back, which draws all my attention away from what should otherwise be genuine enjoyment of the most decorative attire Kid has ever sported.\n\nHer back, distracting from everything else. I see it and realize I've seen Kid in skimpier outfits before, but always with her back covered from shoulder blades to short ribs, and now I understand why.\n\n"Serge. Please don't look at me," Kid cries through her hands, not facing me.\n\n"Kid..." I pride myself on my poetry, you see.\n"Serge, you have to be a man here," Riddel accuses.\n"Yeah. mHmmhm. Kid, who did this to you? How did this happen?"\n\n"I didn't ever want...you must think...I never wanted you to see me like this..."\n"Please, Kid. I'm here and I'm looking at you and I'm listening."\n\nKid fights back her sorrow enough to tell the story of how she once before tried to raid this very manor house, and how she was caught and tortured. Lynx gave her a fresh lash every day. He called it 'teaching the multiplication table.' He got as far as multiples of five. Scars upon scars crisscross her back, everpresent reminder of what it means to cross Lynx, what it means to get caught.\n\nKid grew up learning that any kind of attention was deadly. She had never fully shaken the feeling that no one should ever take notice of her. Meaning one shlub in particular always made her antsy with his constant prurience and inability to take his eyes off her.\n\n"...Geez, fuck, Kid," I'm hitting all the high notes and I'm damn proud of myself for it.\n"Serge...I..."\n"Enough of that," I gather my wits at last, "keep on like that and I'm going to take your last name away. Now you look at me!"\n\nKid steadies her heart and turns in her seat to face me, eyes bloodshot from weeping, full of anger, remorse, pity, revenge, woe and glimmer of sass.\n\n"Good. Now listen up, Miss Courage. I started paying attention to you because I was done with broads who had no fire, who hung on my every word and just wanted to listen to the same songs I had played for them the night before. In you I saw me at my best. Better than that! Here was a brassy chick who would take on anyone or anything, even when she knew she was outmatched, which wasn't often. She had grown up getting the worst of everything and still never gave up. Well now you have the world's worst bard on your side and he's not giving you up for anything, not even this improbably sexy goddess who just gave you a bath.\n\n"You've had a hard life and a harder night. The Kid I know will bounce back from this and remind me that I fell in love with her because she's stronger than I am. Not close. I'd be a lost, lazy coward without you. Think a few dings and dints make me want to trade you in? Forget it. I would still gleefully fuck your brains out."\n\nDuring my speech, Kid stops crying and starts to crack a small smile. Her face looks much better with it on. She rises and puts her hand on her hip, cocking her head to one side.\n\n"Oh ya, Serge? Just when were you plannin' on fucking my brains out?"\n"I figured you were set to cave to my manly charms after another night or so. I was just biding my time for your come-hither. Could have happened any minute. Back there with the skeleton, say."\n"Uh-huh, -snrk- youer manly charms," Kid enjoys a full-bodied laugh at my expense for a minute.\n\n"Heh. Youer too sweet, Serge. An' just the right amount of dirty. How do you like the dress?" she wheels about, lifting her hair so I can see all the lines. It fits her every curve and muscle. My guess is her shoulders are too wide for any of Riddel's other getups. This one is a perfect fit.\n"Stunning. Warms the cockles of my somewheres. But really it only looks good on you because it fits, so the dress I could take or leave. People like yourself oughta consider foregoing clothes and making the world a more beautiful place."\n\nAt that she blushes down to her chest.\n\n"Ooh, stud, you really are a poet," Riddel says, wiping a single tear from her magnificent face, "I oughtta have you come visit me two or three times a night. But then I'd hate for Kid to have to share you."\n"Share him? This louse, pah, Love, you can have him," Kid chuckles, her plucky smile back in full force, still blushing to show she wouldn't give me up for anything either and is in no hurry to share me with this tart. She said all that with her smile. No, really.\n\n"Ooh, so cruel sweetie. And after stud rhapsodized for you. Howabout you both share yourselves with Riddel?"\n\nAnd before either of us knows it, Riddel has grabbed us both up into her four-poster, which is a good fit for all three of us, even though one of us is me. With what little thought makes it to the surface through the pink haze I wonder at why Riddel would have so ubiquitous a bed if not for multiplayer sexual encounters like this. And if that were the case, who were the other players?\n\n[[Start with Kid|riddel_interrupt]]\n[[Start with Riddel|riddel_interrupt]]\n[[Start by watching|riddel_interrupt]]\n

I lunge at the lunging beast, putting my best or at least sharpest point forward. An interrupted snarl tells me my blade has hit the mark, that mark being the withers to the multiple nipples along the port flank of the tawny cat's body. The light of life quickly leaves the stabbed cat, as the welter of his vital gore bids to explode forth from the gash my dagger left in him. Her, rather.\n\nI have not even a moment to contemplate the sex of my feline victim before another one snaps at my hand and arm. I lose my grip on the knife and howl with pain.\n\nSeveral more cats join in and I am overcome with feline mass and fall to earth in a heap, a deadly pie with my body as the delicious crust and a raging, snapping mass of cat fury as the overstuffed filling. That's not a pie I would eat.\n\nIt looks at this point as if my fate is already baked. With as many of them pie-filling-piled on top of me, Kid may have an opening to escape. I yell to her.\n\n[["Kid, run!"|CF_Arg]]

We rejoin Magil along the path leading to the manor. His figure seems to trace itself out of the shadows and become real all at once in front of the limping pair of us: Kid scratched and myself much the worse for wear, most poignant of which being my throbbing balls.\n\nMagil must have heard the din of battle and returned along the path, not in any noticeable hurry and before us now without any expression of concern for our wellbeing, nor any expression whatsoever for that matter.\n\nMagil surveys our injuries with his neutral eyes. "You are wounded," he states without animus or remorse. I wonder if he ever had morse to begin with.\n\n"Had a bit of a scrape with some of Lynx' little devils. I think we've seen the worst of 'em, eh?" Kid offers bravely.\n\n"We should turn back. You are of no use to me like this."\n\n"Now hold on," Kid begins. I can feel her plucky body tighten beneath my arm that it supports, "Burly-bones here an' me did a right good showing of ourselves back there an' I could use the workout. Besides, Serge isn't wounded but his pride because..." Kid hesitates.\n\nI attempt to form words to back Kid up in her retelling of events, which come out as an intelligible, feeble cough instead.\n\n"Because..." I can feel warmth rush into Kid's face through my aching arm, "...because I smashed his bollocks with my hand by accident. He's fine! We're fine! Just hurt. Need to walk it off an aw that."\n\nI summon a weak smile and wink at Magil to show how manly I am in the face of having my nuts crushed by a hundred-pound girl. He seems, as ever, nonplussed.\n\n"Fine," he exhales, "We move."\n\n[[The mansion awaits|Castlevania]]

"Actually if this is a manor hag like I suspect, then we should really leave her be," I say to Kid by way of declining my face to the hag. I press on, "think of her like an object, an outgrowth of the house itself."\n<<set $clockstore = 1>>\n"Oi, like a brass candlestick or a carpet," Kid suggests.\n"Just so, my buxom chum."\n"Wha's that mean, 'buxom' anyway?"\n"I've already forgotten. A poet often must let a word go out into the world as a beloved child, no longer holding it back with such trappings as a precise meaning might bind it."\n"La-de-da, mate. And 'ere I thought there wasn't space left for hot air in that meat moutain you call a body."\n\nDuring this gainful exchange the hag has been vocalizing some semi-meaningful sound in our general direction that I opt out of listening to or understanding. As incidental eavesdroppers sometimes do, I pick up the trailing end of her attempt to interrupt us which sounds like:\n\n"Sortof Fate."\n\nAnd I fail to catch anything else. I never have a hard time paying attention to Kid, and on occasion challenge myself to count her eyelashes, trying to pick out the perfect one among ample competition for the name. Champion eyelash.\n\n[[outta here|Clock_Store_decide]]\n

We come upon an intersecting hallway. To the north is a short hallway I can see a door at the end of. To the west is a longer hallway that stretches further than I can see into the darkness. To the east is the landing where we entered. To the south, a most macabre sight: descending stairs.\n\n[[Go north|study]]\n[[Go west|ballroom]]\n[[Go east|terrace]]\n[[Put your life in your hands one step at a time|bf_stairs_down]]\n

I but momentarily desist my dedicated study of Kid's walk-cycle to take note of the fact that it has suddenly ended, and Kid now stands still in front of me, poised as though listening to the nightsounds that envelop us like the practiced mouth of a welcome night visitor for hire.\n\n<<display 'WoodPath'>>

I take a sip to show how trusting and magnanimous I am. Maybe Kid will be impressed. She takes the tea more cautiously than I, and seeing that nothing untoward has afflicted me, takes a tiny sip. Magil sits at ease in his chair, hands folded gently in his lap, impassive.<<set $tea = 1>>\n\nBut then I'm pretty sure he doesn't eat or drink, so no surprise there.\n\n"Ho ho, there you go. I'm delighted to have you here. Every night I set out a tray in the hopes that one of the younger manor staff will incline themselves to join."\n"We're not staff," I admit, feeling very inclined to be forthcoming with the old goblin, like my inhibitions are relaxing one at a time. I'm unsure why. It just feels right.\n"I know, I know, young man. The master doesn't employ such handsome people like yourself and your lady friend," the gentlemanly goblin replies.\n\nI take a look over at Kid to remind myself how handsome she is by way of agreeing with the old goblin. Not my first choice of adjective, but not bad, either. I'd go with 'buxom.'\n\nTo my mild surprise, Kid looks different somehow. More buff?\n\n"Now now, don't be shy. Why not relax a spell and tell old Pariceles a story of your adventures?"\n\nI feel inclined to tell him such a story and start thinking which one would be the best.\n\nKid is having a rough time of things all of a sudden. Her eyes widen and she collapses over on the floor, dropping her tea.\n\n"Oh dear, dear, dear," dotes Pariceles, "this can happen. When your struggle is over, use this, young man."<<set $catacombskey = 1>>\n\nHe hands me a key and retires from the room. I suppose this is what we came here for. But...\n\n[[Check on Kid|tea_huge_kid]]\n[[Stop Pariceles and question him|tea_question_p]]\n

Kid hops up off a bureau top and corkscrews in mid-air for the Kid Corkscrew Plancha against one of the goblin attackers, who nonetheless counter-ducks, grabbing one of Kid's outstretched legs and smashes her face into the ground with an exaggerated gorilla slam motion. I don't see what happens to her next.\n\nI quickly lower my head and jackknife at the middle to escape a sweeping attack from the goblins. My guess is a poor one, however, as a coordinated pair of overhead chops makes mincemeat of my head, hat, and brains, ceasing all sensation.\n\nThe third-to-last thing to go through my head is the thought that now I'll never fuck Kid. The second-to-last and last things being the goblin's heavy maces.\n\nTHE END

Without a moment's hesitation I wrap Kid up and dive under the cherry desk. The footsteps draw closer and we can hear the saloon doors part and then swing back and forth to close, admitting our follower.\n\n"Hello?" calls the stately drawl of a manor goblin. None of us feels like humoring him.\n\nWhat I feel instead is Kid, and decide to pay her a compliment.\n\n"I didn't know breasts could be this firm and shapely."\n"Youer holding my shoulder you cow's twat."\n"Oh."\n\nI correct my error by gently sliding my hand southward. Kid's left breast is not as firm as her left shoulder, at that, and somewhat larger.\n\nBetween the friendly groping, my proximity to Kid's pink, glossy, full lips, and the fullness of her natural smell, I get an expansive feeling, and as the manor goblin's patrol carries on into the minute, I'm sympathetic to how my unchecked erection must be making kid feel.\nClaustrophobic, I'd guess.\n\nKid scoots around the other way in my grip and stretches her head up to whisper in my ear: "He's gone. You can let go of me now." I gradually comply. She bites my earlobe hard enough to hurt, not hard enough to leave a mark. I recoil a little and bump my hatted head.\n\nThe, er, danger over, we reconvene in the center of the study and quickly decide there's nothing else for us here, more's the pity, and depart for the hallway.\n\n[[return to the hallway|west_hall_1f]]\n<<set $study = 1>>

Without (much) warning, Kid jumps up on me and shoves her face into mine, showing me her tongue is at least as nimble as her fingers, and making me forget that there is anything that exists except her wet, full lips pressed against mine. A little bite takes me part-way back to reality, and I rub her athletic body from her shoulders down to her butt to show her how much I appreciate what she's done with herself. I let my grip follow her thighs around to where they're fastened about my middle. In contrasting pressure, I kiss her gently on the lips, the chin, and follow down to her neck, whereupon she begins to breathe in passionate stutters and tense up around me, squeezing me to a pain well within what I can bear. Her breathing grows more rapid as I gently kiss her breast. She tenses her rock hard abs in response, vibrating her whole trunk. She grabs my head by the ears and pulls me in to kiss her face again, tugging once more on me just as much as I can bear.\n\nKid climbs partway around me, taking up a position on my side with her right shoulder in my left armpit and her head resting on my chest. The heat her body gives off is incredible. She nips at my left nipple to get my attention, as if that had ever left her.\n\n"You still have a room here?"\n"Sure I do. Yours."\n"Uhuhuhu, you've been bad, Serge," Kid chuckles, tightening her fingers into claws and digging into the ribs and shoulder of my right side.\n\nI ascend the tavern stair to Kid's room, thoughtless of either my fatigue or the man-killing danger that is stairs, Kid still clinging to my side, pressed as firmly against me as her small, strong body can squeeze.\n\nOnce in her room, she dismounts and shoves me with force onto her bed, leaping on me with a seven-twenty frog splash, followed with a full contact licking of my face and mouth. Kid is not gentle as she rips off my clothes. Her own find their way off at the same time, as if they had been ready to fly off at a moment's notice if she simply flexed the right way. She reaches for my hat and I stop her, whereupon she relaxes for a moment.\n\n"No, Kid! Not the fez."\n"Youer gonna keep in on the whole time?"\n"If wild passion separates me from the hat, so be it, but on my honor, the hatless man you screw is no Serge Grossfest."\n"Yer one strange, sexy man, mate."\n\nI use the pause to take in the majesty of Kid's stark naked, sweat-misted form. Not that her clothes left much to the imagination to begin with, but the full body shot lends honesty to the interpretation. Besides which it is now abundantly clear that her brassiere is made to flatten rather than support. Yowza.\n\nMy hands win out over my eyes and I grab both of Kid's more-than-a-handful-each buttocks to fit her against me. She descends into place and resumes a pride of kissing that makes my hair stand on end. Each delivered with a severity as if it were the last. Each demanding the next. A litany of infinite final smooches. I grope and explore; whenever I find a sensitive spot, I slow down and Kid reacts by tensing up or vibrating bodily. As soon as I'm away, she lunges in again with animal passion, less of an explorer and more of a fighter. I rub her body from her midriff up her ample breasts and around her neck. Kid mixes kisses with bites and rubs with scratches, electrocuting my skin. She seems to know just how much to hurt.\n\nAs we lose ourselves in mutual passion, I muse upon the scrapes we've been in together, and the many I have in my future with Kid Courage.\n\nHere's to working through pain.\n\nTHE END

Aiming to impress Kid at something she might well be impressed at, I wait for the goblin captain to aim a strike at Kid and then move in to grasp his clasp.\n\nNot missing a beat, the captain with a glint in his eyes squinches his head against his shoulder, trapping my grabbing hand hard between his stylish helm and his studded pauldron. I'm pinched while pinching.\n\nKid seizes the opportunity to seize, yanking hard on the talisman with her strong arms. The leather thong snaps. No sooner than this happens Magil levels a murder beam on the goblin, blasting a smoking hole in his middle that makes the room crack like thunder. The beam lasts steady for three seconds, seeming to draw light into its inky blackness. The goblin captain's life force ebbs in short order, and I pry my hand out of the crook it had been stuck in. I rub it a little to nurse it.\n\n"Whew. We got clear o' that. You awright, mate?" Kid approaches me with a satisfied grin on her face. I match it with a wink and a grin of my own.\n\n"Here, mate," Kid hands me the talisman, "it clashes with my outfit."\n\nI take the talisman from her outstretched hand, which she uses to draw me in for a quick smooch on the cheek. Far too cutesy for my taste, but I stiffen penilly at the approach. Being in such proximity to her glistening body, touching her full lips, smelling her bradford pear. A little less cutesy conversation and a little more action would do my heart good.\n\nI mean my heart!\n\nI tie the talisman around my neck and tuck it into my shirt. I remove all of the unmentionables that are still clinging to me all over, as well as the mentionables that at any rate don't belong as stowaways.\n\n"There's nothing here we need," Magil states icily, "let's repair to the hallway and plan our next move."\n"That statue mirror lady thing has some explaining to do," I offer.\n<<set $talisman = 1>><<set $mirror = 2>>\n\n[[Back to the hallway|east_hall_1f]]\n

My wettest, most lucid dreams never presented me with so perfect an opportunity. I maneuver towards Kid, eager to act out on every urge I've felt since we first met...\n<<display 'riddel_interrupt'>>

We approach an open, oaken door at the end of the hallway. Light from a fireplace dances along the walls of the room, which lofts into a cieling of choice wallpaper in a diamond pattern of interlaced golden piping. Rich oaken trim appoints the runners and mid-wall, ending at the bookshelves with stacks and stacks of books of every description. Tea is set at a short table at the room's center with several chairs around. Seated in the finest of them is a noble looking old goblin, reclined and reading while he takes gentle pulls of his pipe.\n\n<<if $tea eq 1>>\n\nThere's no reason to bother the old fellow again.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_east_landing]]\n<<else>>\n\nThe old goblin's face lights up with welcoming pleasure.\n\n"Oh, come in, come in, I was just sitting down to tea. No need for alarm. I haven't had visitors as handsome as yourselves in quite some time."\n\nKid relaxes a little from her battle stance. Magil peeks an eye out of his hiding spot in the nearby shadows. I pull up a seat.\n\n"Yes, yes, there's a good lad. Why don't you join us, young lady?"\n\nKid hesitantly seats herself on the edge of one of the chairs, still ready to pounce if she needs. Magil sits down as well.\n\n"Would you like some tea?"\n\nI frankly don't know if I would.\n\n[[Have some tea|tea_drink]]\n[[Decline, it's probably poison|tea_decline]]\n<<endif>>\n

Being the high-minded fellow I am, I decide to let the two ladies start on each other before I slide my way in. Between Kid and Riddel, the feast my eyes might miss if I lunge in on one or the other right away would leave me eyehungry for months. There's just never going to be another chance like this...\n<<display 'riddel_interrupt'>>

Kid might be the finest woman I've ever seen or heard of, but a goddess is a goddess. I ease over toward Riddel, intent on counting backwards from 'Ooo' to 'Stud' with successive intrusions of my throbbing member while I explore every sultry inch of woman available at hand...\n<<display 'riddel_interrupt'>>

Real Cad Admirers

"Ya ha ha! Getting tired, are we? You had no trouble felling my battles. What's so hard about this old tree, eh?" the captain taunts.\n\nWe're all weary from fighting, having sparred and ducked and worked for half an hour trying to get any edge on the bedecked goblin captain. Kid's lithe body is wet with sweat. Magil is propped on his scythe, expressionless. I'm clutching my chest in one hand and my dagger in the other and struggling to stay on my pins. My natural impulse would be to ogle Kid in this situation. I've never seen her this exhausted from physical effort before and I'm not likely to again.\n\nBut of course that would spell my death. I have to pay attention to the goblin captain.\n\nUnbelievably, he sets his holy water sprinkler gently down on the floor and crosses his arms, confident that he's beaten us.\n\n"Hn hn heh! You fought well. I have to go train up a whole new crop of recruits after this," he says, bowing in turn to each of us. "I'll be more thorough about checking crannies for fighters like yourselves."\n\n"You, little mouse," he moves towards Kid, "I'm sorriest to kill. Skill such as yours shouldn't go to waste." He picks up her helpless, exhausted body and thumps her under the armpit. The light goes from Kid's eyes and she stops breathing, dropping to the floor like a rag doll. The goblin captain withdraws his mercy-killing weapon, a misericorde. I can guess what's about to happen.\n\n"You, shadow warrior," he walks over to Magil, "It is a shame to murder you. Without my charm I wouldn't have had a chance. With it, we should have been even, but I still feel I cheated you." He slices Magil's throat in a smooth motion, from which sprays scalding, sputtering magical essence along with blood. Magil catches blue fire and screams, his body consumed entirely by flame in a matter of seconds, leaving his robes behind. He can't even die without using magic to cheat somehow.\n\n"You, big boy," he approaches me, "It is a pleasure to put you down. Liam should have died to a warrior, not some overgrown scrub."\n\nThere's a glint in his eyes as he puts away his misericorde and his mace.\n\n"Oh ho ho, your death is just beginning."\n\nHe drags my exhausted body to the stairs and tosses me down. I tumble for what feels like hours and land in a heap at the bottom. Battered and broken, I can hardly open my eyes. I don't notice him come down casually after me.\n\nHe continues to drag me through passageways in the basement, finally opening a cell door somewhere and shutting us in. In the center of the large, chilly, barren room is a pivoting post with spokes sticking out at about my knee level.\n\nHe strips me naked, leaving my hat on, and ties me around the post, binding my hands to each other and my knees to spokes, exposing my back. The post begins to rotate and I hear a whizzing sound through the air a split second before the lash strikes me across the back. I'm too tired already to scream, though I truly want to.\n\nThe flaying continues for hours. The lashers work in teams, taking breaks and rotating shifts. Of all the machines in Viper Manor, the torture team is the most efficient and dedicated.\n\nI try to retreat from the pain, but the only image I can imagine between stings is that of Kid dropping dead before me. The morning sun spills through a tiny crack in a window at the top of the cieling. We've been at this a long time.\n\nI close my eyes, exhausted of agony, and never open them again.\n\nTHE END

<<silently>>\n<<if $cf3 = 0>>\n<<set hotness to something>>\n<<endsilently>>

"Ouf! Watch it, Serge!" Kid exclaims as I thoughtlessly collide with her suddenly still body. "We can't be knocking about all night. And have you been eating bricks for breakfast? You near toppled me flat!"\n\n<<display 'WoodPath'>>

We are at the top of the tower stairs. Before us is a tall wooden door of double-thick mahogany slats, reinforced in Chesterfield style with mottled wrought-iron casting plates. We can enter the tower room or risk going back down the stairs.\n\n[[Enter the room|tower_room]]\n[[Risk descending|east_hall_1f]]\n

"Kid," I whisper, "I've got an idea. I need you to get one of his arms."\n"And get tossed again? No way."\n"I'm counting on him doing that. Just get tossed and I can take him out."\nShe looks at me for a second, darkening her brow in perplexed worry, and then sets to work putting his free hand in a cage.\n\nThe goblin captain tosses her as before, leaving me just enough time to come up from behind and wrap around him. I have my left arm under his armpit and my right over his collar. I've joined my hands in prayer and pumping my axehandle backwards I have him hoisted and locked in a chicken-wing. He doesn't have enough of an angle to either punch or bludgeon me without doing something dire. I can hold him like this for a minute, but that won't be long enough.\n\n"Magil, now! You need a hard swing to get through his armor!"\n"Serge, no! Don't do this," Kid cries sickeningly, realizing the hand she played in putting me here.\n"You're more useful alive, Serge," Magil has his own way of cheering me up.\n"Don't you get it, this guy is better than all of us. Even now he's slipping out of my grip. Kill me with him or he'll kill us all anyway!"\n\nMagil takes a step back, then wheels around for maximum force, driving his scythe end clear through the goblin captain's tabard and armor, as well as his ribcage, lung and heart. It of course keeps going and lances my own guts, showing me that the worst pain of my life before now was a spring breeze by comparison.\n\nThe goblin captain slumps over dead right away. My own injuries leave me alive for perhaps a few more minutes.\n\nKid rushes over to me and props me up in her lap, tears welling up in her baby blue eyes, turning them into sapphires. I try to put on a brave face and not cough blood on her. I fail.\n\n"Kid...don't look like that," I plead. Magil must have hit me in the poetry.\n"It's ok, it's ok, youer not so bad, right? We'll stop the bleeding and get you patched up. You brave idiot."\n"No Kid. It's that bad. Worse than that bad. I gotta make this count."\n"Serge, no!" Kid exclaims, crushing my face into her bosom and sobbing openly. In other circumstances I would be enjoying this position, but with my life blood leaking out of my midsection in gouts at the moment I find her perfect breasts hard to appreciate.\n\n"Kid...listen...there's something I wanna tell you," I whisper, drawing her closer.\n"Tell me, Serge. I'll avenge you, I'll remember this, I'll make Lynx pay, I'll do anything you ask, I'll—"\n"Shut up for a second. I'm literally dying in your arms."\n"S-sorry, S-Serge, I—"\n"Sssh. What I wanted to say is: I still totally want to fuck you."\n\nHer aspect grows an even deeper red and she starts trembling all over. She bends down to kiss me on the forehead.\n\n"Yer a louse, Serge Grossfest."\n\nKid's parting words I take with me into death, as darkness comes over me.\n\nTHE END

"We have a little time to look, and Kid's a good tracker. Lynx is wealthy and may have left some of his vast fortune thoughtlessly about, best that we found it. Lynx is also vicious, and if there are roaming packs of wild beasts hiding in the fold waiting to rend our precious flesh to ribbons, best that we find them first."\n\n"Er. Thanks, Serge. I guess." Kid replies.\nMagil's expression fails to change as he replies, "To the void, there is no precious flesh. This is a waste and you are a buffoon. I'll wait for you at the manor, but only because you are useful."\n\nMagil seems to float away with his long robe barely disturbed at the hem and his baleful eyes no doubt piercing a path directly to where he wishes to go.\n\nI turn my gaze to Kid's eyes, only to get momentarily lost in them: wide and warm and perfect, cast in soft relief by the full, pale moonlight. Her gentle brow suddenly furrows and she assumes the posture of a warrior, tensing her whipcord muscles all over and casting furtive glances like stones in all directions.\n\nThe spell her loveliness placed me under broken, I realize the pair of us, if ever I dared so bold a union in a sentence let alone in life, are surrounded by the acrid stench, slavering maws, and manflesh-hungry growls of a tended pack of feral cats, some half-dozen in count and half-mad in demeanor.\n\nKid readies a leaping kick at the nearest beast while I unsheathe the better half of valor in the form of a battle knife and prepare my quavering heart for combat and bloodshed.\n\nKid gives a hearty shout as she springs further than seems humanly possible and delivers a kick to the windpipe of one of the snarling pack just as it was leaping toward her. The violent action of the melee alone keeps my penis from falling off at the thought of Kid taking on a pack of wild predators barehanded while I flail about with a knife and barely contend with my anus ready to give way to terror-shits.\n\nIn fact a cat leaps at me.\n\n[[Attack!|CF_Attack]]\n[[Magic!|CF_Magic]]\n[[Defend!|CF_Defend]]\n[[Run!|CF_Run]]

An idea comes to me that shuffles all the others out of the way.\n\n"I think I know how this works."\n"Serge you mad stallion," Kid definitely actually says, "what are you doing?" I notice Magil doesn't wait for an explanation before deciding to vanish.\n"This was the penis of a god, right? How else would the ritual go but to raise it?"\n"It's too heavy for you."\n"Then help me get it up like you're so good at anyway."\n\nWith Kid helping out, we get the thing raised upright, and then I jerk it up and try to keep it steadily upward. \n\n<<if $tower eq 1>>She kisses me on the cheek for luck and then departs through the hole we made earlier.<<else>>She kisses me on the cheek for luck and then departs through a hole that I didn't notice Magil just blasted in the wall.<<endif>> My arms grow weary from being upright just under the weight of the sword. I can only imagine what the ceiling will feel like.\n\nThe pain in my arms suddenly flushes through my entire body, and I black out from pain, transported through the cosmos to another realm. I learn through absorption the story of the god who graced the Acacian Dragoons with his leftover loins. Celestial muses tell me the story of how the god spurned the advances of a nymphomaniac goddess, who used her perfect beauty to curse him with a cosmic priapism. To end his suffering, he removed his own penis and sent it to earth as a gift to his followers. The holy of holies.\n\nThe pain subsides, and I'm left in the middle of the room. The mechanism has gone. Swaggerdick is also no more. Vanished for all I know. In my hand instead is the Acacian Signet ring. The key to the final leg of our heist.\n<<set $signet = 1>>\n\nI leave in triumph, meeting up with Kid and Magil back at the terrace.\n\n"Serge!" Kid runs up and wraps herself around me, hanging from my neck and smooches me.\n"Yeah, ok, rumors of my crushing death are greatly exaggerated. What's more, I have the full story of Swaggerdick to go write a bardly ballad about, and..."\n\nI show her the ring.\n\n"A bit, erm, big for an engagement ring, don't you think, Sergey-wergy?" She remains dangling from my neck, gently kicking her legs back.\n"As if I would marry a girl who called me that! Besides, this is the signet we needed. Probably needed. I think need it."\n"Let's take it to the ballroom," Magil interjects, "that's where the dragoon told us it belonged."\n\n[[Let's go east|Clock_Store_decide]]\n[[Let's go west|west_hall_1f]]\n

The hallway grows darker and more sparse as we walk what seems to be going deeper downward but what I'm going to admonish myself from calling stairs. Too gradual and safe a decline to truly be stairs. We're very safe walking here.\n\nBy the time we get to the end of the hall, there's no finery left, but only well cut granite stone all around and a prison door blocking our way. We won't be getting in without the key.\n<<if $catacombskey eq 1>>\n\nWhich the old goblin handed us.\n\nKid shivers aloud as we enter, the macabre aura of the place clearly getting to her, which is depressing. Also, the chilly air of the place is getting to her nipples, which is uplifting.\n\nWithin the prison is a tiered arena the size and shape of a ballroom. Cells surround the pit like seats, where the minstrations of the torturer served as a clear message to the rest of the inmates all at once.\n<<if $catacombs eq 0>>\n\nAll the cells are unoccupied except for one, which contains a withered and diminished old man, the waste of years of torture and imprisonment, a wretch with no hope and, upon closer inspection, no clothing.\n\nThe tortured man seems to come alive as we approach, inspecting Kid with interest in the dress she borrowed from Riddel. I can't blame him.\n\n"Mistress...you've come at last. Do the Acacian dragoons one last justice..."\n"I'm sorry?" Kid responds.\n"Much too late for sorrow. But, you have the power to let justice be done. You, Lady Riddel, the mistress of the male and female alchemy, can hold the acacian signet. You will find it when you bring the holy sword to the tower of trials."\n\nHe's talking to Kid like she's Riddel. If this opens the old man up, then we may as well make good use of him.\n\n"What holy sword?" I ask, trying to keep Kid from blurting something honest and stupid.\n"The captain's old sword, Swaggerdick."\n\nA rare look lights Magil's face. He might have just widened his eyes a bare fraction of an inch. Then again it is dark and I might be seeing things. I have other questions for the Acacian Dragoon.\n\n"What are the Acacian Dragoons?"\n"An order of gay knights under captain Viper, bound by an oath of orgy that the circle never be broken. Each wore a signet ring to remind him of his oath when his needs were most dire."\n\nHe pauses for breath, then concludes.\n\n"Swaggerdick could not have gone far. Take the signet you find to the ballroom. It is heresy for anyone else to wear it, but you can, Mistress, if you complete the union. Thrust your penis into me, my lady, and you too shall be holy."\n<<set $swaggerknow = 1>>\n\nKid furrows her handsome brow, uncertain what to do next. It was apparently no secret to the Acacian Dragoons that Riddel was well equipped, and if Kid tries that trick then her disguise will be ruined.\nOn the other hand, we already have all the information we need from this guy, so we could probably just leave him here craving 'justice.'\n\n[[Kill him for Kid's sake|dragoon_kill]]\n[[Let Kid mercy kill him|dragoon_kid]]\n[[Just leave him here|dragoon_leave]]\n<<else>>\nWe've been to this grim place before; there's nothing else for us for certain.\n\n[[Leave|bf_east_landing]]\n<<endif>>\n<<endif>>\n<<if $catacombskey neq 1>>\nEven Kid Courage can't seem to find hers in this chilling place, so we have no choice but to turn back.\n\n[[Leave|bf_east_landing]]\n<<endif>>

I decline the sip of tea at first. Kid remains suspicious and abstains.<<set $tea = 1>>\n\n"Not thirsty? Oh well, I'm very much inclined to the stuff myself," says the old goblin as he takes another sip, "but since you're here, why not tell me a story."\n"Av got a story for ya," spouts Kid, "there once was a courageous lady thief who popped in on and old gobber an' pounded his face in until he spilled his guts."\n\nKid bookends her story with the gesture of punching her fist into her hand thuggishly. The old goblin is unfazed.\n\n"Young lady, I'm very much disinclined to violence, and I sadly have not so much of a gut left to spill. I'm afraid that tea is all you'll ever get out of me if that's the best story you can tell."\n\nKid squeezes her hands together, flexing her arms to look intimidating. It would probably work on me too if I didn't find it so alluring.\n\n"C'mon, Kid, we finally get a chance to decline a fight and you want to ruin it? Why not let Serge do some of the heavy lifting for once? He wants a story, I'm a bard, easy"\n\nKid regards me, abashed, and settles into crossing her fine arms under her healthy breasts in a pose of mixed belligerence and resignation. And sexiness.\n\nI turn to the goblin.\n\n"Lucky you I'm a story-teller of note," I boast, "what kind of story would you like to hear?"\n"The best stories are both unbelievable and true. I've read many. What I'd like to hear is one I've never heard before."\n\nI work my brain at invention for a moment, and then I remember just the right story to use in this circumstance, a classic trick that all bards need to know.\n\n"Alright, it goes like this:\n\n A man and his family enter the office of a stage producer. The producer tells him to have a seat and make himself comfortable before asking the man to describe his act. With a glint in his eye, the man sets to describing his pitch for a performance. 'It's a family act. The curtain opens to my wife deep in labor and panting on the stage...\n\n//[[(go on)|aristocrats]]//\n

I meet the, er, gaze of our assailant and give my comrades a quick warning:\n\n"I got this."\n\nThe boney warrior is something I would never have wanted Kid to see, let alone fight. Besides, I probably would have had a few stone on who this bloke was in life: no use crying about the fact that he's a magically animated horror from beyond the grave on a quest for vengeance that can only be satisfied with my precious flesh.\n\nBut too late to regret my decision now, I'm charging him. I start with a slow jog leading up, and then full sprint when I get close enough to throw off his timing. I wrap him about the ribs and grab for anything I can hold, which turns out to be his buttocks. His mass is no more than I imagined and his momentum substantially less than mine. His overhead sword chop swings well wide of me and my speed trick to close the distance manages to get me clear of having my helm split.\n\nWe go down in the tackle together, where my semi-significant mass crushes his bones on the floor. His sword, which I now see is in fact a club, flies from his skeletal grip. Much of his person lies in ruined fragments only an archaeologist could love.\n\nHis head, er skull, remains animate and bites at my face. I roll away to get clear of the menace, swatting it away like a bee.\n\nThe whole situation finally gets the best of me and I panic a little, letting out much less manly noise than I would have preferred and far more yelps than I would have planned had I executed the battle to my exact design.\n\n"Ah! Augh! Ah! Augh!" I mutter, swatting at the skull.\n\nKid walks up and picks up the skull by the top.\n\n"Alas," she sighs, and hurls the thing with force against the nearby stone wall, where it shatters into pieces and finally stops moving.\n\nKid gives me a hand up and I dust myself off, checking my ears for bite marks.\n\n"It's cute when you throw yourself into things like that, Serge," Kid confesses, then chuckles, "just mind the bitey parts, eh mate?"\n"Yeah."\n\n[[Onward|riddel]]\n

Taking stairs on the best and brightest of days is a deadly risk. I mount my hands on either wall as we step down the sickeningly steep stone stairsteps one after another, spiraling further and further down into the basement of the manor. The task gives me vertigo and makes me lose all sense of direction or safety.\n\n<<if $stairs_down eq 0>>\nMy whole body tingles and I hum a song to force myself into regular cadence to keep safe against the menace of stairs.\n\n"~I wish all the ladies~\n~were bells in a tower~\n~and I'd be the bellboy~\n~and bang 'em every hour~"\n\n...and so on.\n\nAfter a few verses Kid gets fed up with my incessant racket.\n\n"Serge, could you knock that off?"\n"Just...singing about...you know...holes in the road...and all that," I find it's best not to try and talk and take steps on stairs at the same time. Singing is at least rythmic.\n"Oi, fine, jus, do you know any other songs? I'm blushing my face off ere."<<set $stairs_down = 1>>\n\nSettling the argument for us, the winding staircase mercifully ends in a crossway between halls.<<else>>\nKid covers her ears as we descend, preparing for what is the only way I find I can distract myself from the constant peril of taking them. Being at home on a sheer rock surface, Kid doesn't miss the use of both hands for the climbing task.\n\nI, in bardly fashion, sing erotic cadence chants. We get down in no time.\n<<endif>>\n\nWe can go east or west. They look the same from here.\n\n[[Go west|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n[[Go east|bf_stone_arch]]\n[[Go back up the stairs|bf_stairs_up]]\n

"Hold on," I caution Kid as she goes to free the creature.\n"Oh, what is it you bum? Can't I help out the least little cute thing without you gettin' bent out of shape over it?"\n"I mean use your head. Lynx is the most ruthless, torturous, nasty villain we've ever come across in our history of looting the despotic rich."\n"Damn right he is, and he'll get his!"\n"Yes yes, but, given that, why would he use a humane cage for a mouse? It doesn't make any sense."\n\nI turn to Magil for moral support. I take his blank expression as tacit validation of my logic. Thanks, buddy. I turn back to Kid.\n<<set $kitchen = 1>>\n\n"...oh."\n\nKid ponders a moment and seems to catch my meaning. Her expression darkens and she turns to the mouse.\n\n"Awright then, mouse. Or whatever you are. Youer gonna' stay right there until I get some answers, and if I don't like them I'm gonna reach in there and squeeze the life out of ya."\n"Okay, okay, no need to be so brutal, young man. I truly am not a mouse and I did not mean to decieve you. My kind is called the omniphallus, magical creatures possessed of all the sex parts of all the animals. Lord Lynx coerced me here under magical contract for needs of his own. But then he trapped me here in this cage! I think he's leaving me alive only because he fears the consequences of the contract."\n"Well don't you worry, we're going to get rid of him and then you'll be just fine. In the meantime you get to rot in that cage for trying to trick me!"\n\nNot exactly curious to see what a creature with all the sex parts looks like, I'm inclined to agree with Kid on this one and leave the thing be.\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_east_landing]]\n

Kid grips another beast in a guillotine choke, its jaws and forepaw snapping and scraping uselessly at air, before lifting it bodily and hurling it with force against another charging beast. The mid-air collision of cat against cat echoes cartilege-grinding noises off nearby sonically-reflective stones, joined with wince-inducing groans from the pair of mortally-wounded, back-broken felines.\n\nI jab my knife into the underbelly of the cat that attached itself to me maw-to-forearm while I watched Kid at work wrestling vicious animals into submission. Blood and water precede the mixed gory viscera of the animal's entrails. To my additional horror, the bilious fluids show no traces of any recent meal, as if the gaping wound I inflicted upon the poor beast were a huge mouth, dry-heaving what no longer remained of a paroxysm of earlier vomiting.\n\nI calculate the remaining eight cats are as hungry as this one must have remained until its last putrid, dying breath emitted blood upon my forearm.\n\nAnother beast charges for Kid, who is already entangled with one, setting up for a piledriver that will doubtlessly crush its skull and brain should she only get the chance to succeed.\n\n[[Block it!|CF_Tackle]]\n[[Stab it!|CF_Shank]]

Hoping but not waiting for Kid to take the hint and join me in rout, I all-out-sprint in more-or-less the direction we had come from.\n\nI just get up to speed several feet away, the hot, stinking breath of snarling ferals humid on my heels, when my head collides with an underhanging oaken branch and knocks out of me consciousness and sensation.\n\nIn my unwatching mind, I imagine Kid dishing out dope maneuvers in a ballet of animal bloodshed and glistening, sweaty effort. My unconscious hope is that Kid ran but better than I did in the seconds leading up to what is no doubt my demise.\n\n//[[(onward)|CF_Rescue]]//

An idea occurs to me. Lynx said that not even a wizard could escape The Devil's Circle!™ Well what would no wizard have that I would?\n\nWell, wood, as it were.\n\n"Kid, grab my ass!"\n"What, now's not the time fer—"\n"For one, with the circle closing in on us and us about to die horribly, now would be the perfect time, for another, that's not what I mean. I need a hard-on and you're a damn fine lady for that. Now grab my ass and make it hurt!"\n"Are you a masochist?"\n"I...think I might be. Are you a sadist? We'll get along just fine forever if we make it out of this."\n\nKid does better than a friendly grab and slaps me savagely across the buttocks, giving me just the swelling feeling I was hoping for.\n\nI drop my drawers and try to fuck my way out of the circle. The magical energy of The Devil's Circle!™ crackles around my penis, sending sparks of wild sensations all over my body from the dick outward.\n\nTo my thrill and Lynx's disgusted horror, my guess works and I slide right through the circle, dispersing it. I pause a moment before hiking up my trousers as a way to taunt him.\n\nMagil, freed from the circle, aims a stoning ray at Lynx and makes Lynx's shocked expression permanent. Kid runs over and grabs the statue, hoisting it into the devil's ferris wheel before shattering it on the stone floor.\n\nWe made it out of the circle, the Frozen Flame is ours, and we disposed of the evil Lynx once and for all. Not bad for a night's work, though I would have made it less trying on my throbbing member if I had designed it to order.\n\n"Let me see that amulet," Magil asks of me, "just as I thought. This is what dispersed The Devil's Circle!™ Your dick had nothing to do with it."\n"Oh, well Lynx died not knowing that, so I'll call it a win, eh?"\n"Guess he must av skipped over that part when he was readin," Kid spits at his pieces.\n"At any rate, the Flame is ours, and so..."\n\nMagil outstretches one of his magical begloved hands and whisks us away on a magical current to our favorite haunt, the tavern where I met up with Kid and we decided to set out on our burglary in the first place.\n\n"This is where we part ways for now," Magil monotones, reaching out a hand, "thank you for your efforts."\n\nHe shakes Kid's hand, then mine.\n\n"You two have earned a rest, and each other's company, I think."\n"Wha' about you?"\n"The chain of events we've set in motion by wresting the Frozen Flame from Viper Manor will need my constant supervision. I have a lot more work ahead of me. I may call on your aid again if I require it."\n\nMagil makes to leave, then turns around to tell us something from the doorway.\n\n"And be sure to choose a safe-word."\n\nAt that, Kid looks up at me and then squeezes my buttock, sinking in her fingers just enough to hurt. I'm eager to learn the library of submission holds she's mastered, and figure that she's earned a little playtime after tonight's escapades.\n\nThe mischevious look on her gorgeous face tells me she feels the same way I do. I think I finally understand why Kid latched onto me in the first place.\n\n//[[the conclusion|conclusion]]//

Magil starts off with a magic spell that cascades off of the goblin captain's armor. At this surprise, Magil raises his brow a full one-sixteenth of an inch. Devastating.\n\nKid runs up and leaps atop the head of one of my attackers, wrenching her whole body sideways and down to send him spilling into a second one with the helicopter-hurricanrana. Her efforts winnow the two and give her a good angle on choking one out while the other lies in a heap. I have my own assailants to contend with.\n\nHere come their bludgeons.\n\nIt's time to do some contending.\n\n[[Duck!|goblin_2_duck]]\n[[Dodge!|goblin_2_dodge]]\n

...finally Grandpa takes a sip, and the whole family vomits in unison,' the man concludes. Taken aback, the producer finally says, 'That's quite an act, what do you call it?'\nThe man replies, 'the Aristocrats.'"\n\nThe old goblin looks well pleased with my story. Magil has raised his eyebrows a full one-sixteenth of an inch in abject horror. Kid has gone green in the face, her formerly crossed arms now pressing her hands against her mouth in a pose of queasiness and shock. And sexiness.\n\n"Ho, ho, well now, it seems that the youth of today still has a flair for the old ways. Take this."\n\nThe old goblin hands me a key.<<set $catacombskey = 1>>\n\n"You will need this on your way. Go now, and remember Pariceles fondly."\n\nWe make our way back to the hallway. Kid addresses me.\n\n"Serge."\n"Yes."\n"You're sick."\n"Entry-level bard stuff. And hey, it got us what we needed."\n"I still think yer sick, mate."\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_east_landing]]\n

I thought by now Magil would have used his magic to cheat us out a win, but instead he's reposed a few paces off of the captain with a scythe that he produced from apparently nowhere.\n\n"Get his talisman," Magil instructs, "I can't use my magic on him while he's wearing it."\n\nAnd now things are looking up. The three of us range up on the captain from all sides. Kid closest, me a little further owing to my reach, Magil at ten-foot-pole length plus a pace, scythe ready to strike. We don't need to beat him, just steal from him, I have to admit to myself, Kid and I were born to do.\n\nThe only choice is which one of us makes a grab for it.\n\n[[Let Kid make the first attempt|goblin_3_Kid]]\n[[Make the grab while Kid occupies him|goblin_3_Serge]]\n

"So, you know all about godly dicks, right Magil?"\n\nMagil casts a trademark baleful stare in my direction as reply.\n\n"Uh-huh. Some help you are. Right when I could use an arcane legend outside of the experience of my bardship you clam up on me."\n\nStill no response. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to not get a rise out of him. I don't think he's a riser. Maybe I shouldn't be asking him about penises after all.\n\nTime to wing it.\n\n[[Stab the floor|tower_stab]]\n[[Stab the cieling|tower_complete]]\n

<<if $stairs_up eq 0>>The fact that we've taken these stairs before does nothing to bestill the acrid queasiness that comes over me from the inside out, tying my guts in a knot. I bravely place one hand on either wall to brace myself for the climb, which would be a menace in the best of circumstances and here is a living fiasco blazing at me with a dagger in its teeth.\n\nI mean, yes, stairs.\n\nWe manage to make the climb without incident. My companions seem to not mind. Kid is built to climb cliff faces, let alone mere steep stairs. I think Magil is floating his way up, the cheater.\n\nI'm out of breath at the top from fear and not fatigue, although the second would be reasonable.<<set $stairs_up = 1>>\n\n"Hoo! Gettin' a good workout, eh mate?" Kid snickers from above, her lithe form not sweating at all.<<else>>\nThe only thing keeping me from becoming too weary to climb the stairs is the terror that is climbing the stairs. Contrariwise, the only thing keeping me from succumbing to terror of the stairs is fatigue from climbing. My psyche is strung tight between these opposites, growing more and more taught as we ascend.\n\nKid, barely weighing more than a prize lamb and strung together with steel cables barely notices the climb. Magil is a wizard.\n<<endif>>\n\n[[Just a few more steps...|west_hall_1f]]\n

"I dunno, I'm having a pretty good time watching you carry it. Don't tell me all those muscles are just for show."\n"Serge, -huf- you big ape -huf- I can't believe you'd make me do this."\n"Come now, I'm an even-minded fellow. Distribution of labor and all that. Why should I step in, all macho, and take on the task of lifting and moving things? Because my companion is a girl? Certainly not. I'm too even-minded."\n"Howabout because yer twice my size?"\n"I'll admit you make a compelling case that an even-minded man like myself cannot simply ignore, so I assure you it is with great complexity that I do choose to ignore—"\n\nWhereupon Kid stabs me with a fist, she has dainty-but-strong hands you see, and puts an end to my rhetoric.\n\n"Pick it up!"\n"Ouf. Since you asked so nice."\n\nKid demonstrates her temerity is at least as big around as her bosoms by snickering at me while I grunt and struggle to get it up, finally levering the sword across my shoulders with both hands on the pommel. I take a hand off for a moment to adjust my fez and almost lose my balance.\n\n"Don't drop it now, Serge, heheh," Kid smiles at me in mockery, but I can tell she's also impressed. With my even-mindedness of course.\n"Huf. Hoo. Just what on earth compelled anyone to make something like this?"\n"I know of it," Magil monotones, "Legend has it that Swaggerdick was the severed member of a fallen god, granted by supreme dictum to an order of monks who worshipped him. The monks simply stroked and polished the sword to appease their god, but eventually the evolved into an order of fighting monks, and then fully warrior priests in the name of the Acacian Dragoons. Though their rituals changed, they still kept the sword as a holy relic and used it to christen new members. The man who built this manor was their last captain."\n"What excellent news," I sing, "could we please get on with this thing? I'm not getting any younger but I think I'm getting shorter."\n<<set $swagger = 1>>\n\n[[Leave the room|Clock_Store_decide]]\n

Kid grabs the book from the top shelf, suspicious that it might be too thin to contain the secret key we need. She splits it open on the pinky and thumb of her left hand and begins to read aloud:\n<<set $br1 = 1>>\n\n'...People of all social classes, high and low, constantly overeat, drink too much, and indulge in their desires to an unhealthy degree, all because of forgetting about death. This puts a strain on their internal organs, so they may die remarkably young, or else become sickly or invalid.'\n\n"I don't think I like where this is going," I tell her.\n"Shh, you ought to hear this," Kid continues:\n\n'When you always keep death in mind, even if you are young and healthy, you already know how to take care of yourself. You moderate food and drink, moderate sexual addiction, and behave prudently—"\n\n"Okay, okay I get it I picked the wrong book."\n"Teehee, maybe you ought to take this one with you, too."\n"And risk moderating my sexual addiction? Not on your sweet ass."\n\n[[It is a pretty sweet ass|study_plus_results]]\n

I hesitate as Kid and Magil ascend the stairs at the end of the east hallway of the mansion, heedless of the consequences. \n\nIn my experience, the only direction stairs ever lead is toward doom, and a benevolent staircase is a contradiction in terms. Neither of my companions seems to think anything like as critically as I do of the regularly segmented doomsday device we are all now ascending, and as I put a hand on either wall along our way I notice the stone staircase's menace manifest in more physical ways. It grows colder, damper, darker, and more cobwebbed as we ascend, much like the gnarly dick of an evil old wizard.\n\nAnd also like that dick, no good can come of this.\n\nAfter a climb that feels like forever but is in fact less than one minute, we reach the top to find a tall wooden door of double-thick mahogany slats, reinforced in Chesterfield style with mottled wrought-iron casting plates.\n\n[["Let's get away from here."|east_hall_1f]]\n[["Let's get in before I fall down the stairs."|tower_room]]\n

<<if $clockstore eq 1>>\n"The manor hag! They get trained in the healing arts as part of basic haggage."\n\nMagil looks at me skeptically. Or maybe just neutrally. I don't wait for his approval and instead hoist Kid's tiny body in a fireman's carry and start pounding feet for the stairs up.\n\nI hesitate a moment at the base of the stairs. I know I've donet his before. I know stairs are a death trap. But I also know that I've already got Kid's life on the line. My own heartbeat is pounding too much for me to take the measure of Kid's against the back of my head. I also have not had much experience using the back of my head to feel for things like pulses.\n\nI steel myself for the climb and make it with ease. I'm pretty sure I managed to not bump Kid's head against any of the walls on the way up. I mean, pretty sure.\n\nI hate stairs.\n\nGoing down the east hallway, I find the clock closet where we met the hag before, kick open the door and yell for her.\n\n"Hag! Lady, person! Kid needs help! Where are you?"\n\nThe impossibly old manor hag stretches into place from nowhere tits-first. I'm too frantic to be grossed out at the moment.\n\n"Back so soon, o little bairn?\nTake heart, your lass is not so close,\nTo needing rest beneath a cairn,\nBut needing care."\n\nWith that, an energy radiates from Kid, causing a sympathetic feeling of health and wellness to scatter all through me starting from my balls. I'm pretty sure that's the healing magic, anyway.\n\n"Owch, my aching head? Jus' what happened back there?" Kid queries.\n"You took a dive and I brought you up the goddam stairs and here to see the manor hag again."\n\nThe hag has since our moment of need departed. Maybe her whole life is like this, just in different manors all over the place.\n\n"Oi. Right, well, aside from a few aches and a renewed hatred of skeletons, I'm fit as a fiddle."\n\nKid flexes her arms to prove to me how fit she is. Some facts just can't be ignored.\n\nWe make our way back through the manor, going down the stairs more carefully this time, and back to the hallway where we fought the skeleton.\n\n[[This had better be worth it|riddel]]\n<<else>>\nI look around frantically for help, but realize that I never met anyone here who could turn Kid from victim to docted.\n\nI hold Kid close, trying to put life back in her by osmosis, but instead my heartbeat starts to slow and I begin to realize that I might have a few injuries of my own I didn't notice before.\n\nI set Kid down and take a seat myself, suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue, uncertain how much of the blood on me is Kid's and how much is mine. What happened back there?\n\nThe idea of Kid going out like this must have literally broken my heart, which is just too tacky to be believed. I have earned the worst hell for a poet, thus. I try to redeem myself with my last words before the curtain closes:\n\n"Kid. You had a sweet ass. I'll fuck you in hell."\n\nTHE END\n<<endif>>

<<if $vaultkey eq 0>>\n"The harder to crack, the sweeter the snack," Kid declares, setting her expert hands to work on the lock at the center of the ornate oaken doors.\n<<set $vault = 1>>\n\nSeveral minutes pass with little headway, and while I'm content to watch Kid work with her hands for an arbitrarily long length of time, Magil looms over her as well looking all at once increasingly annoyed and exactly the same as ever.\n\n"Perhaps we could find a key?" Magil sighs in speech.\n\n"Augh! Fine. Never much liked this stuff. Ov always been more of a breakin' than an enterin' girl, eh?" Kid says, punching fist into palm in generic tough guy fashion before nimbly rising from the floor.\n\nWe turn away from the vault door for now.\n\n[[Turn back|east_hall_1f]]\n<<else>>\n\n"I still say we could 'ave busted it down," Kid claims, flexing her bicep to a swell that doesn't seem possible with how thin she is.\n\nI decline to respond to her, imagining what force it may have taken to actually break the door down and further imagining Kid contorting herself and using whatever available devices to prize or break it open, struggling her good muscles to a heated sweat. I should have let her try.\n\n"Ah well, 'bout time we finished this run o' fun. Never have I ever been so long on a burglin' job," Kid announces, sliding the brass key out from where I wish I lived and into the lock on the ornate oaken doors.\n\nIt glides in freely and turns easily. We push the heavy, well-mounted door to reveal the manor treasure vault.\n\nThe sight of wealth within is enough to make strong men's hearts ache with desire, let alone my own. Arrayed on every cabinet, wall, mounting brace and recessed observation annex are riches of every denomination and artistic conformity. Faceted jewels in colors I have never seen, gold in coins, bars, chains, wrought into fine etchings, plated on dinnerware, spun into shapes unlike anything I've ever seen. Everything organized by size and category, and categories within categories. The wealth of a man whose wealth changes hands with regularity of income and outgo, organized by a monomaniac.\n\nMagil casts a baleful, searching look over the shrine to Croesis.\n\nKid trembles from head to toe with avaricious lust. Her eyes widen at the sight of such fabulous riches. She darts in, looking for what to steal first.\n\n"No. We're here for the Flame," Magil finds the killing words for Kid's buzz.\n\nConfronted with a problem that could not simply be grappled into submission, Kid relents, checking her desire to fill her arms, pockets, mouth and anus with lucre. Also I don't know if she has pockets. She still quivers visibly all over. If she had bollocks they'd be blue.\n\nI follow no such dictum and anyway I have plenty of pockets, and surreptitiously ignore what Magil said, starting to work on the jewels I guess carry the greatest value-to-weight ratio.\n\nMagil finds what we came here for on a pedastal at the far end of the vault room. Given a position of authority over all the rest, it sits casting corruscating rays of all the shades of red across our vision and the room around it. I can feel its import, as if omen were a physical force pulling my body towards it. I didn't understand the importance of this gem before I set out on the mission with Kid, but now, certainly this is it.\n\n"It's a fake," Magil says.\n"What?" Kid loses all sense of stealth.\n"What?" It's good to back up your leader.\n"You heard me. Dreamstone is unmistakable to someone who is familiar with it. Being not of this world, it beggars more traditional means of gemology. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this proxy. Even I needed to be close to figure it out, which means—"\n\nMagil probably did say what it means, but I don't hear him over the sudden noise of alarm bells all over the room and probably the hallway. An iron portcullis slams in front of the exit, barring our escape. Goblin voices sound from the hallway. I think this is what Magil thinks this means.\n\nWe hide all at once. Magil vanishes into shadows for free. Kid finds a locker that looks like it can't fit a human being and slips in with ease. I find a massive chest that is empty enough to fit my entire body in addition to the contents, which feel soft at first touch but there's no time to think about it.\n\n[[Maybe this will all blow over|goblin_fight]]\n<<endif>>

"Would you favor us with a magic spell what might vanquish this ghastly assailant?" I ask of Magil, dripping with sarcasm.\n\nHe ignores my tone, or anyway doesn't visibly change the woodcarving he calls a countenance, and raises a glove. Nonsense words quietly drone from his mouth and a dull aphotic glow haloes his hooded head.\n\n"...zenia zeena zorga zom..."\n\nAn orb that seems to draw light into it, appearing somehow blacker than the pitch darkness around it shoots at the skeleton as fast as an arrow, blowing him bodily backward and down the hallway out of sight. Surely such a blast would have destroyed the man he had been in life, let alone the lesser components he but only a moment ago was.\n\n"Much obliged," I offer, facing Magil and tipping my fez.\n"Thank the black wind."\n\nContent that the combat is over well before it began, we continue down the hallway a pace, when suddenly a sound echoes from the far end of the hall out of the dark. It doesn't sound quite like anything I've heard before: perhaps if you were to pop a cork from a bottle of champaigne that were the size of a man, then do so again and again rapidly.\n\nThe skeleton appears again, more quickly, grown larger and visibly, erm, expanded by the bolt of black energy that I can only presume it a moment ago absorbed. It lashes at the three of us with wild vigor, slamming me against the wall. Kid tumbles away. Magil vanishes into the shadows—some help he is.\n\nHe's aiming an overhead smash at Kid.\n\nWe're in for a fight.\n\n[[Go for his legs|big_skeleton_legs]]\n[[Go for his middle|big_skeleton_mid]]\n[[Get Kid out of the way|big_skeleton_kid]]\n

The hall gives way to a reversing set of saloon doors that do nothing to keep us from seeing the desk, stacks and stacks of books, and lighted art pieces that form what must be the manor study. One painting in particular holds a position of authority over the room, with a skylight window letting the moon in at present, as well as several other lamps focused on it from all sides.\n\n[[Check the desk|study_desk]]\n[[Read a book|study_books]]\n[[Admire some art|study_painting]]\n[[Leave the Study|west_hall_1f]]\n<<if ($booksee eq 1) and ($vaultkey neq 1)>>\n[[Check the books for a key|study_plus_results]]\n<<endif>>

The alarm continues to sound as I shift and try to find a comfortable position within my hiding spot. Or at least try to figure out what it is I'm hiding in. Feels like silk. And satin. Various scarves, all perfumed. It is difficult to breathe will all the mixing smells in this tiny space. I'm not built for small spaces.\n\nLock-step footfalls make their way to the portcullis and deactivate the alarm. If I could possibly smell anything else through all this linen, it would be the rank odor of the goblin security team.\n\nI hear the portcullis raise. We could possibly slip out without their notice. They're close enough that I can make out their words and grunts. The goblins talk to one another.\n\n"Alright, my battles. Should be a routine sweep. Stay frosty and keep your grapes squeezed," commands a noble-sounding goblin voice.\n"You worry too much, cap'n," says another, huskier voice, "I bet 's just some rat sneaking in again."\n\nJust a moment later, I hear Kid making rat noises. Nothing too out of the ordinary for her, though she isn't the best at mimicry and other notable thieves often give her a hard time for it. She often suplexes those thieves.\n\n"Ah, too right! Ya hear that? Rats...er, rat, anyway. Cook said he had a wee rat problem lately," says the husky goblin.\n"Nah, nah," a third goblin voice, this one gravelly, interjects, "Cook said it was a cat. You know, feline."\n\nTaking their cue, Kid imitates a cat mewing. I can't help but hear the rich, sweet undertone of her singing voice I only ever get to hear when I get her smashed, and show my appreciation with a little stiffy that makes this tight space yet more awkward and uncomfortable. Something about this smell, too.\n\n"You munging cobber," husky accuses, "you've gone and transmogrified the beast with your hexes."\n"And you," responds gravelly, "would have me what, exactly."\n"I dunno, aim for the sky."\n"Fine! You shite-for-brained whelplet, Cook wasn't complainin' about cats, but randy nubile womenfolk orgasming in the floorboards."\n"At ease, my battles," the captain begins, but against all odds and common sense, Kid starts making the noises they describe all too convincingly.\n\nI'm pretty sure she isn't just making noise. The sight of all this swag really got to her. I take a peek out of the tiniest pin crack of the chest I'm in to regard the goblins, who look just as magnificently baffled as I am.\n\nKid's moaning reaches a fever pitch. There's no room left for me in here and I'm about to cream my pants sympathetically if I don't act out some other way.\n\n[[Burst out now and start the fight|goblin_attack]]\n[[Wait for them to make a move on Kid and get em|goblin_ambush]]\n

Kid gracefully flings her tiny frame against the door at speed, bouncing off fecklessly. Magil seems to have forgotten that he is a wizard and tries the same act, though with less grace and more neutrality.<<set $tower = 1>>\n\nIt's high time I put my burliness to use. Forgetting all about grace and admitting to myself that I was never cut from wizard cloth, I charge the door at full tilt, presenting the select mahogany the squared shoulder of my broad side.\n\nThe masterwork door gives way to my brute force, and I motion Kid and Magil to follow me through. My head feels wrong, and then I spot my hat snagged on one of the ceiling spikes, still lowering to the floor of the room. I reach in and grab it with a second to spare, only to watch the spikes click into their lowest point and then double-time rise back up into the lofted darkness.\n\n"Youer a big fella' ain'tcha?" Kid asks rhetorically.\n\nI rearrange my hat upon its inveterate home and give Kid a brave smile, frustrated that I lack the wind to hit her back with a cutting remark from among the bouquet of them that spring to mind. I remove chips of mahogany slat from my tunic's shoulder and lapel. The smaller splinters will travel with me for some time.\n\n"We must be more careful," Magil monotones.\n\nWith literally no other way at all to go, we descend one of mankind's most dangerous inventions.\n\n[[to the landing|east_hall_1f]]\n

By Kaz (@kazeugma)

"Just like that slimy despot to put a magical condom around his entire realm," Kid intones. "It's a good thing yours truly won that poker game with that saucy wizard."\n"You cheated." Magil adds stoically.\n"Too right, mate!" Kid cheers, "and a good thing he was too modest to give up his pants and spilled his guts about this counterspell instead."\n\nWe effortlessly interlope the outer environs of Lynx' Realm—called simply "town"—thanks to Kid's earlier facility with strip poker and with cheating.\n\nKid's single, supple ponytail braid gently spanks her callipygian form as she model-walks through the cool night air just ahead of me. Nary a stray split-end extrudes from the entire length of that beknotted lock. It is impossible to believe that Kid keeps such perfect hair given her profession, thievery, which of an evening sees her running for safety, dangling by her fingertips, and generally exerting her slight, athletic body for hours on end.\n\nHer hips continue to gyrate in rhythmic fashion, drawing all my attention away from my surroundings.\n\n[[keep staring|CF_3]]\n[[remember the mission|CF_4]]

"I came here to give that no-good bastard Lynx a black eye. An' if you work for him I'll fight you!" Kid declares, clenching both fists and still wincing in determined pain.\n\nThe hag appears from the shadows, a woman who went on living but never stopped aging, bent over double and covered in servant's rags. I fail to stop myself from imagining what ruin gravity has made of her withered teats, and the image makes me shudder and retreat more than a little.\n\n"An orphan thief of tender years,\nsome decade came ago,\nshe had your spunk, your pluck, your spite,\nyour luck too\nif you\nbelieve she might.\nThe master had her caught and flayed.\n\nFate granted her a stay from death,\nan unlikely actor pitied her act.\nShe left no lordlier in wealth\nand barely with her hide intact."\n\nKid's expression changes to dread, exposure, remorse, embarrassment, and pain all at once. She reaches an arm behind her back to scratch at it unconsciously. Such a play of emotions distort her cherubic face I can feel my heart being pulled right out of me through my ribs at the sight.\n<<set $clockstore = 1>>\nNone of us feels like talking. The manor hag goes on:\n\n"In years you have advanced since then,\nin grace, in strength, in beauty,\nin every way but wisdom.\nIf you wish to take, you must let go,\nI am not here to stop you."\n\nShe hobbles toward me and Kid and touches each of us gently with a hand.\n\n"May hands that rescued a babe,\nheal now her woman-self.\nWould that healing wild hearts\nwere as easy\nas poulticing wounds."\n\nWith a snap of magical brightness, a warmth radiates outward from my genitals through my whole body, leaving my nipples tingling with renewed vigor. The same snap must have done the same to Kid, and appears to have consumed the manor hag, rhyme, wrinkle and all.\n\nWe blink at each other momentarily, and reach wordless consensus about heading for the door. And do.\n\n[[outta here|Clock_Store_decide]]\n

I pick Kid up with one hand, then join the other hand in one motion, spinning her around me in a helicopter once to get momentum and releasing her in a hammer-throw at the goblin captain.\n\nMy grip strays, my fist still over sore from using it to bash in a goblin skull, and I fling Kid well wide of my target, effectively smacking her against the wall in gorilla-slam fashion.\n\n"Oh geez, Kid, sorry, are you okay," I rush over to her still form with questions, only to recognize the true weight of my error.\n\nMy cast sent her to oblivion: I roll her body over to see a jeweled sword sticking out of her collarbone clean down to the gilt hilt. Not the way I wanted to penetrate her.\n\nI gather her lifeless body up in my arms and discard all inhibition and manliness, weeping over the irony of my murder of moments ago.\n\nMagil, lacking our support, is no match for the goblin captain, who has a means to ward off Magil's magic or otherwise ignore it. I look over at just the right time to see the goblin captain's mace split Magil's head into a thousand pieces. He pops like a balloon and then evaporates. The damn cheater can't even die straight.\n\n"You fought well, cobber. You all did. For your sake I have to train up a new crop of battles. For their sake," at this he raises his mace. I do nothing to stop the oncoming blow, "I send you to Hell!"\n\nThe expert blow knocks the light from my eyes and the life from my body instantly. It all might have gone differently but for one bad toss.\n\nTHE END

//Loosely based on the Squaresoft game, which was loosely based on certain plot elements of one much better and one much worse game.\n\nA Twine act of vandalism.\n\nAuthor's note: all of the characters within are adults.//\n\n[[Begin|CatForest]]\n\n<<set $kid_dress = 0>>\n<<set $swaggerknow = 0>>\n<<set $catacombs = 0>>\n<<set $kitchen = 0>>\n<<set $swagger = 0>>\n<<set $signet = 0>>\n<<set $clockstore = 0>>\n<<set $tower = 0>>\n<<set $riddel = 0>>\n<<set $statueknow = 0>>\n<<set $statue = 0>>\n<<set $vaultkey = 0>>\n<<set $vault = 0>>\n<<set $talisman = 0>>\n<<set $mirror = 0>>\n<<set $booksee = 0>>\n<<set $study = 0>>\n<<set $bv3 = 0>>\n<<set $br3 = 0>>\n<<set $bv1 = 0>>\n<<set $br1 = 0>>\n<<set $bp2 = 0>>\n<<set $atrium = 0>>\n<<set $seekmirror = 0>>\n<<set $tea = 0>>\n<<set $catacombskey = 0>>\n<<set $teaflask = 0>>\n<<set $lynx = 0>>\n<<set $studypaint = 0>>\n<<set $studybooks = 0>>\n<<set $studydesk = 0>>\n<<set $triedalready = 0>>\n<<set $stairs_down = 0>>

I disregard the opulent finery that adorns every square inch of this bedroom and set Kid down on the bed with all haste. In truth, I had no idea a moment ago that this would be a suitable room for repose: I had just guessed that any room that wasn't a hallway might have something suitable to the task.\n\nGently as I can, I tilt Kid on her side away from me so I can examine her backside—again not exactly as I would have liked—to see what I can. Blood and sweat cover her back and shoulders. The source seems to be the base of her skull. I feel around the wound, again as gently as I can. No foreign objects or missing pieces. No broken bones.\n\nJust bleeding.\n\nI set Kid back down on the bloody bedsheets and toss open the nearby drawer looking for anything cloth that I can use to wrap up Kid's head. I try not to think about how much blood she might have lost already.\n\nI grab the first bit of cloth I can find, which has a sleeve I notice, and rip it into strips. I use the most acceptable strip to bandage Kid's head, and the wound doesn't look or feel quite so bad now.\n\nMy hands and sleeves are a two-toned mess of Kid's blood. The bed I set her to rest on is no better. It used to be a soft pink hue, at that.\n\nI sit down on the floor against the bedpost and try to fight back the sickening feeling rumbling in my guts. I'm no doctor. How can they do it. To hold a life in your hands, spilling all over you. I feel lightheaded. I think Magil is saying something to me but all I can hear is deadened. He prods me with a hand and that does it.\n\nThe whole vision of what I just did and went through replays itself in graphic detail in my imagination, and I vomit. I gasp for as much air as I can between heaves. My stomach seems to want to give more, but I just don't have anything left in me. The burning all through my throat and mouth are sign enough of that, as is the hot fluidic puddle I've left on the nice marble tile floor. I tilt my head up a little to catch sight of two naked feet, not Magil's or even Kid's. Good, womanly feet.\n\nI finally catch my breath and look up to see a woman, certainly a woman, beaded over with moisture, her auburn hair slick and black wet against her naked body. I stare at her a moment, foggy-eyed, hands on my knees and butt on my feet, trying to think of what the appropriate thing to say is when you're kneeling in a pile of your own sick and you're covered in your friend's blood who is lying right next to you in the bedroom of a naked woman who just came out of the shower to discover you.\n\n"Nice bush."\n\nNailed it.\n\nShe gives a good smile and laughs richly. She's somewhat taller than Kid, bustier, and nowhere near as muscular. I feel intimidated for Kid. Also worried.\n\n"Nicer than you know, stud," she walks over to Kid and sizes her up. "Hmm, I think I have something that will help."\n\nThe goddess saunters back to her bath and returns, clothed alas, with a potion in hand. She administers it to Kid's wounds with a small cloth, cooing and nurturing. Kid recovers in no time.\n\n"Ooo, you're even cuter than stud-muffin here. Wakey-wakey now, it's time we got you all clean," she sweetly half-sings everything she says. We were beyond lucky to have run into her. Kid has some stiff competition all of a sudden and I've got a stiff something else.\n\nKid is up and looks panicked. She's awoken to the ministrations and coos of a strange woman. This is a problem that she can't simply suplex out of the way.\n\n[[Try to reassure Kid|riddel_reassure]]\n[[Try to talk to the woman|riddel_talk]]\n

Kid and I quickly rush to either side of the study entrance doors, where it suddenly dawns on me how foolish it is to think that I might ever hide in such a spot. Kid is able to flatten herself against the wall as I cannot, meaning our plan if we have one is for our followers to notice me and give her a chance to do something. Being large has drawbacks.\n\nA stately patrol goblin noses his way into the room, turns solemnly in my direction and blinks.\n\n"May I help you?" He inquires, statelyly.\n"Um, no." It's my dry wit I value highest among my many assets.\n"Are you unwell?" He asks, equally statelyly.\n"Um, no." When you've got a good line, it's important to stick with it.\n\nHe turns around and leaves in a stately manner. What a nice fellow.\n\nKid slowly eases down from her luchador attack pose and we posse up with Magil in the center of the study.\n\n"Why didn't he raise an alarm or attack us?" I query aloud.\nKid shrugs her shapely shoulders.\n"His duties do not include that. Lynx' minions have very explicit orders and follow them to the letter." Magil states, not as stately as the goblin. "We're done here for now."\n\n[[return to the hallway|west_hall_1f]]\n<<set $study = 1>>

I muster up my courage and whatever is left of the ruin of my guts and lunge one more time at the giant-with-all-the-bones-a-man-has-beneath-the-skin.\n\nMy second attempt at attack is short-lived. No less crafty in combat than last time, and with less of a blow to deal with, the skeleton sees my rush and stomps me to the floor, using his larger bones to break the greater number and variety of my own, as well as working havoc by crushing force on much the rest of my organs.\n\n"Serge! NOOOO!"\n\nDeath veils my eyes and leaves my hearing cruelly intact for a little longer. The pain of my death is joined to the symphony of Kid's screams on my behalf underscored with what sounds like someone smashing wet celery against the floor but what I imagine is the noise my body is making while it transforms into smithereens. A marriage made in the hell I live out the rest of my brief life in.\n\nI'm sorry...\n\n...Kid...

<<if ($atrium eq 1) and ($mirror neq 3)>>\nAlternating red and white diagonal rhomboid marble tiles compose the floor with gold pin lines keeping red and white from touching. This leads into the middle of the room, with a fountain built into the floor. It is wide and deep, full of clear water and arrested in the middle with the fountainhead: a composite statue of three nude women, each with a saturnine expression on her face and with a missing arm or leg where she might have otherwise been reaching that limb too far away from the composite statue center. Fountain water leaks from their eyes and mouths.\n\nThis is a dead-end, so we have to go back.\n\n[[Go back|bf_stone_arch]]\n\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($atrium eq 1) and ($mirror eq 3)>>\nAlternating red and white diagonal rhomboid marble tiles compose the floor with gold pin lines keeping red and white from touching. This leads into the middle of the room, with a fountain built into the floor. It is wide and deep, full of clear water and arrested in the middle with the fountainhead: a composite statue of three nude women, each with a saturnine expression on her face and with a missing arm or leg where she might have otherwise been reaching that limb too far away from the composite statue center. Fountain water leaks from their eyes and mouths.\n\nAnd this is what they call an atrium. An opening has appeared at the far end, I suppose thanks to a closing somewhere else that reminds me of how sore I still am.\n\nStill, there's nothing stopping us from keeping on.\n\n[[Return to the stone arch|bf_stone_arch]]\n[[On through the opening|bf_east_landing]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($atrium eq 0) and ($mirror eq 3)>>\nAlternating red and white diagonal rhomboid marble tiles compose the floor with gold pin lines keeping red and white from touching. This leads into the middle of the room, with a fountain built into the floor. It is wide and deep, full of clear water and arrested in the middle with the fountainhead: a composite statue of three nude women, each with a saturnine expression on her face and with a missing arm or leg where she might have otherwise been reaching that limb too far away from the composite statue center. Fountain water leaks from their eyes and mouths.\n\nAnd this is what they call an atrium. An opening has appeared at the far end, I suppose thanks to a closing somewhere else that reminds me of how sore I still am.\n\nStill, there's nothing stopping us from keeping on.\n\n[[Return to the stone arch|bf_stone_arch]]\n[[On through the opening|bf_east_landing]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($atrium eq 0) and ($mirror neq 3)>>\nAlternating red and white diagonal rhomboid marble tiles compose the floor with gold pin lines keeping red and white from touching. This leads into the middle of the room, with a fountain built into the floor. It is wide and deep, full of clear water and arrested in the middle with the fountainhead: a composite statue of three nude women, each with a saturnine expression on her face and with a missing arm or leg where she might have otherwise been reaching that limb too far away from the composite statue center. Fountain water leaks from their eyes and mouths.\n\nThe effect is quite impressive, and I can feel an upwelling in me as I remember how long it has been since I relieved myself.\n\nKid apparently had the same notion, if you can call such things notions, and signals for the other two of us to kindly turn around for a moment.\n\nEven the tinkling splash of her piss is musical. Kid really is something else. Great body, full lips, bright eyes, silky hair. The hell of it is she has a great big heart, too, and if she can turn it off of avarice for a minute it overflows with tacky, old-fashioned lurve and care for whatever else it is she cares about. Cooking, maybe. I still remember the exchange we had the first time I tasted her onion soup:\n\nKid: So, what d'ya think?\nSerge: I'm going to fuck you to the moon.\nKid: Huh?\nSerge: I said it's really good soup. Tip top.\n\nThe musical splash stops and I step up to take my turn.\n\nNot to be outdone by some squatting girl, I remove my trousers and wade waist-deep into the fountain unfurling my loins in the water and putting my hands behind my head.\n\nI notice the silvery flash of a small, narrow fish.\n\nI keep peeing, trying to imagine the humiliation Lynx will feel when he discovers that in addition to filching his most prized possession, we also mixed piss in his opulent fountain.\n\nWithout warning, Kid rushes up from behind and yanks my dick with her firm hands.\n\nChoosing to avoid the no doubt fascinating scientific experiment about whether or not she could actually pull my penis off, I follow her out of the fountain with all haste, and grab and doff my trousers.\n\nStill sore in the south, I glower at Kid:\n\n"What the hell was that for?"\n"That was me saving your urethra."\n\nKid points at the fountain, still rippling from my departure. I see a bunch of the little narrow fish spinning madly about where I had relieved myself.\n\n"Candiru," she says, making the blood go from my face.\n"Well, er, thanks," I admit, rubbing my manhood a little, "you could have, kaff, handled things a bit more gently, maybe?"\n"We're saving that for later I thought," Kid grins devilishly. I'd appreciate the sentiment more if my member weren't still awash with pulling pain.<<set $atrium = 1>>\n\nThis is a dead-end at any rate, so we have to go back.\n\n[[Go back|bf_stone_arch]]\n<<endif>>

But before I can engage in even the barest carnal act, Magil the magical cock blocker yanks me out of the bed where I lie nude but for the hat before him, flag raised.\n<<set $kid_dress = 1>>\n\n"I've found what we needed here. This key will be of use. We must get going."\n\nThe moans and miscellaneous sounds of ecstatic intercourse emanate from behind the curtains of the four-poster bed, missing something without my participation I feel, but maybe not in truth.\n\n"Oh Kid, you're so strong... -ah- -ooh-"\n\nMy balls are bluer than Magil's sallow woodblock. Just why did he pull me out, anyway? I feel like I'm missing the greatest chance encounter of my life as the grunts and moans and skin-on-skin rubbing noises intensify, and I'm left to pull on my pants and tunic, and start to nurse the headache that is going to be my closest companion for the next half hour I expect. Curse your wizard hide, Magil! Just because your life is sexless doesn't mean you have to take it out on me.\n\nA mutual cry of orgasmic excitement peals out from behind the curtains for a solid minute...maybe even longer. The way they're going they'll both need another bath after that. Riddel peeks out through the curtains and addresses me.\n\n"Hey stud, I missed you. Why do you have your clothes on?"\n"I missed you worse. We've got to go. Kid, too if you're done with her."\n"Huh, hey Serge how did you get dressed so fast?" Kid asks.\n"What do you mean? Maggie here yanked me out before I could so much as smooch your forehead."\n"Then who's dick was that?" she says, suddenly wide-eyed at what is the improbable only fact remaining.\n"Ooh, hoohoo, it's good to be a switch-hitter, honey," Riddel coos. Miss Viper indeed, the lady who has it all.\n\nKid is abashed and scandalized and still visibly aroused. I still want to fuck her brains out but it will just have to wait.\n\n"Keep the dress, Courage. It doesn't fit my rack anymore. Besides, you'll need it later." Riddel warns, relaxing herself back in her bed in post-coital satisfaction.\n\nKid gets to her feet and senses. We leave the room still dizzied a little from the encounter, perhaps more draining than the fight with the skeleton. I look forward to seeing Kid fight something else in that dress.\n\nJust what did Riddel mean by us needing it? And more importantly, switch-hitter?\n\n"Serge," Kid tugs at my sleeve, "I thought you were in there with us, but I guess I didn't thank you." She pulls my head in and rams her tongue down my throat, finishing with a little bite on my lower lip. "You had better not leave me after that speech or I will pull your penis off and make you blow yourself."\n\n[[Back down the hallway, bluer than ever|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n

I lose my head and fail to suggest anything to Kid for how to approach them. My thoughts turn instead to saving my own hide, whereupon I find purchase on a bureau drawer behind me and sault myself bodily over my cluster of posing attackers. Each manages to attack me during my flight, leaving marks but not the crushing bruises of a full-on blow.\n\nIf I can tackle the captain out of the way I can make my escape. Maybe they'll chase me and Kid and Magil can sweep up the rest. Maybe I'm leaving Kid to a gruesome fate. I don't care at the moment. I just need enough momentum to charge this magnificently clothed goblin captain. I make my charge.\n\nThe captain looks well at ease in the face of my oncoming battle cry, and with a sudden whirl and flair pivots his whole body down and around by a toe and in one motion dodges my charge and slams me on the back of the head with his bludgeon. I crumble under the blow and skid out into the hallway, pain like I've never experienced before tugging sharply through the crater the captain left behind in my cranium.\n\nI can feel just enough to realize that his blow was deep, and blood is welling up in the hallway nearby my gaping head wound. The captain walks up to me casually after a time. Was it minutes?\n\nThe others are with him. They've killed Kid out of my sight. She couldn't step to the organized four of them even with all her skill.\n\n"Battles! Huuah!" the captain cries.\n\nThe goblins form up into a spectacular team-pose, throwing their arms this way and that, some of them standing, others kneeling, the captain with one arm skyward and another pointed at me, he has one leg up with his foot against his knee. From this posture, he addresses my dying form.\n\n"Yer wizard pal wasn't ready for this," he says, holding up a talisman from his neck, "the master's blessing absorbs shadow magic. Lucky me or I would have croaked along with all my battles here. As for you, Liam's killer...I, Captain Skypunch of the Goblin Force welcome you to your grave. You fought well and have died a warrior. We have killed your other number, so you can die with no regrets."\n\nAfter each sentence, he strikes a different pose for the next, always pointing at least one finger at me. When he's finished talking, I'm finished living. They got Kid, too. Damn. If we had made it through this one she would totally have fucked me.\n\nAll care and pain leak out of me as the icy hand of death comes to grips with my corpse.\n\nTHE END

Kid runs and leaps from behind at the four well-appointed goblins who are closing the gaps around me with maces. She lands on the shoulders of one near the middle and reaches a hand to grab the helmet of two others, one in each hand, and from this position attempts to keep them occupied and herself unscathed. She doesn't have enough room or leverage to work with, and it won't be long until one of them cracks his holy water sprinkler into her supple midriff.\n\nFrom this window of opportunity I engage with just one of the demons, who seems to fight with renewed ferocity and vigor now that he's solo, and my own efforts do not go nearly as neatly as I thought.\n\nI duck and weave, a hair's breadth away from feeling the brunt of his persuader. I long ago lost my hat to the battle and am feeling less and less enthusiastic about our chances with this lot. A magical murder spell out of the shadows would be good about now.\n\nThe weaving and posturing goes on for minutes, finally the goblin stomps my foot, locking my dodge, and punches me squarely in the face with his free hand. I'm staggered enough for him to capitalize on the opening and before I know it I'm disrobed, disarmed, and detained by the one goblin I was supposed to kill. Damn.\n\nHe drags me to the middle of the room where another goblin is detaining Kid the same way. She's unconscious and bloodied all over with head wounds I don't think she'll recover from. The goblin captain flops Magil's corpse, steaming with magic, at my feet. I look up at him through a swelling eye.\n\n"Yer wizard pal wasn't ready for this," he says, holding up a talisman from his neck, "the master's blessing absorbs shadow magic. Lucky me or I would have croaked along with all my battles here."\n\n"Huah!" shout the rest.\n\n"Now, where's the knife that killed Liam? It has more work to do."\n\nHe finds my knife on the floor, and then gently slaps Kid to wakefulness. Her groans are small and pathetic. Blood spills steadily and freely from her mouth and nostrils. I've never felt worse in my life. My little sexy angel. How did things get so wrong.\n\nThings get wronger.\n\n"Awake enough, friend of Liam's killer? You have the honor of cleansing the blade that did the deed. It has one more deed to do."\n\nHe nods to the others, and three of them hold Kid's body down still. At this point I think it would take zero of them. She screams as loudly as she can, which isn't very, as the goblin captain violently slices her open at the middle. His ugly surgery accomplished, he lifts out her still-beating heart and shows it to me. I always knew she had a big heart, enough to take the goblin three meaty bites to get it all down.\n\nThe sight horrifies me to the core. I vomit on the floor and on my tunic and hat. I weep bitterly, body flushed with anguish, my mind a moil of the image I just witnessed, struggling to make it unreal.\n\nThe goblin captain has spoken his peace, makes the sign of some pagan deity upon my hanging head and smashes the life from my body in one fell swoop.\n\nTHE END

It's time to put my girth to use. Given the great repair the rest of the manor is in, I have to hope that this particular mechanism was never up to crushing a man of my size to begin with. A fact about which I have my doubts.\n\n"Serge, what are you doing? You'll be crushed," Kid cries.\n"I was crushed the moment we met."\n"You loon! This is no time to be a hero or a cad, you'll be killed!"\n"Better me than all of us."\n\nThe action of a sharpened spike biting into my trapezius fills me with additional doubts and acute hot pain. The descent is slow and I plant my feet, hoping to my trademark fez that I can beat the odds or at least buy Kid some time to squeeze through some opening we hadn't discovered before.\n\nThe weight is a little much, and I accomplish little more than making the machinery groan louder than before. Maybe that's my groaning. Hard to say, really. Also, hard to speak.\n\nThere might be time to try something else.\n\n[[Break through the wall!|tower_busta]]\n[[Ram the door!|tower_ram]]\n

Kid singles out her victim from the goblins, reaching from underneath to grab his groin, then lifting straight upward with all her ample might. The goblin bends over in anguish then flips forward onto the ground, incapacitated.\n\nIn the meantime, I take a few scrapes and blows from the goblin's maces, ripping my tunic, scoring my skin and sapping my courage. They are good at what they do, I'm outnumbered (though less so thanks to Kid) and overmatched. I have it on them in position and size.\n\nI manage to yakuza kick another goblin away from me and towards kid. His ally brings the butt of his holy water sprinkler down hard on my outstretched leg, stunning me sore.\n\nKid grabs the stumbling goblin with the seat of his pants in one hand and the scruff of his neck in the other, and hoists him up in a clean and jerk motion and drops him in the gorilla press slam.\n\nAnd now we've got a system.\n\nWith a wobbly knee and a dagger that's looking increasingly useless, it looks pretty bad for me off by myself. Lucky for me I'm not. The goblins still haven't realized the suplex machine they're dealing with in my beyond-sexy partner, and if we come out of this with only a few lumps, then at least we're alive. Even if I'm the one wearing all the lumps.\n\nI decide to shorten matters and willingly take a blow to the ribs so I can clamp down on the mace and try to lock up one of my opponents. Kid comes up behind the other, hooking her muscular arm around his neck and levering him over her sweet hip. She follows him down, crushing the air from his lungs with a forward flip and then choking the rest of his life out.\n\nI aim a meaty fist at the face of the one I have locked up, and press the one advantage I have in a fight. I wipe his brains off my knuckles, my fist aching with pain from the impact.\n\nThere's just the captain to deal with.\n\n[[Toss Kid at the captain|goblin_3_toss]]\n[[Hold on and strike together|goblin_3_strike]]\n

I come to. I'm lying on the cold stone floor looking at the lofted ceiling of the hallway where we finally defeated the giant skeleton.\n\nMagil is nearer than the ceiling. I focus on his face. He's looking down at me with the same non expression as ever.\n\nKid is nearer than that; on her hands and knees, wearing the silliest smile I've ever seen on her ruddy face, her full lips barely not wide enough to contain her churlish glee, tears of laughter still—or perhaps again—welling up at the corners of her eyes joining the specular glistening of sweat from her most recent workout. Wisps of her hair catch the nearby torchlight.\n\nHalf of my face feels sore, along with all of my pride.\n\n"Well well Serge -//snrk//- welcome back to the living. I'd say you've been cold-cocked!" Kid jokes. She seems to be enjoying my pain.\n\nI yet live, and it is a relief. My only relief. I'm ready to put this behind me, just as soon as Kid stops sniggering about it.\n\nAh hell, let her laugh. The sound of it cheers me up a little. A different toss of the dice and she might be crying for grief over my grave...or I over hers. Or crying of laughter over my grave. Either way.\n\nThe thought occurs to me that I may want to rinse the giant mummified penis residue off my face before Kid kisses me.\n\nWhich I have totally earned by now. Probably so has she, at that.\n\nKid gives me a hand up with her sure grip and I dust myself off. We make our way to the room the skeleton was guarding in the first place.\n\n[[This cannot be worth the effort|riddel]]\n

Before we reach the end of the hallway, an incomplete figure appears in the distance and starts ambling our way. Incomplete, it turns out, in the sense that most of the human flesh this poor sod once had has rotted away, and what remains is a skeleton of a man—certainly a man—with no clothes, hope, or pants.\n\nHe begins running at us, silent scream on his skull, clattering bone-on-stone noise from his steps, mummified penis the last remaining non-skeletal vestige of his manhood flopping ungirded distractingly between him. Oh and he has an old rusty sword or something. I hope when I die I have clothes on.\n\nBut that death can come much later, it's time for action.\n\n[[Get him!|skeleton_serge]]\n[[Let Kid get him!|skeleton_kid]]\n[[Let Magil get him!|skeleton_magil]]\n

Armed with the information needed to locate the key to the treasure vault in one of the books in this room, we waste no time in finding the shelves, I just need to remember which one it is...\n\n<<if $bv3 eq 0>>[[The purple one on the bottom shelf|book_purple_bottom]]<<endif>>\n<<if $br3 eq 0>>[[The red one on the bottom shelf|book_red_bottom]]<<endif>>\n<<if $bv1 eq 0>>[[The purple one on the top shelf|book_purple_top]]<<endif>>\n<<if $br1 eq 0>>[[The red one on the top shelf|book_red_top]]<<endif>>\n<<if $bp2 eq 0>>[[The off-red one on the middle shelf|book_pink_middle]]<<endif>>\n[[The purple one on the middle shelf|book_purple_middle]]\n[[The red one on the middle shelf|book_red_middle]]\n[[Oh, shiny!|book_end]]

We keep our marching order: Kid model-walking in front, myself ambling thoughtfully in the middle, and Magil skulking up the shadows of the rear all the way to the end of the hallway.\n\nThe hallway opens up to a massive kitchen, tiled smooth all over, with heavy mixing bowls, cook pots, cutlery, stove tops, kneading surfaces, presentation plates, and much more sundry miscellany the envy of the finest dining establishments of the age. All in pristine condition and organized by size and utility, then alphabetically.\n<<if $kitchen eq 0>>\n\nMy mental inventory gets as far as cee for 'colander' when Kid takes note of a breadbox and motions us over.\n\nUpon closer inspection, it is in fact a mouse caught in a humane cage trap. To our surprise, the mouse begins to speak!\n\n"Help me, young man. I am not a mouse but was turned into one by magic. If you free me from this cage I can return to normal."\n"Aw, poor little guy. So cute and helpless. We should let him out," Kid decides.\n"You don't mind that he called you a young man?"\n"Goes to show how much you can get away with when you're cute, eh Serge?" Kid replies, slapping my ass playfully.\n\nWe could free him.\n\n[[Let him out|kitchen_free]]\n[[Don't let him out|kitchen_cage]]\n<<else>>\n\nWe've been here before, and there's nothing interesting left. Especially because this is only the kitchen and not, say, the larder. Not so much as cooking sherry or even hogfat here, let alone anything to snack on. Except Kid of course. I could eat her right up.\n\nShe seems to have noticed my hungry expression and is meeting it with a rueful look of her own, so perhaps it is time to go.\n\n[[Back to the halls|bf_east_landing]]\n<<endif>>\n

Going east down the crushingly opulent hallway, there's a door on our right, and others further ahead. I suppose we could go back to the terrace also.\n\n[[Try the door|Clock_Store]]\n[[Press on east|east_hall_1f]]\n[[Turn back west|terrace]]\n

Kid rams her fist down the nearest cat's throat, against all intuition an effective move, and lifts her arm, cat and all, to lower a swinging clothesline on a second cat, toppling the pair of them in a choking, mewling heap.\n\nI raise my arms to block against the charging force of my animal attacker, who to my chagrin is neatly joined by four or five of his starving companions.\n\nThe weight of cats crushes me to the ground as I struggle to keep the panoply of snapping jaws at bay. They seem to have melded into one flowing, biting mass across my arms and shoulders. My one relief in this maneuver is that this is so many the fewer who are attacking Kid. Pain overcomes all other sensation and I scream, rolling this way and that in an instinctive move to quash a fire.\n\nThis does little to quash the inferno of animal viciousness that is upon me. Toward my lower quarters I feel more have joined the dogpile. Catpile.\n\nThat's got to be all of them now.\n\n[["Kid, run! Save yourself!"|CF_Arg]]\n[["Help!"|CF_Arg]]

I twist myself sideways and out of the way of a coordinated pair of massive overhands from the two magnificently arrayed goblins who are still attacking me. One of their holy water sprinklers catches a length of hosiery that was still clinging to me, and improbably wraps itself up with the other mace.\n\nWhile the goblins attempt to get their maces untangled, I find my way to stabbing one up through the chin, giving him a new point of view in the form of the tip end of my dirk.\n\nThe second trips with the slumping weight of the first, unable to artfully pose his way to freedom before I can stomp squarely on his face, bending his helmet in around his skull and splashing his blood and brains out on the floor.\n\nI look up to see Kid counting down a goblin's vertebrae by rolling german suplexes adjacent to the second goblin who is a hot mess of magical darkness, the work of Magil who stands shadowboxing the captain with his scythe. Where the hell was Magil keeping that thing, anyway?\n\n"I can't use my magic on this one," Magil calls to me, still neutral to the heat of battle.\n\nKid finishes stuffing a goblin's head down his neck and pick her up, her sure, slender hand in mine, the sweat of her workout giving her whole body a satiny sheen.\n\nIt's not over yet.\n\n[[Toss Kid at the captain|goblin_2_toss]]\n[[Hold on and strike together|goblin_2_strike]]\n

"What are Kid's dimensions? You know, bust-waist-hip, blood type, the works."\n"Oi! Serge!" Kid squawks, jabbing me hard in the side.\n\nThe pain of the jab and all my other usual sensory perception almost immediately gives way to other, amazing knowledge. The bust in the mirror opens its mouth and I begin to hear a hissing, washing noise that blots out everything else, I stop hearing it as noise and begin to perceive it as the language of thought alone, filling my brain with more technical facts about Kid than I knew could exist as facts. I was perhaps greedy in asking for 'the works.'\n\nThe moment lasts and lingers, I feel reality tugging me back, the language of thought buzzes and fades into noise. I am suffused with every measureable fact about Kid that ever was or will be. Holy shit.\n\n"Serge! I thought we lost you, mate," Kid addresses me from overhead, "your eyes rolled back in your head and you started muttering numbers really fast."\n"Eighty-eight."\n"Wha?"\n"Centimeters. Your brassiere is too small for you by two centimeters. You should have an 88."\n\nKid recoils from me in shock, clasping at her breasts. The pain of reality begins to reassert itself on my consciousness. My back and butt and the back of my head feel sore. I must have collapsed stiff. My erection is so painfully firm it feels permanent. Knowledge is a hell of a thing.\n\nI get myself up, still in conference with the mirror who seems content to relay information to me in any number of ways, even if those ways floor me bodily. Kid can do a one-armed pullup. She is in the 94th percentile for human decency. I need to focus on my next question.\n\n"Kid, did you know your civet index is 1.02?"\n"What the hell does that mean?"\n"I don't know."\n"Youer kinda scarin' me, Serge. Are you feeling ok, mate?"\n\n<<if $vault eq 0>>\n"Uh, I guess so. What else should I ask about?"\n"Ask it where the Frozen Flame is."\n"Alright," I turn to face the mirror, "show me the Frozen Flame."\n\nThe mirror's image nods and silently fades into black from center, where a red light begins to spread out in an array of faceted magnificence, alighting my face with every tint and shade of red that exists. It is the real thing, atop a pedestal somewhere in the mansion. I guess I should have been more specific but I was worried at what could happen.\n\n"We're on the right track," I tell Kid, "I think we have to explore around some more and maybe I can conjure up specific questions."\n"Why not ask for the whole thing?"\n"I got a taste of what it's like to not be specific with this thing, and now I know how many times your heart beat up until the time we met and how many crickets you've ever eaten. I'm nursing a headache and my dick won't stand down. I'm going to be specific from here on."\n\nKid momentarily lowers her gaze and then meets mine again with a rueful grin on her face.\n"So, ah," she says coyly, half-closing her eyes at mine, "you sure that's not for some other reason?"\n\nShe then slaps me on the ass with one-fifth her full force, still plenty enough to be painful and thrilling, especially with the state my whole backside is in.\n\n"We should get moving. There's nothing else here," Magil dictates. I'd say he's a killjoy but by the same token that I have no idea where I'd sleep in this place, where the hell would I lay anyone out?\n\n[[Back to the hallway|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<else>>\n\n"Yeah," I turn to the mirror, "Okay, next question: where in this manor can we find the key to that treasure room we came across earlier?"\n\nThe mirror obligingly fades from center to show a vision of a room with books. An unfamiliar goblin places a purple book on the middle shelf. I can see a painting on the wall with purple roses surrounding a woman eating a peach. I take it the book that goblin put away is the one we want.\n\n"BE WARNED, MANY BOOKS LEAD TO PERIL."\n\nI rub my temples. The image of the speaking goddess in the mirror fades away.\n\n"Huh, it's gone," I spout without thinking, my head still throbbing.\n"We may be able to summon the Mouth of Truth somewhere else if we need. It is not bound to this place alone," Magil recites as from a handbook of whizbang magical tchotchkes.\n\nI keep rubbing my temples.\n\n"The key to the treasure room is in a book. I know which."\n"Awright, Serge!" Kid jumps up and smooches me on the cheek. I feel a sudden shock in my pelvic region: a dick too severly strained. The pain is momentary and thrilling.\n<<set $booksee = 1>>\n\n[[We're done here|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>

In fact more than just the randy skeleton's man parts have grown significantly, and he now towers above even me, crackling with purple lightning as he moves.\n\nI have to stop him from getting a good hit in on Kid, so I lunge at him for the cross-body block, hoping my genuine girth is enough to teeter him.\n\nIn fact I do manage to get a body check on him that arrests his attack at Kid. He spares not a moment in grabbing me with his free skeleton hand and slinging me against the wall, as one would an annoying cat.\n\nThe impact wall against my back throws aching pain all over my body and fills my woozy vision with stars. I suppose the firm, bony grip didn't feel that much better.\n\nI cough meekly and wetly, in no rush to note the composition of my expectoration. But yes, probably blood in my phlegm. I note.\n\nKid isn't doing much better. She fails to completely tumble away from his next overhead smash with what I now note is a club and not in point of fact a sword. Her leg is pinned for a moment to the ground and she groans—bravely in the circumstance of having one's calf smashed—from pain and ire.\n\nThe huge, virile skeleton is doing a rather efficient job of keeping us away from whatever is at the end of the hallway.\n\n[[Lurch at his legs|big_skeleton_victory]]\n[[Try again to get him about the middle|big_skeleton_victory]]\n[[Tactical retreat|big_skeleton_retreat]]\n

The intent and articulation of my yelp scramble to nonsense as I am overcome with pain and manage to emit only howls of agony in place of other, likely more meaningful sounds.\n\n"Serge!" Kid screams, sparing my symphony of pain a rest measure of wist for the happier occasion where this sensation might not drown out all other concerns and I might be able to enjoy hearing the tenderness in her voice and rise to the occasion in appropriate measure to it.\n\nThree hundred pounds of wild animal make all such expansive feelings impossible, and the rest measure ends with a stray thought that I might never achieve an erection ever again.\n\nA sudden, icy burn suffuses my senses as the air cracks above me, an orgy of noise followed by the vacuum of its absence. The weight of violent action has lifted from me, and after the split second I realize I am covered with the fine pulpy slurry that is all that remains of my attackers.\n\nSome of it got on Kid as well.\n\n<<display 'zorch'>>

I arise as quickly as I can, bursting out of the chest covered in spent knickers and panties, trophies of Lord Lynx's various sexual conquests over the years, some sticking to my exposed skin where I had been sweating from the stuffiness.\n\nWithout a moment's hesitation I lunge at the nearest of the goblin squad with my knife, not a good match for his holy water sprinkler, but as he's only the size of a normal big human, I have a mass advantage on him and press it. His trained reflexes are not fast enough for all of Serge Grossfest flying at him covered in panties, and my knife finds a new home at the base of his neck by the collarbone, drenching me in his vital blood and veiling his eyes with darkness.\n\nI cannot be so lucky with the rest of the squad, whose trained reflexes are now training themselves on me.\n\n"That bastard's killed Liam," cries the captain, "crush him!"\n\nThe captain is a goblin, terrifyingly, about my size, bedecked in bespoked serpentine weave minimail in moire pattern, burnished to a high shine and webbing the fitted, appointed thirteen-point tempered plates of high guard armor that constitute his greaves-to-collar appearance. The tabard frocking his armor has curlicue brocade piping in red and off-red for a depth effect that makes it look more three-dimensional than it is, and bears an emblazoned logo of a coat of arms unique to his squad in my experience. The plates are also trimmed with deburring edges, which are bolted in place with pressed steel skull heads that catch the leftover flux grease to appear darker than the rest of the metal. Each of the goblins wields a braided-end steel holy water sprinkler with triweave oiled leather grip and custom studding to fit their individual hands and styles. They move as a team, attacking and retreating with motions practiced in tandem, and as they reposition their magnificent accoutrements they seem to always strike a pose no matter what they're doing.\n\nThe poses also work in tandem with one another, and it's everything I can do to keep from being crushed and bludgeoned to death by just one of them, let alone the whole squad of five. Or four now, since Liam isn't coming back. Five including the captain, maybe, but he's watching his battles work on me.\n\nDuring these few breaths, Kid has emerged from her crawlspace and composed herself for grappling action. Animal lust serving to increase her ferocity rather than the opposite. She's suggestible in this state, and anyway I think she'd do my bidding no matter what it was on account of my heroic sneak attack. Or maybe because I'm still covered in a collection of women's undergarments. I'm not spending a lot of energy thinking about it while I try not to get crushed.\n\n[["Take on the captain, I'll take these four."|goblin_cap]]\n[["Take one of them off me."|goblin_3]]\n[["Take two of them off me."|goblin_2]]\n[["Distract them, I'll pick one off."|goblin_1]]\n[[Forget about giving Kid orders and run.|goblin_0]]\n

The dangling grossness of our skeletal assailant mentally disarms me, and I stand stunned and perplexed a moment.\n\nTo begin with, he is a monster of dark design I have only heard whispered as legend on the lips of terrified men: the living dead, surely not alive and surely moving.\n\nAnd then there's his total lack of modesty.\n\nNone of this causes even a split second of hesitation in Kid, and before I know what's going on she's jumped at him full force with a flying armbar, wrenching him to the ground with her superior weight and strength.\n\nWith the skeleton on the ground and his sword arm in her hand, which it turns out he had been using to hold a club and not technically a sword, Kid arches her back, flexing her whole body at once and pulling his skeletal arm off, club and all.\n\nKid then tumbles to a three-point stance, rushes in screaming and drops an elbow on his ribcage, splintering it. His skull bounds away from the impact and rolls to my feet. The dead man is having a poor time of things.\n\nI stomp on the skull, bashing it to chips and teeth.\n\n"Nice work, Kid," I state in my most genuine tone.\n"Thanks, mate."\n\nSomething about the combat took a lot out of her. Kid's porcelain skin is shiny with sweat and her heaving bosom is...well...heaving. Her face is flushed.\n\nI hold out a hand to help her up; she's still as light as ever. So much fight in such a small package.\n\n"Are you okay, Kid?"\n"M'fine...Serge...jus..."\n\nKid slumps over on me, going limp. Her back is even slicker than the rest of her sweaty body, and as I draw my hand away I can see the blood. She must have slammed the back of her head against something in the melee.\n\nDamn it! If I hadn't been so distracted by that duder's dangling dork Kid wouldn't have had to do all the work.\n\nI've got to help her.\n\n[[Ask Magil for help|kid_down_magil]]\n[[Look for help elsewhere|kid_down_help]]\n[[Set her down. She needs a rest.|kid_down_rest]]\n

We come upon a landing where to the left are a double set of ornate oaken strongdoors relieved in brass filigree floral patterns with rivet heads carved into the shape of roses. A lush, red ochre lacquer stain decorates the wood surface evenly all over, thick as enamel and uniform as Kid's soft porcelain skin. Ahead of us in another direction are dangerous looking stairs leading up.\n\n[[Try the door|treasure_vault]]\n[[Risk the stairs|torture_stairs]]\n[[Head back|Clock_Store_w]]\n

Kid catches a cat's neck in the pinch of her muscular arm and wheels to crush its skull against a nearby tree trunk. A sickening thud suggests the cat no longer has teeth or ideas as the impact dislodges the thing's right eyeball with enough force to sever the optic nerve, sending the macabre marble on a moonlight voyage whose ultimate end I suppose it does see coming.\n\nRecalling my own unfinished study of magic from long ago and snap-realizing that spells to charm nubile human women and clean my clothes to a sparkle will be ill succor in the current commotion, I reach my offhand to withdraw a flask of spirits.\n\nWith a flip of the wrist, I shake out a dram of the liquid stuff of magic into the eyes and face of my bestial assailant, who rightly tumbles aside and claws viciously at its own face and eyes, rending itself with deep gashes in the vain hope of digging out the burning sensation with cutting force.\n\nIt will continue to mutilate itself, and even if it survives the self-inflicted cuts, it is soon to be dead either to infection from the nasty claws it keeps, or cannibalized as a lesser survivor of the cats' attack on us.\n\nKid completes a hip-toss, launching her attacker toward a nearby tree branch and toward certain paralysis at the parabola's end.\n\nAs she stands to catch her breath, I notice both the scrapes across her supple body slowly oozing her blood across her arms, chest, and midriff, and also the cat running rapidly from behind her.\n\n[[Block it!|CF_Tackle]]\n[[Stab it!|CF_Shank]]

The door at the end of the hallway is composed of cherry boards interlocked with such mastery that the whole door looks like it was cut from the grain of one massive tree. Countersunk circular insets of carved roses spangle the door in a hexagonal pattern. Each one is about the size of a kingdom coin. A symbol of wealth and...\n\n<<if ($riddel eq 1) and ($statueknow eq 0)>>\nWe've already had a good look around this room, and while I appreciate the decor, there's nothing for us here at the moment.\nDame Riddel Viper sleeps soundly in her bed. I'd love to go join her but we simply haven't the time.\n\n[[Back out of here|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($riddel eq 1) and ($statue eq 1)>>\n\nDame Riddel Viper sleeps soundly in her bed.\nShe's been mighty fine to us and mighty fine in general and I'll be sure to come back and see her sometime when this is all over. I'd love to go join her right now but we simply haven't the time.\n\n[[Back out of here|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($riddel eq 1) and ($statueknow eq 1) and ($statue eq 0)>>\nThe door swings open easily—it doesn't seem to lock or even latch—to reveal a well-lit bedroom of fashionable make. From left to right there are standing screens in floral pattern, painted silk drapeaus of stately looking birds, a hatrack with bonnets and other styles of women's hat, no two alike, a legged shelf of knitting and sewing materials, a door like the one we just kicked open, a four-poster bed and nightstand, a bust-sized statue of the buttocks of a man and his erect penis that goes from mid-thigh up to navel, on top of which is a pot with a spray of cattleyas.\n\nI remove the orchids and hoist the buttocks up for a closer look.\n\n"I think this is what we're looking for," I state.\n"Ick. No accountin' for taste. Let's get this over with, eh mate?"\n\nRiddel wakes up and peeks her head out from behind the curtains of her four poster.\n\n"Can I help you, stud?"\n"We're going to borrow your butt portrait, if that's okay."\n"That old thing? I'm bored with it. You can have it for all I care."\n"Much obliged, ma'am."\n"Ooo, stud, call me Riddel if you dare to call me at all."\n\nMay the time for daring come soon.\n\nFor now, we leave the room, ass in hand.\n\n<<set $statue = 1>>\n[[Back out of here|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>><<if $riddel eq 0>>\n"I'll just use my trademark hullo knock," Kid cracks her knuckles and then yakuza-kicks the door open, ready to start suplexing whatever is on the other side.\n\nThe door swings open easily—it doesn't seem to lock or even latch—to reveal a well-lit bedroom of fashionable make. From left to right there are standing screens in floral pattern, painted silk drapeaus of stately looking birds, a hatrack with bonnets and other styles of women's hat, no two alike, a legged shelf of knitting and sewing materials, a door like the one we just kicked open, a four-poster bed and nightstand, a bust-sized statue of the buttocks of a man and his erect penis that goes from mid-thigh up to navel, on top of which is a pot with a spray of cattleyas, a bed trunk with a good arch to it done in hardwood and bright brass, a reposing chair, a fainting couch, a vanity with extra lamps, and a chestnut bureau on top of which is a small portrait frame with a painting of Lynx. In the nude. I'm beginning to wonder if there are clothes in the various drawers around the room, or if all clothing has gone out of fashion among the cultural elite.\n\nI touch my hat softly, making a personal promise that it will never go out of my fashion anyway.\n\nKid begins an expert examination of the room and all the contents of the containers in the room, rifling with practiced hands.\n\nMagil strikes a pose imitating a human being who is considering something, taking keen interest in the reposing chair and the penis bust. The statue waist?\n\nI can't add much to their expertise of looking around at things, so I do, picking up the bedsheets, taking in the smells. Rich, floral aromas. It's very tidy in here.\n\nI withdraw the topmost garment from a roll drawer under the bed, which is a satin nightie of fine profile and extremely delicate make.\n\n"Mind handing me that?" says a brassy woman's voice from behind me. She's close enough that she barely had to do more than whisper and I can feel the breath of her speech on my neck. Magil has already vanished into the shadows and Kid hasn't noticed her yet.\n\nI turn around slowly to see the gently misted stark naked form of a woman of somewhere between twenty-three and twenty-seven. She's applying a towel to her auburn hair and boring through me with steel eyes. Her body is the pattern from which statues of goddesses are chiseled. Do sculptors carve the nipples? They really should.\n\nI try to decide what is the appropriate thing to say to a drop dead gorgeous naked woman whose room you've just invaded with intent to burgle when you're holding her nightie in one hand and have your thief friend at your back busy making rummaging noises and she's just asked you if you mind handing her that.\n\n"Marry me."\n"Some day, stud. First hand me my clothes. It would be a hell of a courtship if we were both nude all the time."\n"Both..."\n"Ooo, stud-muffin, wouldn't you want to match?" she laughs a few times, covering her shapely mouth. Good, rich laughter. "But seriously give me my fucking clothes."\n"If I do, will you put them on?"\n"That's the big idea, stud."\n"Shame."\n\nShe gives a good smile and laughs a little more. She raises her arms and I slip the nightie over her perfect body. The tiny, invisible soft hairs along her neck bristle under the wind of my breath. My heartbeat increases somewhat. I fail to contain my excitement. There's something especially thrilling about being caught.\n\nKid seems to disagree, and emerges from the midst of this woman's possessions to stare like a deer under a wolf's gaze at the goddess.\n\nShe's somewhat taller than Kid, bustier, and nowhere near as muscular. I feel intimidated for Kid.\n\n"Ooo, another visitor. You're even cuter!" she walks over to Kid and sizes her up. I need to figure out how to make her say 'Ooo' more. "Hmm," she continues, guiding Kid gently up and out of the chest, "what could we do with you?"\n\nKid looks panicked. This is a problem that she can't simply suplex out of the way.\n\n[[Try to reassure Kid|riddel_reassure]]\n[[Try to talk to the woman|riddel_talk]]\n<<endif>>

"Are you sure it's this one?" Kid asks, hefting the pink book open with her left hand relaxing the spine and drawing to a middle page with her right index finger in such a way as to make me wish my pants were that book.\n<<set $bp2 = 1>>\n\nKid starts reading aloud:\n\n'The mating passion of the two dragons at that moment spiraled wide to include Lessa. A tidal wave rising relentlessly from the sea of her soul flooded Lessa. With a longing cry she clung to F'lar. She felt his body rock-firm against hers, his hard arms lifting her up, his mouth fastening mercilessly on hers as she drowned deep in another unexpected flood of desire...'\n\n"Ge-eeez, can no one in this bloody library keep it in their pants?" Kid asks, searchingly. When she meets my gaze, she rolls her eyes and muses, "I'm asking the wrong man. Now come on, tell me the right one!"\n\n[[Choose again|study_plus_results]]\n

"Magil, tell me you have a magic spell for this!" I plead.\n"I do not," he states, conjuring up not even the least bit of sympathy or any other emotion, "but I could ease her suffering with a quick death."\n"Jeez, she's not that far gone...just...I don't know. I'm out of my element here."\n\nI hold Kid close and wrack my brain trying to come up with something useful. I sea of emotion tosses my mind around, getting in the way of my progress. Rage at Magil for being so impervious and so useless. Anguish at the thought of losing Kid before we ever fucked. Animal pleasure at holding her body against mine, no matter what condition it is in. Terror at the sight and slippery feel of so much of her blood.\n\nRage.\nAnguish.\nPleasure.\nTerror.\n\nAnd then an idea occurs to me.\n\n"Magil! You're always babbling when you cast your murder spells, right?"\n"Many powerful magicks require oral incantations," he avers.\n"So pick the nastiest spell you got and say it backwards at her."\n"That is profoundly stupid."\n"Please! Kid is dying in my arms here. What's the worst that could happen if you try?"\n"The intellect of man has not evolved to the point where it is capable of conceptualizing the lingering shadow of the worst that could happen if I try."\n"Magil, please! It will work."\n"Fine. ATATAM ANUKAH!"\n\nThe characteristic magical glowy stuff appears all over Magil for a second and then is gone. Kid tenses her body, opens her eyes wide and inhales sharply.\n\nMagil raises his brow one-tenth of an inch, for him an exaggerated gesture of shock.\n\n"Wha's all this then? Serge! Put me down," she says in a huff.\n"I thought I lost you," I admit, trying not to sound how I feel, "Magil did a magic killing spell in reverse."\n"That...could not have worked. It's impossible," Magil stutters.\n\n"No matter, eh mate? I'm here an' fit as a fiddle," Kid says, flexing her arm, which she then uses to clutch her forehead as she recoils somewhat from dizziness. "I just need a mo, mates."\n\nKid has a seat and rests. Magil stares into the distance pondering the magical mysteries of what just happened. I sit and try not to beam at Kid for being so brave and beautiful and alive. I fail.\n\nWe each recover from our stupors and head on down the passageway to the room the skeleton was guarding.\n\n[[This could not have been worth it|riddel]]\n

I hold Kid's hand in mind after hoisting her up and we charge to the goblin captain, intent on giving him the double-clothesline. He backs away from one of Magil's scythe swings and in the same motion ducks under our clothesline while also tripping me.\n\nI stumble into a nearby wall-mounted keepsake box, smashing it open and giving my head a strong bump that starts bleeding. I rejoin Kid and Magil in the fight. This goblin captain fights like a devil, nimble beyond what you would expect was possible decked out as he is in full plate and wielding a heavy holy water sprinkler. He's nonetheless giving the three of us a run for our money.\n\nIt's almost like he's specifically trained at fighting multiple opponents from all sides and ranges, every time I think I have my opening to stab him, he ends up tossing me aside with half a motion, or counter-swinging his mace to ward me off.\nKid can't stick to him, either. She tries for a hammer lock only for him to slide around and hip toss her. He turns her attempt at a straight hurricanrana into a power bomb. He accepts a german suplex only to flip around and land on his feet, still fending me off and spacing himself off from Magil's scythe.\n\nI don't know where his energy comes from, either. The rest of us are tired and ready to start making mistakes and giving ground. Much more of this and he'll have the three of us lined up to bash our brains in all at once. Magil's scythe is giving him the hardest time.\n\n[[Keep at him in the hope that we do better|goblin_2_captain]]\n[[Sacrifice myself to save the others|goblin_2_sac]]\n

Without waiting for a second or third opinion, I make a dash for the limerick-bearing wall, hopeful that its foulness has eaten through the stone somewhat. With shame, maybe.<<set $tower = 1>>\n\nThere's a crunching pain all over my head, neck, shoulders and arms as the blocks of the wall—to my surprise and thrill—give way, letting me out into the cold night air.\n\nA lurching feeling overcomes me as I realize the dirty stones are my companions in open freefall and that the stairs leading up here were diabolically steeper than they looked.\n\nMy flared pant hem catches on something overhead, and I hear an incredible ripping sound as my bottom half falls out of my trousers, barely catching on the other pant leg hem, yanking painfully about my right ankle. My loose-fitting tunic falls off as well, and I but barely catch my hat on its way into the foresty void below.\n\nI dangle for a moment from my ankle connected to the hole I made in the wall by the seat and legs of my pants that formed an impromptu lariat between us.\nI'm nude down to my right foot, have my hat in my hands, and can see my breath as the next nearest sight between me and the myriad dangers below, not least of which is the ground itself bidding fair to suddenly rush up at me.\n\nAs if I weren't exposed enough already, I can hear Kid cackling from above. I look up at her, dangling from her fingertips about the outside of the tower, for her a pose as comfortable as any other. Magil—the cheating asshole—calmly floats nearby as if the whole thing were no big deal.\n\nHer tinkling laughter peals out for minutes until she finally calms down enough to say, "Way to go, Serge, snk, I would never av thought of throwing all my clothes at the problem. At this rate I'm gonna die larfing."\n"That would be a pity after I just saved all our lives. Could you give me a hand perhaps? It's cold as a witch's teat out here and I can't feel my foot."\n"An haul yer whole arse up myself? With whot exactly?"\n\nI rue the mansion designer who ever dreamed up the idea of a tower suspended off the side of the manor by staircase-buttress alone. Being topside-down isn't helping my perspective on the situation, and my complaints to Kid were not idle, though I chose to leave out the description of where my exposure to the elements had gripped me most fearsomely.\n\n"Awright, Serge. I av an idear," Kid calls from above, making my heart sink. I guess rise, technically.\nA Kid brand idea nearly always ends in disaster, which on most other nights would be a charming distraction, but which now has more...gravity, say.\n\nKid grabs my trousers near the top and loops her arm around.\n\n"Serge, we're gonna swing you to the wall. Get set to grab somethin'"\n\nLeft with no choice, I begin to sway my dangling, aching body in rhythm with Kid's swinging. As I get closer to the outer manor wall with each pass, I plan my grip at a ledge and despite myself, hope for the best.\n\nBefore the final swing, I move my hat from my hand to my teeth. I'm no Kid at climbing and will need both hands in order to purchase any kind of support. But if I lose the hat, I might just as well let go.\n\nWith one final grunting heave from each of us, I swing fully to the outer wall and find my hold. My foot pops out of my trouser leg and I am at long last completely naked but for the hat in my teeth. The stony wall is somehow, perversely, even colder than the frigid night air.\nI hoist my petard up through the manor window whose sill it seems I have found my fingerway towards, and, mercifully, the window has no lock and opens easily to the pressure of my naked forearm.\n\nI lay spread eagle at the base of those accursed stairs with my hat on my crotch, panting from the effort, glad of the warmth of anything at all, which in this case is the light of the hallway torches.\n\nStill snickering from the whole caper, Kid nimbly climbs in as if a sheer stone wall were her second home and stands above me, arms akimbo, grinning like a lunatic.\n\nMagil smugly floats in the window and closes it behind him.\n\n"New plan. First I steal some of Lynx's clothes. Then we steal the Frozen Flame," I aver, covered only in the barest way with my fez over my nethers.\n"No need," Magil replies distantly. He outstretches a gloved hand and a fuzzy tingle forms about my body, re-creating my clothes with magic. Tailored.\n\nI erect my aching form and undoff my hat. Kid jumps up to grapple me and plants a smooch on my left cheek and eye.\n\n"That was a right brave fing you did, snrk," she claims.\n"Much obliged," I attempt to say, coughing out a little instead.\n\n[[to the landing|east_hall_1f]]\n

We three soldier on through the labyrinthine wilderness for what feels like hours but is in fact mere minutes. Every new twist and turn past rock and wood reminds me of the aches I wish I could leave behind me but are my seemingly inveterate companions.\n\nI rest my gaze again on the most attractive sight available: Kid's perfectly poised and gently swaying hip motion, and I let my mind wander to the narrative framework of our mission.\n\nLord Lynx, whose dastardly name Kid can scarcely invoke without attaching some gruesome epithet, lives in Viper Manor deep within the bowels of this forest primeval, where he serves as despotic plutocrat for the governance of Regionna at large, and the region of town for alternating sessions when he sits on an additional seat to draw double tithe.\nIf the treasure most dear to his heart is the sound of his screaming torture victims, the second most dear is our current goal: a fabulously valuable jewel known as the Frozen Flame, whose glistening facets are said to beam lusty avarice into the hearts of the most saintly of men.\n\nNaturally, many have tried to steal the Flame and, equally naturally, all of them so far have met with graphic, agonizing deaths in the jaws of Snake House. But with Kid's sexy cunning, Magil's emotionless magic and my sweet music, I am certain of our future success.\n\nThe minutes that feel like hours expand into actual hours, and just as my dogs are ready to give out, the forest breaks into a clearing where Viper Manor, as majestic and malefic as any Vampire mansion, reaches its parapets as menacing claws into the night sky, blocking most of the full moon from view and making my balls shrink with chill at the sight.\n\n"We made it!" Kid shouts. "Yer days are numbered, Lynx!"\n"Your days are numbered? I thought we were gonna, you know, rob him" I ask.\n"Oh er, jus' habit I guess."\n"I swear, if you had the hots for me as bad as you have the hates for him, we'd be fucking where we stand."\n"Yea, too bad fer you, eh?" Kid grins, taking a quick measure of my ass with her slapping hand. Here's to hate.\n\nHaving gotten hooting and/or hollering out of our systems, we skulk about the castle perimeter looking for a shapely opening to penetrate. The hedges, thickets, underbrush, overgrowth, and terraced ivy crawlers cover our approach when finally we find a break in the monotony of foliage and land on the landing of a terrace near a curiously unguarded and swung-wide-open well-lit and well-appointed oxford-style bay window with faux-brocade trimming along the top and bottom, and inset faux columns running the trim from top to bottom.\n\nIn the time it takes me to size up the entrance, Kid and Magil are both inside and looking around for where to go next. I infiltrate the opulent entryway behind them and take a look at our surroundings.\n\n[[Let's go west|west_hall_1f]]\n[[Let's go east|Clock_Store_decide]]\n

I check on Kid, who is convulsing on the floor, visibly larger than before. What the hell?\n\nMagic in the tea begins to transform Kid to gargantuan size, shoving Magil, myself, and much of the room's furniture out of her way as she grows. The transformation sounds painful, but leaves Kid giggling. It's still her rich, sweet voice, but deeper and louder. She sits up, now towering over me even with her butt on the floor. She takes up most of the room with her ass alone.\n\nShe looks at me with huge, hungry eyes. The transformation has done something to her, or perhaps this idea of hers was always just beneath the surface, always waiting for the moment when she was larger than I. A relaxation of inhibitions like I felt, writ large. If you'll pardon the pun.\n\nKid reaches over and grabs me with one hand. Her grip is gentle but absolute. Her strength seems to have scaled up in proportion to her size, perhaps moreso. She's the strongest human in the world if she might still be called such. The look of glee on her face is a little disturbing, but also arousing. Something about her increased size has increased her loveliness as well. I'm helpless in her massive grip.\n\n"Teehee, Serge my little pet, you're so cute!" Kid coos, and begins to rub her huge thumb against my groin, thighs, and midriff. She envelops my head and shoulders in a gentle kiss, the humid heat of which is overwhelming.\n"Aah -ah- Kid, -ah-, you, let's -ah-" is all I can get out.\n\nKid bites her lower lip and blushes clear to her expansive chest. An even more mischievous look alights her ruddy countenance and I notice that she's dug her other hand into her pants.\n\n"Ah -ah-, P-Pariceles!" I shout, conscious of the terrifying and thrilling encounter that awaits me unless I get some help, "what was in that tea?!"\n\nBut the old goblin is nowhere to be found.\n\nThe tea must have increased her lust in proportion to her size. Kid pulls down her pants and aims my head at her snatch. Anticipating her next move, I cross my arms and take a deep breath.\n\nThe next few moments are a blur of throbbing, crushing pain, claustrophobic heat and intense weirdness, which is not as to say it is unpleasant, albeit not the way I would have designed a sexual encounter with Kid if I were planning it myself. In a way I try not to think of where I actually am. In another way, I lose myself to thinking of nothing else.\n\nIn and in and in. Her elation continues for longer than I can hold my breath, and I black out.\n\n//[[(go on)|tea_kid_composed]]//\n

I tumble over to where Kid is and in one motion grab and hoist her up onto my back as we roll together out of the way of the noisy smash the skeleton affects bare inches away.\n\n"Serge, what are you doing?" Kid rasps as I give the skeleton some room.\n"I dunno. Saving you. And running. Lot's of running."\n"We need a plan!"\n"I'm open to ideas."\n\nThe impact with his club against the ground leaves the skeleton stunned with the ringing of the metal, giving us a free moment to back up and consider.\n\nKid, with her arms looped around my neck and her boobs pressed hot against my back whispers in my ear, "Toss me."\n"What?!"\n"I said toss me! Throw me at his smug skull."\n\nLeft with no time to argue and faced with Kid's nice ass as she climbs over to the front of me and sets her foot in my hands, I ready my caber toss and launch Kid with all my strength, not really aiming per se.\n\nKid flips once over in the air and scissors her legs around the brute's neck. Keeping her momentum from my toss, she whirls around the thing's cervical vertebrae and wrenches her entire body around in a reverse hurricanrana that pops his monstrous skull clean off.\n\nI'm dazzled by her tour-de-force so much that I fail to notice the skeleton's headless body stumble over toward me. In its bumbling final steps, it levers its massive cock around to dope-slap me, laying me out cold.\n\n//[[(onward)|big_skeleton_slapped]]//

"There you go, little fella," Kid says, reaching into the cage and picking up the mouse and setting him on the kitchen floor.\n<<set $kitchen = 1>>\n\nA majestic transformation sequence that makes the background fade away into star patterns for reasons I don't understand begins, enshrouding the mouse in shimmering pink ribbons of light and evolving its form into that of a creature I have never seen or heard of.\n\nWhen the transformation is complete, the room goes back to normal and in place of the mouse is a creature roughly the shape of a worm, but standing twelve feet tall, with hind legs of a rabbit. It's body looks to be composed entirely of penises, vaginas, cloacae, pseudopenises, and every other kind of sex part found in the animal kingdom.\n\nKid blushes full red at the thought of having touched the thing, and doubles over to heave.\n\nI'm paralyzed by the profound oddity of what I'm seeing, which then addresses us.\n\n"Thank you, mortals. I am the omniphallus, magical creature bearing every sex part. For your generosity I shall grant you one sexual fantasy each."\n"Only one? Man, how do I choose?"\n"You need not tell me, for I have looked into your hearts and granted them in your future," the thing says, writhing all over just from the normal effort of speech.\n\nWithout another word, the omniphallus disappears into a fluidic pop of moisture, leaving a residue around where it had been that I feel is best left alone.\n\nKid stops coughing and rearranges herself.\n\n"So that thing is going to grant you a sexual fantasy in yer future, eh mate?"\n"Yours to, in case you weren't paying attention."\n"Uh-huh. I'm still not doing anal."\n"Rats. Guess it will have to be something else, then."\n\n[[Consider what it might be as we return to the hallway|bf_east_landing]]\n

<<if ($lynx eq 1) and ($talisman eq 0) and ($vault eq 0)>>\nWe move to the end of the hallway and are greeted by a well-lit, double-sized open threshold and no door. The molding and threshold trim have a gap filled with half foot wide relief sculpture depicting stylized humans and animals in all sorts of situations. We've seen this before and I'm beginning to understand the story that's going on with the relief.\n\n"Oi, come on Serge stop starin'" Kid accosts, "what could we find here what he haven't already?"\n"Yeah," I have to admit, still drawn to the artistry.\n\nI guess we turn back.\n\n[[To the hallway|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($lynx eq 1) and ($talisman eq 0) and ($vault eq 1)>>\nWe move to the end of the hallway and are greeted by a well-lit, double-sized open threshold and no door. The molding and threshold trim have a gap filled with half foot wide relief sculpture depicting stylized humans and animals in all sorts of situations. We've seen this before and I'm beginning to understand the story that's going on with the relief.\n\n"Oi, come on Serge stop starin'" Kid accosts, "what could we find here what he haven't already?"\n"I have another question for the statue."\n\nI go find the mirror again and present my case.\n\n"Yeah," I turn to the mirror, "Okay, next question: where in this manor can we find the key to that treasure room we came across earlier?"\n\nThe mirror obligingly fades from center to show a vision of a room with books. An unfamiliar goblin places a purple book on the middle shelf. I can see a painting on the wall with purple roses surrounding a woman eating a peach. I take it the book that goblin put away is the one we want.\n\n"BE WARNED, MANY BOOKS LEAD TO PERIL."\n\nI rub my temples. The image of the speaking goddess in the mirror fades away.\n\n"Huh, it's gone," I spout without thinking, my head still throbbing.\n"We may be able to summon the Mouth of Truth somewhere else if we need. It is not bound to this place alone," Magil recites as from a handbook of whizbang magical tchotchkes.\n\nI keep rubbing my temples.\n\n"The key to the treasure room is in a book. I know which."\n"Awright, Serge!" Kid jumps up and smooches me on the cheek. I feel a sudden shock in my pelvic region: a dick too severely strained. The pain is momentary and thrilling.\n<<set $booksee = 1>>\n\n[[We're done here|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($lynx eq 1) and ($talisman eq 1)>>\nWe move to the end of the hallway and are greeted by a well-lit, double-sized open threshold and no door. The molding and threshold trim have a gap filled with half foot wide relief sculpture depicting stylized humans and animals in all sorts of situations. We've seen this before and I'm beginning to understand the story that's going on with the relief.\n\nBut now is no time to get distracted. I have some hard questions to put to that mirror spirit and some hard knocks to keep me focused on the task.\n\nWe enter the slapdash feng shui of Lynx's quarters and single out the mirror I used before to discover some clues.\n\nI stare at the reverse image of the bust of the goddess and start my inquisition.\n\n"Hey! You! I have some more questions."\n\nNo response.\n\n"What's goin' on, doesn't it work?" Kid asks.\n"The spirit could have moved from this place. We should seek out another mirror paired with another statue," Magil states.\n<<set $seekmirror = 1>>\n\nI guess it's a bust.\n\n[[To the hallway|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if $lynx eq 0>>\n\nWe move to the end of the hallway and are greeted by a well-lit, double-sized open threshold and no door. The molding and threshold trim have a gap filled with half foot wide relief sculpture depicting stylized humans and animals in all sorts of situations. If there's a plot to the story this relief tells, it goes something like \n\n// "John never wore clothes. One day he bent over backwards to take a bite out of a bull. The bull gored him in the taint as a reward. He died with a smile. Jane always wanted to be the mother of a minotaur..."//\n\nAnd so on all the way around. The relief is the only barrier to our entry, so I suppose if you're very ashamed around nude statuary or paralyzed with interest by art, there may as well be an adamantine lock on a tall door across the whole thing.\n\nI'm no prude and I appreciate the artistry of this piece, but I'm not paralyzed and neither is Magil nor Kid, the one fighting his froofrooitude and the other swallowing her sense of scandal. It's good to be a poet.\n\nThe dashingly unguarded room bears a slapdash sense of design and placement. I can't call it a mess exactly so much as a clash of ideas about what a room should look like fought out over years by generals of severe demeanor and talent. I don't actually know from reading it what that would look like. It's a tidy mess.\n\nA coffee table stands porrect out of the wall to my left, paired with a matching one arranged in the usual way but for velvet cords wrapped about the legs on the floor in front of it. Pedestals, pillows, lamps, chairs, tables, stands, and cabinets are strewn about all over; the usual suspects a room might have. As well as more exotic decisions: a mirror with half a frame, buttresses that don't visibly support anything, a declivity in the floor with a glass orb in the bottom, a bust of a generic goddess hewn of three different kinds of stone stacked on top of one another, spidery wires arrayed in a pattern to fill up a gap. The room continues on this way in a long ell shape. If it was my room I wouldn't know where to sleep.\n\nThere's bound to be something useful somewhere in the room. My squad and I have already started the process of dismantling the room to find whatever that something useful is. Although really, that happened without my doing anything and I think that the room technically is becoming more mantled as we go.\n\nKid rifles through drawers, crannies, books, false books, behind wall hangings and underneath whatever she can readily lift.\n\nMagil probes and senses despondently at the more peculiar of the room's objects, of which there are plenty.\n\nSince I can't beat Kid's cunning or Magil's arcanum for searching places for things, I have to instead try to think like the madman who designed this room, where would I keep something of use or import.\n\nI'm Lynx. I'm mad, vain, wealthy, powerful, despotic. The thing that is most important to me is...me. Where do I keep myself?\n\nI look more closely at that offbeat mirror. I look pretty damn good considering how rough the night has been. I adjust my trademark fez and give the mirror a smile. I can see the tristone bust over the reflection of my shoulder. Something doesn't look right.\n\nI look back over my shoulder and then turn full around. The bust isn't facing the mirror, but the reflection of the bust was facing me. I'm no natural artist, but I don't think mirrors work that way. I turn my gaze back to the mirror, where, still, the mirrored bust of the goddess is looking right at me. It begins to speak:\n\n"MORTAL. I AM THE MOUTH OF TRUTH. STATE YOUR QUEST AND ALL SHALL BE REVEALED," the reflection states gravely and steadily. The voice is that of a giant court crier echoing throughout a valley. Stentorian, authoritative, cold and exact.\n"Fuck me sideways!" I blurt out before I fully understand what is going on.\n\nThe reflection of the room fades out from the middle and shows me instead an image of myself and Kid in the nude, crossways on the floor of some meretricious lodging. We look sweaty and spent. It can't really be me because I don't have my hat on.\n\n"Hey wait a minute, if you're some kind of truth-telling-magic-mirror-thing, in what context does what you show me constitute the 'truth' of anything?" I ask adroitly.\n"WHAT YOU SAW IS THE TRUE VISION OF THE DESIRE YOU EXPRESSED."\n"Bullshit," I quip, "where's my hat? I never do anything without it."\n"NOBODY IS PERFECT."\n"I'll try to keep that in mind."\n"YOU WILL FAIL AT THAT QUEST."\n\n"Serge, what the hell is going on?" Kid asks. I figured what was going on would be obvious, how could she not hear it?\n"You didn't hear that?"\n"I heard you and I sawr something happen in that mirror."\n"It said it's the Mouth of Truth, I think I can learn things from it."\n"Why you?"\n"I...guess I turned it on?"\n\nI turn back to the mirror and conjure up a question that will prove to me whether or not this thing has the goods.\n<<set $lynx = 1>>\n\n[[Does Magil have a penis?|mirror_magil]]\n[[What are Kid's dimensions?|mirror_kid]]\n<<endif>>

Despite her asking me to do so, I'm eager to show off carrying this massive sword around for Kid. The Acacian Dragoons must have worked in teams of three at least to wield this thing, or else perhaps it was a training device or a decoration.\n\nOr a joke.\n\n"Just let your humble servant, Serge Grossfest handle this, milady," I intone, giving Kid a gracious and stately bow of mockery before setting to work lifting the sword.\n\nKid snickers at me while I grunt and struggle to get it up, finally levering it across my shoulders with both hands on the pommel. I take a hand off for a moment to adjust my fez and almost lose my balance.\n\n"Don't drop it now, Serge, heheh," Kid smiles at me in mockery, but I can tell she's also impressed.\n"Huf. Hoo. Just what on earth compelled anyone to make something like this?"\n"I know of it," Magil monotones, "Legend has it that Swaggerdick was the severed member of a fallen god, granted by supreme dictum to an order of monks who worshipped him. The monks simply stroked and polished the sword to appease their god, but eventually the evolved into an order of fighting monks, and then fully warrior priests in the name of the Acacian Dragoons. Though their rituals changed, they still kept the sword as a holy relic and used it to christen new members. The man who built this manor was their last captain."\n"So, how do you like the cock, mate?"\n"Not half as much as you, milady. Huf."\n<<set $swagger = 1>>\n\n[[Leave the room|Clock_Store_decide]]\n

Kid shoots me a quizzical glance before charging after the goblin captain, supporting Magil in his efforts.\n\nI duck and dodge and weave, retreating step after step to the goblin squad's inexorable parade of posing prowess. I'm stunned by their stylishness and by the hard blows they land on my body.\n\nThey have me beat in total mass, training, and dare I say it, fashion sense, and I did poorly in thinking I could even distract them while Kid and Magil took on the captain. I have no attention to spare to tell how they're faring in this fight. It is everything I can do to stay alive.\n\nScarcely a minute into the melee and I'm bloodied and bruised all over, having failed to scratch the advancing goblin assault team. I bit off well more than I could chew, and now they're toying with me before the killing blow.\n\n"This is for Liam," one of them cries before burying his mace and his revenge in my skull, shattering it and putting my brains on display.\n\nTHE END

We finally reach the bottom. My heart is racing from overcoming the threat of the stairs. Lynx has no more horrors waiting for me after that descent.\n\nThe Frozen Flame sits atop a pedestal in the center of a room that's large enough and dark enough that I can't tell how big it is or what shape. Just darkness in all directions far enough away from the center.\n\nAnd next to it, grinning, is Lord Lynx himself, snapping up a book and standing up from his former vampire pose in a chair nearby.\n\n"How are you enjoying your book, Serge Grossfest?" Lynx asks, stifling wicked laughter with every breath.\n"Lynx you sunuvabitch! I'm gonna' take you to the woodshed!" Kid cries.\n"And who is this? 'Kid Courage,' huhu, let's see where you've been tonight."\n\nLynx opens the book and begins reading, word-for-word my own auto-diary account of our activities! The very means I've been using to record our adventure has given Lynx perfect information of our invasion.\n\n"So very right, Serge. Do you think the buxom Kid will still want to fuck you after you've delivered her right into my hands? Huhu, looks like you've fucked her over instead! Oh, and I also noticed you never learned how to escape one of these:"\n\nLynx snaps his fingers and encloses us in a Devil's Circle!™ He tosses the book aside, chortling wetly. It looks for all the world like Lynx is holding all the cards. Damn!\n\nKid looks at me and I can scarcely meet her gaze. I never thought I could be so ashamed and exposed. Certainly not after what happened with all the rest of tonight.\n\n"Kid, I'm so sorry."\n"It's awright, Serge. You couldn't av known."\n\nShe laces her fingers through mine. I'm usually opposed to handholding as a rule, but under the circumstances I can't really complain.\n\n"Awf, you people are so //boring//," Lynx yawps, "so sickeningly good to each other through all the hardships I've put in your way. All the shadowboxing and flirting. Maybe if you went and got a room somewhere instead of raiding my house you wouldn't be about to die. The circle's closing in, by the way. Huhu, not even a wizard could escape it."\n\nI look down to see that he's telling the truth. The Devil's Circle!™ is slowly closing in around us. As Lynx carries on his taunting, Kid has been squeezing tighter and tighter. She has strong fingers.\n\n<<if $teaflask eq 1>>[[I remember the tea|pit_tea]]<<else>>[[I have an idea|pit_pee]]<<endif>>

<<if $studybooks eq 1>>\nI've had a look at the books before, but there are plenty of them, so I decide to pick another and see if I can top my earlier find.\n\nI want a better idea of what I'm getting into this time, so I select from among the books that bear titles on the spine one called //Sex and Species//, figuring it as the most raunchy title available.\n\nTo my dismay, it is merely a tome of morphology and anatomy of magical creatures. Or perhaps ordinary creatures. Or both. I'm not a botanist, so I have no idea.\n\nI resign myself to the fate that I must be the lewdness I want to see in the world, and make a mental note, which I guess becomes a physical one in the auto-diary, to someday write that book.\n\n[[All done here|study]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($study eq 1) and ($studybooks eq 0)>>\nI turn my eyes on the bookshelves. As a poet myself, I'm curious to learn what old tomes Lynx keeps around for his own edification and entertainment.\n\nI select one mostly at random, a large, real corinthian leatherbound tome of fine stretched veal vellum pages, finer than I thought vellum could be wrought.\nThe shame of it is that the composition doesn't live up to the container: all it has are these weird shapes and meaningless glyphs mixed with tattoo-style depictions of nude women in various poses. Men, too, I guess.\nTheir positions become increasingly improbable looking as I thumb on and on through the tome.\n\n"Hey Kid," I call her over and point at a pose in one of the later chapters, "you're pretty limber, do you think you could do this?"\n\nHer eyes widen as she takes in the pose. I'd love to watch her try it out, but as it stands we need to get going.<<set $studybooks = 1>>\n\n[[All done here|study]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if $study eq 0>>\nI turn my eyes on the bookshelves. As a poet myself, I'm curious to learn what old tomes Lynx keeps around for his own edification and entertainment.\n\nI select one mostly at random, a large, real corinthian leatherbound tome of fine stretched veal vellum pages, finer than I thought vellum could be wrought.\nThe shame of it is that the composition doesn't live up to the container: all it has are these weird shapes and meaningless glyphs mixed with tattoo-style depictions of nude women in various poses. Men, too, I guess.\nTheir positions become increasingly improbable looking as I thumb on and on through the tome.\n\n"Hey Kid," I call her over and point at a pose in one of the later chapters, "you're pretty limber, do you think you could do this?"\n\nHer eyes widen as she takes in the pose, but before I have the pleasure of watching her attempt, we hear a noise of footfalls coming all too rapidly toward the door. Whether or not we pose as we go, we've got to move.<<set $studybooks = 1>>\n\n[[Hide by the doors|study_hide_door]]\n[[Hide under the desk|study_hide_desk]]\n<<endif>>

"Is this it?" Kid asks, pulling up the book in front of her and spreading it open to caress the pages underneath. Her expression darkens and she hands me the book. "Here, Serge, this is obviously fer you."\n<<set $br3 = 1>>\n\nI have a look at a page:\n\n'There was a poor parson from Goring,\nWho made a small hole in his flooring,\n Fur-lined it all round,\n Then laid on the ground,\nAnd declared it was cheaper than whoring.\n\nA fellatrix's healthful condition\nProved the value of spunk as nutrition.—'\n\n"Eugh, Serge! I don't want to hear anything about the life of a 'fellatrix,' can we just get the right book, please?"\n\n[[I got the gist of it already|study_plus_results]]\n

So I've got to smooth things over with words.\n"Ahem. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Serge Grossfest, common thief and uncommon lover, a poet and minstrel of no small talent, finding himself at a most rare loss for words before present company's loveliness. My svelte companion is Kid Courage, adventurer extraordinaire, suplex machine, peerless cook and erstwhile thief. I was in love with her until several seconds ago."\n"Well aren't I charmed and flattered. I am dame Riddel Viper," she gives a formal curtsy revealing ample informal cleavage, "You're really named Courage?"\n"Y..yeah. That's me, heheh. Call me Kid," Kid forces out.\n"That's sweet of you, Kid. What say you an me make stud here fall in love with you again? Wait 'til he sees you all cleaned up."\n<<set $riddel = 1>>\n\nWhereupon Riddel takes an awkward Kid into the bath and closes the door. The sounds of running water and gentle splashing tinkle out of the room.\n\nAfter a few minutes, Riddel pokes her head out of the bath. "Hey Se~rge," she lengthens the middle vowel sound to two alluringly, "be a stud and get my green thing out of the top drawer over there."\n\nI can't say no, or anything else for that matter, to those silver eyes, and comply with her command directly. I withdraw the only green garment within, a backless, strapless satin dress that blooms at the knees. Single-thread tailoring. Light as a feather. The lady who has it all.\n\nI hand Riddel the dress. She takes it and blows me a kiss from her full, glossy embouchure. I wish she'd blow something else.\n\nA few more minutes pass, and Riddel comes out of the bath with a worried look on her face, closing the door behind her.\n\n"Hey, uh, Serge?"\n"Yes, kitten?"\n"Don't get ahead of yourself, stud. Anyway shut up for a second. Who is Kid to you?"\n"What, uh, I dunno. I look after her. I'm her meat popsicle."\n"Now's no time to be a prude or a pervert, hunk, tell me straight, are you lovers?"\n\nThe question burns my lungs off. What the hell happened in there? I reply with the first thing that comes to mind:\n\n"Uh..."\n\nSmooth.\n\n"Hopeless. Tch. Just get in here."\n\nRiddel takes my hand in hers and we walk up to the bath door.\n\n"Kid, sweetie, we're coming in," Riddel coos.\n"No!" Kid shrieks. I've never heard her so upset. My heart sinks. My balls retreat.\n"I'm bringing Serge in, Kid. He needs to see."\n"...please...no..." Kid sobs, small and pathetic.\n\nRiddel opens the door. A waft of steamy, sweet smelling air splashes my face. Through the mist I see Kid in Riddel's dress with her other clothes on the floor. She's bathed and her hair is all smooth and combed. She sobs into her hands, hunched over turned away from me. The dress does nothing to cover up her back, which draws all my attention away from what should otherwise be genuine enjoyment of the most decorative attire Kid has ever sported.\n\nHer back, distracting from everything else. I see it and realize I've seen Kid in skimpier outfits before, but always with her back covered from shoulder blades to short ribs, and now I understand why.\n\n"Serge. Please don't look at me," Kid cries through her hands, not facing me.\n\n"Kid..." I pride myself on my poetry, you see.\n"Serge, you have to be a man here," Riddel accuses.\n"Yeah. mHmmhm. Kid, who did this to you? How did this happen?"\n\n"I didn't ever want...you must think...I never wanted you to see me like this..."\n"Please, Kid. I'm here and I'm looking at you and I'm listening."\n\nKid fights back her sorrow enough to tell the story of how she once before tried to raid this very manor house, and how she was caught and tortured. Lynx gave her a fresh lash every day. He called it 'teaching the multiplication table.' He got as far as multiples of five. Scars upon scars crisscross her back, everpresent reminder of what it means to cross Lynx, what it means to get caught.\n\nKid grew up learning that any kind of attention was deadly. She had never fully shaken the feeling that no one should ever take notice of her. Meaning one shlub in particular always made her antsy with his constant prurience and inability to take his eyes off her.\n\n"...Geez, fuck, Kid," I'm hitting all the high notes and I'm damn proud of myself for it.\n"Serge...I..."\n"Enough of that," I gather my wits at last, "keep on like that and I'm going to take your last name away. Now you look at me!"\n\nKid steadies her heart and turns in her seat to face me, eyes bloodshot from weeping, full of anger, remorse, pity, revenge, woe and glimmer of sass.\n\n"Good. Now listen up, Miss Courage. I started paying attention to you because I was done with broads who had no fire, who hung on my every word and just wanted to listen to the same songs I had played for them the night before. In you I saw me at my best. Better than that! Here was a brassy chick who would take on anyone or anything, even when she knew she was outmatched, which wasn't often. She had grown up getting the worst of everything and still never gave up. Well now you have the world's worst bard on your side and he's not giving you up for anything, not even this improbably sexy goddess who just gave you a bath.\n\n"You've had a hard life and a harder night. The Kid I know will bounce back from this and remind me that I fell in love with her because she's stronger than I am. Not close. I'd be a lost, lazy coward without you. Think a few dings and dints make me want to trade you in? Forget it. I would still gleefully fuck your brains out."\n\nDuring my speech, Kid stops crying and starts to crack a small smile. Her face looks much better with it on. She rises and puts her hand on her hip, cocking her head to one side.\n\n"Oh ya, Serge? Just when were you plannin' on fucking my brains out?"\n"I figured you were set to cave to my manly charms after another night or so. I was just biding my time for your come-hither. Could have happened any minute. Back there with the skeleton, say."\n"Uh-huh, -snrk- youer manly charms," Kid enjoys a full-bodied laugh at my expense for a minute.\n\n"Heh. Youer too sweet, Serge. An' just the right amount of dirty. How do you like the dress?" she wheels about, lifting her hair so I can see all the lines. It fits her every curve and muscle. My guess is her shoulders are too wide for any of Riddel's other getups. This one is a perfect fit.\n"Stunning. Warms the cockles of my somewheres. But really it only looks good on you because it fits, so the dress I could take or leave. People like yourself oughta consider foregoing clothes and making the world a more beautiful place."\n\nAt that she blushes down to her chest.\n\n"Ooh, stud, you really are a poet," Riddel says, wiping a single tear from her magnificent face, "I oughtta have you come visit me two or three times a night. But then I'd hate for Kid to have to share you."\n"Share him? This louse, pah, Love, you can have him," Kid chuckles, her plucky smile back in full force, still blushing to show she wouldn't give me up for anything either and is in no hurry to share me with this tart. She said all that with her smile. No, really.\n\n"Ooh, so cruel sweetie. And after stud rhapsodized for you. Howabout you both share yourselves with Riddel?"\n\nAnd before either of us knows it, Riddel has grabbed us both up into her four-poster, which is a good fit for all three of us, even though one of us is me. With what little thought makes it to the surface through the pink haze I wonder at why Riddel would have so ubiquitous a bed if not for multiplayer sexual encounters like this. And if that were the case, who were the other players?\n\n[[Start with Kid|riddel_bed_1]]\n[[Start with Riddel|riddel_bed_2]]\n[[Start by watching|riddel_bed_3]]\n

Going west down the crushingly opulent hallway, there's a door on our left, and the terrace further ahead. I suppose we could go back to the stairs also.\n\n[[Try the door|Clock_Store]]\n[[Continue on west|terrace]]\n[[Turn back east|east_hall_1f]]\n

"Serge, we're not some killer squad!" Kid accosts me as I withdraw my knife.\n"Tell that to everyone and everything you've suplexed to get here."\n"That's different! This guy didn't do anything to us and he even helped out. Please, Serge," Kid draws closer to me, "just leave him be. We'll dispose of that rat bastard Lynx and then there won't be any need for mercy killings."\n<<set $catacombs = 1>>\n\nI can see the soft contours of her features outlined in the pale light. I can feel her boobs against my chest. I can smell her sweet fragrance with every sniff. I'm inclined to let her have this one.\n\nI put my knife away and we leave without another word to or from the Acacian Dragoon.\n\n[[Let's get out of here|bf_east_landing]]\n

"Oh, is it this one," Kid responds to my indicating point, drawing the book off the middle shelf with ease. She relaxes it open in her firm, supple grip to find there's not much in the way of words within. Kid reaches into the cavity and withdraws a large brass key with a triune circle pattern for a head and a long red velvet tassel.\n\nShe tucks it into her bra, letting the tassel hang over her breast like a pasty. What we need is a second treasure room.<<set $vaultkey = 1>>\n\nThat accomplished, Kid nimbly tucks the book away.\n\n"Awright, almost there, let's find that Flame," Kid states, punching fist into palm, making the tassel do a little spin.\n\n[[Back out|west_hall_1f]]\n

In fact more than just the randy skeleton's man parts have grown significantly, and he now towers above even me, crackling with purple lightning as he moves.\n\nI therefore employ tactics suited to fighting much large opponents, and try to bowl him over by his pins.\n\nIt's a good charge and an heroic effort if I do say so myself, but the skeleton seems to have as well increased in cunning as in proportion to his other increases, and, keen to my attempt at felling him, fells me instead with a back kick from his massive bony foot, sending me flying clean several feet against the wall.\n\nThe impact of his metatarsals against my chest and soon thereafter the wall against my back throws aching pain all over my body and fills my woozy vision with stars.\n\nI cough meekly and wetly, in no rush to note the composition of my expectoration. But yes, probably blood in my phlegm. I note.\n\nKid isn't doing much better. She fails to completely tumble away from his overhead smash with what I now note is a club and not in point of fact a sword. Her leg is pinned for a moment to the ground and she groans—bravely in the circumstance of having one's calf smashed—from pain and ire.\n\nThe huge, virile skeleton is doing a rather efficient job of keeping us away from whatever is at the end of the hallway.\n\n[[Try for the legs again|big_skeleton_victory]]\n[[Lurch at his middle|big_skeleton_victory]]\n[[Tactical retreat|big_skeleton_retreat]]\n

A few minutes later, I come to. Kid is back to normal size, cuddling at my side, blushing and smiling in satisfaction. I'm drenched in her vaginal fluids. The terror of what just happened to me meets the smack of stench of my inhalations, and I toss my cookies all over the nice rug that I only this moment realize has been here the whole time.\n\nI clear my head enough to think on why Kid's clothes also changed size with her. A total ripoff that compounds my defeated state of mind.\n\n"Are you done?" Magil looks at me as if he got no pleasure, or any other emotion whatsoever, from watching the whole episode.\n\nHe blasts us with a ray of some sort, cleaning us up completely.\n\n"Man, did you always know that spell? That could have come in handy before now, you know."\n"I didn't think it necessary. Come on. We have the key."\n"Yeah."\n\nI rouse Kid, still a little standoffish. She's still in somewhat of a daze. I think we should get back to work before we get too caught up in puzzling out what just happened.\n\nKid is not as content to ignore it. And looks at me scandalously.\n\n"Serge, I dunno what came over me," she blushes deeply, "but, erm, you were really good."\n"As a human dildo? I guess I'll take what I can get."\n\nI give her a friendly pat on the back to relieve some of the awkwardness, and try to ignore the ache all over my body down to my bones.\n\n[[Let's get out of here|bf_east_landing]]\n

I can feel the weight of destiny crush in from all sides as we descend deeper and deeper into what simply must be the final approach of our noble burglary. It all comes down to this. It just had to be stairs.\n\nEven watching Kid's hot ass work on the way down isn't enough to distract me from the fact that I'm on a staircase yet again, almost losing my footing with each step. I can't see the bottom nor the top now and I need a distraction. I decide to strike up some conversation while we go, lest we all forget why we're here.\n\n"So, er, Magil. What's so important about the Frozen Flame, anyway?"\n"It is the crystalline ejaculate of a cosmic being, rife with power that gave magic to humankind in the first place."\n"Whoa sick, seriously?"\n"Have you ever known me to be unserious?"\n"Point taken. Go on."\n"There isn't much more to tell. Few know its true origin and fewer still its potential for harm. It can be rendered into pure energy, tempered into swords, traded as currency or simply put on display. The nefarious ends possible by harnessing its power are infinite. We need to make sure it stays out of hands like Lynx's before he discovers it is anything more than a beautiful curio."\n\nEntertaining as that was, I was hoping to get all the way to the bottom with that story, so I decide to strike up conversation with Kid.\n\n"So, er, Kid."\n"Not now, Serge, we av to be quiet. We're too close now to take any risks."\n"Okay then whisper to me."\n"Serge! Shh!"\n\nResigned to take the remaining stairs in silence, I hum to myself. It's a long way down.\n\n//[[(go on)|pit_circle]]//\n

I awaken what feels like a few moments later, first vision, then ringing, then swelling ache fills my consciousness and I realize that the feral cats are gone, replaced by a gory mess, dispatched by a murderous magic spell that could only have come from one person.\n\n<<display 'zorch'>>

This is the west landing at the base of the stairs to the basement, we can take the west passage to another split in the hallway, go east to the stone archway, or I suppose enjoy the thrill of barely-contained menace in climbing the stairs.\n\n[[Go west|bf_riddel_lynx]]\n[[Go east|bf_stone_arch]]\n[[Up the stairs|bf_stairs_up]]\n

Trusting to my girth more than my skill, I launch myself at the cat that's charging Kid, heedless of the consequences. The animal seems to multiply and I am of a sudden beset upon by a greater weight of cats crushing me to the ground, snapping and slavering.\n\nIn fact the ground beneath me is the remains of two other beasts who were crushed by my initial tackle and slip. The others above maintain their ferocious effort in spite of this, at least one of which I must have taken with me, clamped to my arm before the charge.\n\nKid's lithe arms suddenly appear amid the melee to enwrap one of the beasts about the middle and lift it off of me in a crushing German suplex that Kid flips around and continues for the rolling German suplex back into the catpile that is making mincemeat of my arms and body, scattering them and knocking the wind out of me with a blow from the suplexed cat's head that feels like being slugged with a bag full of fists.\n\n"I think that's the last of them." Kid says between gasps.\n\nThe rush ends. Calm nightsounds resume. Kid shoves two or three cat corpses away from her atop my ragged body. Her hot, sweaty form pressed against mine is a moment I enjoy, but all too soon ended as Kid in getting up accidentally plants her palm in my ballsack, crushing it against the cold earth.\n\nMy body somehow summons up the energy to fold in the middle and double over on my side in additional, acute, thrilling pain.\n\n"Oh God! Serge! I'm sorry, mate." Kid's worried, mortified tone cuts right through the pain. I cough into cackling with pain, delight, and even a little mirth at the wild circumstance of almost being ballcrushed after so deadly an encounter with bestial menace.\n\nWith Kid's assistance I hoist myself up and manage to walk back toward the path and the manor that was our original destination.\n\n//[[(onward)|CF_Victory]]//

"Why have you stopped?" Magil tonelessly inquires.\n\nWhat little of Magil's face that remains visible beneath the silly magical-man hood he is never without suggests to the casual observer that he has never felt anything in his life and you aren't about to make him start. He now regards Kid and me with the same expressionless countenance, which nonetheless somehow suggests minor annoyance and odor.\n\n"There's something here, er, nearby in that thicket," Kid offers. "I think we should check it out before we get to the manor."\n\n"Much disaffection as I have for how you choose to aimlessly fritter away your inexorable march towards your doom that you call your time on this Planet, we have a mission and a goal and the time until dawn to accomplish it. Go," Magil suggests.\n\n[[I agree with Kid|CatFight]]\n[[I think Magil has a point|Castlevania]]\n

The hallway splits here. To the east is the stairs, which I am loath to try again, counting myself lucky to have gotten through them once. There are corridors north and west as well.\n\n[[Go west|lynx]]\n<<if $riddel eq 0>>[[Go north|skeleton_guard]]<<else>>[[Go north|riddel]]<<endif>>\n[[Go east (not recommended)|bf_west_landing]]\n

We skulk through the manor hallways and arrive at a crossroads of sorts. We can return to the atrium, or take the hallway in three other directions.\n\n[[Go west to the atrium|atrium]]\n[[Go north|catacombs]]\n[[Go south|kitchen]]\n[[Go east|tea]]\n

"Oh, is this the one?" Kid asks while picking down the book and gently opening it in her firm, supple grip.\n\n"Nah, just looks like a normal book. 'cept the pages are all blank, see?" Kid tilts the open book to aim the pages at me, which start out blank but begin to glow subtly.\n\n"Kid! Close that book!" Magil interjects, sounding the tiniest bit frantic, for him a full-blown panic.\n\nBut before she can react, deadly rays spray forth from the book, blasting me in the face and neck. The pain of my death is brief to the point of nonexistence, and my headless body flops to the floor.\n\nTHE END

The waist is a good fit for the length of mounting, heh, pedestal remaining. It's kindof a tight squeeze for me back here, and I have a bit of trouble getting the angle right. Holding this large stone object is awkward.\n\nIt slips from my hand and the penis breaks off.\n\n"Shit!" I'm glad at the opportunity to use one of my catchphrases.\n"Serge, you buffoon, now look what you did," Kid whines at me, withering me.\n"Uh, man, geez."\n\nI frantically try to repair the damage, bumping my head a little and accomplishing nothing of use. A wild idea occurs to my frantic mind.\n\n"I've got it. Kid! Quick, strike a pose or something."\n"Do what? What are you on about?"\n\nWithout waiting for her to understand what I'm on about, I run the litany of close encounters with Kid's animal fineness through my mind, pre-gaming and un-withering for the task at hand. I imagine the statue lady as Kid, taking me most of the rest of the way. I drop my drawers.\n\n"Ew! Serge, what the hell!?"\n"Shut up and don't ruin this. Come slap me!"\n"What?"\n\nI thrust my half-cocked cock into the statue, still picturing her as Kid, aware of and ignoring the cognitive dissonance of seeing her approach and hoping this trick does the trick. I'm glad this is the marble and not the granite piece. She still chafes badly.\n\nKid slaps me across the face, hard, and I appreciate it fully.\n\n"Aa-aaahah," I cry, not bothering to check my elation.\n\nOut of respect for my act of carnal improvisation, the mirror image of the naked statue I'm filling with my throbbing member forms the same head as I saw before and addresses me.\n\n"MORTAL. I AM THE MOUTH OF TRUTH. STATE YOUR QUEST AND ALL SHALL BE REVEALED."\n"Right, -ah- you've got some 'splainin to do about that fool's errand you sent us on."\n"IT LOOKS LIKE YOU HAVE MORE EXPLAINING TO DO THAN I."\n"Screw that! This, I mean -ah- we need to know how to get to the rest of the manor."\n"I HAVEN'T FELT THIS GOOD IN AGES."\n"-ah- just, would you -ah-"\n"I SHALL GIVE YOU A SPECIAL GIFT FOR YOUR EFFORTS. THE REST OF THE MANOR SHALL OPEN TO YOU, BUT I SHALL CLOSE."\n\nBy which she meant two things, first, that her image fades from the mirror, presumably not to appear before us again, and second, that she can animate the statue, closing in tightly about my member.\n\n"Gwaaaah" I cry in bestial pain and elation.\n"Serge! Are you okay?" Kid braces herself against the lithophilia to ask.\n"Aha -ah- ah, I'm spent. And -ah- aw shit."\n"What is it?"\n"I'm stuck."\n"Well geez, Serge, can't you lower your mast?"\n"Not with you around, toots."\n"This is stupid," Magil admits, then shoulders his way in front of Kid to stare at me. As far as unsexy things to put between me and Kid, Magil's wooden expression is near the top.\n\nThe blood drains from my penis and I, barely, squeeze myself out of the stone snatch, sore and frayed. I did not, at that, imagine Kid ever doing the same to me as that statue did. Or maybe I did. I get my pants on and gently rub my soreness.\n\nWe can go through the atrium now to the rest of the manor, or turn back.<<set $mirror = 3>>\n\n[[To the atrium|atrium]]\n[[Turn back|bf_landing]]\n

I leave Kid convulsing on the floor and try to catch Pariceles before he disappears into the hallway.\n\n"Hey, stop! What's happening to Kid!?"\n"Your companion possesses a rare gift. It offers her great power and import. But it also reacts poorly to my own magic. Your next trial begins soon. But take heart, and take this as well."\n\nPariceles hands me a flask, my own flask he must have stolen at some point. I can hear Kid screaming in her own voice, but deeper and more loudly than I've ever heard her.<<set $teaflask = 1>>\n\n"There will come a time when you can see beyond this trial and you might make use of this. Now old Pariceles needs to make himself scarce. You can survive this ordeal but I might not."\n\nHe gives a gracious bow and vanishes into the darkness of the hallway. Before I can mentally process what he said, a gigantic, strong, sexy hand reaches into the hallway and grips my entire body. The hand pulls me back into the room, where I see a gargantuan Kid before me, wetting her lips.\n\nShe looks at me with huge, hungry eyes. The transformation has done something to her, or perhaps this idea of hers was always just beneath the surface, always waiting for the moment when she was larger than I. A relaxation of inhibitions like I felt, writ large. If you'll pardon the pun.\n\nSomething about her increased size has increased her loveliness as well. Seeing all her sumptuous features in detail as great as this does nothing to diminish them and everything to increase them. I'm helpless in her massive grip.\n\n"Teehee, Serge my little pet, you're so cute!" Kid coos, and begins to rub her huge thumb against my groin, thighs, and midriff. She envelops my head and shoulders in a gentle kiss, the humid heat of which is overwhelming.\n"Aah -ah- Kid, -ah-, you, let's -ah-" is all I can get out.\n\nKid bites her lower lip and blushes clear to her expansive chest. An even more mischievous look alights her ruddy countenance and I notice that she's dug her other hand into her pants.\n\n"Ah -ah-, P-Pariceles!" I shout, conscious of the terrifying and thrilling encounter that awaits me unless I get some help, "what was in that tea?!"\n\nBut the old goblin is nowhere to be found.\n\nThe tea must have increased her lust in proportion to her size. Kid pulls down her pants and aims my head at her snatch. Anticipating her next move, I cross my arms and take a deep breath.\n\nThe next few moments are a blur of throbbing, crushing pain, claustrophobic heat and intense weirdness, which is not as to say it is unpleasant, albeit not the way I would have designed a sexual encounter with Kid if I were planning it myself. In a way I try not to think of where I actually am. In another way, I lose myself to thinking of nothing else.\n\nIn and in and in. Her elation continues for longer than I can hold my breath, and I black out.\n\n//[[(go on)|tea_kid_composed]]//\n

"Kid, I think you should grant him his wish," I tell her, withdrawing my knife and getting set to hand it to her.\n"Serge, we're not some killer squad!" Kid accosts me.\n"Tell that to everyone and everything you've suplexed to get here."\n"That's different! This guy didn't do anything to us and he even helped out. Please, Serge," Kid draws closer to me, "just leave him be. We'll dispose of that rat bastard Lynx and then there won't be any need for mercy killings."\n<<set $catacombs = 1>>\n\nI can see the soft contours of her features outlined in the pale light. I can feel her boobs against my chest. I can smell her sweet fragrance with every sniff. I'm inclined to let her have this one.\n\nI put my knife away and we leave without another word to or from the Acacian Dragoon.\n\n[[Let's get out of here|bf_east_landing]]\n

<<if ($studydesk eq 1) and ($study eq 1)>>\nI have another look at the desk between the matching stacks of bookshelves at the far end of the study. The finish on the cherry wood of the desk is as smooth as marble, sanded to a finer flatness than I thought possible. The drawers make no noise as I open and close them just for the satisfaction of the sliding action. Taking a closer look at the silken boxes, I notice each is monogrammed in the corner with reverse nap like a handkerchief.\nThe array of document drafting materials upon the desk just as meticulously organized as before, indicating no work took place since the last time I examined them, as if any ever had. I get a little further in the alphabetized vellum before stopping to wonder what a civet is, or how one had the misfortune to be poached for Lord Lynx's luxury.\n\nI pay less mind this time around to Lynx's inks, black as his soul the deepest is. Deeper black, maybe.\nI have another look at the silver filigree portrait frame bearing the likeness of a faintly smiling maiden.\n<<if $riddel eq 1>>\n\nIt's Dame Riddel Viper for sure. Though why Lynx would have a portrait of her here is beyond me.\n\nI remove the picture from the frame to have a look at the back. There's a message that reads '...for the woman who has it all' in stylish split-tip calligraphy.\n<<else>>\n\nI regard the portrait and try to imagine a more handsome woman. My imagination, for once, fails me. Maybe I can meet her some day.\n<<endif>>\n[[Nothing special in the desk|study]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($studydesk eq 0) and ($study eq 1)>>\nI take a look at the desk between the matching stacks of bookshelves and beneath the well-lit painting. It's crafted of cherry with all dovetailing joists and no nails. The drawers fold open on wooden ball joints, allowing easy access to removable silken boxes that slide out with ease on waled runners.\nThe array of document drafting materials upon the desk is so meticulously organized that clearly no meaningful work has ever taken place here. Short, legal, extra-legal and endless length scroll parchments rest in order within the bottom drawer as well as stacked in series on the top. Vellum compliments match them on the opposite side, arranged by varying degrees of thickness and then alphabetized by animal. I had not known to that point one could make vellum from the hide of an alpaca, nor what one might look like.\nInks in deepening tones and matching bottles line the penstand back of the top of the desk, starting with a middle-gray color and going into deeper and deeper blacks, at least three of which are darker than I've ever seen of anything. The unlighted blackness of an oubliette has a few shades to go to meet the third darkest of Lynx's inks.\nThe only artifact even a little out of keeping with the dizzying regularity of the rest is a silver filigree portrait frame bearing the likeness of a faintly smiling maiden.\n\n"Daughter, do you think? Or wife?" I ask Kid, facing the portrait to her.\n"She looks, what, twelve? So it would be hard to say. Blighter's sexual conquests are no older than his scotch."\n\nMagil also stares at the portrait from a slight distance away, and continues to do so as he comes a little closer. I expect him to mutter something woodenly, but he doesn't!\nHe doesn't say anything in fact, so I poke him:\n\n"Well, what do you think of the lassie?"\n"Huh?" Magil grunts. "...Nothing."\nWas he not paying attention?<<set $studydesk = 1>>\n\n[[Nothing special in the desk|study]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if $study eq 0>>\nI take a look at the desk between the matching stacks of bookshelves and beneath the well-lit painting. It's crafted of cherry with all dovetailing joists and no nails. The drawers fold open on wooden ball joints, allowing easy access to removable silken boxes that slide out with ease on waled runners.\nThe array of document drafting materials upon the desk is so meticulously organized that clearly no meaningful work has ever taken place here. Short, legal, extra-legal and endless length scroll parchments rest in order within the bottom drawer as well as stacked in series on the top. Vellum compliments match them on the opposite side, arranged by varying degrees of thickness and then alphabetized by animal. I had not known to that point one could make vellum from the hide of an alpaca, nor what one might look like.\nInks in deepening tones and matching bottles line the penstand back of the top of the desk, starting with a middle-gray color and going into deeper and deeper blacks, at least three of which are darker than I've ever seen of anything. The unlighted blackness of an oubliette has a few shades to go to meet the third darkest of Lynx's inks.\nThe only artifact even a little out of keeping with the dizzying regularity of the rest is a silver filigree portrait frame bearing the likeness of a faintly smiling maiden.\n\n"Daughter, do you think? Or wife?" I ask Kid, facing the portrait to her.\n"She looks, what, twelve? So it would be hard to say. Blighter's sexual conquests are no older than his scotch."\n\nMagil also stares at the portrait from a slight distance away, and continues to do so as he comes a little closer. I expect him to mutter something woodenly, but he doesn't!\nHe doesn't say anything in fact, so I poke him:\n\n"Well, what do you think of the lassie?"\n"Huh?" Magil grunts. "...Nothing."\nWas he not paying attention?<<set $studydesk = 1>>\n\nWe hear footsteps from the hallway. Magil vanishes into shadow leaving me and Kid to fend for ourselves.\n\n[[Hide by the doors|study_hide_door]]\n[[Hide under the desk|study_hide_desk]]\n<<endif>>

Kid doesn't wait for my instructions, instead picking one from a different shelf and weighing it in her measured caress. The way she moves her index finger along the spine makes me wish I were the book, which does look familiar at that.\n\nShe flips the pages open to the last one, which seems to form words under her gaze. Her baby blue eyes widen as she continues to read and realize what the book is.\n\n"So, wish I'd, what is it?" Kid peers back to the book for a second, "wish I'd 'weigh you in my measured caress'? Want me to rub up and down yer spine with my index finger?"\n"What, but I..." I fumble around for words, at a loss in general and withering under Kid's gaze.\n"What else have you been noting on about while we've been here?"\n"Hold on, I've got my own right here. That's not mine." I take out my auto-diary.\n\nComparing the two, Kid's find seems to form exactly as mine does after the brief delay. A sympathetic diary...which has been here the whole time.\n\n"Serge, when did you get your book and who sold it to you?" Magil interrogates.\n"I...uh. It was a week or so ago. I was in a booksellers looking at materials. The booker was quite rude when I asked for a lesser price on one of his tomes. I mentioned that I was a companion to Kid the Thief, hoping the booker was one of the many lost souls whom Kid had succored over the last few years. To my pleasure, his mood brightened and he gave me the better price of this very book, and I thought I'd thank Kid for her work as it inspired his generosity. I didn't think much of it at the time. Aside from, thank you, Kid, I forgot until now to do that."\n"If you spent less time ogling me maybe you would have remembered to talk to me," Kid accuses, still thumbing through the sympathetic-auto-diary with interest. "I didn't know you felt so strongly about stairs..."\n"That's not important," Magil continues his inquisition, "what was the booker's name?"\n"What, I don't know...Felix?"\n"You idiot!" Magil screams without raising his voice or changing his tone, "Felix Friese is one of Lynx's cronies. He's been using this to spy on everything we've been doing. Even now Lynx probably has another tome and is lying in wait for us."\n"I didn't know that! How could I have known that? I swear on Kid's tits I had no idea."\n\nKid looks down, only after reading so realizing that I had slipped my hand on her boob, giving it a gentle squeeze. She slaps me away and thumbs to another page, reading with interest and blushing on and off.\n\n"Can't we just destroy it?" I ask.\n"Not likely. This is no mere book. We need arcane tools we don't have."\n"So leave it here and we'll scram. Let him guess where we are from here."\n"That could work...but if what I remember of these holds..."\n\nMagil snatches my book and instructs me to stay in place. He and Kid walk out of the study.\n\nI begin to feel tired.\n\nFaint.\n\nI realize too late what Magil is testing, and I collapse.\n\nMoments later I come to, with Magil and Kid standing over me. Kid looks genuinely worried for me, which makes me feel good right down to my balls. Actually that's the only part of me that feels good.\n\n"Oi, Serge ya beautiful bastard!" Kid exclaims, rushing toward me, teary eyed, and lifting my top half bodily into her hot embrace. I can't move. This should be an moment of unperturbed bliss. Everything hurts. I try to talk but nothing works.\n\nKid...pick up the book...\n\n"He might need a moment more to recover," Magil suggests, "or he might never recover. What we did amounted to yanking his soul out with a fish hook. It...might not just go back in."\n\nKid stares at my eyes through her ever-more-blue crying ones. The sensation of pain all over me begins to ebb along with everything else I can feel. I suspect I'm never going to say anything to her ever again.\n\nI guess that she might keep the book with her, or hope, and based on that hope I think as quickly as I can for what I want to tell her before the ink runs dry.\n\nKid. I expect you'll read all this after you're done giving Lynx a black eye. If you haven't done that by now then you're not the plucky, ballsy girl I fell in lust with. Can't really redact the whole tome from here and tack lurve onto what I've been on about this whole time, and anyway I'm literally dying here so give me a break.\nYou're one of a kind and you'll live this down. Keep your wild heart in check and don't let anybody exploit you. Where the hell did you pick up that accent? You would be way sexier without it. I feel scatterbrained and cold. Nothing makes sense. Focus.\nI guess I didn't have all that much to say to you as a goodbye after all. You are one sexy lady. I would have loved to have your kids. Er, strike that, reverse it.\n\nDamn, what a thing to fuck up.\n\nI'm out of ink.\n\nTHE END

We come to the end of a hallway and two massive doors with off-color inset panels, a color-trick accomplished by using the same finish but reversing the fine grain, giving them a velveteen sheen as we open them into what must be the manor ballroom. The doors, though large, open easily and some internal mechanism links the two: opening one opens the other.\n\nThe ballroom floor is polished matte blackwood with an even surface and a good tone. It feels like stepping on a marimba, and tugs at me more than a little with an urge to dance.<<if $signet eq 0>>\n\nAbove the mezzanine level are an array of portraits of no personages I am familiar with. Generic, wry noblepeople surrounded by the defining objects of their lives. Some of them are clutching swords, some have palms upturned. All of them are decked out in their best finery, except that none of them have any rings on. I've never seen a nobleman pass up the opportunity to keep his hand from being naked by covering it with the gaudiest rock available. Just a thought.\n\nFrom a golden chain at the room's domed apex hangs a massive chandelier with sweeping arms of beaded crystal and at least 70 candles.\n\nAt the far left and right of the room are pit holes for chamber orchestrae, and at the end, rising stairs to a mid level throne emplacement with three thrones, which then joins stairs up to the mezzanine on either side.\n\nThe full effect is intense, even in the relative darkness and moonlight.\n\n"Care to dance?" I propose to Kid, the each of us still craning our necks to take in the full sweep of the room.\n"Didn't fancy you for foppish, mate. Besides, we'd need, like, a hundred partners to make use of this room."\n"K, we'll go find some closer quarters and dance there."\n\nKid punches me in the ribs. Lovingly. I think. Ouch.\n\n[[back to the hallway|west_hall_1f]]\n<<else>>\nWe've gone through hell to get this signet ring, and it belongs here somehow. I hold it in my open palm and try to figure out how the mechanisms of the place could work.\n\nMagil offers his advice.\n\n"According to the lore of the Acacian Dragoons, there were rooms they could simply pass through that others could not. I can feel the magic of this place. We need to perform a ritual as they would."\n"They were a spicy bunch," I suggest, "I dunno what they would consider a ritual."\n"D'ya think we just have to wear it?" asks Kid.\n"It could be that easy," answers Magil.\n\nI shrug my shoulders and decide that there are worse rituals I've been through already tonight than simply putting on a ring. I try it on every finger and each of my thumbs, waving it about to show the lack of an audience in the gallery and up on the mezzanine that I'm wearing it.\n\n"Hold on," I think aloud, "what do we know about the Acacian Dragoons?"\n"They were perverts one an' all," Kid states, more aptly than she realizes.\n"Right, and their portraits are all around the gallery here, right?"\n"That one is Captain Viper," states Magil, "I do not know the others, but it is a fair guess that these are they."\n"Right, so what are none of them wearing on their hands?"\n\nWe take another look at the portraits of the Acacian Dragoons, ringless to a man.\n\nKid's expression darkens, realizing the track I've picked up on. I don't wait for her approval before trying the ring on.\n\n"Just be glad you brought Serge Grossfest with you, sister," I bray, sliding the Acacian Signet around the member it was designed for.\n\nThe room responds by sinking its floor into a great spiral staircase leading downward.\n\n[[Down the stairs|pit]]\n\n<<endif>>\n

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I feel there's more we could have done, for instance seeing how Kid would handle being asked to stick her penis into some shriveled old man ass one last time. The only logical outcomes are boring and the only interesting outcomes are impossible, so I don't mind leaving it as a fantasy.<<set $catacombs = 1>>\n\nWe leave without another word to or from the Acacian Dragoon.\n\n[[Let's get out of here|bf_east_landing]]\n

It's important to keep your head about you in situations like this. You hear that, skeleton? I wonder what his name was.\n\nI scoop up Kid's limp frame as best I can and start walking quickly but gently to the end of the hallway the skeleton had been guarding.\n\n"Where are you going to?" inquires Magil noncommittally.\n"If my hunch is right, this room will have something to rest Kid on. It should be better than the floor and I can only keep her hefted like this for so many days before I'll have to switch arms."\n"And you think rest is all she needs?"\n"I'll know better once we get her reposed and I can take a closer look." Not the closer look I would have wanted.\n\nOur conversation takes us to the door at the end of the hallway, cherry boards interlocked with such mastery that the whole door looks like it was cut from the grain of one massive tree. Countersunk circular insets of carved roses spangle the door in a hexagonal pattern. Each one is about the size of a kingdom coin. A symbol of wealth and...\n\nAnd I need to get the damn door open and go through with my hunch.\n\n"Would you be so kind as to open the door for us, Magil? I have my hands more than full with Kid's ass."\n\nMagil complies.\n\n[[Enter the rose room|riddel_ex]]\n

Opening the door, we find organized stacks of spare clock tower components resting against the walls, on hooks and posts, and neatly packed in open crates. Carrying harnesses and gripper equipment lie in neat piles in an open pine locker of sorts. The array of components comprises tall gears, pinions, sprockets, escapement levers, load pins, drive chains, pendulum chains, braided cable of various gauges, and scaffolding planks, among other mechanical components and accessories I cannot readily identify. <<if ($clockstore eq 0) and ($swaggerknow neq 1)>>\n\nI pick up a nearby bronze-wrought encycloidal flaring pinion with an outer chamfered edge on both sides. The handiwork of several craftspeople among guilded masters no doubt wrought this mastery of machine component I heft in my hand. I wonder at how much blood this paragon of pinions cost.\n\nKid by this time has taken a groping inventory of every item in the room and come up with something she feels is of value. From behind a footlocker, she barely hoists a massive plank of some sort, dragging it from its former resting place on the floor out of sight. As she brings it closer, I see it is a sword designed for use by a three person team of six foot tall humans. It perhaps at some point fended off polearms raised against Viper Manor, but as none have dared challenge Lynx in open arms for years, it now sits tarnished and disused among machine components. It has writing on the pommel, space enough for a novel though only a monogram there etched is.\n\n"I think we should leave that, Kid," I tell her.\n"Aw, come on, look at how fancy-pants this old thing is. I'll bet it's worth a fortune."\n"Your perfectly convexed ass is worth a fortune; that is a weighty slab of junk."\n"Ha haw, have a larf. I'm taking it."\n"Tell you what, if you can lift it you can keep it," I propose, and soon regret it.\n\nKid repositions herself nearer the middle of the sword, grips the dudgeon with her right hand and slips her left on the lower middle of the blade, squats low with her back straight and gives a heave with her powerful legs. In fact she does manage to lift the thing for a moment and then drops it with a clang.\n\n"Owch!" she cries, blood dripping from her clenched left fist, "bloody thing is still sharp all over."\n"It's bloody now if it wasn't before. Are you ok, Kid?"\n\nI reach to examine her fresh wound when a voice, not of our number, interrupts us.\n\n"Who have we here? Buxom lass, come to spill\nher blood upon my closet floor? A friend as well\nwho brays and paws and wrecks:\nignorant of the fairer sex," chants the voice of an old woman.\n\n"I'd settle for foul sex if it comes to that, but enough of that, show yourself!" I try at courage that belies my shock and quailing: there is nothing so terrifying as an old woman catching you with your pants down. I subtly tug at my waistband just to be sure.\n\n[[engage the hag in dialog|hag_ask]]\n[[lie your face off to her|hag_lie]]\n[[ignore the hag|hagnore]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if $clockstore eq 1>>\nWe've been here before...\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($swaggerknow eq 1) and ($swagger eq 0)>>\nKid finds the sword the old torture victim told us about and drags it to the middle of the room. As she brings it closer, I see it is a sword designed for use by a three person team of six foot tall humans. It perhaps at some point fended off polearms raised against Viper Manor, but as none have dared challenge Lynx in open arms for years, it now sits tarnished and disused among machine components. It has writing on the pommel, space enough for a novel but bearing the monogram 'AD' in stylized lettering.\n\n"Awright Serge, my hunk of man-meat. Time to do your favorite little lady a favor and haul this unwieldy thing."\n\nIt's sweet of her to call me a hunk, but nowhere near flattering enough to have me do her bidding just like that. Maybe if she promised me a blowjob or something.\n\n[[Shlep it yourself|sword_shlep]]\n[[Fine I'll do it|sword_slap]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($clockstore eq 1) and ($swaggerknow eq 0)>>\n[[Leave the room|Clock_Store_decide]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($clockstore eq 1) and ($swagger eq 1)>>\n[[Nothing for us here|Clock_Store_decide]]\n<<endif>>

<<if $studypaint eq 1>>\nI have another look at the work of L.M.LaPêche. I think the effect of the style is to remind the viewer of stained glass and hot sex at the same time while literally putting neither on display.\nThe lighting, the pose, the juxtaposition of unreal lines and real shades start to convince you that you might go and see such a vision in life, even though I can't imagine either peaches or lips growing to such luscious size and catching light with such beaming detail.\nI could stare at it for hours, but we've got work to do. Maybe I'll come back and steal it when we're done.\n\n[[Enough of art critique for now|study]]\n<<endif>>\n<<if ($study eq 1) and ($studypaint eq 0)>>\nI walk to the far end of the study and have a closer look at the well-lit painting under the skylight. The painting is a frameless 6 x 8 acrylic ars nouveaux in tints from rich pink to dark orange depicting a woman with azaleas for dress straps holding a peach the size of her head in both hands with her improbably rich lips in mid-bite. The background grades into a red rose-patterned tessellation as it draws away from the woman's hard orange outline. She looks like she's enjoying herself greatly, with her blushing cheeks and smiling eyes. Atop her carefully braided auburn hair is a garland of more stark pink-white azaleas. It's signed "L.M.LaPêche"\n\nThe etched burnished bronze title card beneath reads "Beauty Enjoys the Peach."<<set $studypaint = 1>>\n\nShe sure does.\n\n[[Enough of art critique for now|study]]\n\n<<endif>>\n<<if $study eq 0>>\nI walk to the far end of the study and have a closer look at the well-lit painting under the skylight. The painting is a frameless 6 x 8 acrylic ars nouveaux in tints from rich pink to dark orange depicting a woman with azaleas for dress straps holding a peach the size of her head in both hands with her improbably rich lips in mid-bite. The background grades into a red rose-patterned tessellation as it draws away from the woman's hard orange outline. She looks like she's enjoying herself greatly, with her blushing cheeks and smiling eyes. Atop her carefully braided auburn hair is a garland of more stark pink-white azaleas. It's signed "L.M.LaPêche"\n\nThe etched burnished bronze title card beneath reads "Beauty Enjoys the Peach."\n\nShe sure does.\n\nBefore I can appreciate any more of the detailed craftsmanship that depicted the red rose blossoms in increasing stages of bloom toward the outer edge of the canvas, foreign footsteps from the hallway call us to alert. We've got to act fast.<<set $studypaint = 1>>\n\n[[Hide by the doors|study_hide_door]]\n[[Hide under the desk|study_hide_desk]]\n<<endif>>\n

Kid picks up the book and opens it, unable to keep herself from chuckling as she finds it contains a funny story and not the key we're looking for.\n<<set $bv3 = 1>>\n\n"Serge, yer gonna love this:\n\n'A nymph's beauty exceeds mere words. The appearance of individual nymphs varies, but all appear to be ever-young women of human size, with sleek figures, luxuriant hair, and perfect features. Their demeanor is charming and graceful, and their minds are quick and witty.'\n\n"Oh, so close. It was you to a tee up until that last part."\n"You don't think I'm\nquick and\nwitty?" Kid asks, jabbing me in the gut with her daggerlike fist to punctuate her points.\n"Ouf, let's settle for calling you 'sharp,' my nymph-like companion."\n"An let's pick the right book this time, eh mate?"\n\n[[You heard the nymph|study_plus_results]]\n

I have to admire Kid for having the balls that she technically doesn't have.\n\nThe hag replies, "Hoo hoo hoo\nI should leave you\nto accomplish your bold feats.\nFate be your buddy,\nand your body not\na morsel Viper Manor eats."\n\nWithout another word, rhymed or otherwise, the hag's image melts away boobs-first into thin air, grossing me out.\n\nWe wonder a moment at the encounter before deciding we've had enough of this silly place and depart again for the hallway.\n\n[[outta here|Clock_Store_decide]]\n

"Is this the one?" Kid asks, withdrawing the book from the top shelf and resting it open easily with her firm, supple grip. She begins to read it aloud:\n<<set $bv1 = 1>>\n\n'Idaho ignored the river then. It was there and it would be there tomorrow. He fixed his attention on the bridge, letting his military training examine it. He nodded once to himself before turning back the way he had come, lifting the light rope from his shoulders as he walked.\nIt was only when she saw the rope come snaking down that Nayla had her orgasm.'\n\n"Ew, where the hell did that come from?" Kid asks.\n"Must be the wrong book. Let me think."\n\n[[Try another one|study_plus_results]]\n

How did all those old rituals go? I've probably heard of them hundreds of times with all the stories I've traded over the years. Still, I liked the stories of knightly valor most when the knight's chastity was put to the test by some forbidden tart of legendary beauty, so the lengthy descriptions of rituals were boring by comparison.\n\nBut this pose feels right. Sword planted firmly in the ground, kneeling before it. This could work.\n\nI lever up Swaggerdick and ram it with all my might into the floor between a slightly wider crack in the stonework that I think might be its home.\n\nThe ceiling continues to descend.\n\n"Serge! That didn't work"\n"No, it didn't work //yet//. I have a good feeling about this."\n"Fine, you stay here with your good feeling you madman. Let me know how it goes."\n\n<<if $tower eq 1>>Whereupon Kid gives me her vote of confidence by crawling through the hole we made last time and off to safety.<<else>>Whereupon Kid gives me her vote of confidence by crawling through a hole that I didn't notice Magil just blasted in the wall.<<endif>> I'm doubtful of how similarly safe that would be for me, so I simply stand and watch her work her ass on the way out.\n\nIt's getting awfully low now and I take a seat, still with confidence in my plan. Magil also left at some point. Some pals I have.\n\nWhen the deadly ceiling device finally meets Swaggerdick, the impact makes a grinding, whining metal sound that echoes deafeningly all around the tower, vibrating it violently and me with it. I cover my ears.\n\nThe noises finally stop, including the mechanical noise of the ceiling. In fact it is silent in here. I think I broke it.\n\nSwaggerdick looks a little the worse for wear. The pommel is bent over, almost prized off by the tremendous weight of the mechanism above it. I lean down to examine it, and find that the breakage has opened a hidden compartment with a ring inside. I take the acacian signet, our key to the final leg of our heist.\n<<set $signet = 1>>\n\nI leave in triumph, meeting up with Kid and Magil back at the terrace.\n\n"Cor it's bigger than my thumb! Were all the dragoons giants?"\n"Maybe. If they used that sword for fighting then they must have been."\n"Let's take it to the ballroom," Magil interjects, "that's where the dragoon told us it belonged."\n[[Let's go east|Clock_Store_decide]]\n[[Let's go west|west_hall_1f]]\n

I sit up to find Magil standing before me, his begloved hand outstretched from his settling robe, his unchanging aspect somehow giving off a glow of satisfaction in a job well done.\n\n"Crikey, that was top!" Kid cheers in wonder at Magil's display of magical force, "How'd you do that?"\n"I spoke to them a killing word in a language they understand. Are you disabled?"\n\nKid stretches her arms and rotates her shoulder before shaking her head.\n\nI get up and dust myself off to verify the continued function of most of my body, then stare at Kid in ballet repose for a moment to verify the continued function of the rest of it.\n\n"We're good," I tell him.\n\n"Then let's move."\n\n[[The mansion awaits|Castlevania]]

I whisper to Kid, disguising it as a gentle goodbye kiss. Lynx whoops in derision just like I wanted.\n\n"Kid, take a drink from my flask."\n"What?"\n"You think I don't know by now when you've stolen my things? Take it and drink it."\n"Why?"\n"It's Pariceles' tea. Just...try not to lose your head."\n\nKid takes my flask out of one of her many hiding spots and swills it.\n\nI try to give her as much space as I can, which isn't much. Kid rapidly grows to gargantuan size as she did once before. I am pressed against the barrier and to my astonishment, pass right through it. I could have done that at any time thanks to my talisman. I feel like an idiot.\n\nThe Devil's Circle!™ can't handle the strain of Kid's mighty strength and size, and dissipates like a soap bubble popping.\n\n"Lynx!" Kid yells with her giant's voice.\n"Well now," I heckle Lynx, "guess you were bored and skipped the part where this happened. I'd tell you to go find the part you missed but I don't think there's time."\n"What sorcery is this?! Aaah!"\n\nKid's rage has increased in proportion to her size, and she snatches Lynx from a distance with her absurd reach. She hold his tiny body in her huge, strong hands. The look of terror on his face is priceless, to say nothing of the look on Kid's.\n\nI don't think that Kid can think straight at the moment. She's channeling elemental wildness and might. She knows enough to want Lynx dead, but I think that, as before, her other passions have also scaled up to match her. A look of deadly mischief crosses her face, and she begins to rub one of her nipples absentmindedly. Magil talks to me.\n\n"Right, I guess you were out for this part. We needed Pariceles to revive you afterward. Also Kid doesn't actually want you dead."\n\nKid lets out a roar of primal lust and hatred. I think deep down she really is a sadist.\n\nLynx's horrified screams as Kid maneuvers him into her giant vagina are as unique and colorful as his fate. Kid gives him a squeeze that makes my balls ache out of sympathy. There's something poetic about this. I shall have to anthologize it later with a limerick.\n\nKid breathes heavily, slowly shrinking back down to size after discarding Lynx's crushed husk of a corpse. When she returns to regular size she collapses to the floor. I attend to her to learn that she's unharmed, although perhaps I'll be a little more colorless than usual when I tell her about how this went down.\n\n"We've done it," Magil states, grabbing the real Frozen Flame, "now let's get out of here."\n\nMagil raises a begloved hand and zips us all with his magic back to our favorite tavern and haunt.\n\n"You could have done that at any time? Whatabout all the danger we faced?"\n"I channeled the Flame's power to do it."\n"You just have all the answers, don't you?"\n"Not really."\n\nI set Kid down to rest in a nearby chair. She'll be thrilled when she wakes up. After a moment, Magil strikes up conversation again.\n\n"You know Serge, you should probably have sex with her already."\n"I prefer my partners to be awake, besides I know what's been in there already tonight."\n"Whatever. Look, there's one other thing you should know."\n"What's that?"\n"The tea, Pariceles' tea..."\n"What about it?"\n"It wasn't magical. It was just plain green tea."\n"What?!"\n"I examined it at length. It was possessed of no arcana. I can't explain it."\n\nI look down at Kid, she has a contented smile on her beautiful, sleeping face. I guess I'll just have to follow her everywhere from now on to make sure she shies away from tea. I can't dream up a better fate, but if I do, I'll be sure to write it down on my own from now on.\n\nKid wakes up, and I tell her what happened, drawing from this very book where my memory fails me. Her look of contentedness lapses into mischief as she looks me over from top to bottom.\n\n"So, Serge Grossfest, how should I thank you?"\n\n[[Any way you want|conclusion]]\n