The next morning I woke up in Valeria’s arms. Gren had already gotten up and gone out, apparently.
It was an odd feeling to be the smallest person in a bed, but both Valeria and Gren were bigger than me as Abby. Knowing Gren could take care of herself, I quit looking around and treasured the feeling of being held and squished against Valeria’s chest. I didn’t stay awake long, however, before something hard came between us, and the warm comfy feeling of letting myself be small turned into frustration with a heightened awareness of just how big I was, in some respects.
I squirmed out of her grasp, and not surprisingly that woke her up. Her eyes went straight to my crotch.
“Oh my,” she said, blushing.
“I’m getting dressed now.”
“Good plan, I’ll do that too.”
We dressed with our backs to each other. I put on shorts and a halter top, and she put on her traveling outfit. In the tight shorts, you could see what I was packing, but eventually that would go down if I just didn’t think about it. My nipples made little points in the halter top, so I redressed, wearing a bra beneath it this time.
“I should take it as a compliment,” Valeria said, breaking the silence that had come between us. “It was just startling to see, first thing in the morning.”
“You’re a very sexy woman,” I told her.
“You’re a very sexy futanari,” she said. “I’m just glad that it’s harder to tell when I’m – oh, never mind.”
“You look cute when you’re blushing.”
She made a face at me and started making the coffee.
By the time it was done, Kathy and Talos came downstairs, Lesseth popped out of the bag, and Gren came back inside.
“You okay?” I asked Gren.
“Fine,” she said, a bit too quickly. “Vivacious vixen,” she added. “Why?”
“You look a little off. A bit teal.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m fine.”
I lowered my voice. “It’s not about sharing the bed with Valeria, is it?”
She shook her head. “Of course not. Really. I promise you, it’s not that.” And then, loudly, “Is that coffee I smell?”
I wasn’t completely sure that I bought that she was fine, but if she said it didn’t have anything to do with Val, I believed her. We all had cereal for breakfast, with milk, except for Lesseth, who skipped the cereal.
She did, however, demonstrate that she could turn herself into a milk slime, or a coffee slime.
“You look like a poop emoji when you’re brown and shapeless,” Kathy said.
Lesseth reformed her shape into that of a woman again. “What’s a poop emoji?” she asked.
“Never mind,” I said, trying to get the image out of my head.
Valeria took the dishes up to Earth, where there was a dishwasher, and Gren went with her. I unboxed the two vibrators and started charging them, while Lesseth, Kathy and I went back to working on the inventory.
Ah, that, Enash said, when we pulled out a vial of green liquid.
Oh, you’ll find out. Or not.
Nope. My lips, if I had any, are sealed.
A few minutes later, I was saying, “One ring, silverish, with a black stone inset.”
I waited to see if Enash decided to provide more than that, but he didn’t. We inventoried it, and piled the unknown stuff on the coffee table.
Enash kept it up, oohing and ahhing as we pulled out his stuff, with the occasional oh, dear or That’s amazing! and nothing the slightest bit useful.
I came to the conclusion that it didn’t mean anything, and maybe he’d even forgotten what everything was, but he had enjoyed my reaction the first time he did it and now he was just trolling me.
After we had a few things on the table, I cast Detect Magic. The ring wasn’t even magical, it was just a ring. Some of the potions shone brightly. But a crown we’d taken out glowed a bright blue, as magical as anything I’d seen.
I assigned numbers to the level of magic, which just meant the brightness of the blue glow I saw around them, and that got put in a column in the inventory.
My cell phone buzzed. A text from Xyla, which meant she was right outside. “Help” was all it said.
It might have been faster to pull up the security screen on the laptop so I could teleport out, but that would have meant moving Kathy aside and minimizing her spreadsheet. Heading straight for the door was more intuitive, even if it meant undoing a lot of bolts. I could hear her little hands pounding on the door, and I wondered what was happening to her. I opened the door, cursing the time it took.
She was alone, and as I quickly surveyed the area, not under any immediate threat.
“We have a problem,” she said.
“Orcs are coming through the forest, and unless I’m wrong, it’s the left flank of a much larger group marching from the east. Not only are they likely to poach animals in the forest, and perhaps cut down trees, but their path takes them straight toward Gren’s village.”
“In the forest? A few dozen. Total, I have no idea. Orc warbands are often hundreds of warriors, maybe as many as a thousand. But either Gavabar’s people need to flee, or we need to act now to fight.”
“My people will never flee the village,” Gren said. “And an orc warband won’t turn aside unless it’s defeated.”
“We can’t fight a thousand orcs,” I said.
“We need to defend the village,” Gren said.
“We need to defend the forest,” Xyla insisted.
“If they take the village,” Valeria said, “And torture the trolls for information, they will find this place, and the gate.”
“You’re all right,” I said. “Okay. Some of them are in the forest now?” I asked.
“Yes,” Xyla said. “If they go straight, they’ll come back out of it, and then get back in later.”
I knew what she meant. The northern border of the forest wasn’t a smooth curve. It jutted out into the plains irregularly. I pulled out a map I’d made earlier, mostly from Xyla’s descriptions. “Where are they now?”
Xyla pointed to an area where the border looked a little like the coast of Normandy.
“That’s where we start, then. Is it likely they will turn their course, if they are attacked?”
Xyla shrugged. “They are orcs. Who knows?”
I glanced around, but I didn’t get any more definite reaction.
“Well,” I said. “We’ll fight them better in the forest than elsewhere.”
“I can make a path to get us there quickly,” Xyla said.
“We’ll get our armor on,” Talos said, looking at Valeria, who nodded.
“I’m getting my bow,” Gren said.
“I’ll ride in the bag until we get there,” Lesseth said. “But then, I shall burn them with my acid.”
“Okay, let’s get started with that path,” I said.
“How can I help?” Kathy asked.
“By staying back here, and watching the security cameras,” I said. “Use your judgment, and if they are about to come bursting through the door, retreat up the gate and get your gun ready. If there are too many, run for the police. Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that, but I don’t see how you’d be much good in a battle, Kathy. You don’t have any powers, and you don’t know how to fight.”
Talos cut her off. “Abby is right. And I will fight less well if I’m worried about protecting you.”
Kathy glared at him, and then at me. He didn’t let her glares stop him from armoring up. I shrugged at her. “Sorry,” I told her. “But wishing you’d be useful won’t make you so.”
Gren put her hand on Kathy’s shoulder. “When I come back, I’ll teach you how to shoot a bow.”
“And I, to wield a sword,” Valeria said. “I’ll have you better than Abby at it in no time.”
I looked at Valeria, and raised my eyebrows.
She smiled at me. “Sorry,” she said, “but wishing your swordswomanship was better doesn’t make it so.”
“Dammit,” I said. “I’m a necromancer, not a warrior.”
“And it shows,” Val said.
Kathy sighed and waved as we all headed off.
Hundreds of orcs, possibly a thousand. We needed a better count than that. Gavabar could probably put a hundred or more trolls in the field, if need be, so they might be able to stand against the lower part of that range. But probably, we were outnumbered, which to my mind meant guerilla warfare, or –
I was getting carried away, I feared, with my notion of what an orc was. “How about we try diplomacy?” I asked.
“The histories are full of people who have tried to placate an orc warband,” Valeria said. “When they are not on a rampage they can be talked to, but while they are on the move, they understand only strength. And an attempt to bargain with them is usually perceived as weakness. They agree to deals, and then turn on those they have dealt with the next day, burning, pillaging, and raping.”
“Burning comes last, I think,” Gren said. “Pillage first. Burn last.”
“So we can’t trust them,” I summarized.
“Oh, we can trust them once they’ve been defeated,” Talos said. “And before that, we can trust them to destroy everything in their path.”
I supposed that made it simple, although I still hoped to find some more peaceful path, at some point. On the other hand, I had no intention of being Neville Chamberlain. Or Churchill, really. How would the old conservative have reacted to a futanari necromancer? I put the analogy aside and focused on the present problem.
“The way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.”
I must have said it aloud, because Valeria asked what an elephant was.
“Later,” I told her. “First we need to know as much as we can about what we’re going into.”
So I asked Xyla, and tried to make a better map of the area where the orcs were. Squirrels were coming and going, reporting on their movements. They might leave the forest before we got there, because it was going to take us all day and some of the night, but they seemed to be camping now, and the best guess was that there were about three dozen of them in the forest.
And five of us. No, six. It was easy to forget to count Lesseth. If I’d brought the zombies along, that would have helped some, but they were too slow. I didn’t love our odds, but I had some ideas of how to make them better, and of course Xyla in the forest was literally a force of nature.
Gren, on the other hand, was not looking herself. “You okay?” I asked.
“Never better,” she said. “Just –”
“Well, I’m a little bit –”
“A little bit pregnant, I’m guessing.”
I put my arms around her. Right then it felt really strange to be the smaller of the two of us. “Congratulations,” I said.
“You’re okay with this?” she asked, pulling back a little to look me in the eye.
“Sure. I don’t know what bus – oh.”
“I took herbs whenever I was with someone else, so it’s most definitely your business,” Gren said.
“You’re going to be a mommy!” Xyla said.
“Or a daddy, depending on how you look at it,” Gren said.
I got my face in order. Process later, but now was not the time for talking about how complex it was. “Both, and!” I said, trying to echo Xyla’s excitement. I squeezed Gren. “I love you, and I will love our baby.”
Gren’s stiffness melted. “Oh, good,” she said, and squeezed me hard. Maybe a little too hard, but nothing I couldn’t take.
“You’re going to need more space,” Xyla said. “We can clear a little forest for the baby.”
Gren and I both looked at her.
“I mean,” she said. “A baby!”
I was surprised, but I had been thinking we would need a little more space eventually, and if the baby was what made Xyla okay with it, I was willing to take it.
But first, we had to survive dealing with a lot of orcs.
“Are you sure you’re up to – well, fighting?”
Gren grinned. “To protect mine?” She rubbed her tummy. “I’m up to anything.”