"Close enough to help me out if something goes terribly wrong somehow, far enough that if Sky has to distract a monster they won't end up going through me to get to her?" he suggests. "Making a perimeter seems reasonable although I might be being overly cautious."

Eelesia puts herself on watch duty, and suggests that Sky back up against that tree, so she can see everything that's going on and jump in if necessary without getting snuck-up on herself. That leaves Coventina on emergency Laurent-yoinking.

The alraune waits patiently while Laurent undresses. Then again, waiting patiently seems to be its signature move.

It reaches out as he approaches, one hand finding his head and gently petting his hair, as if by rote.

The yonic slit in front of him is juicy and inviting, slick and fleshy and exotic and as warm as any human.

But even an alraune isn't entirely passive. The moment the tip of his cock slips inside, the fleshy tunnel bulges, a terrifically powerful suction slurping his full length all the way into her, yanking Laurent's hips forward to smack flush against the plump plant-flesh of the alraune's lower body. Creases in that lower body reveal themselves as seams: two large, thick flaps of smooth flesh rise up and extend to cup his hips and curl behind him, grabbing tightly to his butt to hold him in place, their inner surfaces textured like a thousand fingers.

With his hips secured, the girl-body part gently tugs his head to rest on her breasts, continuing to pet his hair. Meanwhile, below, the suction on his cock relaxes, and he can feel the inner sheath of flesh wrapped around his cock slide slickly over his length as it moves deeper into the lower body. And then the suction pulses, hard, making him feel the weight of flesh pulling on his dick even as that pull slams the tight sheath of flesh down to the root of his cock, compressing there against his pelvis since there certainly isn't any room for so much as a millimeter of his cock to become exposed during this process. As the pulses of suction drag that inner flesh up and down his cock, milking him, it continuously sheathes him fully from root to tip even as it slides more than the full length of his shaft with each stroke.

It's sort of a spatially fascinating sensation and he keeps getting distracted from matters at hand by trying to picture the mechanics in more detail. No, Laurent, don't condition yourself to become aroused by topology, we've been over the pitfalls of this practice. Think about something that is normal and reasonable to think about in this situation. The automatic hairpetting is kind of nice? A solidly adequate simulacrum of coziness. Maybe later be should solicit hairpets from his inexplicable battle harem. Oh, there's a useful thing to picture while trying to fuck a plant. Conditioning himself to be aroused by thoughts of close contact with his party members seems under the circumstances to be a totally reasonable idea. He should think about that and not about how he would design a hydraulic system to emulate the plant's current behaviours. Is there magic involved? Could you do this using the same principles of articulation present in a Venus flytrap if your energy usage constraints were a little looser than the poor flytrap's, or—no, wait, back to mental images of being snuggled up like this with Coventina petting his hair—

Eventually, he successfully inseminates the alraune.

The behavior of the alraune doesn't change at all in response to his first orgasm.

Fortunately or unfortunately, he's also still considerably hornier than he might expect to be after an orgasm, and he's not going soft as the alraune continues to milk him.

Coventina notices this, and immediately has a guess.

"Huh. It has six pussies. There's only one of you so maybe you have to cum six times before it can migrate?"

"I hope I'm not undersupplying the poor thing with variety, in that case."

"Pretty sure the quest was posted by the guild itself, so probably Luna, and my impression of her is that she wouldn't leave out salient information like that."

She pats his back. It's subtle, from the outside, but she can see the visible hints of the alraune's inner suckling pulsations, and hopes Laurent is having more fun than he's letting on about, with those.

"Want some Nectar?"

He smiles and leans into her hand a little. "Sure."

Mixing the healing fluids of a goddess with whatever mild aphrodisiac the alraune is putting out has pretty much the expected effect. Laurent's sexual stamina is restored nigh-instantly, without resetting his sensitivity. Bad sensitivity is wiped away while good sensitivity remains unimpeded.

The alraune continues to milk him at the same steady, irresistible pace.

He started this with his mana untouched, but still, by the third or fourth orgasm, he'll notice the lingering loss of control in his limbs when he cums, like the pleasure is stealing that control and then not giving it back as promptly as it should.

"Interesting," he remarks. "I can see how this turns out to be a self-limiting activity. Can't wait until I get my next skill point and land that infinite mana hack."

Heh. "I will be very surprised if it is actually an infinite mana hack, but yeah."

His sixth orgasms leaves him slumping down, and Coventina has to catch him as the alraune releases him and lets him fall.

The plant-girl part stretches toward the sky, then slurps down, vanishing into an extra-large slit on the lower body's top. The earth rumbles. Then, the flower petals rip upwards, reavealing roots underneath. Roots which start slithering and churning. Slowly, the alraune starts moving away, sliding over the ground at a steady walking pace.

There is a hollow in the earth under where the alraune was previously planted. It is not empty. A dozen or so of the cabbage monsters and their compatriots spill up out of the hole.

"Greater Solar Bolt."

And those monsters immediately die to plasma blasts before they can get their bearings.

"Thank you, Eelesia! All right, let's go turn this in."

"Right! I think we could probably find another one if you want to but there's no minimum on this quest so one alraune at a time is fine too. How did it feel? Was it as gentle as alraunes are said to be? I mostly wasn't watching until the end 'cause I had to keep an eye out but I think I only heard you moan maybe once?"

"It was certainly gentle. Overall not my cup of tea, I don't think, but not outright unpleasant either. Also I kept getting distracted by trying to figure out how the insides of an alraune work mechanically. There was a lot of complex movement going on in there! Anyway, I don't want to do another one without waiting for my mana to replenish first; mana drain is an uncomfortable and concerning experience."

Nod nod nod.

"I haven't read about how the insides of an alraune work, though somebody must know that kind of study has definitely been done on many notable monster types but what did it do that made you curious?"

He pauses in the middle of getting dressed to try to describe the movements. This results in a shirtless Laurent with his pants hanging precariously off his hips, moving his hands in the air in a half-successful effort to capture the complexity of the alraune's internal stimulation machinery. "—and I only barely know anything about plant mobility and probably the magic affects it in all sorts of ways I haven't thought of but it was just so spatially fascinating to experience—" His pants fall down. He looks down, laughs, then pulls them back up. "Excuse me."

Laurent is so great and Eelesia will happily speculate about biomechanical topology and how it might integrate magical motility to produce the sensations Laurent experienced all the way back to town. Her own leading theory is that the pulling sensation, as evicted by how it physically sucked him in at the start, implies that it was functional and not just stimulatory, which further implies that a pneumatic driver was the figurative backbone of the milking action.

"That seems very likely! Do you suppose someone's written a book on it that we could find if we looked hard enough? I suppose probably chasing down rare books about monsters is not the most efficient use of our time but it does sound fun... oh, I got distracted, were there any harvestable bits of those cabbage monsters and if so should we have brought them back and if so did someone think of that while I was busy thinking about monster anatomy?"

"Um."

Sky and Coventina have been following behind, watching this conversation and smiling about it.

Sky is bottomless (with Coventina's hand on her ass), her metal skirt once more turned into a basket. There is one cabbage and several miscellaneous vegetables piled inside.

Sky makes a small gesture with the basket. "For lunch?"

"Thank you very much. I should really get better at maintaining basic situational awareness even when I'm having a conversation about something interesting. Sure, all right, I can think of something to make with those. No promises about quality yet, I need more practice."

Eelesia's kitchen turns out to have all of what's needed to fry up that selection of vegetables into a tasty medley.

Eelesia recalls a bookshop that might know which other bookshop might have anatomical treatises on notable monsters. While Laurent is cooking she can head down that way to find out. She plays bookshop-tag for half an hour and finds out that there is a known book that contains a detailed anatomical study of an alraune but it's not in stock. It's not a very expensive book so Eelesia requests that the bookshop put in an order.

And then she's back in time to enjoy lunch with her party.

Lunch with the party is good! The food is much better than Laurent is willing to admit. Also he gets to talk to Eelesia about Nerd Topics.