"Yes, Fitness was also the one I was thinking of. I'd like to have a little more of it but it's a fairly low priority for stat points because stat points are capable of doing much more important things for me."

"Well, that really depends on which skills you end up wanting. Without a class bonus that's really the only incentive with regard to the system. Speaking of which, what did you get up to while I was busy? When I told you to wait there I thought I'd be done in like forty-five minutes, not six hours."

"I read a lot of pamphlets. And spent four hours earning 50 Lake to buy lunch with."

"Sorry."

She chuckles.

"Well, tomorrow, my suggestion is to wander around and let you spy on as many adventurers as we can, to unlock for you as wide a selection of skills as we can."

"Good plan. And don't worry about it. I'm not at all upset."

Smile.

Okay, soap and stuff. Actual cleaning up. It's been so long she doesn't even have muscle memory for it, but it's not like it's complicated. Does Laurent want her to wash him too? She can totally do that in her capacity as his cheat item.

Actually, he washes himself first and then notices that she appears to be as new to soap as she is to other aspects of having a body and asks, "Do you need any help?"

"Nope! But if you wanna put your hands all over me anyway, that's cool."

"I will admit the notion does have some appeal. But I'm not sure I know you well enough yet."

"Dude, most of my me is between my legs. You're gonna have a hard time getting to know me if you never touch me."

He makes a thoughtful humming sound and takes a moment to collect his thoughts.

"...if I'm working toward some practical purpose, then the question I have to answer is 'am I accomplishing my goal', and that's simple. As soon as the question turns to what I want, what I enjoy—that's an intimacy not to be undertaken lightly. I expect we can make something work, but that's why I've been hesitant about some things." Wry smile. "In retrospect I wish I'd taken you up on your offer to fuck you while you were still nearly incapable of processing physical sensations, but I would've hated doing it in public and we didn't have the money to get a room yet, so..." Shrug. "Here we are in the world we live in. I'm sure we'll manage."

She sits up in the bath and leans forward, putting a hand on his thigh.

She's glad she got caught in a feedback loop with her Cleric skills and spent six hours taking the edge off her two-century dry spell or else she'd probably be annoyed with him and that's not what he needs right now.

"I'm not any less capable of enjoying sex now than I was this morning," she clarifies first, "staying lucid means there's more of me to enjoy it, you know? If you wish you'd fucked me, then fuck me. The deal was that I belong to you and I'm trying to take that seriously, and not just because it's appealingly kinky. It is true that intimacy shouldn't be taken lightly, but the first and most important thing you'll have to learn about me is that the real me is the me that's always first going to want to know, who are you when you're horny? Because that's who I am. My way of relating to the world and to other people is intrinsically sexual. It always has been and always will be. Two-hundred years without a libido didn't change that, and if it did that would be like dying, because the leftovers wouldn't be me."

Coventina tones down the intensity and adds, jokingly, "If you don't trust me enough to enjoy fucking me, that's one thing, but if we're gonna be friends, friends don't let friends misapply intimacy heuristics."

"Oh, I know you're not any less capable of enjoying sex, but you're more capable of—perceiving me while you're at it, you see. I would like to be friends with you. And if you say that you experience friendship primarily through sex, well, I don't have any reason to doubt you. But—it's not just sex, to be clear, it's just that sex is where it's coming up—I also don't, for example, eat food for pleasure in front of anyone I don't trust. I don't... hmm, how to explain..."

He tilts his head thoughtfully, searching for words.

"...if I don't trust someone, I don't want them to see me existing on my own terms and doing enjoyable things for enjoyment's sake. It takes a lot of... feeling like I understand someone, or like I want to be closer to them... before I'm willing to—have authentic desires in front of them, show them a face I'm not optimizing for the public view. That's also why I was fine talking about strategic maiming in the middle of the guildhall but drew the line at in-depth discussion of what kind of monster I might be willing to fuck."

"As curious as I am about what kind of monster you'd be willing to fuck, I know there are no shortcuts to trust," she sighs. She gives him a rueful grin, leaning back in the water again. "I wasn't actually expecting a coherent objection. How cool of you. See, we know each other better already."

Thoughtfully, "You are totally allowed to molest me in my sleep, if that helps. I sleep pretty deeply. Or at least I did last time I was on a material plane. Or if you wanted to get creative about your discomfort-with-being-perceived some other way, like, if I have sexual boundaries I've never found them. Just saying."

"I was actually thinking that talking about what kind of monster I should be aiming to banish might be a good getting-to-know-you activity. It's... on the spectrum between acquaintanceship and intimacy... for both of us, it seems. ...as for molesting you in your sleep, we'll see. I'm not sure that quite counts as getting to know each other, but if you'd like it..."

"No, I'd have to be awake for getting-to-know-each-other. Just, if you get the urge to touch me or use my body to get yourself off, I don't like the idea of you then deciding you shouldn't, when there's no reason you shouldn't."

Coventina starts rinsing her hair.

"Monsters can be lots of different things but most of them follow a few themes. There's the ones that crudely try to imitate the human form, the ones that basically go all in on being made of tentacles, the ones that are basically genital-seeking missiles with either a hole or a phallus and not much else, the ones that disguise themselves as trees or rocks or mushrooms or whatever and go for envelopment with or without tentacles. And also slimes."

"Optimizing for practicality rather than fun at least to start with, I should probably go for whatever's easiest to crack... although since I have access to you I don't need to worry about geting hurt in the process as long as I'm not outright dead by the end of it... tentacles sound dicey, though, I can't quite decide whether I'd end up having too much fun or the exact opposite of that but I get the feeling it would be one of those. Should probably stick to less exciting targets until I know you well enough that I won't mind the risk of having either a very good time or a very bad one in front of you. Relatedly, what's the deal with slimes?"

"Same as the rest. They're sexually attracted to human mana and can be banished. Or do you mean, like, varieties. Slimes come in a lot of aesthetics depending on what's inspiring the wild magic to spawn them but they're mostly all the same functionally, y'know, just a motile blob of aphrodisiac goo. A slime would be perfect for you, actually, but for that exact reason they're really rare. They're basically a free level-up for beginner adventurers since they're one of the few monsters that are easier to banish than kill, so when one shows up it doesn't last long."

"I see. That's unfortunate. So—hmm, when you say genital-seeking missiles, does that imply monsters that don't need to be cracked before they can be banished, or...? Do some monsters sexually assault people while they still have intact mana cores?"

"Depends on the monster. They're all sexually attracted to human mana but they can have other drives based on whatever their inspiratory source is. But no, you can't banish a monster without cracking the mana core. Sex with an intact-core monster will still create a circuit of mana but instead of draining the mana into you it drains your mana into the monster, which by itself isn't that big a deal; the drain is much slower than the other direction, but if you orgasm while your mana's flowing in that circuit the wild magic will kind of jam up in your body and paralyze you. How long the paralysis lasts depends on how exhausted your mana is, from stopping as soon as the orgasm does, to persisting for hours afterward. And if you run completely out of mana you end up paralyzed anyway, for the same reason: your personal mana is kind of like... like your gut flora. Humans have incorporated magic into their bodies and cultivated it the same way they've incorporated microorganisms, as a sort of pseudo-symbiotic protective measure against the environment. Anyway, most monsters don't take advantage of this on purpose but some do."

"...I hate to put you on the spot, but I have to ask: did you have design input into the monsters?"

Smirk. "Nope."

"No one did, they're an emergent consequence of the thaumophysics and the existence of the Ardor stat. But I was hoping for and expecting something lewd to emerge thus, so."

"I sort of wish you'd managed to make something less hazardous but I suppose it was your first time designing a universe and this is better than many possible outcomes. Hmm, what other questions do I have... What exactly happened to your church?"

Coventina's expression sours as she rubs at her face with her hand.

"It's complicated."

She sighs. "You know how people have this obnoxious tendency to treat the superficial aspects of a thing as if they are that thing? Well, a superficial aspect of my religion was that followers act slutty and say being prude is bad. So of course my church started attracting useless apes who insist on completely missing the point, which was to free people to have all the sex they desired deep down, and instead became a shallow pack of rapist assholes who've been scaring people away from their slut pride for decades now."

"...oh, dear... yes, I can see how that could be a problem. I'm sorry."