Rowana & Azzie Read Marcie & Gina Read CHYOA

"So there Aedre was, on her knees, two Orcs had her by the arms and the leader, who had so much cosmetic surgery that he looked like a male porn star had a baby with a bodybuilder, undoes his fly and this cock just flops out like a length of limp rope. The muscle-grafts on this guy were insane, like you could grate meat on his abs, and his cock springs to life like a spitting cobra, totally prehensile, neural-controlled. And Aedre just opens her mouth and has her eyes sort of downcast as she lets his dick slither in, right? Like a meek little bimbo, utterly complacent."

Rowana took a sip of her Pellenor pale ale.

"Now, this is what's important to remember: if you're going to bite somebody's dick off, you don't look lovingly into their eyes as your teeth meet in the middle of their cockmeat and give them time to pull the trigger first, right? When my bullets perforated the skulls of the two Orcs holding her, Aedre just chomped, twisted her neck, and spat. The stump was still sparking from wires that had been stripped in her teeth when my third shot vacated what was left of his braincase."

Azzie smiled. She liked to hear the occasional war story. Tales about Rowana's ex, not so much.

"So. Ro. We have been reviewed," the Uruk-Hai said. Her large ears spread wide in the night. It was dark in the grasslands, and the moon had just crested the dark shadow of the broken Mount Doom.

Rowana winced. "Yeah. It was...polite? Like as polite as they get. They didn't like it. And they bounced pretty hard off the Looseleaf pages."

"Zeebop might need to work in an easier introduction," Azzie said. "A quadruple-amputee Hobbit hacker in a weird friends-with-benefits relationship with a post-op transman with a malleable purple cock and a kink for fucking her when she's asleep is a lot to throw at readers right off the bat."

"Is it weird that the scene where you finger me until I piss myself wasn't quite humiliating enough for them?" the ex-soldier asked.

"No, they're impossible to please short of some really intense mind control scenario that somehow involves torturing someone with love," Azzie waved one grass-green hand. "Anyway, be glad they didn't read the latest chapters with Bebe yet. Morgoth only knows what they would make of that scenario."

Rowana sighed. "I do think they mean well. Even if they don't know the difference between steampunk and cyberpunk, and haven't read The Lord of the Rings and so have no idea what half the shit going on is. I think a lot of people click on this expecting _Dungeons & Lattes _with fucking and get disappointed when the only Orc dick for the first twenty chapters is an anatomically correct dildo."

“But, Zeebop struggles to create an emotional connection with the reader. Even a horrifying scene like this is described in a clinical matter of fact way. In a sense that could be considered praiseworthy but without that connection the story lacks an emotional punch, so to speak.”

"I did wonder if Zeebop went too far with the PTSD scene," Azzie sighed. "Although all attempts to make a scene with real emotion tend to fall flat on this crowd. It's really hard to convey 'I love you' and 'I want to suck your pussy until the end of time' and have it come off as meaningful and heartfelt at the same time. Not that Zeebop hasn't tried, but...is it that he sucks at reaching an emotional high, or that Marcie & Gina skipped those chapters because they didn't want to read about Hobbit sex?"

The soldier finished her beer. She stared at the green glass bottle, the image of endless waves of grain on the label. Azzie reached over and squeezed her lover's knee. They leaned over and their lips met.

It wasn't going to light up the literary scoreboards as the most passionate or pure kiss. The night was young. The moon rose. Rowana's thighs itched where Azzie's little tusks had scratched her the night before. Out in the fields, the green shoots of the pipe-weed had broken through the soil...and the two of them could dream of the quiet life that wasn't quite theirs yet.