Lateral Movement

by Alzrius

677 - Commentary and Critique

“It’s now official,” announced Shadow as she emerged from the back room of the inn for the second time in twelve hours. “There’s no coffee to be found.”

“Of course not,” groaned Spinner miserably, hunching over her bowl of watery pottage as she tried to avoid the morning light shining in from the common room’s windows. “I don’t know why I even bothered asking. The damned cats-”

“Excuse me?” murmured Valor pointedly, arching an eyebrow.

The bard grimaced. “Ugh, fine. The damned purrsians – there, you happy? – have a monopoly on the stuff, and I doubt the ponies in this backwater have ever even seen a foreign merchant, much less bought stuff from them.”

“You should be thankful there’s anything for us to eat at all,” admonished Woodheart gently. “With how much snow is on the ground, there’s no berries that I can enchant to provide extra nourishment, and Mystaria still hasn’t learned the spell to create food out of thin air.”

Although the druid’s words had lacked any critical tone, Mystaria’s smile was still pained. “I doubt any of us would like the fare that spell creates anyway,” she muttered, stirring her own bowl of broth and withered vegetables. “It’s supposed to be gruel that’s even more tasteless than this.”

“It would at least save these villagers some food,” frowned Valor, though she apparently didn’t feel bad enough to keep from sipping at her portion of their meager breakfast, glancing at Shadow. “I know we’re almost out of money, but we should leave something for the guy who runs this place, don’t you think?”

“After he sold us out to those monsters?” snorted Shadow. “Forget it. If he doesn’t like that we’re eating his food after what he did, he can say it to our faces.”

“Fat chance of that,” grunted Spinner, cutting off an unhappy-looking Valor. “As long as Mister Skull Mask is here, I doubt anyone in this village is going to want to come anywhere near this place.” She took a sip of her pottage then, wincing at the taste.

“At least they’ll get some decent rest,” muttered Valor.

Her comment had a more dramatic reaction than an onlooker might have expected, causing Shadow to grimace, Spinner to snicker, and Mystaria to turn bright red. “Can we please not talk about that?” begged the latter mare, looking like she wanted to sink into the floor.

Valor frowned again, but this time in exasperation as she looked at her friends. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Back on the plains, we heard that all the time. Well, not all the time, but you know what I mean. Tents don’t exactly make for a lot of privacy.”

“Did I miss something?” asked Woodheart, taking a withered carrot out of her bowl and passing it to Littleknight, the almiraj digging in with gusto. “What are you guys talking about?”

Shadow rolled her eyes at the druid’s cluelessness. “After we went to bed last night-”

“At least you got to sleep in a bed,” huffed Spinner. “Some of us had to make do with the floor.”

“It might have been cramped, but all of us sleeping in the same room was the right call,” retorted Shadow. “There’s a reason why ‘never split the party’ is rule number one of adventuring, especially when your innkeeper just tried to sacrifice you to a bunch of monsters in the middle of the night.”

Woodheart looked more confused than ever now. “We all slept in the same room?”

“You wouldn’t remember,” sighed Mystaria, apparently resigned to the conversation going where she didn’t want it to. “By the time we were done for the evening, you’d already passed out.”

“To be fair, she’d had almost four whole ounces of liquor,” teased Shadow. “But to answer your question, Woodsy, we’d all just closed our eyes when we heard them doing it.”

“Don’t call me Woodsy,” huffed Woodheart, before tilting her head. “And heard who doing what?”

“And here I thought Mysty was the innocent maiden of the group,” chuckled Spinner. “Lex and Thermal Draft. The lovely lady was rewarding her hero for a job well done.”

Valor smirked. “From the sound of it, she was the one being rewarded.” Her smile faded as she stifled a sudden yawn, one hoof coming up to rub her eyes. “It did make it kind of hard to sleep, though. I mean, he was quiet enough, but she has quite the set of tubes on her.”

“Pipes,” corrected Spinner automatically.

“Why didn’t you guys just move to another room?” asked Woodheart. “Or ask them to quiet down?”

“Are you kidding?” Valor waved a hoof around, indicating the building they were in. “The walls here aren’t much thicker than the tents we used back home.”

“And I’m willing to bet that if someone had knocked on their door and told them to please fornicate quietly, Lex’s answer wouldn’t have been ‘sorry, I’ll keep it down,’” added Shadow dryly.

Mystaria, however, had reached her limit. Slamming her hooves down on the table, she fixed her friends with a glare. “Will you all please FOCUS?! Last night we were almost killed by a horde of yetis, then by a witch, and then found out that this entire town is being coerced into turning strangers over to those monsters under pain of death! Now we’re getting ready to make our way through blatantly unnatural weather, potentially to find a lost temple alongside a guy who has a major religious ordination that by all logic he shouldn’t possess! So can we maybe, just maybe turn our attention to any of those and not…not…”

“And not the fact that Lex and Thermal Draft were getting it on for what sounded like close to two hours?” asked Valor bluntly. “Sure. Works for me.”

“I’m fine either way,” agreed Woodheart.

“Anything that involves less yelling,” whimpered Spinner, holding her head.

“Thank you…” sighed Mystaria in relief, sitting back down.

But Spinner couldn’t resist getting one last dig in. “Besides, it really wasn’t all that impressive anyway.” Leaning closer to the nun-in-training, Spinner lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Thermal Draft was faking it.”

“No, she wasn’t.”

Shadow wished she could have taken the words back as soon as they left her mouth. In truth, she was plenty tired of talking about Lex and Thermal Draft’s sexual escapades. But Spinner, she knew, liked to present herself as the worldliest member of their group, having been nearly everywhere and done nearly everything. Flatly contradicting her like that wasn’t something the bard would let go.

She was proven right a second later as Spinner raised a brow, a slightly indignant look crossing her features. “Oh really?”

“Didn’t we all just agree to drop it and move on?” groaned Mystaria.

“No no no no, I’m curious now,” huffed Spinner. “What makes our resident rogue so sure that what we heard last night was the real deal? Especially since she put earplugs in after the first couple minutes.”

Valor gave the masked mare a sharp glance at that. “You had earplugs and you didn’t share them?”

“I only had the one pair,” snapped Shadow, starting to grow a little irritated as she glared at Spinner. “And for someone who’s sure that pegasus was faking it, I can’t help but recall that the first thing you did when you woke up this morning was wash your hooves.”

“That was because I still had some yeti blood on them,” fired back Spinner, though her cheeks turned suspiciously red. “Quit changing the subject: what makes you so sure she was being genuine?”

“I kind of want to know too,” admitted Woodheart quietly. “Except for how everyone thinks my getting undressed is a mating display, I haven’t had much of a chance to study the breeding habits of sapient creatures.”

That was enough to make Mystaria lay her forehead on the table. “Luminace help me…”

She wasn’t the only one who looked pained, with Valor rubbing her forehead. “Comments like that are why one of us stays with you at all times whenever we enter a town, Woodheart.”

“And that’s saying something,” interjected Shadow, “coming from the barbarian for whom, growing up, peeing on last night’s campfire was a regular morning activity.”

“I told you, only the guys do that!” Scowling at the masked mare, Valor crossed her forelegs over her chest defensively. “I still don’t see what the problem with that is, anyway. They have to go, the embers need to be put out, and the scent marking helps to keep dangerous creatures away from our territory.”

By that point, Mystaria had begun to lightly bang her head on the table, but everyone else was familiar enough with her prudishness that they ignored her now.

Gulping down the last of her pottage, Spinner piped up next. “That leads me back to my original question-”

“How does sun cats peeing on their campfire each morning lead you back to your original question?” interrupted Woodheart.

“By way of the same part of their anatomy being put to use in both instances,” replied Spinner smoothly, keeping her eyes on Shadow. “How are you so sure that Thermal Draft wasn’t faking her reactions to Lex’s doing her?”

Knowing that it was going to come back to this, Shadow had her answer at the ready. “Three reasons. First, pretending to be pleasured is a chore. You have to try and match your reactions, vocally and otherwise, to what your partner’s doing, all while dealing with sensations that – if you have to fake it in the first place – are probably distracting, if not downright uncomfortable. It’s not something you do for two hours straight; it’s easier to pretend to pass out or something before then.”

“Is that the voice of experience?” snickered Valor.

Knowing that her friend was just paying her back for the earlier jab about the sun cats’ morning custom, Shadow kept going. “Secondly, you might remember that Thermal Draft wasn’t the only thing we could hear.”

Spinner raised a brow. “It wasn’t?”

“If you’re referring to Lex, I’m calling your bluff,” objected Valor. “If he was making any noise at all, his girlfriend was drowning him out.”

“…the headboard,” sighed Mystaria, sulking as she lifted her head from the table. “The other thing we all heard was the headboard of their bed hitting the wall over and over again.”

Shadow nodded. “Gold star to Mysty.”

“So they were putting the bed through its paces.” Spinner’s brow furrowed as she shrugged. “What does that prove?”

“I might not have listened to them screwing for very long, but I heard enough to notice that the headboard kept hitting the wall at irregular intervals,” explained Shadow. “Since it was obviously moving in time with Lex’s thrusting-”

“What makes you think he was the one on top?” interrupted Woodheart, leaning forward as if engrossed in the conversation. “Maybe she was the one setting the pace.”

Shadow scoffed. “You really think a guy who screams stuff like ‘Do as you’re told!’ and ‘Don’t argue! Obey!’ is going to lie back and let his chick ride him? No, the headboard hit the wall in time with his thrusting, and the arhythmic impacts meant that he was varying up his technique, rather than just going in and out of her at the same pace over and over. That’s not only harder to fake reacting to, but is virtually always pleasurable for the mare.”

Mystaria squeezed her eyes shut as she took Luminace’s holy symbol between her hooves. “O Divine Lady of Amity, please grant me your patience…”

“And what’s the third reason?” asked Spinner sullenly, apparently resigned to the fact that Shadow had indeed shown her up. “That you caught a whiff of some rare aphrodisiac that none of us noticed? Or that you heard wings beating in a way that pegasus mares only do when they’re getting off?”

“The third reason is that I’m from Blevik,” retorted Shadow flatly. “When you grow up in the spiritual center of Kara’s faith, you overhear more than a few mares having orgasms. Eventually you start learning how to tell the real ones from the fake ones. And Thermal Draft’s were definitely real.”

Resting her case, Shadow leaned back as silence enveloped the table again. Spinner was pouting, but didn’t seem inclined to argue the point any further. Valor went back to finishing her breakfast. Mystaria was still praying, her eyes shut and ears folded back. Woodheart was passing another vegetable to Littleknight. Finally.

“They’re coming,” announced Valor suddenly.

Spinner sighed. “I think we’ve pretty well exhausted the topic, Valor.”

“What? No, I mean those two are on their way here. Listen.” Pointing upward, Valor perked her ears up, with all of the others – save only for Mystaria, who didn’t react as she continued to chant under her breath – doing the same. Sure enough, the sound of hoofsteps could be heard, moving across the second floor toward the staircase at the far end of the room.

Shifting in place as she made sure her weapons were at the ready, Shadow adjusted her chair so she was facing the staircase. Lex might have saved their lives last night, but the way he’d conducted himself hadn’t filled her with confidence. While Mystaria was under the impression that he was an ally sent by the gods – or at least, by the Night Mare – Shadow couldn’t bring herself to believe that. Quite the opposite, she could easily see him attacking them again if he felt slighted.

And self-righteous bastards like him tend to feel slighted whenever anyone refuses to kiss up to them, she knew.

“Alright,” murmured Valor as the hoofsteps reached the top of the stairs and started to descend. “We failed last night, so let’s hope this is the part where it takes us forward.”

Author's Note:

After an uncomfortably frank discussion, Fail Forward prepares to meet with Lex and Thermal Draft again!

Will the two groups team up? Or will they prove to be incompatible after all?

Comments

[Not so New Brony]

Shadow certainly has quite the wealth of knowledge from her life experience, though most of it rather trivial to the average individual but I guess for her, even the tiniest detail helps though I do wonder how. Regardless, still got a good chuckle out of me at least.

Anyways, I quite enjoyed the banter between Fail Forward's members which is the highlight of the chapter for me as I was wondering how they'd react to Lex and Thermal Draft's bedroom activities since I recall River Bank's servants gossiping about it back at the mansion.

Now to see how Lex conducts himself, even if he 'de-stressed' thanks to Thermal Draft, his mood might still sour given his poor opinion of Fail Forward and same could be said in reverse as evidenced by Shadow with only Mystaria being the apprehensive exception.

[Firefoxino]

Ok this is such a real thing, both in D&D and reality to a lesser degree, putting all the party's head together for something completely useless and downright idiotic is what DND groups do best XD

[Booster Spice]

Atleast Lex turned up before things progressed to various cross pollination products of vegetables.

[Alzrius]

11123933 As Shadow herself noted, growing up in a city that's the center of Kara's faith is probably going to result in quite the education where sex is concerned. Whether or not that's a good thing is something else again; Shadow Star clearly has issues, based on how sensitive she is to being looked down on. Then again, from what we've seen so far, all of the mares of Fail Forward have issues of one kind or another.

That was really what was on display in this chapter, which I'll admit I had a lot of fun writing. I've noted before that when you have a good idea of who the characters are, and just let them bounce off of each other, quite often things write themselves. That was the case here, as each of the girls reacted in a way that was entirely appropriate to them.

Of course, if Lex reacts to their offer to join up in a way that's appropriate to him, things could once again go south very quickly. Of course, hopefully he's not on the edge of exploding after working out his frustrations on Thermal Draft last night. So with any luck he'll be his normal level of unpleasant. Though that might be enough to make things fall apart all on its own.

[Alzrius]

11123969 Quite right! When there's something important to discuss, it seems like a universal rule that the unimportant nonsense has to be brought up first as a (long) lead-in to the real business. In this case, most of what needed to be said was either brought up last night, or had to wait until Lex put in an appearance, so there was little else for the mares of Fail Forward to do but shoot the breeze and have some fun with the audio-only show they got last night...much to Mystaria's aggravation.

[Alzrius]

11124612 I suspect it would have stayed more in the realm of fauna than flora, but otherwise it's not unthinkable that the conversation would have gone there.