Of Alchemical Formulae and Monstergirl Anatomy

((As previously stated, there will be no chapter on the 15th. Thus, next chapter will be posted on the 22nd of October.

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John had saved the proverbial haul from his “art lesson” for when he got home. He could flip through a bunch of shit quickly if need be, but there was no indication of danger so he might as well hold off until he could enjoy it properly. He was now home, and it was time to get the figurative party started.

Objective Completed: Against School Policy
Grope June.
Reward: +1 LIB, 200 EXP

That marked the first time he didn’t have mixed feelings about a LIB reward. With his decision to consistently put points towards INT when he Leveled Up he expected to have no further self-control issues. On top of that, increasing the stat now came with some actual rewards thanks to the Sexual Proficiency Skill Tree.

Objective Completed: Breaking Down Barriers
Grope Qhila.
Reward: +1 INT, 200 EXP

’Wait, what?’

Gaia: Turns out I’d forgotten a semi-colon in the trigger condition for the grope objectives. Should be fixed now.

’... Are you serious? Does it actually work like that?’

Gaia: You really don’t want to know how accurate the analogy is…

That was a disturbing thought. Especially if the Developer was actually the real Gaia/supreme deity and this applied not just to his powers but reality in general. Gravity being **** to turning off due to the equivalent of a typo would be very bad.

Rather than go down that rabbit hole of existential dread, he decided to distract himself with the next notification.

Achievement Unlocked: Second Base
Finger a girl. (Or give a handjob to a guy, I guess.)
I should take this away for ruining the order of these…
Reward: 100 EXP, +1 LIB, +1 The Touch level.

’... I don’t think that’s the common definition of second base.’

Gaia: Since you decided to sequence break these achievements, I decided to use the hardest requirements around.

Apparently, she was grumpy that he didn’t stop Qhila while she was practically feral with heat in order to kiss her before she went to town on his dick. That felt like not really his fault, but between that and the belated Objective reward for groping her, it did remind him that there were some easy EXP to be had from kissing the kobold.

That… didn’t sit right with him though. Not that he didn’t want to kiss Qhila, he did. Very much so. But he wanted it to mean something that it couldn’t. And as long as it couldn’t mean that, he would rather not. Especially if they discovered a way to give her the ability to pair bond later on.

’Actually, shouldn’t I have cleared the “kiss Qhila” objective when I kissed her forehead? Since kissing Mom on the cheek worked…’

Gaia: Nu-uh

’So you’re being petulant about that one too?’

He got no written response to that, but he could somehow feel her glare at him through the chat system.

New Skill Level: Pheromone Aura Lvl 2
New Skill Level: Low Alchemy Lvl 7
New Skill Level: The Touch Lvl 2

That was all pretty nice, but getting three Skill Level Up notifications back to back made him feel like maybe a full on window for each was overkill. Most of the time, they meant a modest increase in the skill’s numbers, with the only major exception being the breakpoints for Skill Perk slots. Which he could check for when he got a Perk Point anyway. A quick trip to the notification settings later, they would now show up as ‘chat’ messages in the same log that damage dealt and taken sat in.

Achievement Unlocked: Appreciation For The Classics
After getting with a monster girl, have sex with a baseline human.
Though putting this achievement in is probably a waste of time, since it’d require him to get with not just one, but two women.
Reward: 100 EXP, +1 Sexual Proficiency level.

’You left the comment like that on purpose’

She didn’t deign to answer.

Achievement Unlocked: Taking Charge I
Sexually dominate a partner.
You did fairly little with it though, so I’m expecting more from you in the future!
Reward: 100 EXP, +1 Sexual Proficiency level.

’Qhila is definitely on to something with the voyeurism accusations…’

Achievement Unlocked: Lewd Cheat Codes
Use magic to make someone orgasm from one or more types of stimulation that normally can’t bring them to completion.
You try watching a species as chronically horny on main as humanity for a few millennia and see how it affects you!
Reward: 100 EXP, 1 Lewd Rare Candy.

He wasn’t sure why she had put her response in the Achievement comment instead of just in the chat field, but it was good for a giggle regardless. He was also more than a little curious about that rare candy…

That looked like the recipe for a great time, but also like he should be very certain that the person eating it knew what they were getting into.

Achievement Unlocked: Amazing Chest Ahead
Make face-to-chest contact with June.
Can’t really sass you for this one. You could probably find gay men who would be envious of this if you really tried...
Reward: 100 EXP, +1 The Wiggle level.

Achievement Unlocked: By Your Cummand
Have a partner orgasm immediately after you ordered them to.
Of course that’s not the same as having them cum solely because you ordered them to.
Reward: 100 EXP, +1 The Thrust level.

He wasn’t sure if that comment was setting an unreasonable standard or telling him what his sexual Skills would eventually enable. In any case, he was down to a single notification, which meant the next one was the big one.

That was all great. He wasn’t quite as enthusiastic about the dick boost as he had been when he got the Quest but it was still very welcome as was the rest. The closest thing to a downside was that part of him had hoped that the item would be a, probably art themed, generally applicable piece of gear. The name did not suggest that, nor did the inventory view revealing that he was now the proud owner of a magic buttplug.

Never mind about the item being a possible downside, this was awesome. Aside from the sex toy functions having a lot of potential for fun, he had played more than enough Pokemon games with some variety of the EXP Share to realize that the Party System range extension was extremely useful.

It would let Qhila get some EXP even from fights she couldn’t participate in for whatever reason, such as being busy or needing to rest. If they got an ally that was too far behind him in power, or if Qhila fell behind for some reason, it could be used to Level that person without putting them at risk, or power Level them the last bit if they were close enough in power to still participate. On top of which it provided thought-operated long distance communication. Sure, it wasn’t an outright power boost, but the utility was off the charts.

Opening his inventory to check the plug also revealed something to him that he had forgotten about earlier, which in turn reminded him of something else he had also not gotten around to doing.

The first of those two things was a cartoonish sack with a gem on the front sitting in his inventory. The tooltip informed him that it was a “bag-o-loot” containing two rounds of Giant Rat loot drops that he had gotten from the bonus objective of yesterday’s Quest.

Inside were some more money and another bone. More interestingly, it also held one of the items on the Giant Rat drop table: Pipe of the Sewers. Based on the D&D item of the same name, he had expected it to be a musical instrument that could summon or control either rats or vermin in general. Or at least **** them to approach similar to the Piper’s Philter they had used for the Pit of Rat Roasting.

Instead, he got a metal pipe about the length of a baseball bat, with a diameter suited to be grabbed in hand and a handle of sorts in one end made of tape wound around it.

If he had still had Bludgeon Proficiency, he suspected that that would’ve been a neat little upgrade to the baseball bat. As it stood, he would ask Qhila if she had a use for it. In the likely event that she didn’t, this was essentially vendor trash.

It might be pretty good vendor trash though. The enchanted weapons he had seen go for thousands on the Auction had probably been in a similar ballpark of magical power to this one if he had to guess. They had been attached to real weapons like swords, maces and such though, not an improvised one made out of a length of pipe. Still, even if that knocked, say, 80% off the price he could get for it, it remained a nice payday.

The other thing that had slipped his mind earlier was the collection of alchemical formulae that he got from the same Quest. Since absorbing recipes didn’t take up Academic Capacity, the limiting factor to his ability to absorb Skill Books, there was no reason not to just absorb it right then and there, so he did.

As a bonus, sifting through the recipes was easier in his interface than in a physical book. The recipes ranged from Item Level 5 to 20, with most of the interesting stuff starting at 10. Most of the items had 2 or 3 different recipes to choose from as well.

The stuff he could make using Craft right now were mostly minor quality of life stuff, like a magical palette cleanser and additives for mundane household chemicals to improve them in some way or other. Boosting the concentrated bleach he still had some of left was probably worthwhile, but other than that he wasn’t quite looking at anything combat relevant yet. At least not without some actual lab time, as he did have the instructions for how to make all the stuff manually as well.

In the next few Low Alchemy Skill Levels, he was getting entry level Abyssal corrosives, venoms and an irritant that was more or less magic pepper spray, as well as elixirs providing minor stat boosts and an additive to caffeinated drinks enhancing the wakefulness. The elixirs did come with negative side effects, mostly of the “penalty to another stat” variety.

The real wealth of alchemical options started opening up past Skill Level 10. There were the goblin knockout gas, minor healing potions, and winter’s breath that he had already gotten from various sources before.

In addition to those, alchemical weaponry expanded to cover multiple damage types, including some esoteric ones like ‘holy’ and ‘psychic’, toxins that came with both damage and debuffs, compounds that expanded and turned sticky akin to D&D tanglefoot bags, and a liquid that turned into a spray of caltrop-like spikes.

Supplemental stuff for the alchemical weaponry included the sticky oil, flammable foam and explosively flammable gas that Qhila had used previously, and substances that synergized with other damage types in a similar way. It also came with additives for alchemist’s fire that extended the burn time or made it create noxious smoke at the cost of some DPS.

Potions and elixirs expanded with cures for most of the debuffs that would become available to him, modest buffs to mana and HP regeneration, and a host of more narrow and specialized buffs than the general stat boosters, but which in turn provided more substantial boosts or came with smaller side effects.

For mutagens, which were technically a subset of elixirs but John was mostly thinking of them as their own category, he got four outright, but one of them was arguably a whole family of very similar ones. The big one was essentially lycanthropy-in-a-bottle, turning the drinker into an anthropomorphic wolf, notably granting natural weaponry in the form of claws and teeth, as well as mildly protective fur and enhanced sense of smell.

The downside was a milder version of the Hyde Serum side effects, plus silver allergy for a few days. The recipe noted that substituting the wolf tissue sample with that of a different mammalian predator or omnivore created a version for an anthropomorphic version of that animal. It noted that such substituting came with “minor” changes in the effects and side effects, but didn’t get into specifics.

The other mutagens provided night vision at the cost of light sensitivity and his color sight, zooming vision at the cost of vulnerability to blunt **** trauma, and highly elastic tissue and resistance to blunt **** trauma at the cost of vulnerability to slashing and bleed damage.

Finally, when it came to lewd applications, there were a variety of aphrodisiacs, one of which doubled as lube, while another had a chance of triggering early heat in demihumans with such a cycle. There were potions to alter his cum in various ways, and potions to temporarily seal someone’s ability to climax. One of the latter even had a particular interaction with the higher Item Level cum volume booster, where the boost was further magnified with every second that the user was kept from cumming. Doing some quick napkin math, it could potentially make for an ejaculation in the liters range.

Entirely unsurprisingly, there were also both pro- and contraceptives, for either sex. Those were of no use to him personally, since he had a fertility toggle to avoid kids and no plans of having them within the foreseeable future. And also no reason to object to the persistence method when it came time to ensure conception. It was, however, also the kind of thing he was fairly sure would sell in any market ever. Between that, enhancers for household chemistry, and some Abyssal cosmetics, doing alchemy for profit was basically just a shopping trip away.

With that all done, he had a little bit of afternoon and a Saturday evening to decide what to do with. The obvious answer was to get back on the EXP grind. However, despite his raised END, he had managed to put his body through enough of a wringer since leaving school yesterday that his legs were sore, which reminded him that rest was also necessary.

He needed to grow powerful, yes, but he also needed to be able to keep at it for a long time. He was very far from Level 500, especially if something like Runescape’s “92 is half of 99” rule was in effect. It would be best to pace himself for a marathon, not a sprint. So instead of getting his Barrier action on, he went to his room to read.

Despite the veneer of dry textbook presentation, the Monstergirl Encyclopedia made for interesting reading. It was surprisingly quirky for an academic volume too. For some reason, all full body anatomical drawings, and many of the partial ones, included a duck, allegedly pictured for scale. This remained true even on drawings that had an actual scale with cm and inches.

Additionally, he couldn’t help but notice that an awful lot of the depicted monstergirls were redheads. Around two thirds of the girls in the entries he looked through as “warm up”. Some of them couldn’t be redheads though, sometimes on account of not having hair, sometimes for other reasons. If you took out those, the ratio was probably closer to four out of five.

He read through several types of fae and elemental before dinner, then returned for Asian dragonesses and merfolk, leading with sharkgirls. At this point, John paused for a moment to wonder why the author had chosen to present them in this order and not, for instance, put all of the dragon-related entries together.

Shaking his head at the silly organization, he skipped to the evening’s main feature: kobolds. In addition to confirming some of the things Qhila had told him, not that he had doubted her, the part with traits of kobolds in general held a few interesting tidbits.

For one, kobolds grew up quickly and then stayed young for a long time. Depending on ancestral tribe, or subspecies as they were called in the book, they reached adulthood at between 8 and 12 years old, then proceeded to be in their equivalent to the 20s for about a century, and their 30s for another one. After that, the longevity came to a rather abrupt end, aging the equivalent of 50 human years in a single decade, though the book noted that between the general dangers of the Abyss and most tribes’ casual relationship with workplace safety, it was rare for kobolds to make it that far.

It also said that kobold females usually laid clutches of 4-6 eggs at a time, which made John extra glad that Qhila was on the proverbial pill. For all that he had assured her that he would’ve taken responsibility, and meant it too, he did not feel ready for a child. Much less 4-6 of them.

More enticingly, the encyclopedia revealed that being an avid cuddler was racial trait of Qhila’s, which in turn meant she probably wouldn’t dial it back much even when she was no longer touch-starved. Apparently, this was a side effect of being adapted for living in large groups in tight, underground living spaces. Insufficient physical contact was highly stressful and could lead to long term mental issues, and being made to sleep away from the customary cuddle pile was typically the third worst punishment a kobold tribe administered, eclipsed only by full blown exile or ****.

While learning that he had every reason to expect Qhila to remain a cute snugglebug forever was nice, discovering the depth of her need for that kind of intimacy also made him strongly consider putting the book away to go visit her. She still hadn’t responded to the text about the Quest to get her a disguise so she could eat dinner with him and his mom, though, so she was probably busy…

That line of mild worry was quickly obliterated, however, by the first paragraph under the mating rituals header:

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of kobolds do not possess the ability to pair bond. This goes beyond a cultural or even instinctive tendency not to, as their minds and souls are generally structured in a manner that makes such bonding wholly impossible without far-reaching changes. However, approximately 3% of kobolds do have the capability in their ancestry though this is effectively similar to a recessive trait, and requires a parent or grandparent who had the capability in order to be expressed. This would primarily happen through a coupling between a female kobold and a male of another race. All instances of this latent trait trace back to alterations made to the Rotmaw tribe circa 20 000 years before the Fall of Atlantis.

John immediately flipped to the index, searching for the Rotmaw tribe under kobold subspecies. He did not find it and, with far less enthusiasm, flipped to the last entry in the list instead, which held subspecies that had been omitted due to lack of reliable data. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, they were listed there.

Feeling dejected, John went back to reading about kobold mating rituals. Which didn’t do all that much to lift his spirits, because he wasn’t actually sure if trying to emulate any of it would come off as a nice gesture, he had to stop himself from thinking of it as a romantic one, or bring up bad memories relating to why she left her tribe. Or just make her feel bad about her inability to pair bond.

The section on Skytails specifically was more helpful, not least of which because several parts of the anatomical description brought up very pleasant memories. Coming as no real surprise was that Qhila had an erogenous zone in her mouth, specifically the stretch between her pharynx and esophagus turned into one when aroused. What was mildly surprising was that this could be intense enough that some Skytails had trouble eating solid food during heat.

Reading on, it turned out that John hadn’t been entirely off the mark when the first barrier in her womanhood had made him wonder if she was somehow a virgin despite her past. It actually was her hymen, only repurposed from whatever a hymen normally did, apparently Abyssal biologists weren’t certain either, into an elastic seal that maximized semen retention.

The thought that her body did what it could to hold on to as much of his semen as possible was super lewd and super hot. Much as John didn’t want to think anything positive about Orronth, he had to admit that the dragon’s monstergirl design skills were on point.

At least, so he thought until the next point gave him a solid several minutes of severely questioning that, among other things. His sense that her womb seemed to have been pushed deeper into her body as she rode him had been accurate. Skytails were indeed, as Qhila had put it, stretchy, and even designed to derive pleasure from being stretched beyond most other creatures’ safe limits. Between highly elastic soft tissues, a hip that consisted of five distinct bones attached to each other with even more elastic connective tissue, and a womb that was designed to be both safely and pleasurably penetrated, their maximum capacity was rather ****.

Now, the thought of being able to go big, give her a solid abdominal bulge, and have her enjoy every second of it had undeniable appeal. But comparing this to the basic anatomical data revealed that the average Skytail kobold could safely fit an entire average Skytail kobold inside of her.

John spent several minutes grappling with the horrifying implications of the possibility that Orronth may have been forcing Qhila and her kin to participate in an unbirthing fetish. Or vore fetish, since their jaws could unhinge allowing similar oral flexibility. Then it occurred to John that he didn’t actually know how big True Dragons were, as the Asian dragons chapter had focused on typical humanoid and human-sized forms, but that fantasy media tended towards ranging between big and colossal. Perhaps this was simply the amount of flexibility necessary for him to safely have penetrative sex with his kobolds without transforming…