Chapter 75: Teasing
702 4 21
X
Reading Options
Font Size
A- 15px A+
Width
Reset
X
Table of Contents
Loading... please wait.

The guard led him the tea room, which was simply the room that he had been in last time.

To his relief, this time the room was empty. The thought of spending any length of time in the presence of those skimpily dressed maids filled him anxiety. He felt that straight up ignoring them seemed rude, yet simultaneously looking at them also seemed rude.

Unfortunately for Stanley, the room didn’t stay empty long. Apparently informed of his presence by the nearby guards that they had a guest, the skimpily dressed maids entered and began preparing and serving food on the table.

“Excuse me?” Stanley interrupted the nearest maid and attempted to get them to leave, “There’s really no need to prepare anything. I already ate and I’m not thirsty.”

The maid lifted her already too short skirt higher and bowed, “It would be too rude for us to not serve our guests desserts and tea, Young Master. Please, eat as much as you like.”

Stanley held his tongue. He wanted to remark that even if they served it, he wouldn’t dare to eat it.

He’d arrived this time without the Narrator’s instructions. That meant there was no guarantee the food wasn’t laced with aphrodisiac or sedatives. After knowing that Elisabeth had attempted to poison him last time through the food and tea, how could he dare to eat it?

Still, the underdressed maids brought out fancy treats and made tea in an identical manner to last time. He had no complains about their professionalism, only their outfits.

Elisabeth showed up almost immediately after the table had been set and the maids had left through a side-door. The timing was so coincidental that Stanley couldn’t help but wonder whether they scheduled of her entrance in advance.

Fortunately, unlike his previous visit, Elisabeth wore relatively formal attire. The elegant formal dark-red dress was laced with various rubies and revealed only a moderate amount of skin.

Breathing a quiet sighing of relief, Stanley politely stood up and complimented her choice. “Hello, Elisabeth. You look beautiful in that dress.”

Elisabeth’s face lit as she smiled and she lifted the front of her dress in a teasing manner, “Want to see how beautiful I look without it?”

Hearing her bold offer, Stanley coughed awkwardly and declined, “I’ll have to take an indefinite rain check. I would first like to apologize if I upset you during my last visit.”

“Hmmm…” She playfully pretended to be thinking and eventually responded, “How about this? I’ll consider forgiving you when you redeem that rain check.”

Stanley fell silent knowing that was never going to happen. Stanley had only been politely declining her offer and both of them knew it. He had no idea how to deal with someone acting this brazen.

Knowing he’d never be able to compete with her boldness, Stanley attempted to change the conversation to the teleportation beacon, “… So while I was pondering our last encounter, I realized that I neglected to consider another possibility for peace. If you don’t mind, I would like to know your thoughts on the matter.”

“Straight to business…” Elisabeth frowned and moved toward a mirror in the corner of the room to examine herself, “Do you not like this appearance? You’ll make a girl lose confidence in herself if you reject her advances this much.”

At this point, Stanley had a massive headache. Even attempting to have a normal conversation with Elisabeth was proving impossible.

She moved at her own pace, and she insisted on dragging him into her pace. Her question was loaded with no correct response. Even silence or misdirection would be taken as affirmation.

Sighing, Stanley attempted to mitigate any damage, “I already complimented your appearance as beautiful. I’ve just got other priorities and I’m not particularly interested in your advances.”

“Rejected.” Elisabeth immediately refuted the statement and sent her gaze toward Stanley’s body to examine it from top to bottom. “You must be around twenty years old? Unless you’re impotent, there’s no way I’d believe you are not interested in the opposite sex.”

Stanley desperately wanted this conversation to end, thus he latched onto the provided excuse, “If I say I’m impotent?”

“Oh, you poor darling…” Elisabeth said with a wearily smiled in response to his question. She slowly approached Stanley and whispered into his ear, “Then I would want to test exact how impotent you are.”

Swiftly backing up, Stanley bumped into the table knocking over several plates and denied hastily, “Not impotent! Just not interested.”

Stanley couldn’t understand her thought process. Does she even understand what the word impotent means? He was regretting choosing to come here. If he’d chosen to ask Schrödinger for help, he wouldn’t have to deal with this girl.

Elisabeth’s expression lit up as though I’d spoken a fundamental truth of the universe, she confirmed, “It really is my appearance you aren’t interested in…”

“No, that’s really not what I meant…” Stanley argued in vain, unaware he’d been completely dragged into her pace. At this point, he had completely lost the initiative and had zero control over the conservation.

Propping up her breasts with her arms, Elisabeth leaned toward him and asked, “Then, on a scale of 1-10, how sexy would you rate my current appearance?”

Stanley remained speechless for several seconds.

How had he even gotten into this situation? He only came here to ask her thoughts on people using the teleportation beacon.

Choosing his words carefully, Stanley finally replied, “I am invoking my right to remain silent.”

Elisabeth sat down on a clear space atop the table and crossed her legs while staring toward the ceiling, “Wow, that bad… Why didn’t you say something earlier? You know I can change my appearance into even your innermost desire, right?”

Stanley threw his hands into the air in defeat and walked toward the exit, “I give up… I’m leaving.”

“Tsk…” Elisabeth clicked her tongue and bit into a biscuit on the table and conceded, “Wait, I’ll tone down the teasing.”

Stanley stopped as his hand was about to reach toward the door’s handle. Leaving midway would definitely anger her and he didn’t want to lose his only connection to the doppelgangers unless there was no choice. Bargaining, Stanley stated in an attempt to sweeten the agreement, “You’ll completely stop teasing me?”

Elisabeth swallowed the remaining biscuit as she glared toward him, before replying, “That’s impossible. I’ll tell you what though, if you answer a couple of my questions, I’ll answer a question of yours.”

Stanley debated bargaining further, but eventually decided that continuing to threaten leaving would only make the situation worse. “Fine.”

He walked back toward the table. Pulling a seat out from under the table, he placed it in front of Elizabeth a couple feet away from where she was sitting atop the table. Sitting down in the chair, Stanley sighed to himself and inquired, “What did you want to ask?”

“Let me think about it.” Elisabeth replied as she uncrossed her legs and began swinging them underneath the table. “Hmmm…”

She leaned forward, having come up with an idea and asked, “What’s your favorite animal?”

“What?” Stanley’s mind crashed from the question. He’d been expecting her to ask about his ability or a multitude of other things.

“Come on, don’t be shy. Favorite animal.” She prodded, apparently eager to learn this fact.

“I don’t know? Dolphin?” Stanley answered utterly confused.

Elisabeth nodded, before she leaned backward on the table and resting her entire body atop it. “Never heard of a dolphin before… What does it look like?”

Stanley narrowed his eyes toward her, suspicious of whatever she was planning. “It’s an aquatic animal… you know fins, flippers, and excreta. Why?”

“Sounds interesting. Favorite land animal?” She inquired without moving.

Stanley paused, hesitating as to whether to reveal this more personal information, before finally saying, “I used to have a cat. A beautiful kitty named Snow with pure white fur… so cats are probably my favorite land animal.”

“Cat as in cat-kin?” Elisabeth inquired as she lifted herself upward.

“Maybe? Usually cat-kin refers to demi-humans, though… Does cat-kin refer to an intelligent race?” Stanley understood there were some difficulties with the system’s translation function because of the fundamental lack of words in the target language.

“Mmhmm…” Elisabeth said as she hopped off the table.

In the short time Elisabeth, white furry ears appeared atop her head and long-thin white tail flowed out the back of her dress.

Staring at the new additions to Elisabeth’s appearance, Stanley felt like his headache had returned.

This was probably why she asking what his favorite animal was. She wanted to test out his reaction when she shapeshifted into it or something similar.

“Cat-kin look like this.” Elisabeth replied, taking this opportunity to showing off her new cat-ears. Before turning around and showed off her new white-tail, which lifted up her dress and displayed her black underwear.

Stanley shut and rubbed his eyes in annoyance at the flash of underwear and stated. “Cat-kin are similar to, but also different from cats. Specifically, cats are a non-humanoid species… Are you finished asking questions now?”

“One more question.” Elisabeth asked in a teasing voice, “Would you prefer that I stay a cat-kin?”

“Please don’t.” Stanley pleaded, softly and repeatedly banging his head against his chair.

Sadly, his plea fell on deaf ears.

“I’ll be taking that as a yes.” Elisabeth said laughing at his antics. Taking the opportunity to tease him further, she waved her new white-tail on Stanley’s face. “What was your question?”

Stanley silently endured the ticklish feeling of her tail on his face. Providing an entertaining reaction would only serve to encourage her further.

Stanley spit cat-hair out of his month and sighed, “Please, just tell me whether you would consider letting people use the teleportation beacon. Since you don’t want to evacuate your own population, granting other people access to the teleportation beacon would allow them simply leave to the next zone and the problem will be solved.“

“Impossible.” Elisabeth shook her head, “Even if I wanted to agree, the dragon sleeping atop and guarding the beacon would make any such plan impossible.”

“Dragon?” Stanley probed trying to figure out what she meant.

Elisabeth plainly stated, “It would be faster to show you.”

Led by Elisabeth, Stanley was show to the center of the compound. When they reach a room with entirely stone walls, Elisabeth pointed toward a one-sided mirror.

Looking through the mirror, Stanley found the familiar runes of a teleportation beacon with an unfamiliar dragon with dark-red scales laying atop it.

When he saw it, Stanley was shocked. However, what shocked him wasn’t the power level of the dragon… because the dragon didn’t seem particularly powerful. The amount of mana it released wasn’t that impressive in comparison to the monsters he'd seen from Hell Difficult.  

No, what shocked Stanley was the dragon’s sheer size. It was over forty meters long and was one of the largest creatures Stanley had ever seen. While Stanley was slightly confident he could kill it if he needed to, he was certain that he wouldn’t be able to kill this dragon quickly. Given it's size, it could certainly cause a large amount of devastation to the surroundings if he chose to fight it and the location its sleeping meant there's no way to sneak past it into the teleportation beacon.

How was he supposed to leave with this thing sitting atop the exit?

Spoiler

...I have no idea how Elisabeth turned out this way. I feel like if I'm not careful, she alone will bring up the age rating of this entire novel.

(Have I even given this novel a age rating? Should I do a 13+ warning? 15+?)

[collapse]
21