The Fertile Grove Ch 4

The Fertile Grove: Chapter Four: The Devil In Me (Felicia)

In the period of time between when Starfall arrived and when my next wife-to-bed was scheduled to arrive, I had to do very specific homework and make sure my ass was covered, because I knew with the next woman to arrive, so too would a shitload of complications.

Succubi were nothing to be tangled with lightly.

Eternal Wayfarer College had a lax admissions policy for anyone who could afford to pay tuition (or had a sponsor willing to loan them the money for tuition), but succubi and incubi had generally been considered persona non grata for EWC, simply because most of them were unable to control their natural abilities to inspire lust all around them. Not that they were directly at fault for that - their race are born with a specific pheromonal gland called a samear that produces a very powerful kind of natural magic all on its own. While many of them had tried to find ways to manage and control those abilities, unfortunately for centuries they had proven too much to control for even the most skilled of adepts, not only of their own kind but from most of the magical universities as well. Sure, there were a few succubi and incubi students over at the University of the Midnight Apostles of Stellar Tombs, but tuition over at U-MAST ran something like five times what EWC charged.

Felicia Hitch was the first half-succubus that EWC had ever admitted, and man, lemme tell you, was it quite the gossip storm when she was. There'd even been quite the active discussion of whether not half-succubus was even the correct (and polite) way to describe her. I don't want to bog you down in the massive semantics argument of it all, so let me just go through it

extremely

fast. Felicia's parents were a human sorceress named Martha Hitch and an incubus named D'ronzix. Now whether or not succubi and incubi are exactly the same species is apparently a matter of some heated discussion, but since she didn't have a succubus mother, some people are arguing that she should be described as half-incubus, but being as she's a woman (and very proud of that fact), I'm of the school that says however she wants to describe herself, that's what the rest of us should adhere to. And when I first met her, she told me she was half-succubus, so that's what I've always called her.

Because she was only half-succubus, she didn't have a full samear gland, but instead had a sort of semi-functional one that only operated at about 20-30% of the power of a normal succubus. With that fact in mind, EWC felt like she could be a student safely without risking anyone losing control or inadvertently falling under her sway accidentally. She did know how to use her samear gland to exert lust upon people, though, although it took a toll on her to use it all that much, and even then, she didn't have much practice in being subtle with it.

I wouldn't have described Felicia and I as friends even on my boldest of days. We didn't hang in similar circles, but believe me, I'd heard the stories and always seen her being the center of attention for any campus activity I happened to find myself at. There was outgoing, and then there was Felicia, who took outgoing to the next, next,

next

level. She was the life of every party she was ever at, and she could drink everyone and anyone under the table, including my fellow dwarven student Pulley Chasmheart, who I'd seen conquer every bar he'd ever set foot in without so much as breaking a sweat. She knew basically everyone on campus, including me, and she was incredibly sharp. She was a social butterfly the likes of which EWC had never seen, and always made it a point to at least be friendly with any student she ran into. She was big, brassy and loud, and she was involved in so many extra-curricular activities, I doubt anyone could keep track of them all. She was a cheerleader, part of the debate team, played rugby, was on a roller derby team, spoke a couple dozen different languages and was just generally as cool as fucking possible.

So when I'd seen she'd basically been trying to tempt me to take her pussy from the Fertile Grove by having fresh tattoos around the edges of it, I'd actually wondered who had more confidence, her or me. I mean, I've got some swagger, but talk about putting everything out on front street. If anything, Felicia was the one

I

was the most nervous about meeting. I sort of knew that once we got past the initial awkwardness, things would probably be fine, but I knew out of all the women I was going to be marrying, none of them would be as outspoken or as outrageous as Felicia would be.

She was also one of the few that I did homework for before her arrival.

See, once I saw the tattoos on her flesh, I knew I wanted to verify that the professor who'd translated them for me hadn't left anything out. That meant learning at least the fundamentals of Base Demonic very quickly and doing some research to find out how the Fourth Lake offshoot dialect varied from Simplified Demonic.

Most languages have alphabets based on a relatively small number of letters. High Elvish has 37 main characters, with some variants. Root Dwarvish has 44. Satyric only has 19. But Demonic uses logograms and has close to thirty thousand characters that are commonly used, and millions of splinter deviations, not to mention all the regional dialects. That meant I wasn't going to be able to pick up more than an extremely primitive amount of understanding of the language within a few days, even if I took a hard crash course on it.

So I ended up reaching out to my buddy Dwayne Lunghammer, a Frost Giant student with a penchant for multiple languages, and thankfully, he was fluent in a dozen different offshoots of Base Demonic, including Fourth Lake, Felicia's native tongue. During the month I'd had Felicia's pussy held hostage, I'd spent one day copying every single line of her tattoos into my notebook, and when I showed that copy to Dwayne, he laughed pretty hard.

"Don't

ever

tell her you let me see this, Wedge," Dwayne told me, his chuckle almost like a purring earthquake. "This is really meant just for anyone she's banging, and even then, I bet most of them don't get a good look at it. You're telling me she's really got this tattooed around her cooch?"

"She does at that, Dwayne, and the professor gave me a rough translation, but I wanted to be sure he wasn't pulling my chain or anything," I told him. "I've picked up a little bit of Demonic since then, but Fourth Lake is fucking brutal man. The double and triple diphthongs are murder on trying to make heads or tales out of it, not to mention that apparently the pitch notations for Fourth Lake are on an entirely different tonal scale than Common Demonic."

"Yeah, I'm sure you're trying to be all cool and speak to her in her mother tongue, my dude, but let this one lie," he said. "You might eventually pick up enough to be conversational in Fourth Lake Demonic within about ten years, but she'll be a much better teacher for you at it than I would. What do you need from me?" he asked me. "I still owe you for the thing with the crossbow and the genie, and we go way back, so how can I help?"

I took out another sheet of paper. "So that's what the professor's translation was. Double check that, and then I need you to be able to write 'Wedge Deepcopper' in Fourth Lake Demonic to fill in the spot where she's left it blank," I told him. "We're going to be married, so clearly she means me, and I'd like to be prepared and ahead of the game instead of running slow, you know?"

Dwayne leaned his massive head down and squinted at the professor's translation that I'd written down to line up with the tattoo itself. "Yeah, his translation's a bit off here. It's more like 'exquisite and incomparably mighty fuckhole' but with about four or five extra layers of poetic grandiosity. That's the thing - Demonic can get pretty flowery when it wants to be. But yeah, other than that, it's about right. And yeah, I can see the part you're talking about, where you want to add your name, considering she's gonna be your wife. Gimme a couple of minutes, I gotta transliterate some of it. Do you want it phonetically or actually with matching words?"

"Can you do it as a straight translation of my name, but still give it markers to make it clear that it

is

my name, and not just a couple of objects?"

Dwayne looked at me like I'd asked him if he was capable of counting to three. "Of course I can do it. I just want to check a couple of things. Wedge is real easy. It's just—" Then he made a sound like a parrot warbling through a ceiling fan while someone played a guitar a few doors down.

"

That's

easy?"

"It's easier to write than it is to pronounce," he chuckled. "It's just combining Deep and Copper into one solid piece, then assigning ownership and possessive tone to it, then giving it the markers to show that it's a surname, then adding in the lines to combine with your first name, sneaking in the imperial modifier, then adding in the lines to show the possessive clause is attached to the words following it, and finally the shift in semivowel to make sure the epenthesis doesn't dilute the meaning of the whole piece and... there you go, Lord Wedge Deepcopper's tight cunted bitch, in Fourth Lake Demonic. Tight fit, but you should be able to get it in there with a good enough tattoo artist. Sorry I wrote it so damn big, but you know, big hands can't do small work. As long as you keep the proportions the same, shrinking it down won't cause any lingual problems."

"You added the Lord part in?"

Dwayne laughed, rolling his eyes. "They

officially

make you a Lord when you beat

one

of the Secret Six high challenges. Nobody's ever beaten

more

than one before, but I assume you still get the Lordship anyway. What, did you think everyone was calling you that for fun?"

"I mean," I laughed, "I sort of considered that people were just doing it to mock me. My brother never mentioned he was Lord Deepcopper."

"Well, he's your brother, innit? He's not going to want to call you to the mat for not giving him his proper due respect," Dwayne said. "Anyway, you know you're going to have special needs for getting that tattoo updated. I'll bet you Sharpsy's got a demonic needle, but getting angel's blood pigmentation is no walk in the park, and then you've got to convince Sharpsy to

do

the tat for you, although I guess Felicia and her go way back, so maybe it won't be that hard. But you know Sharpsy's rules - if you want exotic work done, you bring the materials yourself. She may not even let you slide on the demonic needle."

"The needle's no biggie," I told him. "I picked one of those up last weekend over at Embage's Bazaar for a steal, and have spent the last few days sterilizing it, which was the harder part. The pigmentation I've got a line on, but I'm probably going to have to run a five-line trade up to get to it, so I'd better leg it." I rolled up the updated paperwork and tucked it into my satchel before I shook one of Dwayne's fingers by way of thanks. "You find yourself with more transdimensional real estate negotiations, you know who to call, yeah?"

Thankfully, the next day was Saturday, so I didn't have anything I needed to do, so instead I found myself going through a long, complicated series of trades, as expected. A gargoyle named Doyle had the angel's blood pigmentation, but he wanted some lich skull fungus for it. To get the lich skull fungus, I had to talk to dark elf named Shasta, but she wanted some labyrinthian hollow mushrooms for it. To get the mushrooms, I had to talk to the EWC grounds caretaker, an antediluvian arachnid sorcerer named Veboke, who had both the easiest but most time-consuming request. At least, I

thought

it was going to be, but as it turned out, Veboke was a cunning little bastard himself.

Veboke had been with EWC since its inception, and as such, he was a treasure trove of knowledge like I'd never believed when I'd first arrived. He was nearly three meters tall, with eight arms of fuzzy black and grey, and with eight yellow eyes and a heavy black robe that covered much of his body. Arachnids were typically very solitary individuals, but Veboke had been part of the original cadre of adventurers and spellcasters who'd gotten together after a particular long campaign against a dark sorcerer named—You know what? Nobody gives a shit about those old timers, considering most of them have been dead for centuries, but Veboke would outlive all of us.

When EWC had been founded, he'd asked to be a part of it, but only really wanted to teach a few things. He taught ley line navigation, he taught maze design and, naturally, he taught gardening and arboreal casting. He tended to many things on the campus, but my favorite of which had always been The Great Drifting Hedge Maze, which he'd designed and maintained, with his personal home (nicknamed the Dark Lair) at the very heart of it.

To even get to meet with Veboke when he wasn't teaching, a student had to navigate through The Great Drifting Hedge Maze, a challenge that even the most senior of students had difficulty doing, because as the name implied, the layout was never the same. Exactly

how

Veboke had trained the foliage of the Hedge Maze to constantly move was a secret

nobody

knew how to replicate. In fact, in much the same way the Secret Six had their challenges, Veboke had a challenge himself, in that anybody could build their own Drifting Hedge Maze would take his job. I'd

seriously

considered trying to figure out his secrets when I'd first arrived at EWC, but nobody can be good at everything, and it turns out I do

not

have a green thumb. Agricultural magic and I do

not

get along.

But!

I have a great love of puzzles, and while I couldn't

make

the maze, I'd figured out how to semi-reliably navigate the maze, even if I couldn't do so as fast as the champions at the school. I won't get into the mechanics of it, but if you're trying to figure it out for yourself, lemme tell you that you need to have a good memory, some understanding of celestial navigation, a bit of knowledge about lunar phases and, most importantly, the various deity statues you will encounter throughout the maze offer a lot of subtle hints to be picked up on. Nina, who went with me everywhere these days, found the navigation annoying at first, but eventually got into the spirit of things, coming around to getting joy from how the whole thing fit together.

You'll never guess what Veboke wanted from me. He wanted a portrait with me, which I needed to autograph. As it turned out, he has a wall inside the Dark Lair called the Legendary Wall, which he reserved for him and portraits of students who did something nobody had ever done on campus. Now, I told him that I really didn't have a few days to sit for a portrait, but he told me it wouldn't take days, but less than half an hour. I wasn't entirely sure how that was going to happen, but he told me a phrase that I'd used more than a few times during my college career.

'I got a guy.'

Turns out, Veboke had an artist friend named Ostrander who was a timestretcher. Don't worry if you aren't familiar with timestretchers - they're an

incredibly rare

stripe of magician, because having to adapt to living that way is enough to drive many people crazy. So, time is a wild thing, but it's massively elastic, and the stretchers would pull and push time when they needed it. Instead of sitting for hours or even days, the portrait was done in about twenty minutes, but it was twenty hours for Ostrander's life. Eventually, there would be a comedown where he'd have to endure the reverse, but it allowed him to capture a moment in just a short period of time. The portrait of Veboke and I together was remarkably detailed and an excellent likeness, so all that remained was for me to autograph it, for which Veboke even had a special quill pen.

Naturally, I had to sign in blood, and yes, I had to use my own blood, but nothing in this world comes completely free. I know plenty about the use of blood in magics, and there wasn't any way that Veboke could use it for any sort of nefarious plans, not that I imagine he had any anyway. For an arachnid, he was remarkably upbeat and joyous, and he was especially impressed by the fact that I'd used challenging

all

of the Secret Six to conceal

which

of the sororities I'd been actually going after. He told me they were likely considering implementing some kind of penalty for issuing a challenge and not actually making an attempt to defeat their challenge. It's nice to know I was leaving an impact and a legacy behind.

Once I'd signed the portrait, he gave me a large bag full of the mushrooms, which I took back to Shasta. She only needed a handful, so I kept the rest for myself, and took the lich skull fungus to Doyle the gargoyle, who wanted

all

the fungus I'd brought him, but true to his word, he had a small vial of angel's blood pigment to give to me, which he said could be mixed with additional reagents should I have the need. I'd soon learn what he was suggesting.

I arrived back at my house just in time to see Professor Antevestian approaching my abode with Felicia Hitch in tow. It was extremely easy to recognize Felicia's demonic heritage even at a distance. While loads of students had jet black hair (which she wore a daring bob), few others had large, spiraling horns atop their head, or cloven-hoofed feet. Her skin pigmentation was a deep shade of rose red, with her lips a much more lustrous shade of blood red. And there was no mistaking those bright orange demonic eyes, much more similar to cats' eyes than human eyes.

"Hi Felicia," I said to her with a smile, while Nina waved as the half-succubus and her professorial escort approached us. I'd intended to make a smooth and suave approach, but as soon as her eyes lit on me, Felicia raced over, abandoning her suitcase next to the professor, leaping into the air to wrap her legs around my waist and her arms around my neck as she pushed her tongue into my mouth in the most intense first kiss I'd ever get. While Felicia continued to make out with me, Nina moved over to the professor to get the half-succubus's suitcase, bringing it over towards the front door of the house.

"You wanna do it in front of him?" she asked me. "I'd kinda like to make him squirm, but if you don't want to make him endure it, I can respect that. But before I crawl into that bed tonight, you're gonna do me dirty one way or the other."

Ticking the professor off was fun, but I also knew that there were little clauses he could use to get me into trouble if I pushed it too far, so I needed to mind my P's and Q's and not get tripped up into whatever little traps they were setting for me to try and get me to step out of line.

The administration didn't enjoy being made a fool of, and they most certainly didn't enjoy people telling them

no

, but I've navigated the murky waters they've laid before me, and I need to keep moving forward. I'm not going to lie - seeing them eat a bit of humble pie was a nice side-effect of my plan. But it was never the main effect, never what I'd set out to do. It just came along with the package.

"Nah," I said to her. "He might take it as me showing 'poor moral character,' and I can't have that. How've you been, Felicia?"

"More than a little giddy about this moment," she purred, her hand clenching on my ass. "I was a

little

butthurt that you didn't pick me to show up first, but I understand that you and Ciara have been dancing around one another all semester long. But Starfall before me?

Really?

What's up with that?"