Chapter Twenty-five – In which Ark discovers that a goblin can be taught magic, if sufficiently motivated to do so.
“GWA-HA-HA! Husband not throw off when piss?”
Jewel was teasing me about what happened during breakfast. It was my own mistake, as I thought I was leading Vera through an ejaculation, and I was pretty sure she had cum, but after I came inside of her and she came right after… or at the same time… she sort of… peed on me.
“I thought she was just feeling good. I didn’t think she mistook the actual feeling of having to piss.”
I wasn’t mad at her, but being pissed on isn’t exactly a fetish of mine. I didn’t yell at Vera when it happened, but instead decided I would speak with her about it later, about the good kinds of pee, and the bad kinds of pee, because she can orgasm all she wants, but number one and number two go only in the designated places. And I’m not one of them.
“Husband, Vera stupid.” Jewel said as if it was gospel.
“It was just an accident, and it was my fault for not telling her in advance what she was going to be feeling, and how to tell it apart. No harm done.”
I was in Ivory’s room with Jewel and Ivory right now, flattening walls and making her cave uniform to Truffle’s next door. I had made a nice corner of her room, the one adjacent to Truffle's, full of similar shelving for Ivory to display her bone works, and I made a few wide box-like bins that recessed into the floor a bit, for extra bone storage. She could separate them now by size and type this way, and she had immediately set about doing so once they were done.
Along with an additional bedroom, I had created a space between her new bedroom and the corner shelving and made it a recessed booth-style cubby hole. It could fit two goblins on either side easily and there was a built-in table for her to sit at and work on her bone stuff.
Ivory was stunned when she gave it a try.
Jewel had completely slacked off on holding the dagger tight against my neck, and she was instead asking me exactly what else I knew about cave-hole remodeling. I think she wanted me to make her a cave-mansion or something.
Well, I’ll do my best to make her happy. Jewel is one of the more physically attractive goblins, and if I could compare her to any kind of human in my previous life, she’d be something like a super popular teenager in high school. I can’t say we have any special chemistry between us, but there is no question I enjoy getting it on with her.
I had finished the job that Ivory and Truffle arranged with Jewel, and she collected a few things from the girls. Truffle handed over a number of mushrooms, and something wrapped up in a thick leaf, while Ivory handed over a decorative bone doll. Jewel said she’d drop the topaz off in my room in the ground pillar I made with magic to show her how it worked, that had now become my room’s semi-permanent light fixture.
As Jewel said she had other things to do today, I was left to my own recognizance.
I had an eager goblin wanting to test her new cave-hole out, and another goblin who popped in from the connecting passage who also wanted to test her friend’s cave-hole out, and I was just a helpless Husband thrust into an impromptu threesome with two goblins who were only too happy to use their tongues on anything that looked like a mushroom or a bone. Lucky me for having something that fits both descriptions!
Was I about to say no?
Hell to the no!
Plus, these girls were wild. They were very comfortable doing things to each other while I fucked them, and that motivated me to fill their bellies up as much as I could with my spunky sporeage. I mean, they did bring me a lot of fresh straw for my room, so I was more than happy to pay for it this way.
On my way out after a short rest, I saw a nice bone among Ivory’s stock of bones and I asked if I could borrow it for a while. Ivory said I could keep it if I wanted, if in exchange I would ask Berry to make something called blue water for her, so I thanked her for it properly and agreed to talk with Berry later on. My intention with the bone was so that I could carve a magic formula into the ground pillar in my room for remote activation of the topaz stone to emit light when I couldn’t touch it. I’d explain the whole thing to Jewel, so she understood that it was functioning only as a light, and that she would still need to be there for the times I needed to remodel a room.
When I had returned to the breeding room, I found Vera laying down on the straw bed in her room and rolling the round stone she brought with her as one of the three things I said she could on the floor. It was keeping her occupied, so I stroked her head sweetly a few times and gave her a kiss on the cheek before walking over to the pillar to begin drawing out the basic mana transference formula I would need to use to power the topaz.
There are fourteen symbols in the magic system, there are also five diacritical marks that change the inflection of each of the magical symbols–Runes as they are called, themselves. I really only knew the basics of formula magic, though I did have some detailed notes in my notebook, if I ever came across it. Hopefully the pages weren’t torn out and used as toilet paper by now.
My roommate-slash-mentally challenged little sister of my main wife had come out of her room and was watching me as I finished carving the formula design into the dirt floor with the bone I got from Ivory.
“What?” She pointed at the magic circle.
“It’s magic.” I answered her. “See each of these marks? They tell the magic what to do.”
She seemed curious, so as she pointed to each letter, I mentioned to her what they were and what they did. I went over a good third of the formula with her before stopping, but she was looking at all of the markings the entire way around the magic circle and almost appeared to be able to follow the formula’s construction.
“Here.” She pointed at the ground.
I was staring at where she was pointing before even realizing I had somehow failed to put an important diacritical mark in the center of a blocky backwards C. I quickly fixed the error, and she kept looking at each Rune until she reached the end of the circle and sat down.
Was… she actually smart enough to understand formulaic magic?
I had quickly etched out a beginner problem in a separate area, one my brilliant mother in this life had taught me when I was first learning magic. I asked Vera if she could find anything wrong with it, and after looking at it carefully, she seemed to do so. I handed her the bone and told her to fix it.
She put the missing diacritical mark in the right place, scrawling two lines above an upside-down triangle, and I was sure of it now, that she wasn’t stupid at all.
Maybe there was something going on in her head to prevent her from functioning normally on the outside, but her mind was good enough to solve formulaic magic. It’s like discovering a child thought to be unable to answer two plus two aloud, yet easily able to do algebra in their head and put the solution down on paper.
Savant, I think, is the term for it.
“One more, okay?”
She nodded.
I began writing it out, but before I could finish she had already caught it.
Bloody hell… You’re a wizard, Vera!
Well, whether that part is true has yet to be seen, but she has an amazing grasp already of formulaic magic.
“Okay, fix it.” I said, “Don’t worry about the rest of the formula, just fix the part that you feel is wrong.”
It was a sort of trick question I wrote, using the wrong symbol entirely even though it looked correct by syntax. She rubbed out the appropriately wrong Rune and drew the right one where it should be.
“Vera, you might actually be the smartest goblin in the cave!” I said happily and picked her up, twirling her around a few times before putting her back down.
She was positively beaming.
“Hmm, want to try activating the formula to light up the topaz stone?”
She nodded enthusiastically.
“Let’s see, how about we attune you first?”
She looked at me blankly.
“Oh, uh… attuning is like… I’ll push my mana into you, and you do your best to remember what it feels like, then try and make that feeling happen on your own. Think you can try to do that?”
“Try.”
“Okay, uh, here, come sit on my lap.”
I sat down next to the power rune that I would need to touch to activate the magic circle. Vera was quick to sit on my lap, and just help herself to my seed-stick at the same time. This girl is a bit cheeky, but this is a reward phase right now, so I’m fine to give her some motivation.
“Put your hands up against mine.” I told her and our hands were pressed patty-cake against each other.
“I’m going to send my mana through your hands. It will feel warm, maybe like soft mud. I want you to pay attention to how it feels and remember it clearly. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Here goes…”
I channeled my mana through my hands and into her body through them. For this exercise, her body’s own mana pathways will need to be recognized by her mind. Most humanoid species have a similar mana pathway inside their bodies, with small deviations unique to them, like fingerprints or DNA.
After attuning for a solid minute, and this little minx wiggling her hips the whole time trying to distract me, I swear!, it was over.
“Did you catch the feeling?”
She nodded.
“Okay, now, put your fingers on the power rune, and imagine sending your mana through your arm and into your fingers, pushing it out into the rune with the intention of making the topaz gem at the end of the formula glow. A small glow. If you push too much mana into the rune, it could cause the topaz to explode.”
She nodded again. I hope she understood. I hadn’t fully explained how some runes acted as a capacitor. She put two fingers on the power rune and closed her eyes. Still grinding away on my cock the entire time. Slowly the runes began to glow in order, like watching a slow electrical current flowing, lighting up each carved symbol on the ground as her mana passed through, heading straight to the gem in the raised pillar and making it glow slightly.
Amazing.
“Light.” She said proudly as she pointed at the gem.
“You’re the best, Vera. You are a goblin magician.”
“Want.” She buried her face into my chest as she kept wiggling her hips.
“What do you want?”
She pushed my upper body down, causing me to lay flat on the ground.
“Husband.” she answered and placed her hands on my chest as she grinded out her reward.
And it was hers to have. I added in a little thrusting of my own, but nothing intense, and she was making nice moaning noises as a small strand of drool escaped her mouth. I dumped another belly full of seed inside of her, causing her to growl excitedly before her body fell forward and settled peacefully on my body.
I held her warmly against my chest and stroked her head.
I waited a little while before asking her how she knew the runes in the formulas I made were wrong, and she sat up, taking both of my hands. One she put on her belly, and another she put on her head, and answered with a single word: “Know.”
A good enough answer as any, mainly because she knew she knew. Not everyone can say that when it comes to magical formulas, especially about their construction. Even though I, who only has half a foot in the door to the intermediate level of formula magic, made a basic mistake. But this goblin had no problems at all understanding it, and even correcting it after seeing the magical runes only once.
“Vera. Can you do me a favor?”
She nodded.
“If you actually have to piss in the future, can you not do it on me? I was trying to make you feel good with my seed-stick at breakfast and sometimes that good feeling you get makes you think you have to piss. So, try to remember which is the good piss that won’t come out, and make sure for the other one that we go to the shit-pit properly, okay?”
She nodded again, looking a bit ashamed.
“I won’t bring it up again. I know you are a good girl.”
She laid back down on my body, rubbing her cheek against my chest, and I just held her preciously for a while.
My thoughts were of Vera and the future now, but not in regards to magic.
They were instead hopeful thoughts, that if she was smart enough to grasp formulaic magic, that perhaps she might not have her life thrown into full chaos when it comes time to give birth to our daughter.