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Hialfi's world By Strega

"Welcome to my world," the drunken foxtaur said, and belched.

The minotaur tugged his nose ring and grinned. He'd been telling the fox about waking up next to a spectacularly ugly bugbear with no memory of how he got there. He had a flexible view of what constituted an acceptable bed partner and would take almost anything there, sometimes whether said partner wanted to be there or not. This time, though...what had happened to her face?

"Reminds you of something, eh?" Bareun said. Hialfi just grunted and poured half a gallon of beer rather messily into his muzzle. It took a lot of alcohol to get a two-ton fox drunk but Hialfi had been working on this bender for some time. Bareun had only heard that the Wandering Bar had set up in the woods at midnight. The fox had been there since dusk.

"You have no idea," the foxtaur said, and slammed his mug on the log that served as a bar. "More beer!"

"Sure I do," the minotaur said as the bartender refilled Hialfi's drink. "Just look," he said with a wave to the creatures clustered around the bar.

The Wandering Bar was one of several monster drinking establishment with no fixed location. This one was owned by the ogre mage Sammusk, who brought a Portable Hole full of ale barrels and stronger spirits. It was impossible to set up a permanent monster bar this close to civilized lands, but once a month or so Sammusk, or Riddles the brass dragon, or one of the others would spread the word and set up for a night. All of the bar owners were formidable and needed to be. Besides the risk of adventurer or local army attacks should word of the bar get out, they also had to be able to stifle any fights that developed, or at least chase the combatants away from the bar.

"Right there," Bareun said, and pointed to one of several ogres at the far end of the bar. "You got drunk and got it on with Gaptooth there, and her brothers came after you with clubs. You limped for a week afterward."

Hialfi groaned. "Don't remind me. She was too small anyway."

"Mm-hmm," the minotaur said as he took another gulp of ale. The ogre woman was nine feet tall, a foot taller than Bareun himself. That still made her six feet shorter than Hialfi, or seven feet if you counted the fox's ears.

"No centaurs here tonight," He continued, "But I remember -"

The fox flicked an ear and took another drink of his beer. "That almost worked. One more minute and I'd have finished."

Bareun had been sleeping off another visit to the Wandering Bar when something woke him: a falling-down drunk Hialfi and a very fat and nearly as drunk centauress. The two had just about managed to consummate a wine-sodden affair when the centauress yawped and bolted out from under Hialfi. Lying beneath a nearby bush Bareun got a look at the fox's equipment, which was nearly three feet long and thick as a man's thigh - and that didn't consider the monstrous knot swelling at the base. No wonder the centauress had run.

"Maybe if you hadn't been so drunk. Let's see..." A crowd of gnolls yammered belligerently at a pack of orcs, both sides half-soused. Sammusk had to tug threateningly at the hilt of the huge curved sword slung across his back to break it up. No gnoll or orc woman could share Hialfi's bed, given their respective sizes, but members of both species had occupied his stomach. The fox didn't like to hurt thinking creatures, but he had to eat. Chances are he'd eaten a minotaur or two, but Bareun never asked.

A couple of exotics sat on a fallen log. A skeletal knight with glowing eyes thought his own thoughts as he drank, unconcerned that the beer poured out of his ribs as fast as he drank it. Nearby a cone-shaped, tentacled creature of indeterminate gender and several eyes had mugs in three of its tentacles. Behind them, though -

"Aha! Look Hialfi, manticores!"

That got another groan out of Hialfi, and Bareun grinned. Manticores were winged lion-beasts with tails that could fling sharp spikes, and he'd once helped pull spikes like that out of Hialfi's rump. The fox had eventually admitted that he'd been hunting the beasts for bounty when a female, injured of wing and unable to fly, offered herself to him to preserve her life. Hialfi's volpa half was as peaceful a fox as you could hope to meet but it rode along on a quadrupedal fox body that was more concerned with base pleasures than social niceties. When it got an offer like that it took it whether his brain was interested or not. She had lashed his sides raw as they mated, and half a dozen tail spikes were too far back for the fox to easily reach.

"I wouldn't think a manticore would be big enough," Bareun said as he jabbed his elbow into Hialfi's side. "Not like that winter wolf or the hell hound, eh? Or the -"

"If I ever catch that bard I'm going to eat him," Hialfi muttered.

"It's true isn't it? It even mentions the manticore."

"Most of it's true, but that damn bard keeps adding verses. I've never even met a lammasu, whatever that is."

Two hill giants emerged from the woods to join the gathering around the bar, and he elbowed the foxtaur's flank again. "Hey, fox."

Hialfi's head had already turned. One of the giants was female, just over ten feet tall, and though ugly and overly muscled to Bareun's eye she had some nice curves.

Hialfi actually shuddered. "No thanks."

That was odd, the minotaur thought. The memories were a bit fuzzy due to copious amounts of alcohol on that years-ago night, but he thought he remembered Hialfi enthusiastically humping a hill giantess after a Wandering Bar visit. From the amount of noise she made it must have been a powerfully tight fit but that had not stopped the fox. What had changed? Had she just been too tight for him to want to repeat the experience?

"A Frost or fire giantess would be bigger. About your size, even."

"I don't know," Hialfi said. "They might be...you know. Hot or cold. I've never met one anyway." It was a hell hound separated from a fire giant raiding party that got the fox blisters in a very uncomfortable spot, according to the song. The winter wolf had presented him the opposite problem. At least he hadn't gotten frostbite, just frozen to her for a time.

"One of these days your dick is going to get you killed." The scars on Hialfi's cheek and face were not from battle. Hialfi's scars were from angry lovers.

"It already got me kicked out of the monastery. Back in a minute, I have to piss." The foxtaur went off to relieve himself of a gallon or three of beer, and Bareun took another drink. He was pleasantly drunk now, and his own eye began to wander. Unlike Hialfi he was not too big for gnoll or bugbear women, so he played a game of catch-the-eye to see if one was interested. One of the male ogres was actually hitting on a female manticore. There was no accounting for taste.

He idly wondered where the foxtaur had been for the last year. These were Hialfi's usual haunts and you could count on seeing him trotting from town to town at least once a week. The big fox could cover an enormous amount of road with little effort and made ends meet (if barely) by acting as a high speed messenger and mail service. In the absence of griffons, other fliers or a Teleport network, you couldn't outpace a sixteen-foot-tall foxtaur.

But he hadn't seen or heard of Hialfi for many months until tonight. He'd been half convinced the foxtaur had been killed or enslaved by some wizard until one day he just showed up, skinny and without his harness but very much alive and not at all inclined to discuss his recent activities.

Something tugged on his shaggy calf, and he looked down to find a kobold. Bareun blinked. He'd glimpsed a few of the little humanoids skulking around the clearing, but these smallest and most picked-upon people had kept out of sight except for trips to Sammusk's bar.

"Message for the fox," the little dog/dragonman said, and held up a scroll tube.

Bareun didn't much like kobolds, though he had eaten his share, and that dislike intensified when he realized who he was talking to.

"You work for that skunk-snake, don't you?" A kobold in clothing this fine - some of the others he'd seen had full suits of chain maille - had to work for her. She lived somewhere nearby, exactly where he did not know or care to know. People who got too close to one of the lamia sisters tended to end up with a blue and white fur coat, the kind the digests you.

"I don't like minotaurs either," said the bravest kobold Bareun had ever met, "Or the fox, who has eaten many kobolds. My mistress was asked to pass along this message, though, and so here I am."

Bareun frowned and took the scroll tube. In other circumstances he'd have stomped the kobold flat, but if he got on Sammusk's bad side it was back to fungus beer and fermented milk.

He almost forgot about the kobold as he caught the eye of a tall and muscular gnoll woman, and distractedly handed the scroll tube to the foxtaur when Hialfi reappeared at his side. It could be a good night, he was thinking as the gnoll made her way over to him. Then the foxtaur swore.

"Bugger," snapped Hialfi, and Bareun and the gnoll both looked at him as he unrolled the scroll. Stamped in the now-broken wax seal were two runic Rs back to back, one reversed so the whole resembled a skull, or it could be read as "Magic Magic" - R being the rune for it. Or, it could be read just as "RR.."...

"The Maker," the gnoll-femme growled, and Hialfi cursed again. "Ruhollah Rushiadah."

"What's going on, fox?" Bareun asks, but Hialfi was already rolling the scroll back up. "What does the mage want with you? We're not in his lands."

"But he knows about me," the foxtaur said with his ears folded flat. "For whatever reason I'm to meet with his representative in a few days. My safety is guaranteed, it said, and I am promised a reward for a few hours of my time."

"I wouldn't trust him," was the minotaur's instant reply. "He's a wizard, who knows what he wants."

"He made the fox-people," the gnoll femme growled, and Bareun hurriedly signaled Sammusk to get her a drink before she forgot why she'd crossed the clearing.

"He made my great-great-grandfather and -grandmother from foxes, yes," the foxtaur said. "I owe him a meeting, at least. And who wants to piss off an arch-mage? Not I."

With that he slugged down another quart of beer and Bareun returned his attention to the gnoll. Interesting as Hialfi's problem was, he had an itch he'd like to scratch tonight, and he'd happily scratch it with the gnoll-femme's help. Hopefully more than once.

*****

Three days and a hangover passed rather more quickly than Hialfi liked, for as Bareun had said before taking his evening's prize off to a private place, "One shouldn't trust finger-wagglers."

He dug the scroll out one last time. It contained two sheets of vellum, one stamped with the wax seal and one that had been added later. As he had the first time, he read that one first.

"Dear foxie," he read, and smiled. He didn't have many romantic encounters he remembered fondly, but the evening he'd spent with the skunkette-snake was one. He'd paid for her time with a gnoll, and the gnoll hadn't been the only thing she swallowed that night.

"Whilst I was in Greyston (which you probably call Monstertown) this last week, I was contacted by a follower of the Maker. He somehow knew about our meeting and asked if I could get this message to you.

"As far as I know the Maker can mostly be trusted, and I wouldn't want to piss off an arch-mage -"

"That's what I said," Hialfi muttered, and continued.

"So if I were you I would do whatever it is he wants. I'll send this message with a kobold, since my activities are well known to the humanoids in your woods and some of them aren't happy that I have, shall we say, thinned their numbers a bit. On that note, look me up next time you have some tasty creature to spare. I'll make it worth your while. Hugs, Uvuzi."

He rolled that parchment up and stuck it into his tailfur. Beneath that long brush of hair was a harness strapped to the spine of it, complete with pouches for various small items. At one point he had got into the habit of strapping potential meals in there are well. His tail was massive enough that an entire orc or whatnot could lie under the fur and hardly make a bulge, but then he had to worry about them pissing or vomiting or whatnot. These days he carried less messy things there and future meals in large sacks.

There'd been a time he owned several magical trinkets that made hunting easier, chief among them a ring that deflected arrows. Those were lost now, but at least his hide was intact enough despite his recent harrowing escape from captivity. His possessions were meager and it took only a few minutes to retrieve them from a treetop stash out of reach of most anyone who walked by beneath.

People didn't often think to look thirty feet up a tree for a hollow, whereas he could stand up on his hindpaws and reach it easily. A couple of oversized blankets (one of them nearly waterproof thick wool), a harness with rings and straps for his feral half to carry the rest, a shovel, a couple of sets of homemade bolas that would probably end up being swallowed along with whatever prey they were wrapped around. A heavy wooden staff, a woodchopping axe, a few knives and small tools, a pouch with some herbs and bandages, flint and steel, and finally a second smaller pouch with his small savings of coin. That was it.

Luckily he didn't need shelter as much as smaller creatures, though he avoided the mountains in the snowiest months. What he really hated was a cold rain, and that was about the only weather that could drive him into shelter - assuming shelter large enough for his frame could be had. He'd been sleeping in an abandoned barn until it blew over in a storm a month back.

"Half a league outside of Yarrowton," he read from the inner scroll, "On the north road you will find a marker stone with "Jonas Swenson" chiseled in. Follow the cart trail to the farm, and you will be met at the barn."

Hialfi shrugged. He was welcome in the local towns, but maybe the Maker's representative was so odd as to inspire comment or even hostility. Some people didn't like gul, and they weren't the weirdest or most dangerous creatures serving the Maker.

He knew Yarrowton well and stopped to talk to a baker friend in the town square. He did not ask for, but nevertheless gratefully took two loaves of day-old bread. Prepared food was a luxury. He could rarely afford. Maybe someday he would find a sizable cache of loot in the possessions of a bandit, or catch one with a substantial bounty, but until then he was almost always strapped for cash. The bandits might even empathize were they not usually well on their way through his digestive system by the time he pawned their gear.

On the way out of town he stopped again to talk to the local guards, gathering information on monster sightings, humanoid and bandit raids. He recognized a formerly rusty but now polished breastplate, a good solid shield with its cracks now repaired, and a short bow. Some of the little local towns had half their guards outfitted in gear that once belonged to bandits, largely unaware that the previous owners existed only as a foxtaur's vague memories of previous meals. He doubted they would sleep any better at night knowing so he kept his mouth firmly shut.

There was a report, little more than a rumor really, of a Green dragon sighted well south of the town. That was fine. If it was was who he thought it was, hopefully she would stay well south. Otherwise it would be time for him to head north. Or possibly east. He'd heard the opposite side of the Lortmil mountains was lovely this time of year.

A little while later he found the marker stone and headed obediently down the cart path. A creaky wooden bridge over a stream and a few hundred yards of woods later he came to the farm.

A little fieldstone house with a thatch roof, a low stone wall, and no more than two acres of corn bordered by what looked to be further abandoned fields quickly turning back to woods. It had the sad look of a farm on the way to becoming a ruin, with not enough children to carry on the family agriculture. There was no sign of the inhabitants. The barn, though, was surprisingly large, probably dating to before the fields were reduced, but showed signs of recent repair.

Hialfi shrugged once more. It wasn't his business beyond the twinge of angst at seeing a place so close to ruin. He didn't know the story, after all. Maybe the family was in the process of moving or it was just an old couple making do with what food they could grow. He was just here for the barn.

"You will be met," he said aloud, and slid the barn door open. There were stalls full of chopped firewood and straw, a corn-crib, some turnips hanging on a string, and a faint smell of barn cats there to keep the rats away. Just inside the door sat a square straw basket with a fitted cover. Tied to this was a parchment note.

"Open immediately," went the writing on the note, and there followed the forward-and-back Rs of the Maker. Hialfi settled down on his belly and leaned forward to take the lid off the basket. It wasn't a large thing, barely big enough to hold the bread he'd gotten in town. This wasn't what he expected when he was told he'd be met.

He had no idea what would lie within. A tiny envoy? The next in a series of notes that would eventually lead him to his true destination? A custard pie that would shoot out on a spring?

Or none of the above. In the basket were folds of smooth gray fabric, shiny as silk but with no obvious texture. On one side was a charcoal-gray section and hints of lighter shades as well.

"Right, Maker, you have me curious." His fingers were an inch from touching it when the fabric moved by itself.

Hialfi was a dozen feet away before he consciously reacted. Just as his lower half got him into trouble, its instincts sometimes kept him out of it. Whatever was coming out of that basket, he wanted to know more before he had anything to do with it. Just the same he was curious, and instead of sprinting away he watched the thing emerge. After all, practically nothing could catch him if he decided to run. He knew that from long experience.

As the folds of fabric, shiny and smooth, emerged from the basket a shape became evident. The flattened ringed tail, its bands of charcoal and gray divided by visible zigzag seams, was a strong clue, backed up by dark narrow-fingered hands and feet, each with rubbery claws. Air whistled into the thing through a nozzle at the tip of its tail, and it began to have a real bulk and shape, like a living creature. By the time the bandit-masked face with its black nose and cup-shaped ears appeared he knew what he was looking at.

It was a mock-praka, a smooth-skinned little prakafemme balloon of strange slick fabric. And it was alive. It smiled and looked him over as it inflated. It was a balloon and yet it was alive.

It - she - shook herself as she reached full inflation. From a distance she was now a simple prakafemme; put a dress on her, dim the light a bit, and you'd not know what you were looking at. From this distance, though, he had a good idea what he was seeing. This was clearly some new creation of the Maker, a rubbery little golem or construct.

"Hello, Hialfi," she said in Common, and made a little curtsey. It shouldn't have been a surprise but was. Why wouldn't it speak? And why shouldn't it speak Common? This wasn't a real praka, after all. "My name is Blossom and I am very happy to meet you."

"I'm Hialfi," he said, and remembered that she already knew that. "That is, pleased to meet you. I've never seen anyone like you before, um, Blossom."

"And I've never seen a foxtaur before," she said with a giggle. "I've met a gul-taur (there's only one), and centaurs, and I have met wemics, which are liontaurs, but I've never met a foxtaur. The Maker says you're the only one he knows of and that you are the way you are because of a magical accident."

"That's not quite right. Actually, I'm not sure. It was a Wish that turned me into this from a volpa. I guess you could say it was an accident. What about you, Blossom?"

"You probably think an accident did this to me too, or that the Maker made me," she chittered. Even in Common there was no mistaking the voice of a praka, shaped by her muzzle and fangs. "But no. It turns out there is a kind of rubbery creature that eats others and sometimes, rather than digesting them, blows them back out into a mock-version of their old self. It was a mock-gul that did this to me, and he was transformed in turn by a mock-volpafemme. And what made her that way I could not say."

"And do you eat people?" Hialfi asked. She did not look threatening, but he knew there were praka who could swallow prey their own size or larger. Stretchy as she probably was, though, he was not afraid. She was only four feet tall, if that, and he would outweigh a praka that size a hundredfold. Even balloons had limits to their elasticity.

"Only once," she said without a smile. "At the Maker's command I ate a volpa and transformed him as I was transformed. I did not like to do that, and I do not need to eat much at all, so nowadays I subsist on other things."

"So why are you here, Blossom?" Said Hialfi. "Loyalty to the Maker, who is after all the creator of the volpa and ultimately, me, brings me to this place. I have no idea what interest he has in me, but here I am."

"The Maker has set for himself a new project," chittered the little mock-prakafemme. "He wants to change the praka, all the praka, so they can speak languages other than their praka-speak. He says their lives are hard enough (outside his lands, anyway) without the prejudice that comes from not being able to speak any but their own language. To prepare for this he is studying those of his people that are different, whether via magical alteration or random nature. This will aid him in understanding the changes he must make to an entire race, so he says."

"So he wishes to study me? How long will that take?''

"He only needs a little of you to study. A sample, so to speak. For now anyway."

"All right," Hialfi said. "What sort of sample are we talking about? Fur? Blood? Some magical thing?"

"Well," she said with a twinkle in her eye. "You know I said I don't need to eat much. In fact I live mostly on...donations you might say. Three or four friendly males a day is all it takes. Of course they aren't nearly as big as you are. And I don't have to absorb it all at once. I can leave it in there until I need it...or the Maker does."

Hialfi blinked. "You mean you want to -"

"Oh yes," Blossom said with gusto. "Have I mentioned how elastic I am? Why, I could stretch myself around one of your great foxish legs to the knee. Or around another part of you, I think. And then things would happen, and the Maker would have his sample."

"That is, er," Hialfi said, "But," and he paused. His foxish lower half didn't know how to react to this any more than his brain did. Not even a hint of arousal, which was odd considering what the balloon-raccoon was proposing.

There was an obvious reason not to go along with it, though. "How do I know you won't digest, or rubberize, or whatever it is you do? I'd hate to do without that part or my anatomy. Or any other part for that matter."

"I control it," she said reasonably. "I would very soon run out of lovers if I were at all predatory, and the Maker would turn me into a pool toy. And you are very strong. I don't want to be torn apart by an angry fox any more than you want to lose your dangly bits."

"Well," Hialfi said, and he felt the first stirrings of lust as his feral half finally perceived that fun might be had here, "Are you sure this will work? I've had women your size (well, a little bigger) rub themselves against me, but you want more than that."

"Why don't we find out," she said with a smile, and with that she turned, went down all fours and lifted her tail.

That was an invitation his feral self wasn't going to ignore, even when a tiny female offered it, and Hialfi was just a passenger riding on his four-legged lower half as it stepped forward over her. Somehow it had access to his senses and just as it enthusiastically mounted the giant badger female he'd met a few months back even as he apologized to the badger's rider, so it lowered its haunches to mount this much smaller mate.

It was the trickiest coupling it -- he'd -- ever attempted. His few other visits with small females had amounted to them rubbing themselves against his sheath, shaft and assorted naughty bits until certain uncontrollable and messy things happened. He'd left a pair of volpafemmes with their fur matted down by dripping fox goo when they'd rewarded him for eating a few troublesome gnolls. Actual insertion was simply out of the question with such small females and luckily there'd never been a situation in which his anything but picky lower half was tempted to do what it was doing now.

By all rights it shouldn't have worked. One of his paws was as large as her entire body and he couldn't even see the faux-prakafemme past his feral half's chest. There was scarcely a brush of latex against his bellyfur to tell him where she was. Yet either by good luck or because she moved as he did, the next thing he felt was an indescribable stretchy grip around the tip of his shaft as it met some faux-praka orifice or other.

That was enough for his feral half and his haunches lurched forward. A mix of rubbery squeak and startled yelp came from beneath his belly and the stretchy grip around his tip suddenly encompassed as much of him as was unsheathed. That was nearly all of his length and as fast as the rest popped from its furry home his feral half's uncontrollable thrusting squeezed it into the rubbery little raccoon.

Just because he couldn't see what was going on or control his lower half's lusty nature didn't mean he couldn't feel it, and it'd been a long while since snug female sex, or rubber, or whatever had stretched itself around his shaft. Hialfi let out a yelp of his own and leaned forward. He just had to see what was happening.

He immediately wished he hadn't. There below his belly was Blossom with fingers and toes wedged between the cracks of the floorboard and tail flipped off to one side. That part wasn't disturbing; even anthropomorphic foxes and raccoons knew all about 'feral style'. It wouldn't have been odd at all if she had a normal-sized praka male or even a feral one humping her for all he was worth. Or, for that matter, a volpa male, or even a gul. Anything reasonably sized might find a cute a little prakafemme's invitation appealing.

But he wasn't something reasonably sized. He was used to his own proportions, and his shaft was presumably perfectly normal for a two-ton fox. It just wasn't normal to see thirty-plus inches of shaft stuffed into a female who wasn't that tall from crotch to eartips. She was stretched, deformed into a fox-penis shape, her torso and neck bulged out and his tip pushing her muzzle forward into a penis-tip-shape with each hump. It was horrifying.

His lower half didn't care, and he rapidly lost his aversion to it as well, because though she was stretched so thin he could see a shadow of red fox cock through her hide, there was still the tantalizing tightness wrapped around him from balls to tip. Smooth and slick rubber slid over and around him with each thrust, and though she wobbled and bent each time almost all of his shaft stayed inside. As he humped and thrust the fingertip-thick rubber of her torso squeezed him, whether though some weird muscular action or the suction created by her clinging elastic body.

He'd never felt anything like it, and it didn't take long for the inevitable to happen. Hialfi shuddered, his haunches bucking as his big feral body reached its climax, and through glazed-over eyes he actually saw himself come. Oh, he'd seen that before, whether it be the rare small female rubbing him off or his own hand wrapped around his shaft, but never before had he simultaneously been inside a female and been able to see it happen.

The experience got weirder still as gouts of fox spooge appeared behind her deformed face and failed to emerge through her mouth. Even though his tip fully occupied her head and pushed her muzzle out of shape so her rubbery black nose rode like an ornament on the half-visible foxcock, she kept her elastic jaws firmly shut. Trapped between his erection and the thin-stretched gray and black rubber skin, a quart or more of fox goo spread downward. A milky haze obscured the red shadow to pink as the first bout of shuddering ended.

Of course that wasn't the end of it. The slight swelling at the root of his shaft felt the tightness of her stretched rubber body and in its mindless way reacted as it would to any female sex wrapped around itself. Swiftly it swelled into a knot the size of her whole lower body, bulging her out round as a fruit and preventing - at least, were she any normal female - any attempt to dismount. From groin to muzzle she was stuffed full of fox, and though the great gush of seed had ended the tightness around his knot milked more out of him by the second. It would be half an hour, perhaps more, before that flow stopped and by then a whole gallon of watery goo would lie in the space between flesh and rubber.

Hialfi winced. Of his few appropriately sized lovers, most hadn't appreciated this part at all. Oh, the dragoness, twice his size, hadn't cared, and the hell hound and winter wolf bitches were well accustomed to being tied to their mate until the knot went down. His other lovers had been pained or angered. He'd lost half an ear to an enraged sphinx when she did not take at all well to the pumpkin-sized knot, and before that a griffoness had savagely clawed him for failing to let her know about it beforehand. He'd been lucky not to lose an eye.

But this was not a lover made of flesh and bone. Blossom wasn't pained, and the smile on her stretched face showed it. Her rubbery claws slipped once more into the cracks in the floor and though stretched like elastic around his shaft and knot she began to rock forward and back. With lubricating fox goo layered between shaft and rubber the sensation was different, but still much like a normal mating, and he didn't complain when his haunches once more began to rise and fall. A weird squeaking and squelching noise accompanied the thrusts as air trapped in her rubber body bubbled to and fro, and Hialfi for once was not merely waiting for his knot to go down but enjoying every minute of the long slow orgasm.

Eventually they lay side by side, Blossom nestled against his flank. She'd pulled herself off his still half-inflated knot without difficulty, her flexible body returning to its normal shape, and as long as she didn't move much there was no sloshing sound to remind him that six or eight pounds of fox semen remained in her body cavity.

"When the note mentioned that I would be rewarded for showing, this wasn't what I expected," Hialfi mused, and Blossom giggled. After a moment the smile left her face.

"Did you change your name, Hialfi? When you changed into what you are now?"

"Of course not," he said lightly, but then he saw she was serious. "Why would I?"

"A clean break," the the faux-praka said. "After I ate the volpa and transformed him, I knew I didn't want my parents or friends to know what I had become. They only knew I had disappeared. The Maker agreed to send word that I and my lover had been killed by a monster that was itself killed by hunters. I changed my name to honor my mother, Summer's-Blossom. Blossom is a common enough name among praka that no one would make the connection, even if they guessed the Maker didn't create me."

"I already had that break," Hialfi said. "There was no way I could live in my home town any more. The buildings were all too small, no one wants leather goods - my trade - made by someone with fingers as thick as a man's arms. I left and I've never been back."

It was his turn to pause. "And then there were the werewolves. They had made my life hell, and just after I changed I beat three of them to a pulp and while they were recovering from that I swallowed them whole. I was so angry I wasn't thinking straight but it turns out that werewolves, supposedly vulnerable only to silver or magic, are nevertheless digestible. I'm not proud of doing that, but it was a strong reason to leave. If I had stayed I'd surely have come under suspicion, and at least I had a full belly to see me on my way."

"I don't want to eat people," he continued. "But I have to eat. I have to hunt for food and orcs, goblins and bandits outnumber deer. I even get bounties sometimes."

"I'm not judging you," the little balloon-praka said. "I need meat to survive, too, but not very much, and it turns out that gul- and volpa- and praka-seed, and all the other male's' too, is close enough. Once a week or so someone catches me a fat rat and that plus the seed seems to be all I need. I have a choice beyond 'Eat people or starve.' You don't."

"It would be nice to be a volpa again," Hialfi said. "But it could be worse."

Blossom smiled. "But about that reward."

"It was fun," the foxtaur said. "I don't have many, er, meetings that I remember fondly. Some of them give me nightmares. There was this dragoness...suffice it to say that I wasn't a willing partner."

"I was," she said, and patted his flank. "But that wasn't the reward. It was just me convincing you to provide the sample. No, the reward is something else."

Hialfi watched her root around in the straw basket, which had gotten batted into a corner by a swipe of his tail during their mating. Soon enough she surfaced with a small ceramic jar.

"This," she said, "Is...someone-or-other's ointment. I forget. It's a magical healing salve. It can counter poisons, close wounds. It can also heal scars, however old and healed they are. It's quite an uncommon item, and it is all yours."

Wonderingly he took the jar, so large in her little hands but almost unmanageably tiny in his. She had to help him open it; it was no larger than one of his claws. He ended up using a claw to apply it, too, as his fingertip just wouldn't fit in the jar.

The first thing he thought of was his ear, or half-an-ear, raggedly healed after being bitten off by the enraged sphinxess. He rubbed the salve along the scarred end and watched in the mirror Blossom pulled from the basket as flesh and fur and cartilage grew back. There was a warm tingle as his ear restored itself, and just like that the years-gone mistake was corrected. His ear was whole again.

The scar across his eye and the ones on his chest were next, and within five minutes they too were gone. Wounds he thought he'd carry to his grave were knitted, scars healed into smooth fox skin once again. It was a marvel.

He wasn't sure what to say. It had been so long since he'd been hurt that he had gotten used to the irritation of furless, scarred skin. He got sunburned there sometimes, which was not problem he usually had. Now he was whole again, unscarred.

"Thank you," he said sincerely.

"It was nothing," she said, and patted a fox toe bigger than her head. "The Maker can be generous, and you're more fun than some of the people he's sent me to. The last one was an enormous feral praka, some sort of experimental accident. About your size, but heavier. Fat. I got the donation out of him easily enough but then he up and stuffed me into his muzzle. Luckily he didn't have a tooth in his head but that didn't stop him from swallowing me. I'm made of latex! The only thing he swallowed worth any calories was his own seed, and that was in my stomach. Luckily the Maker anticipated he might not be trustworthy and gave me a way to Teleport away."

"And do you have a way to Teleport away from me, I wonder," Hialfi asked. Blossom just smiled.

"If you ate me I'd just go all the way through." She said. "I did that once. It's icky. It'd take someone with a really strong stomach to digest me, like a dragon, and the only dragon I've met, I met the way I just met you." She swayed from side to side and Hialfi had to grin as she sloshed.

"It's been a pleasure to meet you, Blossom," Hialfi said, and reached town to cuddle her close. "I don't have many friends I can talk to like this."

She stroked the fur on the back of his hand, a hand as large as her entire body. "It's been nice to meet you too, Hialfi." A smile curled her chops. "You already know I'm very stretchy. Why, one or two more donations wouldn't strain me at all, even ones as big as the ones you deliver."

"I think we should test that theory," Hialfi said with a smile of his own. He was already rising to his feet, and Blossom's grin widened as she glanced beneath his belly. The foxtaur took a long step forward and the little rubbery raccoon opened her mouth.

It occurred to her as she once more stretched over his shaft that if they had a suitably sized female here she could both swallow the fox's cock and be shoved into his mate as he thrust. She'd never done that yet.

There wasn't such a female available, though. It was just her and a big, horny fox, and that was fine.