Kobolds From Space 2: Kobold of Shadows

Things got a bit tense after that. Fire and Star, and the diamond dogs watching the puppies, were always stressed and during one play period we heard two of the caretakers arguing about whether the Alpha was doing the right thing, cracking down on anti-kobold sentiment. Apparently there was anti-kobold sentiment.

The next time we woke up, half the puppies were missing. “They go home, to learn like dogs always do,” the remaining caretaker said, with a sigh. “They don’t learn as much, but some dogs think it’s more important to learn the right things.”

I was just miserable for a different reason. Perro and Star between them were able to set my broken bones and knit them together quickly – they were mostly things like ribs and shoulder blades that weren’t easily replaced with cybernetics anyway – but I spent an extra week in school while everyone else got put back in reality to play, because it would have been too painful. I was still pretty sore the week after, but it was bearable, at least according to Star who didn’t have to bear it.

There weren’t a lot of physical sensations in our accelerated virtual world, so the only thing I felt for almost a year was pain. I’d heard the stories about how Star cut off their arms and legs on purpose to get them replaced with robot limbs, and I was starting to think that maybe I wanted to do something similar.

But it did get better, eventually, and just as I was finally starting to get used to the idea of enjoying life again, we graduated.

Star and Wave, of all people, were there to greet us, along with Wave’s dragon-friend and their gaggle of baby half-dragons, who were lurking around looking menacing, all spiky fur and horns and teeth.

“Congratulations!” Star said. “You’re now all officially adults. You’re old enough to pick a name, and an icon, and a specialized field of study!”

“And old enough to make decisions on your own,” Wave added. “Once you’re registered, you’ll have full control over your own rig.”

“This is a big responsibility!” Star said. “But don’t worry, we can guide you through everything, as much as you need. We’re here to help!”

“Where’s Fire?” asked Eff. There were some other mumbles from the crowd.

“He’s… busy,” Star said.

“He’s in the palace,” the dragon said, “ruling the pack.”

“That idiot!” Wave said, throwing up her hands.

“What happened?” Ay asked. “Are we taking over? Should we start breeding an army of kobolds to devour the world now?”

“If you want!” Star said. “But no we’re not taking over.”

“Aren’t we?” Wave asked.

The dragon shook her head, and explained for the rest of us, “They found a big nest of rebels, and rumor said it was where they were holding the warp crystal. The Alpha and his guards went in to get it back. It was a trap, the crystal wasn’t there, and the Alpha was killed.”

“Fire finished off the surviving rebels, and everyone on our side who got killed was brought back. Perro’s spell worked just like it was supposed to!” Star said.

“But the diamond dogs have a rule,” the dragon said. “Whoever kills the Alpha is the new Alpha. Being brought back from the dead doesn’t change that. Fire killed the dog who killed the Alpha, so he’s Alpha right now.”

“If they don’t have to die permanently, can’t the Alpha just kill Fire and let us bring him back?” Ay asked.

“You would think!” Wave shouted, throwing up her hands again. “But no, Fire wants to make some changes first.”

“He just wants to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Star said.

“He’s an idiot,” the dragon said. “If the conservatives weren’t protecting him, he’d already have been assassinated.”

“I’d like to see them try!” Star said, “Actually no I wouldn’t, too many people would die. I don’t get why they’re on our side though?”

“They’re not,” Wave said, mouth-line changing to a jagged sawblade. “But they think arranging for a fight with a predetermined conclusion is cheating.”

The adults seemed to finally notice that we were all staring at them. Star gave a big, jagged grin, and said, “If any of you weren’t completely confused or annoyed by all that talk of politics, I know *just* the specialty for you!”

“We have to register everyone first before we start assigning jobs,” Wave said.

“I know,” Star said, their faceplate changing into a spinning star. “I’m the one who looked up the procedure, and I’m the one who’s going to have to do it. Just make sure your demon-babies don’t devour the puppies while I get them processed.”

For some reason, the procedure had to be done in the real world despite almost none of it affecting the real world in any way. I think it was because they were changing all my settings and needed to completely reboot my account or something like that.

“Alright, CeeCee,” Star said. “This is pretty simple, but that doesn’t make it easy. I just need your name, icon, gender if any, and what color you want your rig to use to display the glowy bits.”

“Raven Darktalon of the Endless Abyss,” I said.

“I need a one word name that represents your icon,” Star said, patiently. “You can set your display name to Raven Darktalon of the… um… you can set it to whatever you want afterwards. Raven and Talon would both work, there are good icons for those.”

“Raven, then,” I said, flattening my ears. I didn’t realize they *forced* our names to be boring.

“Alright, here are the raven-related icons from the library,” Star said, and an array of twenty different birds and bird heads and feathers spread out across my faceplate. “Unless you had something else in mind? You can also draw one if you want.”

I was pretty sure I couldn’t draw a raven to save my life, so I picked one that looked appropriately menacing. “Can I change it later?”

“Technically yes?” Star said. “It’s the same procedure to change it as I’m using to set it right now, so if you change your mind by the time I’m finished with everyone it’ll be no trouble. Otherwise it’ll be some trouble, so you can figure it out yourself. Gender?”

“Huh?”

“Are you a girl or a boy or both or neither or undecided?” Star asked.

“I didn’t know that was a setting,” I said.

Star shrugged. “It’s not but Wave wanted me to ask. You’re a girl, aren’t you?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Okay, I’ll mark you down as ‘girl, I guess ’. Now, what color do you want to set your rig to? That’s easier to change but it’s easier on everyone else if you don’t.”

“Black of course.”

“No, I mean the glowy bits,” Star said.

“Black.”

“No,” Star said, deadpan. “You can’t have your rig show your face and icons in black. No one would be able to see it.”

I pouted. “But ravens are black!”

“They aren’t,” said the dragon, startling me. I hadn’t realized she was listening. “I like working with their feathers. They’re kind of black but also a bunch of different colors.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”

“Huh,” Star said. “She’s kind of right.”

She sent me a packet of pictures of ravens, and I flipped through them. I’d seen most of them before, but now that I was looking… yeah. They were black at first glance, but a glossy black and the gloss was all different colors. A very dark-hued rainbow. “Like a rainbow of darkness,” I said. “Can I do that?”

“We can try!” Star said.

It ended up looking a little too rainbow for me, so we filtered out the warm colors and kept it to greens and blues and purples, and turned it down as far as we could to still have it visible.

“Alright, Raven,” Star said. “Give it half an hour to propagate before you try to access anything, or things could get weird. Can you send Dee in next?”

I didn’t respond, staring at the little raven on my thigh. It shifted colors as I moved. I loved it!

“Raven?” Star asked again. “Raven!” she tapped me on the shoulder.

“Huh?”

“Can you send Dee in next?”

“Right! Sorry,” I said. I was going to have to get used to a new name. That’d probably take more than half an hour.

I was still showing off my icon to the other new adults when Dee screamed from behind me, “CeeCee get back here!”

“There’s no one by that name!” I shouted back.

She stomped over to me. “You stole my name!”

“What?”

She poked me in the chest. “I wanted to be Raven and Star says we can’t both have the same name! Just change your name to Talon.”

I shook my head. “I like Raven better.”

“You always do this! You stole my name, you stole my chance at the warp crystal, you stole my stuffed lizard…”

“It’s not my fault you’re always a little too late,” I said. Stuffed lizard? Was she still complaining about something that happened when we were six?

“It’s Fire’s fault for giving you a later number,” said Eff. “And Star and Wave for always going in order.”

“It’s not Fire’s fault, he picked at random,” Star said, coming over to join us. “It’s just bad luck.”

“You’re nothing like a raven anyway,” I said. “Ravens are quiet and watch people, you’re always nagging and complaining.”

“And you’re always stealing things and running off!”

I grinned. “Am I? Like some sort of… small bird…”

She bared her claws, cacked her faceplate, and leaped on me, clawing and biting. We wrestled around a bit until the dragon came over and separated us. I sat there on the ground, faceplate blank, trying to back down from a sudden panic. I slowly took stock of myself… a few scratches, but no bleeding. No broken bones. She hadn’t – she wasn’t like those dogs, she hadn’t really been trying to hurt me. She couldn’t have known…

Eff looked down at me. “Did you piss yourself? I mean, that was a good pounce, but…”

“Shut up!” I snapped, and ran off to clean up.

“Cat,” she said, creeping up behind me in the shower. The shower was just a spigot on the wall down on the fabricator level, so it wasn’t like it was supposed to be private.

I spun around.

“I picked Cat,” she said. Her face was pink. Bright. Pink. She turned to show off her icon, which was the outline of a cat, crouching down to pounce.

Why hadn’t I thought of that? Oh well, my version was prettier anyway.

“Aren’t black cats bad luck?” I asked, scrubbing myself off a bit.

“Yep,” she said. “Now it’s my turn to give bad luck to other people.”

“It wasn’t bad luck, you were just after me numerically,” I said. Then realized, “Oh god, you picked Cat because it was near the start of the alphabet, didn’t you!”

She grinned, and gave me a little wave as she headed back up.

I spent a long time cleaning off, because I really didn’t want to go back up and face everyone. By now Eff – or whatever he called himself now – would have told everyone, and maybe I could just live my whole life down here in the fabricator… except no, Star would be down here eventually to build something, and I was sure Ay – I mean Fairy – would want to be her apprentice, so that was at least two people I’d need to face…

So eventually I skulked back up to the lounge, where everyone was talking to Star and Wave as they described the different specialties we could study, or else reading up on them on their own since there was a swarm of us compared to the two of them. The dragon was watching the dragon babies who were play-fighting or gnawing on the furniture. I didn’t really know why they acted so immature, they used accelerated learning just like us and the puppies.

Wave waved me over. “Oh, that is pretty!” she said, looking at my icon. “Did you decide what you wanted to study? We still don’t have a real doctor. Doctors get to cut people open and play around with their insides, that sounds fun doesn’t it?”

“I want to be a warp technician,” I said. “Obviously.”

“Obviously, that’s not going to happen,” Warp replied. “You don’t have the talent and we don’t have a warp crystal to train you on anyway. Even if I took back the baby one I gave Perro it isn’t ready to train a newbie.”

“Then I’ll go get the other one back,” I said.

“I don’t think you realize how dangerous these people are,” Wave said. “This isn’t a movie where a plucky kid can waltz into the villain’s base and steal their treasure right out from under their nose. And if you’re planning to copy Fire and go in with heavy weapons…” she stopped dead. “Forget I said anything. You’d just end up killing yourself.”

“I’m an adult now,” I said. “You can’t stop me.”

“Cinder, stop her,” she said, and suddenly I was dangling from the dragon’s claws.

“Alright, if you’re going to be like that you can play with the other children,” said the dragon – Cinder, I guess – before dumping me in the middle of the little half-dragon babies. Who were larger than they’d looked, sitting next to Cinder – they were almost as big as me, and much much pointier.

“Ha,” said one of them, brown-furred with gray stripes. “What are you in for?”

I looked around. Nothing was restraining any of them. “What am I in?”

“In trouble,” they explained. “We’re all grounded because we set the cushions on fire.”

Something started gnawing on my tail. “And biff Snaff’s tail,” mumbled the baby dragon chewing on my tail. They weren’t chewing very hard, at least.

“How long are you grounded for?” I asked, turning to pet the little fluffy dragon behind me. They made happy noises.

“They’re grounded until they molt,” Cinder said. “If they never molt, then they’re grounded forever.”

“Forever?!” I said, eye-spots wide.

She looked confused. “Well, yeah. If they don’t molt they won’t grow wings, so how can they fly?”

“How long are they being punished?” I asked.

The dragon shrugged. “I don’t know, you’d have to ask Wave.”

I spent a few hours playing with the dragon babies. They really were just kids – they’d taken so long to hatch, and hadn’t really been able to get any virtual training in the egg because of the level of heat they needed while they were incubating (Cinder explained). They were getting accelerated training now that they were out, as much as they could manage to make up for lost time, but after a year they were still only about eight.

I mostly talked to Pancakes, and Cinder who kept butting in but was mostly helpful when she did. Soufflé eventually got bored of chewing on my tail but not of being petted, so I let them sit in my lap. I was a little jealous that they’d gotten real egg names, but not very jealous of what those names actually were – and Wave would have been one of the ones naming us, so maybe we’d dodged a bullet. The other four had been named by Cinder, and she’d given them random gem names, which was a little better.

Pancakes was completely obsessed with a mining game where you had to dig for randomly generated resources in an infinite cavern system, so we mostly talked about that. I’d played it a little, but I’d always been more interested in the Labyrinth simulator. They were similar enough for us to trade stories of things we’d found, at least – he really liked the idea of a giant chasm connecting multiple levels; apparently that didn’t happen very often in their game.

Eventually, Wave came back to talk to me. It was time for her and Cinder and the dragon babies to go back to the palace, so they had to let me go. “Have you decided on a specialty you can actually train for?” she asked. “If it turns out you’re able to use a warp crystal, you can always switch, but there’s no way to even start that training now.”

“That’s why I wanted to go find it,” I said. “Isn’t that more important than training?”

“We already have a lot of people looking,” Wave said. “We’ll find it sooner or later. And I’m not going to have you wandering through the mines on your own so you can get attacked again!”

I perked an ear at that. “So come with me?”

She shook her head. “I have other duties, and someone needs to talk sense into Fire. I also couldn’t protect you. Cinder is here because someone needed to protect *me*.”

I looked at Cinder, and she shook her head. “I have the same other duties as Wave.”

“Fine,” I said, sulking.

“And don’t think you can just wait until we leave and sneak out,” Wave said. “I may not have the crystal with me, but I can still track your headset.”

“FINE,” I said, sulking more. “I think I know what I want to study then.”

She looked surprised. “Oh?”

“I want to learn how to sneak,” I said. “And how to hack computers – erasing records, making cameras ignore you, faking tracking data, that sort of thing.”

She glowered at me.

“What? Did someone else pick computer security?” I said, trying to look innocent with a giant grin.

“I give up,” she said, turning her back on me. “Come on, Cinder, let’s get back to the menagerie. The Alpha’s probably getting really bored since he doesn’t have a job right now.”

But at least she sent me the link to the espionage training, which covered physical sneaking and electronic infiltration (and a bunch of other stuff that I wasn’t as interested in). Apparently it was actually a thing.

The sneaking training was more interesting than I’d expected. It was a lot like the labyrinth simulator, except that I wasn’t always in a labyrinth and instead of getting past the traps and fighting or tricking the monsters, I had to get past everyone unnoticed. For a while this meant ‘literally unseen and unheard’, and it wasn’t too hard to figure out what I was supposed to do at least although actually doing it took a while. Every time I failed, I’d be captured, tied up in some humiliating way, and the teacher of the classroom portion would explain to the class (which was just me) what I’d done wrong and how to do better next time.

Yes, all the training was accelerated. We – the former kids – had all gotten together to talk about our schedule, and we decided pretty quickly that we wanted to stay in sync with each other, so we’d all be done with our training at the same time and could start working on the next generation. It took a little longer to settle on the ‘half on/half off’ schedule that we’d been forced to use before, where the ‘half’ that was on would end up being most of our lives since it was accelerated. I was one of the ones arguing for it, since I wanted to speed through my training until I was confident I could sneak past Wave’s tracking (and any diamond dogs in the mines who wanted to beat me up ).

There were a couple of people who wondered why we weren’t starting on the next generation now, but most of us wanted *some* free time and on balance we decided to stick with the wisdom of hundreds of generations of kobolds before us who told us to wait until we were done with training.

One of the reasons we wanted free time was that we were able to go to the full virtual world now, the one with senses and avatars that felt as detailed as real life, but that only ran at normal speed so we couldn’t squeeze very much of it in in the breaks between classes that used to be playground time. The games weren’t really that much better – games had always been able to sleazily improve the sensory feedback without overloading the processors or our brains – but it was the sort of place where you could make your own fun, which for a bunch of kobolds newly off the leash often meant sex.

I… tried it once. I noticed that Steel and Honor were also running the same combat tracker I’d had to install, and we went off alone so they could show me their moves. I hadn’t actually learned any fighting yet, so I mostly watched them fight each other, while they pointed out what techniques they were using – which were all pretty simple, since they’d only just started training too.

Steel won, reducing his opponent’s hit points to zero with a few solid hits. “Ha! Good fight,” he said, helping Honor back up.

She fiddled with her settings to bring herself back to full health. “We should play for stakes.”

“Like what?” Steel asked.

Honor smirked. “Winner gets to screw the loser?”

“So what, either way you both screw each other?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem like much of an incentive.”

“Alright then,” Honor said. “Winner gets to screw you. Fighting over a girl is a long and proud tradition!”

“…in fiction,” Steel said.

“What, are you scared you’ll have to watch us having fun?” Honor asked.

Steel looked up at me. “Are you okay with this?”

“Uh…” I blushed, which was mostly an ear thing although my faceplate displayed it too. “Yes?” I’d been waiting for someone to ask me, and this was probably as close as I was going to get.

“Readysetgo!” Honor blurted out, whirling into a kick that she probably hoped would land before Steel was ready, but he caught it and threw her into a wall. There were a few more exchanges before she gave up, but it was obvious that Steel outclassed her. He actually had Honor beat in all three physical stats in the tracker; that had to be really frustrating for her if it made as much of a difference as it seemed to.

“Ugh, fine, I’ll just sit here and play with myself,” she said.

Steel walked over to me and held out his hand, helping me down from the wall I was sitting on and pulling me into a hug. He cracked his faceplate, and I followed his lead, and we kissed…

That part was really nice.

Then he laid me down on the ground, with him on top, and his cock teased at my sex and it felt so good for about three seconds before I started to panic and teleported away.

He sent me a message later, apologizing for ‘pressuring me into something I wasn’t ready for’, and reassured me that he’d been able to have his fun with Honor so I didn’t need to feel bad about backing out.

I still felt terrible. I wasn’t scared of the sex at all – I’d been excited at the thought. But when he got on top of me like that… I was back in mine, about to be beat within an inch of my life, and the fact that I was in the virtual world and getting punched would just deduct hit points and wouldn’t really hurt didn’t matter to whatever was apparently driving me insane.

And then word got around and no one ever approached me for sex, assuming I hated it, and I didn’t want to explain what had actually happened because that was even more humiliating than being asexual. I started spending my virtual time as a literal raven, which was too small for people to even hug, not that hugs had ever set me off yet. I was terrified that they’d start, so I just avoided all close contact.

I threw myself back into my training, and let the sheer blinding terror of being caught drive me to work harder.

I’d apparently made a good impression on Pancakes and Soufflé, because they invited me over to play the mining game with them. It was an accelerated game (of course it was; they were still kids and only got to play accelerated games) so I could play it during accelerated downtime between classes. I hadn’t ever tried it before because it *didn’t* improve the graphics, instead (I found out now) opting for a more realistic physics system and fully destructible terrain.

Destructible also meant craftable, and the dragon babies had made a full-size copy of the palace where they lived, although the real palace probably didn’t have jagged zigzag walls on the diagonal passageways. Or maybe it did? We’d seen the palace from a distance on the way to the arena, and the lava moat was authentic at least.

“Don’t jump in the lava,” Pancakes warned me. “You’re not a dragon so you’ll burn up.”

“Can you jump in the lava?” I asked, looking down over the edge. The virtual lava didn’t look very threatening in this game, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t deadly.

Pancakes nodded. “Yeah. Cinder says we can swim in lava because we’re dragons even though we have fur and kobold ears and other parts. Bright Star said it’s because we have dragon magic and kobolds don’t have any magic so we only have dragon magic so we’re dragons but if we were part pony we’d have more pony magic because ponies have more magic than dragons so we’d be ponies.”

“Ponies can eat rocks,” Souffle added, “but they don’t like to.”

I wasn’t sure I really believed that, but I wasn’t going to argue with a little kid. “Kobolds can eat rocks but we have to make them into food first,” I said.

For some reason that made them both giggle a lot. I wasn’t sure whether to be insulted so I kind of sulked until they were finished laughing.

They showed me the chasm they’d been working on, which was impressively deep although it wasn’t as wide as the ones that showed up in the labyrinth simulator. We hopped down from ledge to ledge until we got near the bottom, where a swarm of spiders and skeletons were walking back and forth. Pancakes didn’t have fire breath in the game, but he did have a bunch of bombs, and we threw them at enemies for a while but didn’t really seem to be making a dent. It did blow holes in the walls, though, and the dragons thought it would be a great idea to make the chasm wider by planting bombs everywhere…

So yeah. It was fun.

It wasn’t long before the sneaking class moved on from the initial ‘literally being quiet and unseen’ part, and switched over to social engineering – blending in with crowds, talking your way past guards, that sort of thing.

“I can’t really blend in with the crowds here,” I said to the teacher, interrupting them. “Can we study electronic security first?”

The teacher paused in their explanation. “It would be possible to re-order the lesson plan, but we would need to have a consensus from all the students.”

I looked around the otherwise empty classroom. “I, um, I agree that we should do the computer stuff first?”

“Very well,” they said. “Since it’s unanimous.”

One of the first lessons was about the security settings of our rigs.

“As you can see,” the teacher said, as I looked at my own settings, “the default settings put a lot of trust in your friends. For most people, this is convenient – you want your friends to know where you are, or to be able to send and receive files. But who are your friends? How does it know? The unfortunate answer is that it guesses, and it errs on the side of including more people.”

“By default we can look at our friends’ logs?” I asked, spotting a particularly suspicious setting.

“There’s no UI for it, but yes, with a simple script like this…”

I spent the next free period abusing that script.

My friends list had basically everyone on it – all the other kobolds of my generation, Fire, Star, and Wave, Cinder, Pancakes, Souffle, four assorted half-dragons named after gems, Perro, Lupe who I recognized as one of the caretakers, and about a dozen other diamond dogs that I assumed were some of the puppies. Wow, he hadn’t been kidding about it being overzealous.

I started with Five, because I wanted to know why they’d wanted to name themselves Five and why Star had let them. The script took a time index so I set it to the day we’d all chosen names, then fast-forwarded through the resulting window until it got to their turn. The log replayer had a checklist of senses to experience, but I stuck to sight and sound and had it put the result in a window.

“Four! It’s your turn!” came Star’s voice. The viewpoint walked over to the slightly remote area where we’d discussed our future.

Star smiled at the camera. “There’s only a few things to fill out, so your part should be very easy. I just need your name, icon, and what color you want your rig to use to display the glowy bits. I’ll also note down your gender for Wave, if that’s okay?”

“I want to be both genders,” came Four’s voice. “That’s what we are and anything else is just pretending.”

“Oh, I thought you were a girl,” Star said.

“I like the girl pronouns better.”

Star smiled. “I think Wave is the same way. Have you thought about a name?”

“Kind of…” she said. “I mean, it’s stupid, but it’s always bothered me that there was a Zero, One, Two, Three, and Four, but no Five.”

Star looked confused.

“Can I be named Five?”

“I don’t see why not,” Star said. “There should be plenty of five-related icons…”

There were. One of them was the number ‘five’, and it flashed as she selected it.

I stopped the playback. That had been significantly less interesting than I’d hoped. And yet… just watching through their eyes like that… I felt a little thrill. And the option had been there for so many other senses…

I scanned through my own logs to find the exact time, then ran the script to fetch Steel’s logs from the incident. Excitement tingled through my fur as I checked the boxes next to all the recorded sensory info…

I looked up at myself, sitting on a wall, looking embarrassed but not terrified, not yet. My hand reached up to help myself down, and then we kissed… I felt myself starting to get hard, my arms reached around to take me in my grasp, and I lowered myself to the floor, heart racing in eager excitement. There was some fumbling as I tried to get the aim right, while my upper body just stayed pressed close to myself, and then I fell a few inches as I disappeared from beneath myself.

“What the fuck,” I said in Steel’s voice. “She bolted.”

“She looked pretty terrified,” Honor said from across the room. She’d been masturbating up until a few seconds ago, and her fingers were still wet. “I guess it’s her first time.”

“I can’t believe she just bailed like that,” I said, anger burning in my chest and ears. “I mean – I don’t want to force her but that was really rude. What’s wrong with her anyway?”

“I don’t know, you know her better than me,” Honor said. “I wouldn’t take it personally, though.”

“It’s hard not to.” I felt my ears flatten, as my erection slowly subsided. I was still super horny though.

“Oh, don’t be like that,” she said, getting up and kneeling in front of me, taking my cock in her hands and stroking it, coaxing it harder and then taking it into her mouth, her tongue squirming around it while I gasped and grabbed on to her head between her ears.

“What are you –” I started to say, then moaned instead.

She pulled back and sealed her faceplate. “Do you want me to stop?”

My head shook back and forth. She went back to work… and slipped her finger down to slide into my vagina, all slippery and sensitive already, thrusting in sync with her tongue’s caress. It didn’t take long before my arousal peaked, and I fell back onto my tail, quivering and clenching around her fingers as my cock pulsed in her mouth. “What was that?” I asked, lying back in the afterglow.

“A good start,” she said. I glanced down to see her evil grin, before she slid up on top of me, pinning me down while her cock thrust into my pussy, driving me to cry out her name and convulse in pleasure again as she moaned, “Steel… yes…” and her thrusts became erratic but firmer for a few seconds before her warmth spread through me.

We lay there in each other’s arms, her on top of me, pinning me to the ground, and it was wonderful.

I stopped the playback and sat there with my head spinning for a while, before I started to cry, ragged sobs of shame and loss. Why was I so broken?

I rewound the log to the point where Honor started to suck Steel’s cock and played through it again.

If I’d remembered that I was allowed to turn off the nagging software, I might have gotten totally reward-locked by my voyeurism. There were a lot of logs of kobolds having sex, especially when I figured out how to query the intensity of sexual pleasure over time so that I could go right to the key moments and experience the good parts, usually from both sides but sometimes from all three sides or all five sides or whatever.

But I‘d left the nagging software on, and it reminded me to get some sleep, and when the next between-class period rolled around it reminded me that I’d spent the entirety of the previous session on solitary activities and should really go talk to people. It certainly hadn’t felt solitary! But I suppose that just means that it was an especially dangerous temptation.

I didn’t go visit Pancakes and Souffle. They were too young to talk about sex and I *really* wanted to talk about sex. I mean… what I actually wanted was to *have* sex, myself, where I could control my actions instead of just being along for the ride. I wanted to prove that I *could* have sex. I wanted to share the script I’d been using so that maybe I could watch the recordings with other people and talk about them afterwards. I wanted to keep it a secret so no one would know that I’d been spying on them – that was rule number one of being a spy! Don’t admit that you’re spying on people.

They don’t make things ‘rule number one’ if they’re easy.

I decided I’d go see Steel, because he was one of my closest friends (although not, I will note, vice versa) and because he was phony enough that I was confident he wouldn’t call me out to my face, so I’d be able to spy on what he said about me once I was gone, and yell at him then, displaced in time and space so that he was guaranteed not to catch on.

He was in the avatar builder, which wasn’t really a place but I teleported to him anyway and existed alongside him as a disembodied presence overlooking an extremely detailed model of a diamond dog.

“Raven,” he said, not letting me break his concentration. He seemed to be focusing on getting the combat characteristics right, which wasn’t something you had to do with the avatars – by default they’d leave your response to other peoples’ attacks effectively up to you.

“Hey, Steel,” I said. Queue awkward pause.

He didn’t respond right away, but after a couple of minutes he finished the fiddly bit he was working on, and exited out so that we could look at each other, albeit in the low-resolution bodies we used in accelerated time. They’d updated with our new names and icons, at least, although they didn’t bother with color.

He sat down against something that was supposed to represent a giant mushroom. “To what do I owe this occasion?”

“It never used to be an occasion when I came to talk to you,” I said, standing there fidgeting.

“You never used to avoid me for weeks on end,” he said. “I guess you’re safer here.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “I’ve never felt unsafe around you.”

“Right,” he said. “Just disgusted at the thought of touching you.”

I laughed, nervously. “I’ve definitely never felt *that*. I want –” I squirmed. “I want to have sex. Everyone assumes I don’t and it’s getting old.”

His mouth got a bit jaggy. “We can’t have sex in accelerated time, so it seems odd that you’d come to me now.”

“My nagging software told me I was spending too much time alone,” I admitted.

He looked confused. “Nagging software?”

“Star made me run it after I started spending too much time alone, way back when our parents actually cared about us,” I said. “I sort of assumed they gave it to everyone.”

“Oh, the reminder app,” he said. “Running through labyrinths again? It’s more fun with friends.”

“It’s more annoying with friends,” I said, scowling. I’d never liked people watching me mess up the traps and get killed, and I guess I’d never gotten back around to doing it with other people once I was no longer so terrible at it. “But no, I was, um.” I paused. “Having sex?”

“In accelerated time?” he asked. “Did someone make a sex game that works here?”

“Ehhh, no,” I said. “I was…” I waffled a bit, then sent him a file. “Here.”

“Snakes?” he asked, apparently playing it back like we normally played back our logs, visual and audio only. “What are they – oh!”

“Yeah,” I said, curling my tail around in front of me. I’d sent him one of my favorites – Fairy and Cat in snake avatars, coiled nose-to-tail and licking each others’ cloacas. There was so much close contact, even if the sexual pleasure was fairly subdued…

“They sent you a log of them fucking each other?” he asked. “Were they trying to seduce you or insult you?”

“I like that one because it’s something I can’t do in person without panicking and running away,” I said, not answering the question. “Whenever someone holds me like that, I panic. Ever since the diamond dogs – don’t tell anyone! Please!”

“So that’s why you don’t want to touch anyone?” He tilted his head. “How are you planning to have sex without touching anyone?”

“I think I might be okay if I was on top,” I said. “I want to try a few things and I want you to let me try again if I panic and that means I have to tell you that I panic and I don’t want everyone to know.”

“So why did you come to *me*?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I like you?”

He gave me a neutral look, for a bit. “You should ask Honor,” he said eventually. “She’s a lot more patient about things like this.”

“Huh?”

“You want someone who’ll let you experiment with sex in various positions, even after you panic and run off a few times,” Steel said. “That would drive me insane.”

“Huh,” I said. “Yeah, I guess you get frustrated easily. I bet your combat training would really make you mad if you didn’t always win.”

“I don’t always win!” he said, looking embarrassed. “And there was an entire week teaching us to be good sports about losing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just like the entire week spent teaching me not to hum sneaking music when I’m trying to be stealthy, I bet.”

He snorted, pulling his hands up to cover his mouth. “Really?”

“It’s harder than it sounds!”

Unfortunately, I’d used all my courage approaching Steel , so when the weekend rolled around and we had non-accelerated time that I could have used trying to have sex with Honor, I just hung out with random people in public areas instead. Mostly in real life, actually – I decided I should get some real-world sneaking practice in so I practiced sneaking around our lair without being noticed. I managed to startle a few people!

Near the end of the day Fairy and Pear were flirting with each other, and when they were about to go off into the virtual world and have sex, I asked if I could come watch.

“Sure,” Fairy said. “Are you sure you don’t want to join in?”

“No,” I said. Somehow, they took that as ‘no I don’t want to join in’ so I just ended up watching them make out for a while, perching on a branch overhead.

After they were both relaxing in the aftermath of some very weird sex – Pear had turned themself into a giant pear, that Fairy was able to take bites out of, but had their own giant mouth with blunt teeth that they were using to gnaw on her leg – Pear asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to join. “Even just for a taste?”

“Um… sure,” I said, and flew down to peck at their skin. It was sweet. I don’t know if it tasted anything like a real pear, and Pear probably didn’t know either. “I mostly came so I’d have a log I could look at later. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Why would we mind?” Fairy said, wiping some juice off her chin. “I’m sorry if this isn’t to your taste.”

“It’s not what I was expecting,” I admitted. Mostly, I’d just wanted to make sure that people were okay with me looking at logs – privacy wasn’t a big thing for most kobolds, but we were supposed to respect it if people asked.

I was too shy to admit how much I’d actually been spying, though.

“Buuut…” Fairy said, grinning, “If you’re going to masturbate to us, could you do it while we watch?”

For safety, the virtual sex program didn’t let you masturbate; it was too close to reward-locking yourself, especially if you abused the settings to maximize orgasms. You could stimulate yourself a little, but you’d never actually reach a peak. “I don’t think we’re allowed?” I said.

“Not in here, no,” Fairy said. “I bet no one’s in the nursery though, if you don’t want anyone else to see.”

I logged off, and woke up in the lounge, blushing furiously. Fairy and Pear were on another couch nearby, and turned to stare at me, grinning. Half a dozen other kobolds and at least four diamond dogs mostly didn’t notice anything, at least until I spread my legs, and reached down to my crotch, stroking the fur there to stimulate myself a bit. “Why wouldn’t I want anyone else to see?” I asked.

“See what?” Rain asked.

“See her masturbate!” Fairy said enthusiastically.

I hadn’t actually masturbated in a while… but I still remembered the mechanics, from sex-ed. Tease the sensitive area until the cock emerged from my slit, then stroke it gently with my hands, until it was long enough to wrap my fingers around, then work it up and down in a steady motion… I leaned back and closed my eyes, focusing on the sensation and on my own arousal.

I yelped as something slid into my vagina – I was wet, of course, so it didn’t hurt, but I still yelled, “Cat!” as I saw her kneeling in front of me, sliding a soft plastic rod back out of my sex. “What are you doing?”

“I’m not touching you!” she said, with a grin, shoving it back inside. I jerked, and my legs spread wider as if of their own accord. “I’m just giving you a gift,” she said, as she continued to stoke it in and out of my pussy, smoothly. “If you’re going to masturbate you need toys, right?”

I screamed as my cock spurted up into the air, splattering down on my chest and faceplate, and convulsed around the toy just like I’d felt ‘myself’ convulse around a cock in a dozen logs. Cat didn’t stop, though, continuing to work her toy, triggering a series of smaller orgasms until I planted a foot on her chest and pushed her away, exhausted and oversensitive.

The flopping toy landed on my chest with a wet slap. It took me a while to come back to myself enough to grab hold of it.

“What a show!” Fairy said. “Who’s next?”

But then the timer went off on all of our faceplates simultaneously – the weekend was over, and it was time to go back to school.