For Lappy, morning meant excavating herself from beneath her long-time lover and washing off the stink of their lovemaking from the night before. After a full two years, this goblin couldn't believe the way that she used to live, walking barefoot in the dirt, eating unseasoned meat if she ate at all some days, and sleeping in the filth of the warren with all the breeders. Now, being able to take a luxurious bath almost whenever she felt like it was a fixture of her schedule. She looked into the mirror, by the way now knew that mirrors had something to do with light bouncing and not another goblin on the other side of whatever reflective surface, and thought that she was in fact getting a little chubby.
Oh, and she had boobs! Not like miss Leigh's comparatively huge ones (she claimed most humans had bigger ones, but she was the only human Lappy had ever seen), but they were there and they were squishy. Lappy some days slipped away to feel herself up because otherwise Leigh would giggle to herself at Lappy's expense.
Then there was this expectation miss Leigh had about body hair, namely that there shouldn't be much if any on a woman, and Lappy had resisted at first when it turned out this involved scraping it away with blades. Now that she had been introduced to cotton panties and the sensation of wind blowing across a summery dress, she wouldn't go back to her hanging, matted hair unless she was made to. On the other hand, she'd loved shampoo from the first day, getting a massage in warm, cascading water by a nubile woman, bubbles popping all around, and coming out of it with tamed, light-feeling hair to boot! It was like a dream, like being invited to stay with a goddess as a member of her personal harem.
That was the real prize, being able to indulge in her own desires to like a clean, fresh-smelling woman instead of being confined in her choices to either be confined beneath swelled bellies in the breeding pit or being used by the males whenever they wanted to get a nut off. And no, it wasn't that Lappy only liked females, as Leigh thought early on, but she definitely didn't like the way the males treated her and the breeding sows were too busy lying on their backs, waiting for food to push her off when she wanted to pleasure herself on their bodies. But that, that wasn't lovemaking, a concept Lappy had never once thought about because it just wasn't the way her people worked.
If you're a male, you hunt, and if you're a female you either dug for the warren, collected fruit, or you had been seeded and you were waiting to birth your litter, hoping it wouldn't kill you. In all that, Lappy just happened to be one of the females who wasn't bred no matter how many of the males spurted inside her, and she was scrawny enough that bringing her along with a hunting party wouldn't mean giving up much food for the services she provided at the night's campfire.
As she waited for her bath to fill (she still didn't understand how this tower had hot water whenever it was needed, though Leigh had explained it so many times) Lappy put a glob of bitter, cold-tasting stuff on a brush and went to work on her teeth. Apparently a mostly meat and fruit diet hadn't given her "cavities" whatever that was, but she had to accept after smelling her human lover's breath that this was much preferable. The bitterness would go away anyway when she rinsed and the refreshing, "minty", feeling would remain.
That done, she squirted some fragrant lotion into the water and watched in ever-renewed wonder as the tub filled with shimmering, pink bubbles. She stepped inside, parting the bubbles momentarily as she soaked herself to her pointy ears and let them close back in over her body like a fluffy blanket. Whoever it was that allowed her to be born in this time, able to experience this luxury, she thanked them profusely even as she laid her head on a folded towel at the tub's edge and dreamily floated, bubbles popping delightfully against her skin.
The door in the other room opened and closed, a signal that Leigh, the sleepyhead that she was, had passed the point where it was fun to stay lounging in bed.
Of course, Leigh entered the bathroom stark naked and sat down to pee, only then noticing through sleep-blurred vision that Lappy was right there enjoying her morning soak.
"You know, we're going to have to go into town if you want to keep using bubble soap like this," Leigh said with a drowsy smile and a yawn, "I need to get some special stuff too, if you want to come along?"
Lappy said, in practiced human language, "Can I see humans?"
"Prob'ly," Leigh said, "Though we're actually nearby a Dwarf kingdom. That's the one that actually owns this part of the forest, the one I'm renting it from. But it does a lot of trade with the human cities on the continent, so I'm sure we could rustle some up if we wanted to."
"Dwarfs are the short ones, right?"
"Good job~ They are a little taller than you guys, typically, and stockier."
"That means fat?"
Leigh set her chin on her hand, a symbol of thought, and said, "Not necessarily, and I think it mostly has to do with their diet, all the beer they tend to drink. But they're known for being really good at craftsmanship, metalwork, so they have to be strong. Stocky is more of a general body shape than strictly being fat."
"So they're, umm..." Lappy half-swam to the edge of the tub, her top half covered in a shroud of pink bubbles, so she could be closer to her love. "Big and muscly?"
"Yeah, mostly," Leigh said, "but you do see some trimmer ones, mostly the ones that integrate into human cities. Same thing in the other direction, since if you stay in a dwarf city you're mostly going to be eating bread and drinking beer, so many carbs all the time will make anyone chunky."
"What are carbs?"
"Stuff in food that the stomach makes into sugar to give you energy. Wheat has a lot of it, so bread and beer which are made from wheat have a lot of carbs. If you have too much of it, your body makes it into fat."
"Oh," Lappy said, "So what's wheat?"
"It's a kind of grass with really big seeds. You can take the seeds and grind them down to make all kinds of food, and the rest of the plant you can give to your animals. Dwarfs give a lot of their land over to farmers because so much of their construction happens underground anyway, so they're a big exporter of wheat," Leigh said. Then she was done with her business.
