Old Blood and New

Author's Note: This will be a LONG first chapter, and anyone that knows my writing well can tell you it will a long time for sex to happen. This universe is completely fictional, and although I used many historical concepts as inspiration, this universe doesn't represent our reality. This story will probably involve nonhumans, male bisexuality, group sex, non-consent, pregnancy, and prostitution. There will also probably be some violence, although I usually try to keep the violence separated from graphic sexual scenes. Any time anyone will have very violent sexual encounters, the rougher details will not be shown to the reader. All characters involved in graphic sexual scenes are adults, often older than 18. This story is another experiment of mine. I'd love any feedback you might have, even negative feedback. I need that stuff more than the positive feedback. It helps me grow.

***

It was a coastal city, mainly there for commercial shipments and fishing. That didn't mean there weren't other professions. Every type from butcher to soaper could be found there. There was a local courthouse, a jail, a prison, apartment buildings, brothels, toy stores, gunsmithing workshops, anything one could think of, really.

The roofs were pitched and covered in scalloped tiles, often dark blue or gray. The ground floors were usually made of old stone or brick while the upper floors had a pale plaster with wooden lattices. There were also several purely brick buildings, sometimes with quite the colorful theme, or at least colorful for the area.

One of the ships that arrived to this city didn't carry spices nor tea, and certainly not any cotton nor maize corn. Instead, it carried mainly people, people that had to travel for one reason or another and weren't necessarily in the business of overseas goods.

Some people were moving to have a marriage of convenience, an arranged marriage with the full knowledge and agreement of both groom and bride. Some were visiting family. Some people were even tourists, for beyond the city, there was a quaint village, and past that village there was the province's capital.

On this misty morning, as all sorts of people bustled about, more people seemed to leak out of that ship. Thankfully, they were neat and orderly, being led by some government officials off to an official building to be legally processed. One by one, they went up to several desks inside, showing identification papers, signing forms, important things like that. A bit of a commotion came up, however, when a clerk took one look at a certain man's identification papers and snorted.

"Luralf?!" He was incredulous. He practically threw the papers back at the man. "You're from that shit hole?"

The man looked down at the clerk with a stony face, but his tanned cheeks did darken a little. A long lock of brown curly hair tumbled out from under his hat, trailing past his back and down to his waist. "Yes Sir." His accent was slower than the clerk's. Luralf had the same language as this place did, but with plenty of differences here and there.

"Well go fuck off with that!" The clerk made a rude gesture and then demanded to see the next person in line.

The tanned man with the falling hair was stunned for a second, holding his documents with shaking fingers, making little wobbly noises with the paper. Just when he was about to express a protest, another voice came to interrupt.

"That's it, Hilarson! Enough of you!"

A slightly older man with a bit of a belly approached, surprising quite a few people that happened to notice the scene, especially the now pink in the face clerk. That older man walked around that clerk's desk and quite firmly told him if he didn't get out of the chair then he'd be shoved out. The clerk sputtered something, but then he got up and walked off to who knew where. The old man sat down before the tanned man, gave a frustrated and tired sigh, then looked up.

"Oh," he said with only a mild bit of surprise, "you're a large sort."

Deflating a bit, even putting on a timid smile, the tanned man breathed out, "Yeah."

"Papers please," the older man said as he held his hand out, palm upwards. He was given those papers very politely, as it was done before. The older man scanned every section, using a stamp that had been coated in ink to seal his approval. "Yes yes. This checks out. That checks out. And that asshole," here, he made a gesture with the stamp still in his hand, "is checking right now, or he should be."

Too afraid to say much about the incident, the tanned man only nodded.

"Listen now, Young Man." The older man said as he put what seemed to be the final seal on the last paper.

Nodding again, the tanned man said, "Yes Sir."

"When you're doing official business, like working with the government, you tell them right where you came from, hear?" He made sure each paper was properly drying in the air, none stacked, so that the ink wouldn't smear. He even slightly adjusted one paper's position with a nudge of a fingertip. "But when you're just talking to people, especially getting a job at some random place, make sure you lie. Lots of people are too simple with their judgments, you know. There's another word for that." He tapped a paper with his fingernail. "Stupid."

Turning his head away, the tanned man coughed into a fist. He wasn't ill, though, nothing ill about him.

"There's nothing in your paperwork about any work for you here," the older man said. "You don't have anything arranged?"

"No Sir," the tanned man answered.

With a shrug, the older man told him, "I can give you directions to the nearest whore house. They might take you as a bouncer. Those girls need protection." Then, with a rough laugh, he remarked, "They might take you on with the men's section, if you're willing to do that sort of thing."

Unwilling to respond to that, the tanned man only exhaled through his nose and waited for any more advice.

"If that doesn't work out, there's a fighting stadium with a gymnasium attached. You can go there to apply to fight for money." As he spoke, he was writing directions down on a separate piece of paper.

After a quick nod, the tanned man tried to roll and fold his hair back under his hat.

"And if for some reason you think you need to leave," the older man said with a slight warning hidden in his tone, "then you need to go to Cheppa Village. It's east of this city. You can be a farmhand there, maybe even a bouncer at a bathhouse. The bathhouse there is a lot bigger and tastier smelling than the bathhouses here, anyway. The ones here all smell cheap."

The reason for the bouncers at the bathhouses was the same for brothels. Prostitutes usually worked there, although that wasn't always so.

"You could always move to the capital, maybe even get a job at the castle as a guard," the older man suggested, still writing down all kinds of notes. "But guards usually need to have some worthy background to them, while you're a foreigner with nothing much you seem to want to tell."

The older man went on this way, suggestion after suggestion, making the other people in line grumble and whine. Finally, the older man handed the tanned man his papers, and he said, "Put that in your bag and go on. Hurry now. Before you run out of coin."

***

It was called the Rainbow Mermaid. It was a fairly tall building with pale, if distressed, powdery blue painted bricks. Up top, hanging and jutting out, there was a danging sign that announced the place's name along with a painted image of a naked mermaid. There were likely no literal mermaids to be found in there, but everyone seemed to know that.

The secretary in the foyer asked the tall, tanned man for his name. He looked quite bored as he did it, didn't even look up at him. He didn't even care that the tanned man's clothing was baggy.

"Vynstrum Dahlren," the tanned man said with his drawling voice.

The secretary only replied, "Well that's a mouthful."

"Vyn is fine, then," the tanned man said, once again trying to tuck his stubborn hair back in place.

"Whatever." The secretary stood up. "Come on. We need all the help we can get. Two men got into a fight over one of the gals. We can't be shorthanded."

Vyn assumed that meant if he got involved with any of the prostitutes here, he'd probably be dismissed quickly.

He was led off to someone in an office upstairs. Some other fellow was there, and he was apparently the brothel's owner. He was also too busy with his own thoughts to care much about what Vyn looked like. He only listened to Vyn's gruff, foreign, and countryside tone and told him he was hired already.

The bouncer's dormitory was downstairs, right next to the maids' dormitories. Apparently, nobody cared if they had affairs with the maids. The owner even made a joke about how it might be good to sleep so close to them, winking and slapping his own thigh near the end.

Later on, Vyn was given a spare bed with empty boxes underneath for his personal belongings, not that he had much. Everything he owned had been carried over his back. The other men were in a variety of shapes, but none seemed too thin nor too fat. They weren't particularly friendly, but they weren't vicious either. They simply existed, and they seemed fine with letting Vyn exist. Vyn didn't mind any of that. He was just grateful his new boxes had padlocks and keys.

Since most customers wanted a treat at night, that was when most of the shifts took place. It was the bouncer's job to stand outside a door and listen for any suspicious sounds, like a certain bell's tone or any known code words. It was a little embarrassing, really. Vyn had to stand there, a second bouncer at the other side of the door, and listen to a prostitute pretend a customer was the most wonderful thing in the world.

One night, Vyn's blood turned cold and he moved to force the door open, but the other bouncer grabbed his arm and said quite firmly, "That's only Nyxa. She agreed to what's going on in there."

She agreed to all that?!

But she was crying no! She was begging for him to stop hurting her! She was weeping!

It hurt Vyn's ears. It had him shivering.

Reacting to Vyn's growing concern, the other bouncer only put more insistence in his words. "Don't worry. She's not getting any more hurt than she's agreed to. She'll give him the code word if she needs him to stop, and if he doesn't stop, she'll give us the code word to make him stop."

None of that made Vyn feel any more comfortable, but he was convinced to leave the situation be. After a time, the customer emerged, and soon after that, the prostitute named Nyxa emerged too. She was so discolored, so swollen, and so wobbly that Vyn automatically rushed to her, holding her waist and trying to keep her from shattering.

"Gods be called," Vyn said in with pure horror. "Gods be called and sacrificed to. You must be in so much pain."

With the dullest, most uninterested expression he'd ever seen on a woman, Nyxa just glanced up at his face long enough to say, "He paid more than enough. It's worth the two weeks off."

Then she pushed herself away from Vyn and weakly made her way elsewhere.

On another night, Vyn found himself assigned to a room a young man was meant to work in, which was no more nor less acceptable to Vyn than work with the women involved. What startled him, though, was when he first saw the man. That fellow was so small, thin, and soft, that Vyn vaguely wondered if it was a girl in a man's clothes.

In fact, once the young man looked up at him with a bright smile and said hello, his voice amazingly feminine, Vyn decided that wasn't a man, or not what he believed a man should be. If that person had a penis, then that person was simply a woman with a penis, or a woman with a man's body. How that was possible was beyond his simple and inexperienced thought process, but it was all his brain could salvage together.

Still, he didn't see anything wrong nor incorrect about the customer wanting to spend his time with that male prostitute. While Vyn's vision of manhood was very, very different, he knew he had no room to take any harsh action. Let the girly boy be himself. Let the customer be himself. Vyn even decided if anyone wanted to cause problem for that little girl-boy, then he might be the first to defend him, if possible.

And besides, Vyn knew he'd be a hypocrite if he ever judged any man for wanting a taste of another man, girly or not.

He was in a new place, learning new things. He was open. He could deal with it.

On another night, a frightening sound literally rang out. Vyn and his partner at the time broke the door down and had to pull the customer away. The idiot had decided to pull out a knife on the poor dear, and she definitely hadn't agreed to anything involving cutting the skin, or cutting anything else.

The chilling part was how the prostitute had been tied up and gagged at the time, unable to fight back nor scream. Thankfully, the woman's fingers were still able to reach a fairly well hidden cord that was attached to a loud bell.

Vyn wondered if the customer's plan had been to do something awful and then sneak away, perhaps out the window, since they weren't on one of the higher floors. However, it was still a stupid plot. Maybe he was so desperate to hurt someone that he couldn't help himself. Maybe he didn't want to touch a street walker for some reason.

Oh well. None of it mattered, because not only was the customer banned, he had several of his bones broken, including his nose. The police was called too, and he was arrested not too long after that.

Vyn's first payment was exactly what he needed. It comforted him, made him feel like he could really live there. He was already getting used to all the unpleasantness. Life was slowly turning less and less miserable.

On one of his days off, Vyn went to an inn for some food and drink. Usually, he'd go to the local marketplace, buy a few things, and then go off to the brothel's kitchens to whip a meal up himself. Either that, or he'd ask one of the cooks to make something for him, and there were cooks indeed. Even whores had to eat.

He wished he had a wife to cook for him, but that wasn't a person he could have right then.

Vyn was nearly relaxed at the sight of his simple meal. A chicken's drumstick that had been baked in butter and herbs, a little bowl of three different kinds of beans, and a cup of plain but almost well known ale. That alcohol reminded him of things he'd drink at home. It was a comforting sort of alcohol.

It wasn't a quiet place. The inn was thriving. Vyn found himself amused by the waitress rushing this way and that, trying to get as many orders to as many people as possible. She didn't have a kerchief pinned around her shoulders and over her bosom. That great set of breasts was bouncing as much as her corset would allow, and she wore that corset like it wasn't meant to be underwear, the same for her chemise. Plenty of working class women did that with no shame to bear. A higher class woman simply wouldn't do that.

With a bit of disappointment, Vyn mentally reminded himself that most women he'd taken with large breasts had absolutely no ass. Finding a woman that was just plump enough in the top and bottom was rare, and he'd gladly take a flat-chested woman if her backside was just right.

He was chewing a spoonful of beans when someone surprised him with a smooth tone.

"Ah, Vyn! I'm glad I found you!"

Vyn looked over to see that girly-boy taking a seat beside him. The table was a small, round thing. There wasn't much room. Swallowing his beans, Vyn shifted his chair over, making a screeching noise. What was that tiny fellow's name? Vyn frowned as he took his seat near him, and then pushed his chair in a similar way, dragging on the plain stone floor.

His smile on, the girly-boy asked, "How do you like Geraldan?"

Not really thinking much of the question, Vyn only said, "It's a nice city." And it was. The mist hadn't been constant. Warmer and brighter days had been popping up. Besides, it always smelled like the sea. He rather liked that smell. It was so different but also cleansing to the soul.

Leaning a bit, seeming to want Vyn to smell his lavender perfume, the girly-boy asked, "Have you talked to any of the maids yet?"

One of Vyn's broad shoulders jerked up for only a moment. "I might've said hello a few times."

That was true indeed. Vyn liked the look of some of the maids, but they'd all seemed too busy to talk much with him, or simply not interested. He imagined his lack of fashion sense might have been one reason. Even a working class man would try to keep his clothing fitted. Anything that didn't fit well could always be altered, if not by a family member or a tailor, then by the man himself.

Men could sew too, although they either worked on men's garments or corsets, also called stays. The baleen in corsets were physically difficult to prepare. Anyway, the poorest of men often wore ill-fitting clothing, and Vyn knew he looked a little bit poor at times.

The young man leaned even more towards Vyn, which made the larger man shift his chair away even more with a light grimace. He held no hatred, but he was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the sudden closeness.

"If you haven't been chatting with the maids," that little man said, "then perhaps you've been chatting with the men?"

"No more than required," Vyn curtly told him. "Hey." He made a few loud sniffing noises and rubbed his nose with his loose shirt's wide and somewhat rolled up cuff. "Your perfume's strong. It's messing with my tongue. You mind scooting back?"

His lower lip pouting out, the little man complied. Then he said with a bit of a whine, "That's not very fun. How are we supposed to get to know each other better?"

Vyn's thick eyebrows rose as the realization finally reached his brain. Then he smiled down at the young man as gently as he could. "Hey, Fellow? Listen, I don't even know your name, and I've never bothered to ask. That's because I'm not interested." At the now shocked and slowly reddening face the little man was displaying, Vyn added, "Now don't act like I just insulted you. You know there are plenty of people that would pay for you. There are also plenty of people that wouldn't give you a look. That's how it is. Lots of people don't like me either, and I don't let it tug on my hairs."

Now, instead of red, that little man's face was purple, and he slapped his palms onto the tabletop. Then, his soft lips bending and pursing, he got up and left without even a goodbye.

Vyn took a bite of his drumstick. The butter was an excellent ingredient.

***

By this time in Vyn's life as a brothel bouncer, he'd collected a few books and put them in a box under his bed. They weren't brand new, expensive things. Some of them were cheaply made with paper covers, and he had to be careful not to fold them. They were just books. A couple were novels. Some were autobiographies of famous people. One told the story of the author's journey to a strange jungle full of old fashioned tribes and frightening wildlife.

Since he didn't feel like visiting the local gymnasium this time, Vyn chose to read something. A small book cradled in his heavily scarred hand, he left the brothel to walk over to the inn. Taking a table near a window, he ordered a bowl of pea and bacon pottage with a mug of something spicy. Then he opened his book and let the afternoon light warm his spirits.

He stayed there for a good while, taking little bits of his pottage and reading. Everything was peaceful and correct. There was no indication of anything wrong happening.

So, of course something wrong would happen.

One of his coworkers approached with a bitter tightness in his eyes and lips. He said to Vyn, "The boss wants to see you, now."

Looking back to his book, Vyn said, "I'm not working. He shouldn't tell me what to do while I'm free."