Kingdom Come: Ch 18

I spent a good twenty minutes milking Zlazlo for information on the Endlar, then left him to sleep. After telling the medic what I’d done to treat him, I headed back to the bedroom to wait for Suri and Karalti. And while I was doing that, I had a look over what I’d unlocked.

Firstly, I’d unlocked Lazar as a recruitable ally, though I still had to meet his pre-condition: the side-quest. That left us with over ten recruitable NPCs and a big fat ‘zero’ when it came to actually recruiting them. But hey, Advanced Crafting! 

Lying on my bed with my hands laced behind my skull, I went to my Crafts menu and had a look. 

New Advanced Crafting Skill: Medical Facilitator (Field Medicine + Herbalism)

With this skill, you know plan and effectively build hospital facilities for player bases. These include wards for patients, a pharmacy, greenhouse, and medicine storage. If you level Alchemy and Surgery to Journeyman level or higher, you will also have the option to build an Oratory (for Alchemy) and an Operating Theater (for Surgery). 

Hospitals are capable of automating several important medical crafts. As you level this Craft, your Field Medicine and Herbalism skills will continue to grow. Gain levels as a Medical Facilitator by building medic tents, volunteering in triage centers, and completing hospital-support quests. Your facilities can be staffed by players or NPCs with the appropriate professional skills.

As you gain levels in this Advanced Craft, more Engrams will become available. Engrams are the ‘blueprints’ for your facilities, and will tell you how many build points and what resources you will need. 

Building medical facilities on PVP servers requires Build Points, which can be obtained by completing Guild quests or by recruiting Heroes through the Mass Combat System. The more manpower you have available, the fewer Build Points you require to complete a structure.

“Wait a second… PVP server? Guild quests?” Those terms were like a missing tooth in among the rest of the information. I knew we were looking at 60 Build Points for finishing the Myszno questline, but there were no registered guilds. Players could kill each other here. I guess that meant we were on a PVP server. It was one of those obvious things I should have realized a month and a half ago, but I’d innocently believed that Ryuko would upload thousands of people to a PVE server and anything to the contrary was a glitch in the system. “Why the fuck did Ryuko send two thousand HEX refugees to a PVP server?”

There were several answers to that not-so rhetorical question. They ranged from the relatively sane conclusion of: ‘Well, they were in a rush and left the Guild system switched off when they were trying to save people’s lives’ to the ever-deepening spiral of ‘what if the server reset was fake and me and the other 1999-ish people here are part of some whacky digital desert island experiment?’.

“Yeah… no. Probably shouldn’t follow that train of thought.” I groaned and stretched, and was just about to get up and start looking for alcohol when the door burst open, admitting Karalti. Honking like an excited swan, she leaped onto me and flung me onto the bed.

“Yay! Comfy bed! Comfy bed!” Five-and-a-half feet of polymorphed dragon began to romp around and around on hands and knees like an excited puppy, burrowing under the blankets and then bursting out of them. “No more straw! No more caves! Blankets! Pillows!”

“Grr…HURRK!” I tried to cheer, but then I took an armored knee to the gut and just decided to curl up in the fetal position and wait until she was done.

The door opened a second time, admitting Suri. “Woah, guys – sorry to interrupt.”

“No! You weren’t interrupting anything!” I waved both hands at her, as if trying to push back the storm of drama I sensed on the horizon. But to my surprise, she just busted up laughing.

“Are dragons ticklish?” Suri asked me.

“I… uhh…” Too stunned to react sensibly, I watched with slowly dawning horror as Suri took a wrestler’s crouch and began to pace toward us. Karalti bunched up on the end of the bed and hissed.

“Arrrrre they?” Suri wiggled her fingers.

Karalti hunched like a cat on a fence, then squealed as Suri tackled her back onto the bed. Karalti was fast, but Suri was strong and my dragon was not used to fighting in human form. I rolled off just in time for the pair of them to collide, and then watched helplessly as the larger woman pinned the smaller one and began to mercilessly tickle her as she yelped and squirmed.

“Hector! Hector! She’s killing meeee!” Karalti lashed her body from side to side, kicking ineffectively as Suri got her fingers up into her armpits. “Murder! Murderrrr!”

“Welcome to the mammalian kingdom! Time to shape up those combat skills of yours! First rule: never let someone get you in a headlock.” Suri laughed, glancing over Karalti’s shoulder at me. I crossed my arms and grinned back.

“Leggo! Leggo of me!” Karalti was giggling despite herself. She stopped kicking and tried to bite Suri’s arm. When that proved ineffectual, she lashed her head from side to side. “AAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHHHH!”

“Okay, kids. That’s enough. Round goes to Suri.” I made the K.O sign with my hands.

Suri let Karalti loose, and the polymorphed dragon flew off the bed and up onto her feet, still giggling. “She won, but I’m still sleeping in the bed!”

“Course you are.” Suri winked at me. “Because the winner gets to starfish on her own damn bed in complete comfort.”

“You won this time! But just you wait until I get more used to this… this… monkey suit!” 

I blinked a couple of times. Suri really wasn’t jealous. A brief tussle to work out her reservations, and some fun and games to lighten the mood, and she was good. “Uhh… do I get a say in who’s bed I sleep in?”

“Nope!” They chorused together.

***

As usual, I woke up before the alarm went off. It was dark and warm in our quarters, eerily peaceful. Karalti was tucked into the circle of my arm, her hand resting on my chest, one feather-light knee laying over my thigh. 

As much as it shamed me to admit it - and despite my feelings for Suri - it was good to share a bed with Karalti again. Some of my happiest memories of Archemi were related to snuggling her when she was growing up. But now, those memories were confusing. Karalti wasn’t my little egg-butt anymore: she was an eighteen-year old-ish woman on the cusp of maturity. 

I gave Suri’s bed a guilty fleeting look before reaching over to smooth some of Karalti’s hair away from her cheek, tucking it back behind one pearly ear. She murmured sleepily and bit her lip, and a jolt of primal energy shot through my gut and headed straight down. Fuck. 

Was it normal to want to bang the dragon you’d raised from a hatchling once she was old enough to turn into a human? I didn’t want to be some kind of controlling pseudo-incestuous creep, but I’d never had to deal with any feeling as compelling as this before. Was I taking advantage of her?

“Or is it just a damn game, and you’re way overthinking shit?” I thought to myself. “Because realistically, the Devs have enabled this for one reason and one reason only: To fulfil your wildest, kinkiest fantasies so you rate their game five stars on PlayerNexus. And if you and everyone else wasn’t dead, you would have.”

I stroked my hand down Karalti’s back. She shivered with pleasure just before her eyes cracked open, molten slits of amethyst that glowed slightly in the dark.

“Hey sleepyhead,” I said.

“Hi.” She stirred in the covers, then stretched and yawned with sinuous abandon. “Mmm… that was good sleep.”

“Had to have been if you’re up early.” 

Karalti gently mouthed the edge of my pectoral, blinking up at me. “Yeah!”

Hooo boy. The Bond and my hormones were hammering at me, but they were going to have to wait at least one more level before I was comfortable doing anything with or to her. Probably more than one level. I settled for smoothing her hair back, stroking it gently. “Looks like we need to get ready. You only have thirty minutes left on that spell.”

“Yeah. I know.” She leaned into the caress with a little sigh, eyes closing. “But I missed this feeling… It feels nice to be small again. Small and warm.”

I smiled in the brightening dawn light. Now that I thought about it, this wasn’t really that weird… it was just that when she was in her natural form, I didn’t notice how much we actually touched. If I wasn’t petting her, riding her, or stroking her wings, she was licking or snuggling or rubbing her cheeks against me. We’d always been like this. I really was overthinking it.

“Hey, Hector.” Karalti nuzzled at me. “We should get breakfast, and then today’s potion day. Remember?

“Sure do.” It was tempting to go back to sleep, but we had a long, long day ahead of us. We also had to clear out of the room. Suri had some resistance to mana, but not enough. The ingredients in the dragon’s blood potion I had to make were dangerous. “Come on: let’s get up and go find a roof to land on. I want to make sure we do our brewing where we won’t gas a bunch of people.”