"C'mon, take one for the team," Kelly insisted. "I swear I won't hold it over you."
"That's a lie," the rest of us chimed in independently of each other. "We won't make fun of you though," Daphne added unhelpfully. Her I believed, along with Lorna. But Kelly was already bursting with jokes at my expense. Which was filthy rich, because I seem to recall her admitting to have slept with a goblin herself once. Not that that mattered in the slightest.
"And we could really use her help," Daphne added. "Actually, we kind of need it."
"Fine," I grumbled, rolling my eyes. I repeated, loud enough to make it clear to the goblin on the other side of the workshop that our group discussion was done and I was now talking to her again, "Fine, I'll do it."
Her little green face poked up from behind a workbench and she smiled from ear to ear. "Good," she rasped. "Come on into the back office. Your friends can go home, I'll have the materials you need forwarded to them after I've been...paid."
I felt dirty. Mind you, I had nothing against prostitutes, I fully respected their work. But this felt coerced, and there was just something about being on the other side of it that got to me.
Ziura was in the last stages of pregnancy, expecting to go into labor any day now, so Bridget was at her bedside and the rest of us were doing jobs around the city to stay close to them through the process. We had come to the city's most recommended engineer for upgrades and resupplies, but my reputation had apparently proceeded me, because she somehow knew about the party of women of every race and their human breeder. And this little goblin (no literally, I'm not insulting her, she was a member of the goblin race) wanted to be paid either more than we had, or was willing to cut the price if I showed her what everyone was so obsessed with.
I waved off the girls and sent them back home before following the artificer through the workshop to a little back room. It wasn't much more than a closet really, with a sizable coin box in one corner and a small bed in the other. A few odd tools lay scattered on the floor or on various surfaces.
"You'll have to excuse the mess," Riga said. "A good craftsman focuses on the work, not the workspace." She brushed some tools off the bed and crawled onto it, so she now stood almost at my chest height. "Gods, you humans are tall." She unbuckled her overalls and peeled them off, standing alone on bed in her undergarments. "Well, don't keep me waiting."