After about a quarter of a mile on the mail southerly road, the party veered onto a much smaller, and less well maintained trail, which branched off of the main track. They followed this trail for perhaps another half mile, walking in relative silence, enabling Lexi to enjoy the enveloping cascade of sounds made by the myriad of animals which inhabited the forests immediately surrounding the city’s walls. She hoped that they were close enough that they did not run into any roving bands of goblins. However, almost as soon as the notion crossed her mind, the paladin realized just how completely outmatched and outclassed a small party of goblins would be against her alone — much less her freshly healed and newly leveled up party.

That reminds me! Since Luella’s officially one of my NPC followers now, I should take a peek at her stats just to see where she stands with the rest of the team.

Pulling up her team’s collective stats, Lexi was quite pleased — but not surprised — to see that Luella fit in perfectly with Samantha and Danica. With all of them at the same level, Luella would neither overpower her existing companions, but nor would she be a burden on the group. And, as a rogue, the mothkin was sure to bring some new skills to the team, which would surely be useful as they approached this new quest. If a lifetime of playing RPGs had taught Lexi anything it’s that you always wanted a rogue or thief in your party on dungeon quests to do things like disarm traps and find hidden doors. Naturally this game’s administrators had been operating along similar lines when they contrives this whole scenario and placed Luella in Lexi’s path as a new NPC follower.

Holy shit! She’s got some serious mind-break resistance for only being fourth level. I guess the game’s logic expects rogues to rely more on fucking their way out of tight spots and blasting with fireballs, so that makes sense. Still, if she’s as…receptive…to certain “team building” activities, that could make for a LOT of fun.

For the second time that evening, Lexi felt a familiar surge in her nether regions as her cock and pussy came to life, an unmistakable bulge forming beneath her tabard while her pussy lips moistened themselves in anticipation. While she mused on the sexual possibilities of a partner whose mind-break resistance equaled her own, Lexi’s eyes were locked on the mothgirl’s incredibly juicy looking ass, whose jiggling flesh she could just barely make out as the loose linen pants she wore stretched against it with each step the rogue took.

Interestingly, the mothkin’s wings proved to be not only excellent for providing camouflage, but were also extremely flexible. When the party set off, Luella managed to fold the wings up behind her so that they resembled a fluffy gray and white backpack. This had the dual benefit of keeping the presumably delicate wings from getting snagged on any stray branches as the quartet walked the narrow wooded path, and gave Lexi a perfectly clear view of her delectable looking round ass as she followed directly behind the mothgirl.

The futanari’s attention was stirred from the cute mothgirl’s delicious ass and the resulting situation developing between her legs when Luella turned her head left and right, sniffing the air. It was a small gesture, but when she followed it with a quick glance at Lexi, the half-smile and narrowed eyes made Lexi’s erection shrivel and her pussy dry up faster than if she had just walked in on her grandparents fucking. It was a look that clearly said, “I know you were staring at my ass, because I can smell your pussy juice from all the way up here.”

Lexi had never stopped to consider whether or not different beastkin would have the enhanced olfactory senses respective to the animals they resembled, but it totally made sense. Still, they idea that one of her companions could literally smell her horniness was more than a bit unnerving to the almost incessantly aroused futanari. However, it also struck Lexi then that the hint of confusion that tinged the mothgirl’s look also meant that Luella wasn’t quite sure about what she smelled. After all, if she could smell sexual arousal, it stood to reason that a juicy pussy would smell different than a hard cock.

Smelling both coming from behind her was probably as much of a shock to Luella as the revelation about the mothgirl’s sensory powers was to Lexi, and most likely meant that when Anya enlisted Luella to her cause, that she had not revealed Lexi’s nature as a futa to the mothgirl.

As Lexi pondered these mildly embarrassing revelations, the thick covering of foliage lining the trail on which the party was walking unexpectedly opened up onto a large green pasture. Crossing the road and separating the forest out of which the quartet emerged from the expansive field beyond, there stood an old crumbling stone wall, not dissimilar from the kind Lexi imagined would litter rural parts of Scotland and Northern England, where stone was plentiful. At the point where the road and wall intersected, there stood the vestiges of what had once been a large archway. Although, in the current state of disrepair, it took a bit of imagination to determine that the arch might have looked like.

“Here we are!” Luella announced cheerily, bringing the party to a halt just a few paces from he dilapidated arch.

Lexi and Samantha looked at each other, neither one sure what exactly “here” was supposed to indicate, since it did not appear that there was any dark portal to some underworld world anywhere nearby — just an old stone wall surrounding a farm field.

“What’d we stop for?” Danica asked, hopping in between the three larger girls from her trailing place at the column’s rear. “Weren’t you supposed to be taking us to some kinda door? I mean, it looks like there might’ve been a door here like a thousand years ago, but even if there was it just would’ve led into the field over there, and we can see that already even though the door’s gone, so—”

“If I might,” Luella cut in, quickly realizing that if she did not interject something into the elf’s rapid-fire line of interrogation, that she might not otherwise get a chance to speak. “This is the doorway we’ve been heading to. We just can’t see it…yet.”

“…”

Reaching into a worn leather pouch hanging from her belt, Luella withdrew a handful of some kind of silvery dust that had the consistency of ultra-fine sand, and cast it into the empty archway. For an instant, Lexi was wondering what the point of this seemingly nonsensical exercise was, until she saw the minuscule fragments of dust not falling to the ground, but hanging in midair, each one refracting enough starlight that it shone within the ruined archway like a miniature star itself. The intensity of this cascade of miniature stars increased, eventually filling the stone void completely with a uniform array of refracted starlight.

“That,” Luella said, placing a hand on one hip and turning back to the three adventurers. “Was stardust. In the right circumstances, it can help to reveal magical concealment, and — thankfully for us — the stars are definitely right tonight.”

“Wooowww…” Danica whispered as she crept closer to the luminous portal, her long ears bobbing up and down with clear interest. The impetuous elf reached out an eager hand, clearly intent on touching the suspended field of light.

“Hold on there, squirt!” Lexi snapped, grabbing a handful of Danica’s skirt right behind her waist, and holding the small elf in place just a foot or two from the glowing portal. “That might not be something you need to stick your hand into.”

“She’s right,” Luella said, nodding at the elf. “What this needs now is exactly the right kind of touch. Anything else, and the door won’t open into the right place.”

The mothgirl stepped forward carefully. She reached out with her lower pair of arms, delicately running her hands along the luminous surface of the portal which had formed out of the coalesced field of light within the stone arch. At her deft touch, the light took on the appearance of a mirrored surface, almost like a vertical surface of a pool of illuminated water. Luella put a third hand forward and knocked once towards the upper half of the portal, and the reached out with her forth hand to knock at the center — the two creating sounds reminiscent of someone knocking on a hollow piece of metal, like a bell. With a final rap of her knuckles, a sharp crack resounded through the entire area, as the shimmering surface of the portal shattered into a thousand shining shards.

“Holy shit!” Lexi exclaimed.

What filled the archway in the wake of this extremely curious event was decidedly not the field which could still be seen on either side of the arch. Rather, Lexi saw that it now formed the entrance into a passage, with a staircase leading so far down into the earth, that the paladin could not see the bottom.

“Well done,” Samantha said coolly. She stepped in beside the mothgirl, clapping a large hand on her shoulder, and giving it a reassuring squeeze, the edges of her mouth just barely turning up into a smile, which — for anyone that knew the monk well — meant that she was really impressed. Danica, on the other hand, had no such subtlety in her reaction.

“Oh man, that was so cool! Like, one minute it was nothing, and then it’s all super shiny, and then it’s like BOOONNNGGG, and then you’re all like CRACK — and now there’s a spooky tunnel! I mean, it’s—”

“Haha,” Luella laughed, somewhat self-consciously running her hand over the back of her neck. “It’s not that big of a deal. Just a little bit of knowhow when it comes to magically concealed doors and stuff.”

“But it’s not something any of us could’ve done on our own,” Lexi said seriously. “You’re already showing your worth in the group just from this. Something tells me your skills are going to keep coming in handy where we’re headed.”

“Well, speaking of that,” Luella said briskly, we’d better get in there quick. The doorway won’t stay open that long, and it’s hard to predict when it’ll close."

“Lead on then!” Lexi answered heartily, giving the mothgirl a slight bow and a smile.

And so, falling back into line, the party descended down the staircase, taking their first steps out of the surface world above, and down into the subterranean depths of the underworld. After what seemed like an eternity of walking down an endless succession of stone steps within an angled corridor of cut stone blocks and a rounded tunnel-like ceiling of the same construction, the party came to the bottom, with the stairwell opening up into a wide foyer at the base. Lexi gasped when she reached the bottom, her head whipping left and right trying to take in the entirety of the strange place in which they had ended up.

Lexi realized in that moment, that in the back of her mind she had been expecting something more like the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms world in AD&D, with networks of natural tunnels and caves. Instead, this was far more like the descriptions of a subterranean dungeon from classic “dungeon crawler” modules in the original iterations of D&D like the Tome of Horrors — where the “dungeons” looked more like the kinds of corridors and rooms that you would expect to see inside of a castle, made of cut stone blocks, and complete with arched portals, doors, stairwells, etc. And, while this revelation certainly proved interesting, it also filled Lexi with a growing sense of dread.

Nothing good ever happens in a dungeon crawler.