Vagabonds

It was Finn Griffin's first day on the

Vagabond

after their last wizard had retired

,

and he was already regretting joining it in the first place. Beyond the below-average pay, there wasn't much to worry about at first, he'd thought. A nice, medium-sized spaceship with several individual rooms; a small crew who'd known each other for years; a

simple

,

safe

job to lay back and focus.

It only took one hour for one of those expectations to be broken.

They'd been in orbit near Janus after a cheap bounty someone had claimed, the details of which Finn hadn't bothered to learn. It was a small and barren planet with a few human settlements, and he would've forgotten about it by the next day if he hadn't suddenly felt an echoing pull of magic reach his mind. It struck his head like a rock rippling across a lake, leaving in the aftershock nothing but an electric taste.

He'd been in his room, studying runes and spell books piled atop his new desk, though they were quickly forgotten in favor of the signal. That's what it had to be - a signal. There were no magic currents in Janus, or nebula, or any other close phenomena. Someone was trying to send him a message, and exactly one minute after the first one hit, he felt it again. Stronger, making him dizzy as it spun inside his head.

Not two minutes later - and other two signals later - he'd barged into the engineering room to find the ship's mechanic, Hank Wood.

"Um, Hank?" Finn swallowed as he peered into the room, hands clammy with sweat. "I have something to--

Oh!

" He yelped.

The engineering room was hot, being so close to the engine and bearing so many different machines, but Finn didn't expect to find Hank fixing a small thruster in the middle of the room in nothing but his boxers.

"Come on in, buddy!" The mechanic grinned. The two of them couldn't have been more different - Hank was tall and bulky, with tanned olive skin and muscles everywhere save for his chest, where they were hidden by a light layer of fat, itself accentuated by a trail of body hair that started at his pecs and didn't end. The hair on his head, however, was white, short, and wild, probably as hard to comb through as a dragon was to wrangle.

Finn, on the other hand, only reached the man's chest in height, and while not all that scrawny, had to ask for help to open something as trivial as a jar of animal eyeballs.

At the sight of Hank's state of undress, Finn immediately felt himself go red as shame boiled his face, "I-- um... I'm sorry, I..." As sweat made his glasses slide down his nose, he pushed them back up.

"Nah, we're all men here, don't be like that!" Hank chuckled, standing to wipe sweat off his forehead. Strangely enough, he didn't bother doing the same with the grease and sweat coating the rest of his glistening body.

Finn gulped and withdrew even more into the doorway. Inside his pants, his underwear was getting tighter by the second, and he prayed to seven different gods that it didn't show. At the very least, his wizard cloak went down to his trousers, so it would likely stay hidden.

"I, uh, a-alright." He stammered, walking into the room and picking one point away from the man to focus his gaze on. "I picked up a magic signal in my room. I-Is there anything out of order down here? Any, uh, bad runes?"

Hank scratched his head as he looked around the room with a furrowed brow, "I don't

think

so, but I've been wrong before. How long have you been feeling it?" As Hank turned to Finn, so did the meaty bulge in his dark boxers.

Finn closed his eyes and looked down just in time for another wave of dizzying magic to hit his head. At the very least, it was weaker this time."Um, about once every minute." He sighed, holding the sides of his head as if it'd help.

"Must be coming from down there then, Janus."

"Well, but... there's no magic source in Janus."

"There is now," Hank grinned, fists at his waist, "Wanna head down there and check it out?"

"No!" Finn blurted, "I mean, isn't that super dangerous?"

Hank crossed his muscular arms, "Well, you can stay here

or

go down there and be the very first person to see this new mysterious thing that

could

just put you on the galactic map."

"I... um,"

"Man, I can't believe you actually came." Hank snorted as the four of them stepped out the light shuttle that had brought them down onto the planet. Along with Finn and Hank, the ship's pilot as well as its fighter had also come down, leaving the ship on autopilot up above.

The sight of both still startled him a bit, for similar reasons.

Thomas Augustus II was many things, but the first thing people tended to notice was that he was a full-time werewolf. In a suit. And tiny glasses. Finn hadn't yet found the strength to ask about it, having been lucky enough that his initial fright wasn't noticed when he'd first met the man, but despite the werewolf's polite tone it was still hard not to think about what the

other

werewolves usually got up to, rather than sipping tea and piloting spaceships.

Mason, on the other hand, was human, but a very big one at that, bigger than either of his other old shipmates and chiseled like a god. Finn didn't know anything about him other than the fact he was ex-military, judging by some old uniform trousers he'd spotted on the laundry basket and his ginger near-buzzcut. He also wasn't fond of conversations, and his bulging muscles were intimidating enough for Finn to dismiss any potential attempts at finding out more.

The four of them descended onto the barren red desert without much clue of how to proceed, save for the only piece of information Finn had deduced thus far - the closer they got to the signal, the stronger its effect on his body was.

"This

has

to be tied to our bounty!" Mr. Augustus chirped in his deep yet somewhat still posh voice as he examined a holomap projected by the pocket watch in his hand. "Oh, my heart pounds with excitement!"

"Y'know, the two of you didn't

really

need to come." Hank grumbled as they followed the man. At the very least, the mechanic was now wearing a tank top and cheap jeans rather than close to nothing. "Coulda been just me and Finn and we would've been fine."

"Nonsense!" Mr. Augustus shook his head, "This is a team mission! Tell me, Mr. Griffin, how is your head?"

"Um, dizzy. Getting worse." Finn replied, trying not to glance at the looming Mason casting a shadow beside him. "And you can call me Finn."

"I don't see anything but desert and mountains." Mason grunted, gaze fixed at the distant, rugged red ridge.

"You didn't need to come either, Boots." Hank sighed.

Mason's eyes shot down at his heavy boots and then snapped back to the mechanic with a cold gleaming edge in them. "If I knock you out now, you'll forget I was ever here. You'll forget the whole week." His robotic gauntlets balled into big fists, "Is that what you want?"

Hank turned with a sheepish laughter, "Now, now, big guy, c'mon--"

Energy suddenly thrummed up Finn's spine and exploded inside his head, buzzing like a swarm of bees as he fell to his knees and grit his teeth, hand clutching the ground. To his horror, there was a runic circle inscribed into the red dirt, large enough that all of them had been standing in it.

"Mr. Griffin-- I mean, Finn!" Mr. Augustus yelped, grabbing the wizard's shoulder with his large hand.

"You alright, bud?" Asked Hank.

"I-I..." Finn swallowed, each word a mountain to push out of his mouth. Electricity glued his hands to the floor. "Here. It's here!"

A hurricane of red sand emerged from the floor around them, and though it lasted only a few seconds, when it vanished the four of them weren't alone anymore.

Three beasts surrounded them, though Finn only realized why the others looked so astonished once the blurs in his vision faded.

Mr. Augustus gasped, "What in god's name..."

One of them looked like a Terran gorilla, but several spikes grew out of its back and an extra pair of arms out of its chest; the others were both closer to wolves, only made of glistening metal without losing the organic shape that most robots sacrificed. Were these even robots at all?

The gorilla lunged at Finn before he could think of an answer. Its hands splayed all around it in every direction, pushing and shoving his teammates out of the way as it grabbed his ankle and tossed him five meters into the air.

Below, as he spun back down and screamed with vertigo crushing his stomach, a loud thud echoed seconds before Finn's back fell into an unexpectedly comfortable nest.

When he looked up, he found Mason's panting face staring back at him, the man's heavy arms holding him against his chest. Finn couldn't help but blush as he noticed the warmth radiating from his muscles.

"Thanks." He muttered, but tired Mason looked even more pissed off than normal Mason, and the man let him down without another word or glance.

Finn looked back to find Mr. Augustus wrangling back a wolf on one side and the remaining wolf lunging at him from the other. Before it could reach him, however, Hank slid in front of him and punched the beast aside like it was a sack of potatoes. When the wolf didn't get back up, he turned with a grin and a thumbs up.

"

Bad

dog." Mr. Augustus huffed, cleaning the blood off his hands with a handkerchief as the wolf lied still at his feet.

"What was that?" Hank asked.

"This is a warding rune. It was a trap." Finn swallowed. "Whatever's down there is what's sending the signals."

Like clockwork, the circular rune suddenly gave in and began descending into the ground like an elevator, creating waterfalls of sand around its circumference. Their surroundings switched from the hot desert surface to pitch black. The fact that the floor around the ward was now metallic didn't help Finn's worry.

As his blood flow sped up, Finn cupped his hands in front of him and then concentrated the heat inside his veins into it. When he opened, a ball of light was inside. It promptly burst into dozens of small pieces which then scattered around the room like fireflies.

As it turned out, the room was smaller than Finn would've thought, but beyond the old cobwebbed computers and machines, there was a long vertical object emerging from the floor. A test tube.

And inside it was a person draped in shadows and murky water.

"Took you long enough~." Said a masculine voice inside it.

With his mouth agape, Finn ordered the fireflies to center on the man.

Hank, rather than react with shock, picked up a chair and casually tossed it at the glass, shattering it into pieces and draining its murky liquid onto the floor.

"Oh

dear

." Mr. Augustus blurted, stepping forward.

"What the..." Mason muttered.

From the wreckage, out stepped the creature they'd been gawking at. It was no man at all.

From head to toe, it was red - and

naked

, Finn thought,

dangerously

naked,

distractingly

naked. It hair was dark, short, and spiky, interrupted at the front by a pair of pointy horns that paved the way for a hungry look and a grin full of sharp edges. Dripping with liquid, its defined chest had a thin line of hair running down his pecs that stopped at his... his...

Finn choked back a cough.

The line of hair only ended at the base of its red six inch cock that swayed carefree from side to side as it approached. "Name's Rall. I'm an Incubus. To whom do I owe the pleasure?" He extended his meaty arm to offer a handshake.

Finn crouched to hide the obvious tent in his pants with his hands.

"Dear god, an incubus?!" Augustus gasped, ignoring the outstretched hand, "What are you doing here?"

"They were harvesting him." Mason affirmed, stone-faced as always as he gazed away from Rall's casually naked body, "Incubi energy can be converted into a power source. " He sighed, "Someone get him some pants.'

"I'm perfectly fine like this." Rall's smile widened as he took a step closer to look up at Mason, arms crossed against his chest.

"Harvesting? Harvesting what?" Asked Hank.

"Let's just say it wasn't my blood." Rall grinned, before turning to Finn with an inquisitive expression. "You... You smell funny."

Shit. He'd noticed. "I-- um, I'm sorry, I couldn't--" Finn stammered, turning his shrinking body away from the incubus as he shot him a glance over his shoulder.

"I recognize that smell." Rall's eyes widened with recognition at the same time as his grin became a beacon of joy, fists at his waist. "You're a virgin." He purred with delight.

"What?!" The other three blurted out .

"It's alright, I'm used to the effect I can have on people. Well, then,

mon chéri,

" Rall put his hands behind his head and then thrusted his pelvis towards the wizard, his dick flopping up and down as it slowly hardened, "Dig in~"

Before the line of drool running down Finn's chin could drip off, the heat in his cheeks rose to his head. All thoughts were cut short as his eyes rolled back and he fell to the floor.