We found ourselves in a raucous tavern, with stout oak beams layered with graffiti, scratched wooden tables, and rickety bar stools. On two of the tables, strategically placed, danced elves, one male and one female, each mostly undressed and losing more clothes by the minute.

There were orcs, trolls, and humans in the tavern, mixed in with the elves, and a few races I hadn’t encountered before. A large, cow headed woman whose rough dress didn’t quite manage to disguise the shape of her four breasts sat alone at a table, despite the shortage of seats. And there was someone with scales and a forked tongue that kept popping out between his sharp teeth, although he was more popular for some reason, as he had an elf babe on each arm. I wondered at that.

“Just imagine what he can do with that tongue!” Gren said, staring.

I quit wondering. Okay, sure. Although I suspected Lesseth could do all he could do, and more. It was a shame I couldn’t let her out.

“So,” said our guide, a male elf named Uriel. “This is The Brown Leaf, the most notorious bar in all of Elfland.”

“Do you intend to close this den of depravity down, Abby?” Valeria asked. “It might create a diplomatic incident.”

“Of course not.” Honestly, I didn’t see what was so depraved about it. Sure, you couldn’t run a place like this in Rockville. The nudity, for one thing. And the waitress pinching that seemed to be going on, accompanied by laughter and giggles – sure, it looked consensual, but when someone was getting paid for their labor, that –

“Let’s go set down next to her,” I said, gesturing to the one table that had seats.

“Her?” said Uriel, looking horrified.

“Yeah.” I walked over, and smiled at the cow woman. “Hi. I’m Abby. Mind if me and my wives sit down?”

“Here?” asked the cow woman. “Ah. There are no other seats. Go right ahead. Make yourself comfortable.”

“Sure.” I perched on a stool, and it didn’t give way, which I thought was a victory. My table companion must have been twice my weight, though, and she seemed okay, although there was a bit of a methane smell about her. Gren and Valeria took seats at my flanks. “What’s your name?”

“Me? Oh, I’m Betsy.”

“Ah, we use that name for girls where I come from, too,” I said. And cows, too, for that matter, but I didn’t say that.

“Oh.”

Gren grinned at her. “I’m Gren. And this is Valeria.”

Valeria gestured to our guide, who didn’t look like he wanted to be introduced. “And this is Uriel.”

“Hi Gren. Hi Valeria. Hi Ur – um.” Betsy seemed to stop at the look at Uriel’s face. “You all aren’t from around these parts, are you?”

“No,” I replied.

“Abby has been brought from afar so that she can paint a picture of the Queen,” Gren said.

“Ssshhhh,” Uriel said, looking about. A waitress came by with clear glass mugs of some dark red liquid, and I signaled for her to serve the whole table. She plunked a bunch down.

“What?” Gren said. “It’s not like I told her about Abby’s cock or anything!”

Betsy started laughing. I practiced my deep breathing. Uriel stood, looking awkward, and glancing around to see if anyone was noticing us.

They were. A fair number of them had stared as we entered, and I’d noticed more than a few checking me out.

“What’s so funny?” asked Valeria.

“A woman like that, has a dildo?” Betsy asked. “I mean, she’s gorgeous! I reckon any man in this place would be happy to try to wrangle her!”

“Sometimes men are just too much trouble,” I said, trying to salvage something. “So high maintenance.”

“How ‘bout you, pardner?” Betsy asked, staring at Uriel. “Are you high maintenance?”

Uriel simply nodded.

“I’d have to rope you up nice and tight, wouldn’t I?”

“Ah, rope,” Valeria said dreamily.

Uriel shuddered.

Gren leaned over to Betsy. “It’s not that she has a dildo, and anyway I don’t think she’s into men really. Although maybe she’s just waiting for the right one. It’s that she has a real cock, just like a man!”

“Just like a man?” Betsy asked.

“Except bigger. A most puissant pussy-thruster!”

“And she’s really good with rope, too,” Valeria said.

Okay, I couldn’t control the conversation, so I just leaned back and sipped the concoction in front of me. It tasted pretty strong, like extra-fortified port or something.

“Wait,” said Uriel, looking between me and Gren. “What do you mean she has a real cock?”

“I wonder,” Gren said, “If they’d let you dance on the table and show everyone what you have?”

“Oh,” Betsy said, “Those people work at this here saloon, I don’t reckon that they’d much cater to people just jumping on the tables and dancing. Although they might make an exception for Abby.”

I sipped some more elvish wine. I was not getting in the middle of this. Better just to observe. I watched the dancers. I took in the ambience. I listened to my wives chatter with Betsy, and enjoyed seeing Uriel squirm. The wine was really good.

“That long?” Betsy asked, her big cow eyes widening further.

“A bountiful boast, but true!” Gren said.

“Do you like being tied up?” Valeria asked.

“I’d rather do the wrangling, if you catch my drift,” Betsy said.

Uriel finally sat down on the remaining chair, although he pulled it a bit away from the table, and started sipping the wine. He turned to me, and we clinked mugs, and took another drink.

Mine was empty, but this time Uriel signaled the waitress, and it got replaced. He groped her, and she playfully swatted him away. Gross, right? “You shouldn’t do that,” I told him. “It’s a conshent violation.”

Uriel shrugged. “Do what?”

“Grope the waitresh.”

“She likes it!”

“She worksh here, she doesn’t have a choice.”

“She chose to work here!”

“She probably can’t leave without losing her health insurance,” I replied, proving to myself I wasn’t drunk by not slurring a single word. I took another sip of wine. It wasn’t that strong, I decided. I could totally handle it.

“They speak some strange lingo around here,” Betsy said. “But I do think you’re the strangest, friend Abby.”

“Hmf,” I said. “Is it hot in here?”

“Not particularly,” Gren said.

I fanned myself, pulling at my neckline to get some air on my chest. “Seems hot to me.”

Gren looked at my chest. “Now I feel hotter, too.”

Uriel looked, too.

“So,” Valeria said. “I’ve been to a few bars, and I’ve never seen a cowgirl in one before.”

“Yeah, normally it’s the menfolk who go to foreign bars.” Betsy said.

“Minotaurs!”

“Yeah. They hire themselves out sometimes, to people who want a big man who knows his way around a sword.”

“Are you a swordswoman, too?” Valeria asked.

“No,” Betsy said. “I like to use a big club. You guys need a mercenary? Or just a bodyguard?” She looked hopeful.

“Abby,” Uriel said stiffly, in a quiet voice, “Is under royal protection.”

“Oh,” Betsy said. “Must be nice. Why are you all in this dive, then?”

“I wanted to shee,” I said. “See. She her.”

We were getting a lot of attention, I noticed. Well, no wonder. Valeria and Gren were the best-looking women in the whole place, and I was with them. Everyone was probably jealous of me, and that’s why they were checking me out, trying to figure out what I had going for me that I was with such gorgeous babes, and apparently deciding it had something to do with my chest. Well, they couldn’t see my brains, so I guess they had to fix on something, and they’d settled on my chest.

I felt it, to make sure it was still there, and all. I had boobs. Oh, right. I remember now. I was a hot demon necromancer seducer, with all sorts of bonuses to attractiveness or something like that. I could even cast spells. All because of these delightful, squeezable orbs on my chest. Or not because, really. Anyway, it was all connected somehow.

People kept staring. I suppose they couldn’t help themselves.

“The wine at the palace is much better,” Uriel said.

“Hard to believe,” I replied.

“It is true,” Uriel said, a bit snootily, “that foreign palates tend to be uneducated ones.”

I remembered not fully appreciating the top-shelf brandy Kathy had brought over to get me drunk on, and didn’t argue the point.

Then, at another table, an elf knocked over a troll’s drink. The troll shoved the elf so hard he fell off his table and into the bar. Two of the elf’s friends tackled the troll.

The female table dancer, now totally naked, cracked one of the friends over the head with a mug. Someone grabbed her from behind, although it wasn’t clear whether it was a fight move or a grope. An orc hit that guy with a chair, and the girl squirmed away.

An elf got on a table, and then dove into the fray from there. Not effective, but dramatic.

“No fighting in the bar!” yelled the bartender, the most rotund elf I’d seen yet.

“We’re not in the bar!” yelled someone back. “We’re in the seating area.”

“In the tavern, then!”

“Take down a wall and we can fight all we want!” said someone with a creative sense of topology. “Then it will be an unbounded space, and in will have no meaning!”

I knew better to get involved, which put me one up on a good chunk of the denizens of the Brown Leaf. Pretty soon, fists, mugs, and chairs were flying around the place at a dizzying rate. But if you got involved in a fracas like this, pretty soon you’d end up chatting with some dwarf who thanked you for helping him out and who wanted you to go to some underground lair to rescue somebody or other, and I had a naked queen to take pictures of in the morning. So I just watched, and enjoyed the rather remarkable beverage in my hand.

All the commotion wasn’t cooling me down any. Why had I worn such a long dress, anyway? Elegant, but not really made for bar hopping. If only I could ditch it somehow, maybe change into something else. There had to be a bathroom around somewhere.

“Bathroom?” I asked.

“This is a saloon, not an inn. You can’t take a bath here, pardner,” Betsy said.

“Restroom? Water closet? Toilet? Latrine?”

The last one finally hit, and Betsy pointed. I followed her directions, and changed into a tank top and a short skirt. My bra peeked out from under the shirt, but that’s okay, I was an eccentric artist. I also took advantage of the opportunity to pee.

I’m not going to describe the latrine, other than to say that it was different than a bathroom at an IHOP, the differences were not in its favor, and the less said the better.

The fight was still going on when I got back, so I settled in, drank some wine, and enjoyed the local culture.

“Shouldn’t we stop all this, Abby?” Valeria said.

“What, with more violence?”

“Well, maybe a distraction?” Valeria said.

“Oh, fine,” I said. I climbed up on the table, and yelled, “Hey, everyone!”

It made sense at the time. People did stop and look, but I knew that I had a fragile hold on their attention, and I wasn’t sure what to say.

So I took my top off.

I’m not sure the table was precisely level, either, but I managed to balance on it somehow, and dance. The fight stopped. I tossed a few strategic spells around, and people yelled for me to ditch the skirt, which seemed perfectly reasonable. I was still pretty warm. I bent over, which was popular, and grabbed my mug of wine so that I could have another good swallow for my parched throat.

Then I slid the skirt off.

I wasn’t sure what happened after that. I know I kept using magic. I remember people chanting, “Girl cock! Girl cock!” all around the bar, and Gren taking pictures with her camera.

The next thing I knew, I was at the palace with a gigantic headache, and light was streaming in the window. Valeria was shaking me, trying to get me to wake up. Gren was giving me a blowjob, possibly with the same intent.

“Lemme sleep,” I said.

“You have an audience with the queen,” Valeria said. “You have to get up.”

Lysandra was just inside the door, shaking her head.