The Fertile Grove
Chapter One — The Beginning
A “Detachable” commission
Goddamn it. Even with the drizzling rain, the fireflies were running rampant tonight, and that was going to make this shit a lot harder than it needed to be, but I knew that my best option was to go tonight, because I knew something nobody else knew about. It was an ace in my back pocket that I’d been holding onto for four years since my older brother had told me about it.
I was atop of the alchemical studies building, overlooking the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority House across the street, focusing much more on their garden behind their building than the building itself. It was the middle of April, and the fireflies had appeared early this year, much earlier than they normally would, probably the result of some frondmancer tampering with the local ecosystem for a class project. For all I knew, creating hordes of lightning bugs had been one of the assignments for Fauna Magic 304 or something. There were far too many classes being taught at Eternal Wayfarer College (EWC for short) for me to keep track of all the assignments and what got let out into the nearby area.
April was the month of all the senior challenges, though, and that meant all the professors were encouraged to introduce anything that caused spectacular mischief with the students’ pranks and schemes. You see, every April, all the fraternities and sororities held these legendary skill challenges for seniors only. That meant there was all sorts of madness going on across campus, although only seniors were eligible to participate in the challenges, and even then, only seniors in good standards. Juniors had been expelled for less, and the one time someone too young had tried to sneak into the challenges, he’d nearly lost his life. These challenges are a Big Fucking Deal, so everyone treats them with the utmost respect.
There were some caveats to all the challenges—some ground rules that were unbreakable, designed to keep the classes running without too much disruption. Students engaging in the challenges weren’t allowed to miss a single class session, otherwise they would instantly forfeit. But, that also came with a caveat—none of the Sororities or Fraternities could do anything to a student engaged in a class or school activity. Nobody wanted the weekly football game against another college to be disrupted by sorority sisters attacking a student who was out on the pitch, and no professor wanted to be mid lecture as two students broke out dueling or some such. While a student was busy with schoolwork, they didn’t have to be constantly looking over their shoulder.
A century or so ago, when EWC had been founded, three fraternities and three sororities had sprung up, mostly composed of a mixture of noble highborn humans and erudite elves with the occasional wild card thrown in. The Secret Six, as the six orders were often referred to, each had their own specialty, and eventually expanded to have branches at other magical colleges across the planet, but the ones at EWC were the originals, and therefore, the most prestigious.
What you need to know about me is that I’m not human or elf—I’m a goddamn dwarf, and proud of it. My name is Wedge Deepcopper. I’m the youngest of five brothers, and only two of us displayed any magical acumen growing up, so us two were both eventually sent off to EWC. It was expensive, but our parents had always fostered any skills we had growing up, so when my brother Bellow and I both began to display magical talents at an early age, money was set aside so we could go and attend college when we were old enough.
My brother Bellow was something of a hero across Eternal Wayfarer College for his last few months because he had actually beaten one of the Secret Six’s challenges his senior year, and a specific challenge that had perplexed students for lifetimes. It was something nobody had ever thought even vaguely possible. His success had been nearly a decade ago though, so his tale had somewhat been diminished. That was all the better for me because it meant few people had even considered that I might build upon my older brother’s success, at least after the first few months of my classes anyway. They wrote me off as the odd kid, too mercurial to see anything through to completion.
Which was exactly what I wanted them to think.
I’d been planning this night’s escapades since my arrival at EWC almost four years ago, and during those years, the plan had gone through multiple iterations. I would’ve loved to have been able to just coast on my brother’s coattails and use his exact plan, but the housemembers of the sororities and fraternities that made up the Secret Six weren’t idiots, and they had patched over what they thought was the most important part of what he’d exploited.
Each of the Secret Six houses specialized in a few forms of magic, and as such, offered different challenges to anyone brave enough to take them on, with prizes equal to boot. Gebo Sowilo Tiwaz Fraternity, for example, were known as the concealment masters. At the beginning of April, they as a group made their Fraternal House disappear and relocate. Each day after class, each brother would return to the house using secret pathways. Anyone who could find the Grebo Sowilo Tiwaz Fraternity House (who wasn’t a member) during the month of April won their weight in diamonds and ten-year contracting gig with the Inescapable Dowager Brothers Bounty Hunters Club, generally an invite-only firm that specialized in hunting down the most troublesome magical criminals. They’d given away their prize four times in a hundred years.
My father had hoped I was going to take on the Ansuz Hagalaz Othala Fraternity and their so-called Invincible Challenge. During the month of April, all members of AHO had a simple proposition to any senior on campus who’d signed up for the challenges—draw a single drop of blood from any one of our members. The winner would claim possession of one of a legendary series of weapons made by the great dwarven weaponsmith Alaxion Chasmflame, as well as a high-ranking position in the Nightcloud’s military army.
Dad had been drafted to serve in the Nightcloud army for a decade when he was younger, and had described several of the commanders, who were often AHO brothers, as entitled pricks. But I’d never been one for combat magics, and the idea of trying to find a way to penetrate a series of shield magics that had withstood a lifetime of challenges didn’t much appeal to me. Having something made by the great Chasmflame was certainly appealing, but it didn’t lean into the sorts of things I was naturally good at. Only two people had ever been able to beat the AHOs at their game, and I had no plans on trying to be the third.
No, my eyes were on the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority, who were known for two things—their transportation magics and their defensive wards. Their challenge was simple—get into their garden in the back of the sorority house, take any of the protected objects and get out. Without being caught or detected, of course. You also lost if they were able to retrieve what you’d taken from them before the month was over. My brother had done it, nine years ago, and only just by the skin of his teeth, but he’d dined out on that story for a lifetime, and his now-wife always seemed to take great delight in him telling it to someone new.
The garden out back behind the sorority house was known during the month of April as The Fertile Grove, because that’s exactly what it was, and why so many people would spend much of the month trying to break in. The women of KJD were so confident that their magics couldn’t be beat that each of them hung a talisman from one of the trees in the back garden, each about the size of a teacup saucer, so they couldn’t be easily moved or concealed, which was important.
Because each woman of KJD placed her very own pussy in one of these talismans and hung it in the back yard of the sorority house for any mage brave enough to make a go at it. They were connected to each woman via magic, a sort of portal kept open for an entire month, and if you could take one out of the garden without being caught, you could do whatever you wanted to with it for the rest of the month. More importantly, if you could prevent the owner from locating their pussy after it had been taken, keeping it with you for the rest of the month, then you won the challenge. You and the owner would be betrothed on the first day of May. You would also gain a ten-year contract with Impregnable Madeline’s Potent Securities, or the IMPs, as a sneaker.
Sneaker was the shorthand term for someone who was hired to test security systems for flaws and defects. Sneaker teams were typically made up of ex-law enforcement and ex-prison management, but they had also been known to take on reformed ex-convicts and criminals, people who had spent a lifetime finding flaws in these sorts of things.
My brother was the only person who’d ever beaten KJD in a hundred years, and his wife, Eleanor Glassflower, the kind of beauty that every man on campus would’ve slit the throat of the guy next to him to just have had a chance with. Thankfully, Eleanor had been so impressed by my brother’s sexual skills before they’d even met that she was already falling for him when she was formally introduced to him on the first of May, and they had been an excellent match since. Even had a couple of kids now.
“The key, Wedge, is that once you get it out, you have to be prepared to hide the thing for a few weeks, and that’s where everyone usually gets tripped up,” my brother had told me about five years ago, on the night we’d found out that I’d also been accepted at EWC. On that night, my brother had dared me not only to repeat his performance, but to improve upon it. “I’d say someone breaches the defenses about once a decade or so, and then about two-thirds of those make it off the grounds, but I’m the only one who’s ever been able to avoid getting caught afterwards. I’ll tell you completely how I did it, and I won’t exclude the one detail that I have every other time I have or will tell the story, which’ll give you an edge. It’ll give you my way in. But you’ll need to figure out your own method of not getting caught. Keep that in mind. If you want to do this, you’re going to have to be twice as clever as I am, and at least twice as ballsy.”
I intended to be just that.
During my tenure at EWC, I’d been a complicated student. The first year, it had been common knowledge that I was Bellow Deepcopper’s little brother, and so initially everyone had expected me to go for KJD. That meant I’d had to work incredibly hard to throw everyone off the track for the first few months. So, while I was taking all the common curriculum my freshman year, I’d also taken a few optionals that had everyone confused, not the least of which was Magical Weaving 101, something that was usually taken by students intending to try and take the Wunjo Perthro Dagaz Sorority challenge, considered the most impossible of all the House challenges.
If you wanted to challenge WPD, just like any other the other houses, you had to drop off a letter to them sometime during the seven days before April announcing your intent, as well as listing your class schedule for the month. The WPD challenge itself sounded relatively simple—don’t let a WPD sister touch your bare skin during the month of April. The prize was a title of nobility and your choice of WPD sister as personal concubine and bodyguard for life.
No one had ever beaten WPD.
By the end of my first year, everyone, and I do mean everyone was convinced I was going to try and take on WPD, so I found myself under even more intense scrutiny as I entered my sophomore year, especially since my grades were exceptional. In year two I took on specialties in teleportation and transportation magics, something that the bookmakers had felt signaled that I was definitely planning on attempting to evade the WPD sisters.
Oh, didn’t I mention the bookies? When a student enrolls in EWC, they’re given two categories by the bookmakers—who are they going to attempt to challenge, and will they succeed against whoever it is they challenge when their senior year rolls around. Only students and teachers were allowed to gamble, and you weren’t allowed to bet yourself, naturally. You also weren’t physically capable of telling anyone who you were taking on until you started the challenge, either. It was one of the spells cast on all incoming students.
By the end of my sophomore year, me taking on WPD was a sucker’s bet, and would pay out so little as to not even be worth it, because everyone and I do mean everyone just knew I wanted to be the only student in EWC history who beat the WPD system. This, of course, meant the sisters of WPD had taken a severe interest in me, going out of their way to be friendly with me at any opportunity, hoping it might give them an edge in a couple of years’ time. I even dated a few of them along the way. Man, were they fucking wild in the sack.
This, of course, meant my junior year confused the fuck out of everyone. I took things that made sense in terms of the WPD challenge—acrobatics, evasion, and the like—but I also took magical dueling, armor and defensive spells, temporal magic, illusion mastery and, most perplexingly, automation magic, specifically spells that could sustain themselves for long periods of time and adapt to unforeseen circumstances.
Automation magic was considered a dying art, something that had seen a massive decline in enrollment over the past few decades, so much so that the automation classes only had maybe half a dozen students each, which was fine by me. It meant nobody was around studying to see why I was taking the classes.
With only a couple of hundred students in each grade level, the sport of prepping for the challenges was the major pastime of students and faculty alike. During each of my first three years, I’d taken the month of April to watch and grade all the various attempts by seniors, both on offense and on defense, because there were a few things that I hadn’t considered early on that were going to come into play tonight when I finally made my go.
First and foremost, student challenges weren’t allowed in any form during a student’s class hours, meaning that while a student was in a classroom, the WPD sisters couldn’t try and touch your skin and no one could take a swing at an AHO brother to try and draw blood. The games were encouraged by the faculty, but never once were they allowed to interfere with education. This was a hard and fast rule and if someone from one of the Secret Six broke it to try and end a challenge, the challenger would be immediately declared a winner.
Along with that, casting magics to affect the mind of anyone during the challenge month was completely forbidden, so nobody could be forced to reveal anything while the games were going. No brainwashing someone to tell you how to remove their armor or where they’d hidden something.
To ensure all of this, each classroom had a large crystal in it, to detect when magic had been cast by a student. These were the failsafe guards, and if a student attempted to cast magic while a class was in session in that room, it would light up brilliant green, and proctors would be called.
They didn’t know it yet, but I’d thought of ways to use these restrictions as weapons.
That brings us all back to here, tonight, April 18th. I’d been under a lot of scrutiny since the last week of March, because I’d done something nobody had ever thought to do before—I’d declared my intent to go after each and every house in the Secret Six.
It had caused quite the riot when I’d done it, because the morning of March the 29th, I’d headed over to the Wunjo Perthro Dagaz Sorority and dropped off a letter of intent. But while the fuss of that was just beginning to circulate on campus, I’d gone to each other house in the Secret Six and had dropped off a similar letter, announcing I was also going to be making a play for them as well. With each successive house, the more chaos I was generating and the more frantic people were getting on campus. Students were consulting the faculty rules regarding the declaration process left and right.
As astonishing as it was, there hadn’t been anything in the rules stating you could only take one challenge during your senior year, only that you had to be a senior to take part in a challenge. And not only had I been insane enough to try more than one, but I’d also been out of my mind enough to try all of them.
It’s at this point I’m going to let you in on a little secret—I never had any intention of doing all six challenges. In fact, up until February, I never intended to do more than one. The idea of signing up for all the challenges was a delicious smoke screen and it meant that the people watching me to see what I would do were tripping over one another so much, it was causing problems nobody could anticipate because nobody knew if I was a genuine threat to them or not.
Back in the middle of February, I’d gone to visit my brother Bellow and his wife, just to bounce a few of the particulars off them, which was permitted by the rules. I certainly didn’t tell them everything—just a few specifics about how I intended to complicate things for all the houses. When I had Eleanor pointed something out to me—with a couple of minor tweaks, I was already likely to beat a second challenge anyway. So why not at least try and beat two? She even had a specific suggestion regarding another aspect of it, one that tickled my fancy greatly.
On the very first day of April, the WPD sisters made their first attempts to find me and touch my skin before dawn had even broken, only to find that I wasn’t even in my home. I was actually offended by how little they’d estimated my skill that I would be inside of my home at all during the month of April. It was a rookie mistake, and one I very much did not intend to get caught up in.
They also tried to make a play for me again after my first class of the day, Theoretical Limits on Magical Scale, only to discover the first of my many complications, one that I imagine they still haven’t stopped swearing about. When the class let out, every single person walking out of the classroom was encased in an illusion of me for five minutes. That meant it was impossible to pick me out of a crowd or even to guess which of the dozens of students leaving a room I might actually be.
The WPD sisters were working hard on illusion shattering spells, but the spell I’d devised only used my appearance as the template the first time, and each subsequent time, the copies were all of someone else. The sisters had to be sure it was me they were touching, so until they could find a way to mass banish illusion spells, they had no way of knowing where I was going once class was over. It also bothered the crap out of them how immediate the illusion spell went into effect as soon as class ended. But I’ll let you in on another secret—the spell went into immediate effect at the end of every class because that’s what it had been designed to do.
Remember me telling you about how I spent a lot of time learning Automated Casting, that thing nobody really studied anymore? Well, each of these illusion and disruption spells was, in fact, an automated casting, timed to coincide with the beginning and end of each of my classes. And because I’d snuck into the building in the middle of the night in March when I’d cast them, the crystals weren’t going off. Because I wasn’t casting anything. It had already been cast long, long ago.
Other than classes, I was a ghost on campus. Nobody knew where I was, what I was doing, what I was planning or how to protect against it. Even my closest friends didn’t know how to get a hold of me. I’d told each and every one of them in mid-March that I’d see them outside of classes sometime in May. Everyone told me they hoped I’d pull off whatever it was I was planning, because even they didn’t dare guess what I was really trying to do. The very act of declaring my intent to take all the challenges had thrown an even bigger monkey wrench than I’d expected into the system, and it felt like it was all anybody was talking about on campus.
I’d meant to generate chaos, but it was also increasing the heat on me, something I hoped wouldn’t bite me in the ass.
This night, April 18th, was the only period of any vulnerability I felt like I had in my plan, but the fact that I hadn’t even really tried any of the challenges yet meant most people thought the slate of declaration letters had just been to throw the WPD sisters off-guard, so some of them had grown a bit more complacent.
The GST frat was convinced I wasn’t even looking for their hideout, but they were taking extra precautions regardless. They didn’t want anyone to find their secret hiding place. But they were right—I had no intention of trying to track them down.
The AHO brothers had been loud braggarts at first, repeatedly dismissing that there was any way I could get them to spill blood. That went on for a good week or so until my dear friend Robér had pointed out to one of them that the challenge technically specified I only needed to get a droplet of blood from one of them, not that I had to do so in combat. If I could get beneath a shield and steal a droplet of their blood, it would fulfill the challenge just the same. And if I could do it without them noticing? Well, wouldn’t that be just the sort of cheeky thing that seemed in line with my character. They stopped boasting after that and started buckling down.
It hadn’t really occurred to the WPD sisters that finding me would be the hardest part of the challenge, and that was vexing them something fierce. One of them had almost gotten into a shouting match with one of my professors just yesterday.
As class had been ending, there had been a sister at every exit to the classroom, and the sisters had basically gone out of their way to get as many people to skip this specific class session as possible, meaning there were only three of us in the classroom, myself, the professor and a student named Skarr Torsson, who also couldn’t afford to miss any classes, because he had signed up to challenge AHO.
When class let out, Skarr walked to one exit, where the WPD sister there had searched him thoroughly. Then I had appeared to walk to another of the doors, and directly through the sister waiting before me. She’d been smart enough to cast a dispel at the illusion and it had disappeared, leaving the classroom empty except for the professor, as the crystal overhead had bloomed into warm green light when the sister cast her dispel.
“Clearly this student is cheating, professor!” the sister had howled at her.
In response, the professor had sighed deeply, pointing to the crystal overhead as proof of what he was about to say. “You know as well as I do that if a student cast a spell within this classroom, that crystal would’ve lit up.”
“Maybe it isn’t working!” the girl said angrily, stamping her feet. “Yes, my spell triggered it, but—”
The professor, Dr. Lara Weaver, rolled her eyes and lifted her hand upwards, causing a small orange flamejet to erupt a few inches from it, as the green crystal suddenly bloomed into a wash of emerald light once more, filling up the room. “However he’s fooling you, he certainly isn’t casting magic in my classroom.” I’d heard the whole story from Robér, who’d heard it from Skarr.
I’d also heard second hand earlier today how angry the WPD sisters had gotten from Robér during my Necromantic Energies 402 class. We were lab partners and could gossip a bit while working on the lab work. He’d been tickled pink at how frustrated they were getting about everything. He told me us not being able to hang out for a month was worth whatever shitstorm I was bringing down on the Secret Six. I told him I was only just getting started with my chaos.
As I stood atop the roof of the alchemical studies building peering down at the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority House in the middle of the night, I hoped like hell my brother had been completely truthful with me about everything, and that the rain would keep up for another half hour or so.
And, most importantly, that the damn fireflies wouldn’t fuck all this up.
I placed my heels to the edge of the roof and counted ten paces back to the center of it before spinning on the ball of my foot, looking at the cool night sky. I inhaled a deep breath, let it out, drew a second one in and then started running.
On the tenth step, I jumped.
This next part involved a bunch of math, so believe you me when I tell you I had checked, rechecked and triple-checked these calculations a dozen times. On top of that, I had to pray that my spell timings held, because if they didn’t, I was going to be in a heap of trouble.
Once I’d jumped, a pair of magical wings had snapped out from my back, extending to give me a low glide. I’d prepped that four months ago. The invisibility spell I had draped myself in using a cloak I’d enchanted last month was holding well, but the presence of all the fireflies meant the distortion of it might be recognizable to a sharp pair of eyes if the lights from the bugs’ butts struck the field in just the wrong way. I simply had to pray nobody was paying that much attention skyward this late at night.
I hadn’t heard any alarms when I was directly over The Fertile Grove, which meant the first of about eight things I needed to go right for this to work had. Now came the trickiest part. I tapped the sigil on my chest and the wings disappeared and I began to fall like a stone.
You’re probably thinking, Wedge, surely there’s got to be spells to detect things coming in from above. Well, yes, but no. This was the private thing my brother had told me, the one bit of information he hadn’t shared with anyone about how he did it. The Grove was set up to detect biological things passing through an invisible barrier around its outskirts, but other, nonbiological things could pass through unimpeded.
Like water.
Now, I don’t know if you’re aware how hard it is to set up a spell to transmute your entire body into water and back, but let me tell you, I spent two years of studying before I was even ready to try it in the safety of one of the spell labs. I knew it was possible, because this was how my brother had gotten in—he’d waited until a rainy day and then turned himself to water just before he hit the barrier and back again just after he’d passed it. Even after the two years it took to get the spell working right, it took another six months to reliably bake it into a bracelet, plus another season to get it to reliably revert quickly and precisely on my schedule. All said and done, the bracelet on my wrist held only two spells in it, and I’d spent nearly half my college career’s spare time getting it to work.
My reversion spell hit just after I’d passed the barrier, and my anti-fall enchantments on the boots kicked in. The spell covering the top of the garden had simply assumed I was rain, as per the plan, and it had paid me no mind at all. That was why it had to be today—I wasn’t certain I was going to get another day with good, heavy rainfall to camouflage my entrance.
The thing I’d learned early on was that most of the casters here at EWC—and I’m talking both students and faculty—they were almost all inherently lazy. They didn’t think about spells until right at the very moment they needed them, and just cast them then. By being prepared, by thinking in advance, I could have dozens of spells operating and functioning, and almost all of the detection devices wouldn’t see them, because the spellwork had been done days if not weeks earlier. They were looking for a person casting spells, not a thing. The feather fall enchantment on my boots had been cast months ago, so when it slowed my fall, it wasn’t setting off any alarms, because the spellwork happened long before, just like I’d also done with the classrooms.
When I got my feet down, I could finally have a look at the inside of The Fertile Grove, a thing few peeople outside of the KJD sisters had ever seen. Oh sure, when it wasn’t April, they used this garden as a popular hangout spot, but during April, no one was supposed to go in or out. When it wasn’t April, it wasn’t really called The Fertile Grove either.
Hanging from the trees were around twenty-five oversized pendants, each about the size of one of my fists, each containing the pussy of one of the KJD sisters. When my brother had reached this point in his heist, his heart had been beating so fast, he’d barely even stopped to consider what he was doing and had simply grabbed the first pendant he could before getting out.
I had no such fear.
Twenty-five vaginas hanging from the trees like delicate fruit, each waiting to be plucked, to be stroked, to be used. There was a demarcation point where flesh ran into braided gold at the edges, and each one seemed to shimmer in the dark grove with a subtle glow, nothing overly bright or gaudy, but just enough ambiance to let a viewer know that they were special. They also had a light border spell, designed to keep them from getting cold, or from rain dripping in.
None of the pendants were marked with names, so I had to be something of a detective, attempting to discern each owner from things like skin tone or hair color. There was one in specific I needed to find above all else, otherwise the back half of my plan was tanked. One with vulva lips a shade of green, like that of summer’s grass. That one was the most important, and the rest were just gravy on top of things.
While some of this year’s KJD graduating class were very nice, there were also a handful of utter harpies in the batch of students, mostly figuratively, but in one case, literally. So, I wanted to have a good idea of which pendant belonged to which sister. You see, unlike my brother, I’d realized something else about the KJD challenge that he hadn’t, that I guess no one had until I did it.
The KJD sisters were so confident in their abilities that their challenge had never mandated that a skillful thief wasn’t permitted to take more than one pendant from The Fertile Grove.
My first selection was an elvish snatch with a patch of violet tinged hair atop of it, one that I was almost certain had to belong to Starfall Willowdance. Her visible hair atop her head bore a similar shade to it. They both also smelled of lilac, so I felt like that was a good sign. There was a single silver ring, pierced through one of her vulva lips, though, which surprised me a little. It had elvish script on it, so I couldn’t be entirely sure what I was looking at. Starfall was bright, cheerful and overall, a woman of good standing. I lifted it from the tree and slipped it into my pack.
The second one I came across was, fortunately, the one it had been mandated I’d have to get, with dark skin made of wood and green pussylips instead of pink or brown. There was also a small patch of moss at the top of it, and I say moss because I meant it and not hair. This was the pussy of Rosegrove Everflower, one of the dryad students at EWC, which meant she was part tree. I’ll explain why I had to get her specifically in a bit.
Next, I found a pussy completely bare of hair, but the skin was a shade of ocher, which led me to believe it belonged to Princess Kaori Nevaria, a lovely woman with almond shaped eyes and a kind smile, if somewhat mischievous nature. She was third in line to the throne of Davila, and she had turned aside several suitors as “not brazen enough.” I wondered if she would think this brazen enough as I loaded the pendant with her cunt on display into my pack, settling it lightly on top of the first two. I’d found her to be charming in the classes that we’d shard together over the past few years, and she’d been one of the two women whose pussies I’d mentally committed to taking before I’d even gotten here.
The fourth one I grabbed was ringed with tattoos in a script I did not recognize, and believe me when I tell you, I have studied more than my fair share of dead and forgotten languages, and these characters weren’t from any of them. The characters threatened to hold sway over my mind if I left my vision on them for too long. On top of that, the pussy lips themselves were a deep shade of crimson. It occurred to me that I was either looking at the pussy of Danica Bloodstone, whose family was rumored to have long standing arrangements with demons, or Felicia Hitch, the first half-succubus to be admitted into EWC. I couldn’t be sure which it was, but there was something so unearthly and unusual about it that I had to take it, and so I laid it in my pack on top of the others.
For my final trophy, I grabbed a pendant which had on display pale skin like that of moonlight, although there were a smattering of tiny light brown spots covering bits of it, a heart shaped block of coppery hair atop of it. I knew to look for the shape because she’d told me about it, which was why she was the other one I’d planning on specifically finding. I was dead certain this was my lab partner for Magical Weaponry 412, Ciara O’Murphy, whom I’d been flirting with on and off for the last few months. She was something of a gorgeous redhead whom I’d been trying to talk into bed for the better part of a month. Each and every time, she’d deflected, never saying yes or no, but instead telling me to ask her out again once April was over, “just in case ye pull off something cheeky like your brother,” she’d told me. As it turned out, I wasn’t going to have to ask her out. When I pulled this off, we’d be engaged. I noted that there was a glimmering golden tattoo just off to the side of her snatch, pulsing in the low light, giving off its own light. Most people would’ve just thought it was a random sigil or drawing, but I knew exactly what it was—it was dwarven miner code.
Dwarves, over the centuries, have developed a series of shorthand symbols that can be painted onto walls, letting other dwarves know about conditions while they’re mining. Things like “unstable tunnel,” “flooding,” “exhausted vein,” and the like. The one she’d chosen was “fill hole.” It made me giggle and love her even more. She’d hoped I was coming, I think, because she certainly wasn’t dwarvish herself.
With the five pendants carefully secured in my pack, I just needed to make my exit. And yet, temptation was still staring my straight in the face. Twenty other pussies hanging from trees, taunting me. I made a split-second decision, and I probably shouldn’t have done it, but I figured what the hell, I sort of wanted them to know I’d been able to infiltrate their grove, so why shouldn’t I infiltrate a few of them before I left as well.
Completely at random, I grabbed the first pendant I could, one which contained a sort of gelatinous pussy, that Ph’t’cti Nh’r’tzxi, the shapeshifter who wore a different appearance every day she went to classes. At least… I think it was hers. I tucked my pants down and just shoved the jelly snatch right down onto my cock, the odd texture cool, almost cold and icy against my prick and yet somehow mercilessly snug as well. I couldn’t enjoy the weird sensation of it for long, however. Each second staying inside of one of the pendants was shaving time off my escape.
I pulled that pendant off and grabbed another, this one clearly a dwarven pussy, and stabbed my prick down to the hilt on it, feeling those muscles tense in surprise around my shaft. Whoever she was, I’d certainly woken her up, which meant I really needed to be going. I pulled the pendant off, amused that I could feel those walls trying to squeeze, as if yearning for me not to go. I needed to beat feet, though, and as soon as possible.
But there was one last bit of temptation I couldn’t pass up. I’d tossed the dwarven pussy aside and right before I was going to exit, I saw a pixie pussy before me, and I just… I just had to know. The pendant was smaller than most, as it had to be, since pixies were rarely more than a few feet tall. It belonged to Olivia Distantmoon, the only pixie in KJD. I heard students talking with her before about how hard it must be for her to date at EWC, and she’d shot back that her body could handle anything any of us could put inside of it.
I really shouldn’t have, but I grabbed that last pussy and pressed it up against the head of my dick and pushed down against the back of the pendant with both hands. It was with a swift POP that I felt my cock slip inside of her unearthly tight twat and I immediately shot into orgasm, unable to resist that unfathomably snug clench around me. I even had to tug a little to get my cock to pop back out again, and at that point, I tucked away my cock and needed to get my shit in gear because my little detour had assuredly blown a chunk of my time advantage. Without even thinking about it, I hung the pixie pussy pendant around my neck.
Now, I desperately needed to get out.
Here, my plan had to diverge greatly from my brother’s. You see, if a student beat one of the Secret Six in their challenge, most of the details of their attempt were made public, so that the Six could learn from their mistakes and improve for the next year. Students were allowed to keep one solitary detail—in my brother’s case, that he had turned into water to get into the Grove—to themselves. But to exit the Grove, my brother had done the ballsiest thing I’d ever seen.
He climbed a fucking tree and jumped out.
All the detection spells had been designed to catch someone going into the Grove, so getting out of the Grove was, at that point, as simple as just walking out. They wanted people to feel like they had a chance, but this, it turned out, had been too generous. Since then, they’d obviously corrected that little flaw, so I’d had to devise something a lot more complicated, and that had required a lot more planning and luck. If I just walked out, as my brother had, all sorts of alarms would be going off and the KJD sisters, who were mostly asleep literally next door, would be upon me before I could get more than a dozen steps away from the building. That’s why I had done so much planning in advance. Now I just had to hope that my escape route hadn’t been discovered.
This wasn’t technically my first time being in the KJD garden. They held parties back here all the time, and part of the reason I’d gotten so friendly with them over the years was so that I could get into this area several times when it wasn’t April.
Last August during their Back To School mixer I’d buried a small ring beneath one of the larger trees. I hoped I’d concealed it well enough not to be found in the intervening months, otherwise I was well and truly boned, especially since I’d just basically telegraphed my presence here to a handful of the sisters by sampling them before I’d left the Grove. I’d hidden the ring along the backside of one of the trees closest to the wall, and I was just starting to panic as my fingers raked through the dirt unfruitfully before I finally felt the cool metal to my touch. I exhaled a sigh of relief, pulling the ring from its nestled hiding spot. I wiped away the dirt and slowly pushed the band of spun gold onto my finger, feeling the charge still there, active and ready to get to work.
I had one final step to make things far more complicated for the girls of KJD, as I scooped up all the remaining pendants, hanging them over one arm before I took and dropped them all in a pile just where I’d buried the ring originally. I didn’t have time to bury them properly, but I did gather up some loose branches and covered the stack of them up. I suspected it would be at least a few hours of wasted time before they realized most of the pendants hadn’t been taken, just squirreled away in the grove to throw them off my scent. My last bit of obfuscation in play, it was time to make my exit.
This was the point of no return. Once I did this, all of them would know I’d been and gone, not just the few I’d had a bit of ill-advised fun with, and the hunt for me would begin in full force.
Fuck it.
I gave the stone on the gem a quarter turn to the left, a half turn to the right, and a full spin to the left, and the teleportation spell I’d baked into it a year ago fired off as I could hear alarms blaring all across the Grove. The ring whisked me and my prizes away from The Fertile Grove to a small, abandoned cottage some thirty miles away.
The cottage was a dark stone building that had probably been a farmhouse at some point before whoever had lived here had given up and headed for greener pastures. The wood floors showed heavy signs of rot and the walls were covered with graffiti from the various kids who would sometimes come here to try drugs or fuck. A little less than a year ago, I’d started prepping this place to be as close to an impregnable fortress as I could, including getting the entire ECW student body to forget it existed. I had to start after last year’s challenges, because any heavy magic work always got rooted out when the games were on.
This would be the single most important spell of my career, which was why I’d been working on it for years, albeit indirectly. The idea of being magically invisible for a long period of time is basically impossible, but to do it for short periods of time? That wasn’t all that hard at all. And I’d been layering and layering and layering this spell, so if it worked, I’d be home free. I grabbed the cloak I’d spent nearly a year on and opened a portal with the first of two enchantments woven into it, taking me to the Hall of Passageways.
For those of you not in touch with the magical world, imagine a building that contains portals to and from nearly every major location in civilization. That’s the Hall of Passageways. It was the central corridor from which you could get to anywhere else.
Despite it being the middle of the night, the Hall had loads of people in it, as it always did, and nobody gave me so much as a second glance. I reached into the cloak and touched the sigil, and three hundred days of daily spellcasting went off all at once.
Every day of the last three hundred days, I’d taken this cloak through multiple passageways, and now, using the second enchantment woven into it, the cloak was replaying all of those trips all at once, thousands of variations of me heading to each and every portal, while me, the real me, walked to a portal I’d only used once before. If the sisters were going to try and use a tracking spell on me, they’d be chasing these phantoms for months, as they came and went in and out of endless passageways, making my most recent tracks impossible to pick out among a sea of magical footprints, all freshly laid down by the phantoms replaying our earlier journeys.
The portal I took delivered me a place nobody expected to look for me—a lab in the basement of the alchemical studies building, literally across the street from where I’d just broken into. Professor Idlehands, my accomplice in this brazen gambit, was waiting for me. He wasn’t all that old for a professor, maybe only ten or twenty years past some of his students, but he certainly had a rather cantankerous nature to him, something that had been beaten into him as one of the graduates of EWC who hadn’t been a member of any of the Secret Six (like myself) and who hadn’t succeeded in any of the challenges (unlike myself). He was tall, lanky, with jet black hair slicked along his skull and a pair of penetrating blue eyes that could bore right through you if he wanted them to. He was also a satyr, so his bottom half was goatlike with strong furry legs capped with hooves, although he wore a kilt so that he maintained at least an illusion of decorum.
That said, Idlehands was a reasonably good-hearted man, an excellent spell caster and a crafty thinker. His classes valued original thinking and challenging expectations and tradition. His motto was “Assume nothing; question everything.” It was a lesson not enough students took to heart and was why I’d approached him last fall to be the last leg of my solution on how to beat the houses. I explained to him many (but not all) of the steps of my plan, including the fact that I was going to provide a giant distraction by claiming to be going after all the houses, and that I was going to end up taking multiple things out of the Fertile Grove, because there wasn’t any rule saying that I couldn’t. What I needed him for was making sure that once I was out, that I didn’t get caught.
“You do studies all the time, Professor,” I told him during a private meeting in his office in late August. “That’s why I’m coming to you. If you were, say, to do a two-month sleep study, starting in mid-March and ending in mid-May, that would be considered a school activity, wouldn’t it?”
The look on the Professor’s face told me that right away he’d grasped what I was suggesting, and instead of dismissing me outright, he got a sly grin on his face. “That’s entirely correct, Mr. Deepcopper. What’s in it for me?” he’d asked.
I remember getting a little nervous at that point in the meeting, but I wasn’t entirely sure what I had to offer him, other than the prestige of being able to help outwit the arrogant Secret Six. “Well,” I asked cautiously. “What do you want?”
“Rosegrove Everflower,” the Professor had told me, naming the half-dryad girl I mentioned earlier. “She’s a senior in the KJD. She’ll have a pendant hanging in the Fertile Grove. She was exceptionally flirty with me last year when she was my student, but rules forbid professors fraternizing with anyone they’re teaching. Now that she’s not my student, there’s no longer any conflict of interest. You have to bring me her cunt and let me do whatever I want to with it for however much time remains in the month. That’s my price.”
It wasn’t that big of a request and seemed a perfectly reasonable level of exchange for what I’d be getting in return. There also weren’t any rules about what a student could or couldn’t do with things taken out of the Grove, so it would be well within my rights. “That can be arranged,” I told him.
“And maybe let me play with a couple of the others?”
“We’ll see,” I told him with a chuckle. “Maybe one or two of the others but certainly not all of them. I’m doing almost all the risking here, so don’t get too big for your britches. I could always go and make the same offer to another professor.”
“And I could always go tell the sisters what your plan is.”
I remember smirking at the time. “Except I haven’t told you any of the real details that don’t involve you, meaning I’m still going to make it work, and someone else might get to enjoy collegiate pussy to fuck as your own personal cocksleeve for at least a few weeks.”
Idlehands seemed to consider that for a moment before he nodded then extended a hand for me to shake, which I did. He went about establishing the sleep study, which would cover twelve hours every night, from eight at night until eight in the morning. It would run from mid-March until mid-May, so it would be a little less obvious what the purpose of it was before I’d completed the challenges. It included meals and bathroom breaks, as well as showers, all of which were considered as happening during ‘protected time,’ so even if the KJD or the WPD found me during sleep study time, they couldn’t do shit about it. I brought a suitcase down when it started, so I would have plenty of change of clothes, and could keep my gear for the heist hidden safe and secure away from prying eyes. I even had half an hour each night to do whatever I wanted before I laid down to sleep, during all of which the professor would be around, which would allow me to fool around with my newly acquired treasures.
That meant literally the only time I was not in ‘protected time’ during the month of April was specifically when I was breaking into and out of the Fertile Grove. The rest of the time, I’d used the most powerful magic of all to cover my ass—bureaucracy.
Now that I was back in the nestled security of the sleep study lab, I saw Idlehands sit up with a broad smile upon his face, rubbing his hands together. “You got it, I take it?”
“I did,” I told him, setting the bag down next to the elevated mattress I’d been sleeping on for almost a month now. It wasn’t exactly the nicest of places to lay my head down, but I’d known sacrifices were going to have to be made to achieve such greatness. I shifted the contents of the bag around to find Miss Everflower’s pendant, holding it up for him to see in the room’s low light. “One dryad pussy, ready for you to use it for a few weeks, fuck toy on demand.”
“You’re going to partake in it yourself as well, aren’t you?”
I smirked at him. “I took it from the Grove, so of course I am. But we’ve got weeks to fool around with them.” I set the pack down on the bed and slowly pulled the pussies from my bag one after another, laying them down on the mattress. I was about to consider them all, then realized I still had one final one hanging around my neck, taking that off, placing it with the others. Six, in total. Quite the haul for my first time breaking and entering.
Each of them was unique and delightful in its own way, but if I stopped and let analysis paralysis take me, I wouldn’t have a chance to enjoy them all tonight, so I resolved to just have at them, even as the professor looked on in envy. “Gods below, you really took as much as you could carry, didn’t you?” the professor said to me. “Imagine if you’d taken the whole lot.”
“That’s far too many wives for any one man to manage,” I told him before I selected my first delight to sample. “No man should have more women than days of the week.”
I decided to open with Ciara’s, as I pushed two fingers between those extended folds, her lips trembling as soon as my coarse dwarven fingers penetrated her, brushing my callouses against her slick walls. I could feel those internal muscles of hers clench on my digits, a little shocked that her pussy had been chosen from all those missing from the Grove, but still greatly enjoying the touch I was bestowing upon her, nonetheless. Maybe she was just now realizing it might have been me who pulled off the heist, and she was debating what to do about it.
Somewhere on campus, Ciara was telling her fellow sisters that her cunt was being used by whomever had taken it, so they needed to be looking for some way to track it, to find whoever had absconded with it, and I like to think that somewhere in the middle of Ciara telling them that, Starfall was standing right next to them as she began to moan when I shoved my tongue inside of her snatch, my fingers inside of one girl and my tongue lodged up another.
Around that point, instead of tracking me down, they were all so worked up that they were all running to the Grove, to see how many of the pendants I had taken, only to see that none of them were hanging up where they’d been left. Starfall’s elvish snatch was far smaller and tighter than Ciara’s and I could feel the hard shivers that her body must’ve been giving, her walls trying to slicken as much as they could. I imagined her both excited and apprehensive, enjoying the intense sensations despite her nervousness. I’d known that Starfall Willowdance was quite the noblewoman, but I certainly expected the sisters had to have at least considered the option they might lose again some year. The relentless clench of her walls around my tongue was tight, far tighter than I had expected her to be. The girls of KJD certainly had had quite a sizable amount of faith in their spellworkings. I suppose their nearly unblemished record gave them precedent to feel so confident.
My fingers moved out of Ciara’s cunt, undid my breeches, tugged them down to my knees and then picked up a third pendant, that of Kaori Nevaria. I chuckled quietly as I moved to rub the tip of it against my thick dwarven cock. “How’s this for brazen, your fucking Highness?” I said as I pushed her cunt down onto my shaft, it clamping down hard on my prick suddenly.
The princess hadn’t been expecting someone quite as girthy as I was to penetrate her innermost core, especially without warning. I could feel her muscles trying to hold me in place but I had leverage and control over the situation so I pulled her snatch back, sliding it most of the way off before jamming it down hard, screwing it all the way to the base of my cock. I was rewarded with a short quick gush of clear liquid all over my shaft before feeling the sensation of her going through a hard series of wild shivers, something I thought was sending her through a series of orgasms. The slickness made it easier for me to push and pull the pendant up and down faster and easier. The spasms of her velvet innards were eventually enough to get me to blast a hot and heavy release of my cum inside of her, that sudden rush of warm liquid burbling up inside of her. I knew, somewhere on campus, she was probably ashen white, feeling the sticky sensation of my sperm shifting around inside of her belly.
God, the power was intoxicating.
None of them knew what to expect, or when, or how.
As my cock slipped out of Kaori’s pussy, I immediately laid it back down on the mattress facing upwards, so that the gravity of it would keep my spunk from dripping out from inside of her. I wanted her to have that warmth inside of her all night long.
“Get to Everflower, already,” the professor said to me. “I want to use her with your cum still dripping from her hole.” I remember being a little apprehensive about fucking a dryad, but as I touched her wooden pussy, I found that it began to slicken immediately with a sort of sticky sap. I brought it to my lips, giving a little taste, and found it almost like maple syrup. Despite the slight stiffness of the semi-wooden flesh, I felt her give way as I pushed my cock inside of her twat, her insides cushioned and lush, although the texture was wildly different than Kaori had been. I hoped like hell I wouldn’t get poison ivy or something similar on my cock, but the new and unfamiliar sensation of her wooden pussy walls around me refused to let me soften.
I forced the pendant down and felt a shiver and seep of more sap along my shaft, even as I started to lift it up and down, the sensation of moving just this small amount of a person instead of an entire person herself a weird disconnect in my nerves. But there was also something entrancing about it, to be able to claim such pleasure and manipulate a woman’s private parts without so much as a sound from her, no movement beyond what meager squeezes she could provide around my cock.
A few moments later, I was releasing my seed into my third pussy for the evening. I’d taken a virility potion just before I’d gone to break into the grove, which was why I was able to recover so quickly in-between rounds. And as soon as I pulled the pendant with Miss Everflower’s pussy from my cock, I saw Idlehands reaching for it, even with my spunk still dripping from her wooden folds.
As soon as he’d taken her pussy from my hands, he lifted his kilt to reveal a rather thick and bestial looking cock, leaning more towards the goat half than the man half, I think, and he didn’t wait even a moment before pushing her leafy folds against the tip of his shaft, a thankful bleat of pleasure as he forced the pendant slowly down his shaft, as if his very size was a challenge for her to take.
I decided to simply spend a few minutes lapping my tongue at Starfall’s snatch while letting the Professor get his kicks off with Everflower. Starfall’s pussy tasted of wine and roses, fragrant and exotic, and I could feel her trying to send some sort of message to me with the squeezes of her muscles, but I paid it no mind.
Once my jaw ached and I needed a break, I picked up the semi-demonic looking pussy that was lined with golden glowing script I didn’t recognize, considering it for a moment, just as the professor let out a filthy howl, obviously spilling his satyr seed deep inside of the dryad’s cunt. He was panting and gasping as he looked over at me, considering it, able to spot something different from the glow the magical tattoos were casting onto me. “What’ve you got there, lad?” he asked me as I pondered it.
“Strike you a deal, Prof,” I said to him with a chuckle. “You tell me what these symbols say, and I’ll let you have free time with any one other pendant excepting the ginger for the rest of my time here.” I didn’t mind the professor fooling around with most of the other pussies, but Ciara was mine, and I wouldn’t share her with anyone.
He gave a bleat of laughter, gesturing for me to bring it over to him as he picked up his reading glasses, setting them on his nose as he took the pendant from me to clearly examine it before laughing once more, this time even harder. “You’ve got the snatch of Felicia Hitch here, boyo, because all of this is in Fourth Lake Demonic, the regional dialect where she and her mother are from. She’s a filthy one, that, because it’s quite graphic.” I could see him struggling to look away from the script, as I had, as there was something hypnotic and entrancing about the characters, almost like they exerted their own will on the observer.
“I’m not going to let you collect if you’re not translating it word for word for me,” I told him.
He nodded, shaking himself from the allure of it. “This says ‘stick it in,’ this says ‘cumdump,’ this says, well, common doesn’t have a literal translation but I think the spirit of it is ‘hole with no purpose other than brutal fornication’ or something to that effect. And this last bit here, well, it’s missing an attached identifier, that’s why there’s a little space here, but it basically says ‘so-and-so’s tight cunted bitch’ with the so-and-so waiting to be filled in.” He chuckled deviously. “I’d say you could put your name there now, but the only thing that’s going to pierce that skin is a demonic needle, and you’d need angel’s blood pigmentation, neither of which we’ve got here, nor do I know where to get them. But your name’ll be there soon enough.”
I chuckled, stroking my reddish beard a little. “That’s fair, I suppose. So, I’ve got half-succubus pussy, elf pussy and pixie pussy on the menu. What’ll you have?”
The satyr stroked his own goatee for a long moment. “As tempting as it is to have Miss Hitch’s cunt wrapped around my cock, I’ve never had the delight of a pixie pussy before.”
My left hand reached over to the bed and grabbed the smaller sized pendant, holding it out to him. “It’s still a bit sticky with my cum in it, and I’ll warn you, it’s ridiculously tight. That rumor about pixies being able to adapt to anything? Completely true. So be careful.”
“Let me learn for myself, lad,” the Professor told me as he took the pendant and lined it up against the tip of his oversized pink cock.
“Deep breath,” I teased.
The satyr shot me a snarky look and then started pushing down on the pixie cunt within a pendant, feeling the tip of his cock finally pop through before suddenly it shifted to slide all the way down to the furry base of his dick, nestled right up against the balls, as he let out a sudden bleat of shock which turned into an almost delirious laughter. “Fuck’s sake! You weren’t kidding!”
As the Professor struggled to get the pendant to slide along his shaft, I took Felicia’s crimson pussy and lined it up with my own shaft, forcing myself good and deep, even as her vulva lips folded inward like a Venus flytrap, clenching on me, adding another layer of engulfment to my cock.
Neither the professor or I lasted all that long, albeit for very different reasons. Olivia’s pixie pussy had practically molded itself into the exact shape and size of the professor’s cock, as it had with mine, and so the intense clinging was enough to send him off into a release, while I had found that the internal body temperature of even a half-succubus ran more than a little warmer than expected, and so I was sweating my balls off when I finally crested that wave inside of her.
I grabbed Ciara’s pendant to wrap up and pushed my hand through the cord of it, resting my palm on top the bed with the top end of the cord twisted around my wrist. I placed the pendant itself upright with the back resting against the edge of the bed. It meant her pussy was pointing horizontally, like I had her bent over the bed itself. I took a good wide stance, lined the head of my dwarven dick up against that slit and then just rammed forward for all I was worth.
I could imagine her eyes bulging as she felt me taking her from locations unknown, unable to stop herself from giving a whorish moan as her whole body was overwhelmed by me taking my pleasure from her. Her face must’ve been as red as her hair as I savaged her slit, railing it with enough force that she could even feel the weight of my balls pressed against her flesh. I’m certain she was completely unable to focus on tracing me down, her body flush with sweat because I could see beads of sweat just around her pussylips when I paused to glance at it.
We really did need to begin the sleep study for the night, but I wasn’t going to let Ciara off easily. I stood up and then flopped down on my back on the mattress, keeping the pendant in both hands as I began to spin it quickly while I kept rampaging my hips up into it again and again. I’m fairly certain that once I started lining her pussy walls with jizz, it sent her into the kind of orgasm she’d never had in her life, because I felt her lock down, trying to keep me in place, whether to help them find me or to just give her a moment’s reprieve, who knows. But at that very moment, wherever the hell she was on campus, she knew in that instant that she was now and forever mine.
A few moments later, I slid her snatch off my cock and started laughing, using one hand to wipe my forehead clean. “Bloody hell, I really fucking did it,” I said to myself in astonishment. I’d never considered failure, but I don’t know that I’d ever really convinced myself that I was going to get away with it, either.
“You really did, lad,” the Professor said to me, as scooped up all the pendants and put them back in the bag. The professor looked at me with pleading eyes, and I shrugged, offering a benevolent smile, and took Everflower’s pendant back out, holding it out to him.
“It better be back in my bag by the time I wake up each morning, and you better not mess with any of the others,” I told him. “What’s mine is mine.”
“The pixie pussy?”
“Only when I’m around and awake. As per our agreement.”
The satyr smiled in regretful admiration and nodded. “You drive a hard bargain, lad, but a fair one. Now get into bed so we can resume the study. If we aren’t by the book for this, you might be disqualified from the challenges.”
But I wasn’t. We stuck to the script from there on out. Sure, we had about an hour’s worth of time to fool around with my trophies each night for the rest of the month, and the Professor certainly took out all his aggression on Miss Everflower’s snatch on every opportunity afforded to him. While both the KJD and the WPD figured out where I was spending my nights towards the very end of the challenges, it was exactly as I’d expected. School activity time wasn’t to be interrupted unless a student voluntarily stepped out of the activity, which I’d done only once during the two months. For the one hour it’d taken me to get in and out of the Fertile Grove.
To really rub it in, the last day of classes, I went to each of my three different classes with a different pendant hanging around my neck, in full view of the not only the students in the class, but all the teachers as well. The last class of the last day, I was wearing Ciara’s pussy pendant in a class with her, and I enjoyed giving it a little finger in the middle of class, only for a moment, just to make her breath catch. She glanced at me and smiled, mouthing the words “cheeky fucker!” although the expression on her face was one of exhibitionistic delight.
On the morning of May 1st, it was announced that I had successfully completely two of the six challenges, the Wunjo Perthro Dagaz Sorority challenge and the Kenaz Jera Dagaz Sorority challenge.
(For what it’s worth, my friend Robér had beaten the AHO challenge using a method I’d suggested to him, so I like to think I beat three challenges, but nobody credits me for that one.)
After detailing how I did it to the councils, it was agreed that I had broken none of the rules of challenges, and nothing I had done was in violation of the accords. I was betrothed to Starfall Willowdance, Princess Kaori Nevaria, Felicia Hitch, Rosegrove Everflower, Olivia Distantmoon and Ciara O’Murphy. (And yes, I did eventually end up filling my name in on Felicia’s tattoo, although it took quite some time for us to track down someone who knew how to translate dwarvish into demonic, not to mention getting the ink and needle.)
Once I was done lording my victory over the KJD, I moved on to my other stop, the WPD, who were even more frustrated with me. I chose Nina Vanderbilt from their senior class to serve as my concubine and bodyguard. That caused a giant ruckus by itself. Miss Vanderbilt was a lady of great standing, but for years she’d been exceptionally rude to scores of men who’d just been trying to ask her out for drinks on any random night, including me. Greeting a man by dousing him in stale beer for simply saying ‘hello’ is taking rejection to an impolite extreme by anyone’s standards. So, y’know, karma’s a bitch. But at the end of the day, I was triumphant and the WPD hadn’t been able to touch me at any point during the month, so my victory was indisputable, no matter how much the Secret Six wanted to bitch and moan about it. Nina came around in the end, filling out the position out of obligation at first, but in delight after a few months of it.
After we graduated, the girls also fooled around with putting their pussies in pendants for me regularly for long, long after. I think they enjoyed the idea of getting pleasure whenever the whim struck me, and without them getting any warning it was coming. Ciara even made sure I kept it visible and around my neck when I went to work, because she got off on it, and who am I to tell her no?
So, all’s well that ends well.
Oh, how did I do it? How did I evade everyone for the entire month and get from place to place without being caught along the way? Sure, I’ve told you how I spent my time eating, sleeping and shitting while under the protective shield of the sleep study, but how did I get from there to all of my classes? And from my classes back to the study? The council was astonished, the Secret Six members were livid, and yet, everything I had done was perfectly within the rules of the challenges. Of course, the rules were changed for the next year.
The trick is... I never left a schoolroom.
During the entire month of April, other than my little adventure in and out of The Fertile Grove, I was always skipping swaths of time. At the end of any given class, I was immediately teleported to the next class, and pushed forward in time to the start of the class period. In the months before, I had snuck into the classrooms at night and built in spells that were time gated, so as one of my classes started, I would teleport in just seconds after class started. Seconds before the class ended, I would teleport out again, moving forward in time and space, to my next class and skipping all the time in between. I didn’t walk anywhere, so there was legitimately no point at which the WPD could’ve ever touched me, except during the hour when I was breaking into the KJD’s Fertile Grove. But I never missed a single second of any class, which was all the rules required me to do. The sleep study had been commissioned to examine what happened to a student’s circadian rhythms by skipping about 5 hours of time a day, something that was uncommon, but not unheard of.
The bag with the pendants was with me all the time, but because it was skipping through time and space, nobody could find it or me at any point in time when I wasn’t in a classroom, and when I was in a classroom, the bag itself would read as empty. Remember me telling you that I’d taken magical weaving? Well, I’d made the bag so layered with camouflage spells that when I was in class, nobody could tell it was anything other than a normal bag. If I’d had something so valuable in it, surely it would’ve shown up to detection, right? But I’d been testing and refining this bag for years, and nobody had been any wiser about it. They were looking one way and not the other, trying to figure out how I could be so fast at spellcasting that I was gone as soon as any given class was over. The answer was that I wasn’t—I’d simply thought ahead, planned in advance, set up the spells to be automatic.
Everyone was looking for me to cast spells, and in the month of April... I didn’t cast any.
Wedge Deepcopper—so bloody good, they had to change the rules.
Bloody legend.