"Hmm. My top priority is being sure of food, water, and shelter for the immediate future, I think. Equipment and magic come second unless it starts to look like equipment and magic get me closer to having a roof over my head tonight."

"The smallest payout for a quest listed here is twenty times the biggest payout among the odd jobs," Coventina notes.

She doesn't bother to mention that she technically has food and water handled. Or, her breasts do, anyway. She has enough of a read on Laurent to know this wouldn't particularly appeal to him and also its been centuries since she's tasted anything and she wants real food too.

"You could try to pimp me out," she mentions wryly. She'd be remiss if she didn't bring up the option, but inwardly she's actually a little embarrassed at the idea. She's newly incarnated and climaxed just from grabbing her own boobs; she is less than confident in her current ability to be the best fuck of a guy's life. Which is objectively an unnecessarily high standard, she recognizes, but still.

"I mean, if you wanted to try that, I certainly wouldn't stop you, but I don't know that I have anything to contribute to the enterprise. Supposing that we don't, though, then we're left with the question of whether it's faster to achieve basic security of immediate material needs by doing a bunch of odd jobs right away, or by trying to scrounge just enough cash for a weapon and then—I don't actually know what to do to get my first skill point, to be honest."

"I'm just trying to respect the thing where I technically belong to you now," she teases him.

"Probably I can keep you alive if we go up against some of these even if we fuck up badly, but actually completing the quest... we might just end up spending all day running away with nothing to show for it afterward."

"It did occur to me, reading the list of your skills, that losing a battle against a single opponent isn't necessarily a showstopper if you can just tap them gently on the nose and give them all your wounds. I assume it's more complicated than that in practice."

"I mean, if I use Flesh for Flesh on someone who is already wounded, I receive those wounds, but other than the logistics implied by that, it is just about that simple, I think. I have enough Flesh affinity that I could probably cast that spell a hundred times before I started to get tired."

"Then, concept: we fight someone or something that doesn't have any friends and is wildly out of our reach by normal means, let it beat you within an inch of your life nearly unopposed, give it all your wounds and then kill it. —if you object to this plan because it would hurt a lot, we can come up with a better plan. Actually given how new you are to sensation in general I might insist you try out a small-scale injury first to make sure you won't be incapacitated. Actually it might be a better idea to acquire the wounds under controlled circumstances... I don't know, what do you think?"

"I'm not into pain and my... newness, is a concern. I might end up too incapacitated to cast. It's not a bad plan otherwise, though. I could transfer wounds from you to the enemy if I can touch both of you at once... but if money is the objective I'm sure you'd rather hang a for-sale sign on my pussy than be horribly maimed. And if stat points are your objective, then the plan is suboptimal because you get way more experience points for banishing monsters than killing them."

"Banishing?"

"Oh right, you wouldn't know."

Lecture pose.

"Monsters, the kind that give you experience points anyway, are a sort of byproduct of the symbiosis between wild magic and biology. They are essentially wild magic getting confused and mimicking something alive. Killing a monster unbinds the wild magic and some of that power feeds into you through your adventurer card. And some monsters can only be dealt with that way because they don't have sex organs. But wild magic is very sensitive to reproductive potential, so most monsters shape themselves for it unconsciously. Every monster has a core of crystalized mana. If you manage to crack the core while the monster is still alive, the mana will stream out and leap toward the nearest human like lines of force into a magnet. Nearest or whoever has the highest Ardor anyway. And the mana will form a circuit with the human and drive the monster into a lustful frienzy. If you're up to the task, you can just let it fuck you, closing the circuit, and it will cum itself to death, which leaves you with all of the wild magic converted into experience points."

"...that sounds... hmm. Like it calls for strategizing best done in private, I think. Which means a hotel room of some description which means money which means some combination of odd jobs, prostitution, and the Flesh for Flesh hack. I'm fairly sure you're happier about prostitution than I am about being horribly maimed but if I abstract away the safety concerns I'm not actually completely sure of it, so I think I'll leave that question up to you."

"I'm totally cool with the prostitution option," she says. "I mean, the newness-ness is kind of a concern there too, but, like, only in the sense that it kinda dings my pride to charge someone for the experience of watching me cum my brains out and pass out without contributing on purpose to their satisfaction. That might just be me being weird. I'm sure you could find someone who'd be interested even while I'm so off my game. I should put my free stat points into Moxie. That should help. Unless you want to drag me out back and fuck me up against the wall until I can stay coherent with a dick in me."

"...I'd consider it, if we had a hotel room, which leaves us back at square one again. How cheap are hotel rooms? We could do odd jobs or the maiming hack to get a hotel room to get you into a state where you can sell sex without any harm to your pride?"

"My pride will survive if you don't wanna. I mean, they barely have porn in this world. And actually getting to touch the girl while you watch her cum her brains out is worth a lot objectively even if it seems like a heartbreakingly low standard to me. Probably if you asked around you'd get mobbed."

"I'd hate to ask you to practice your craft to a lower standard than you prefer! That would be—well, if I was the one who had to do something I'm good at badly in public, I'd look into getting maimed first."

Coventina laughs. "Well, its not zero tempting. But between slight embarrassment and agonizing maiming, being live porn wins hands down."

"Fair enough."

With a plan in hand, Laurent finds that if anything Coventina was underestimating her appeal. As soon as he starts paying attention, he can overhear multiple adventurers already speculating licentiously about her and her lewd regalia. Probably all he would have to do is name a price.

"Were you serious about involving me?" he asks her. "It's not that I exactly object, it's just I genuinely don't know whether we gain any practical benefit that way. And I don't know how."

"Trying to respect the thing where I'm your cheat item," she reminds him in flirtatious tones.

"If you'd rather not be involved at all, I can handle it myself. I guess it depends what kind of first impression you want to make on your fellow adventurers."

"I think I want to make the kind of first impression where everyone is paying much more attention to you than to me."

Aw. That's kinda cute.

"Fair." She takes a bracing breath. "Wait here then, I guess."

Coventina goes over toward whichever clump of adventurers is talking about her in the most complementary ways, and introduces herself. It takes her about twenty seconds before she's sitting on a bare-chested warrior's lap while his girlfriend fondles the goddess' breasts. It takes about five minutes before the couple is shoving a bag of coins into Coventina's hands and dragging her, flushed and giggling unsteadily, out of the hall.

He steps out after them, not intending to follow them as far as a private space if they make it all the way to one, but wanting to be sure he doesn't lose track of where they've gone.

There's an inn at the end of the block. It's not quite in sight of the guild hall but it's close. The couple half-carries the moaning and giggling goddess into the modest townhouse-ish inn.

It's good that she's having fun. He can wait by the guild hall until she comes back.

Actually, on second thought, he's thought of a question for Luna that doesn't immediately reveal that he arrived in this universe half an hour ago. He goes back inside.

"Excuse me, do you have another pamphlet explaining what each of the stats is all about?"