“Welcome back, Abby,” Kathy said, looking up from the computer, where she’d been doing some shopping. Then she looked at Kendala. “So, did it work?”

“I got a scorching hot kiss,” Kendala said proudly.

“Great!” The two women high-fived, and I wondered if I’d been had. Well, there were worse ways to be had, since I fully agreed with Kendala’s description of the kiss.

“Well,” I said. “If I’m not needed for anything, I have some errands to run on Earth.” I filled them in on the situation with the elves and demons.

“What are you getting?” Kathy asked. “I might need you to pick up something.”

“Well, I need to get a really big printer from the computer store. I assume we aren’t providing PCs to the orcs and trolls yet.”

“No,” Kathy agreed. “One troll on the internet is plenty.”

“Hey,” Gren said. “I resemble that remark. Oh, and Abby, it’s okay if I set up my Only Fans now, right?”

“Still no.”

“How long are you going to keep saying no?”

“As long as you’re blue,” I said.

“That’s racism!”

“It’s reality,” I said. “Sorry. Feel free to flash all of us, though.”

Gren grinned at Kendala. “Hey, want to pose for a selfie with me?”

“Do I!” Kendala said.

“Okay,” Kathy said. “So where else are you going?”

“To my doctor’s, if I can get an appointment.”

Kathy frowned. “What could be wrong that Valeria can’t fix?”

“I need a Viagra prescription.”

“You? Oh my god. And with four wives! No wonder you’ve been pushing off Kendala. But you have so much else to bring to the bedroom, Abby, I think –”

I rolled my eyes. “Not for me. For the Archfiend.”

“Does Viagra even work on demons?” Kathy said. “I mean, it’s a decent idea, but…”

“Well, I have a demon body, as you know. So I can try it out on me first.”

“What’s Viagra?” Gren asked.

I looked over. She and Kendala were taking topless selfies, making sure that their boobs were touching in each one.

Kathy explained before I could.

Kendala’s eyes widened. “So she’d be insatiable!”

I was suspicious of the gleam in her eyes. “I don’t think it works that way. It’s really for people who have difficulty, um, getting it going. Like the Archfiend.”

“No one would have difficulty getting it going around me,” Kendala said. She frowned at me. “Or so I always believed.”

“Abby doesn’t have difficulty,” Gren told her. “She’s horribly hard around you. It’s just that she has something called ethics.”

“Oh. Can’t Valeria cure that?”

Gren shook her head. “Valeria has it too. A bad case. The best one can do apparently is make it situational.”

“Don’t make me make you ladies read Kant,” I said.

Kendala shrugged. “I don’t know what Kant is, but I can’t read, anyway.”

“Well, if you can’t read, you can’t read Kant,” I agreed.

Kathy frowned. “No Kant/can’t puns around here.”

“But I didn’t!” I protested.

Eventually, I escaped. I got an appointment for the next morning, not with my regular doctor but with a physician’s assistant, which I figured should be fine. And I bought a gigantic printer, made for printing out posters. I would have liked to just have the poster printed, but I knew anyone who would do it would have questions, and possibly objections, to printing out a nude. They might also ask about the setting, and the pointy ears, and I expected to have further commercial use for the big printer anyway.

On a whim, I stopped by a used bookstore and picked up a lot of children’s books. If we could teach Gruush and Kendala to read, that could come in handy down the line. In fact, if more orcs in general could read, maybe they’d be a bit more peaceful, although I wasn’t sure literacy had actually had that effect on Earth.

I printed out two copies of “Queen Maeve, reclined,” and put them both in cardboard tubes. I noticed there was now a letter-sized picture of Kendala and Gren groping each other on the wall.

“Where did Kendala and Gren go?” I asked Kathy, who was lounging in one of chairs outside, working remotely.

Kathy shrugged. “I don’t know. They used the printer a bunch, and I think the toner is low. Then they left with a bunch of papers in their hands.”

“Ah,” I said. What else was there to say?

“What could possibly go wrong?” Lesseth said.

“Nothing is going to go wrong,” Valeria told me.

“Right.”

Kendala and Gren didn’t come back until the wee hours of the morning, when I was sleeping with Xyla in the woods. But when I went back to the crypt, I saw them at the computer.

“We exchanged a bunch of pictures for gold from the trolls,” Kendala said. “And credits for the orcs. And now Kathy says she’ll let us buy things off the internet in exchange for the gold! So we’re shopping for outfits.” She pointed at the screen, and said to Gren, “I think you should buy that one.”

I suppose a strap-on harness was technically an outfit. Maybe.

“I’ll pound you all night long. A rough ravishing,” Gren said.

“Promises, promises.”

“Oh, hi Abby,” Gren said. “I didn’t mean tomorrow night, of course. Tomorrow night’s my night with Abby. Right Abby?”

“Right.”

“The night after?” Kendala said.

“Yeah. If it arrives in time. Yep, next day shipping!”

The two girls high-fived.

I went upstairs to Earth, holding back a smile until my back was to them. Kendala was getting her needs met, and I didn’t have to be involved. Okay, being involved wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, qualms aside, but it wasn’t as if I was lacking for opportunities to have sex. I didn’t have to go to bed with every beautiful woman I met.

I arrived at the doctor’s a few minutes early; the PA saw me only a few minutes late.

“So what’s the problem, Mr. Thorson?” she asked. She was my age, a bit on the short side, with a nice bright white lab coat. She was pretty.

I felt one should be able to tell one’s doctor anything, and I always interviewed them to make sure that they were up to being told anything about sex, especially. As a poly person, I couldn’t be hiding the fact that I had multiple partners from my doctor.

However, there were limits. “I’m having trouble, er, performing. You know, in bed,” I lied.

She raised her eyebrows. “You’re very young for that,” she said. “It could be part of an underlying problem. We should check your testosterone levels.”

“I was hoping you could get me a Viagra prescription in the meantime? You see, I have a date tonight.”

She shook her head. “We’ll need to do some tests first. We don’t just want to give you a pill when something else is wrong.”

I shook my head. “I don’t mind you doing your tests, but this is an emergency.”

“Really, Mr. Thorson? I’ll make a deal with you. If you let us do the tests, and promise to come back if there’s an issue, I’ll write you the prescription for six pills, no refills.”

“Alright,” I said.

“Now take your pants off.”

“Sorry?”

“I need to look to see if there’s anything physically wrong.”

“Oh. Sure.”

I pulled down my pants, and she got close to my junk. Then it hit me. The one thing I absolutely could not do was get an erection.

If I hadn’t had that thought, it would have been easy. She was a professional, nice-looking but there were lots of nice-looking women in the world. We were just doing a doctor visit. But the knowledge that I couldn’t have a reaction made it harder. Literally.

“May I touch it?” she asked.

“If you have to.”

She nodded, clinically moving it this way and that. “Mr. Thorson,” she said. “Blood flow seems normal.”

“It might be partially in my head,” I said. “I get nervous sometimes.”

“Ah. I’ll have to check your prostate. Bend over, please.”

I bent over. I heard a glove snap. Did she have to do that?

A moment later a lubed finger slid inside me. She managed to find the same spot Lesseth had gotten to a few weeks before. “Gah.”

“Prostate is normal. Turn around.”

“I’d um, rather not.” Cold showers. Nuclear war. Income Tax. I thought of every non-sexy topic I could think of, and none of it helped.

“Nonsense, Mr. Thorson. Trust me, I’ve seen it all.”

I turned. Her eyes widened. “Why did you need Viagra, again?”

I needed to come up with something. “I can’t get everyone to stick their finger up my ass – and for the rest…”

“Oh.” She turned away, and asked me what my pharmacy was. I told her, and she wired in a prescription. “Have a good day, Mr. Thorson.”

“You had tests you wanted to do?”

“No,” she said, her face turning red. “I think your testosterone levels are probably just fine.”

“Right.”

She got up and left without shaking hands.

I sighed, and put my clothes back on. We passed each other in the hall, and avoided looking at each other. Then I headed to the drug store to pick up the script.

The generic, Sildenafil, only cost me twenty bucks, and I noticed she’d given me several refills. I guess she didn’t want to see me again. I was embarrassed, but an involuntary physical reaction is what it is. The weird thing was, I had no problem keeping it down on a nude beach. Of course, a lot had happened to me since the last time I was on a nude beach.

I headed back to Amaranth, eager to get going. I sought out Xyla, and explained to her what I had to do. She pouted, but in the end, she understood.

This time, I could take Gren along, and not hide Lesseth.

And, we rode bicycles. I had some repeater stations to drop off on the way, so hopefully we’d be able to be in radio contact with Kathy at home base the whole time.

The first of those stations went in our trading post in the orc village. Inka came out to greet us. “I heard Kendala got a kiss.”

I gave into the inevitable, and kissed her. She pushed her body against me and milked it for all it was worth, and reminded me once again that I didn’t really need the Sildenafil. She noticed, and grinned. “Staying long?”

I shook my head. “Sorry, Inka.”

“Next time, maybe. But at least let me show you the books. We’re making an incredible profit.”

We were. I wasn’t sure how much I cared about the profit per se, but the fact that everyone was peacefully trading and that people’s lives were getting better? That was awesome.

I noticed a picture of Kendala and Gren on the front of the counter but said nothing. “Well, thank you Inka. You’re doing a great job.”

She turned bright green. “Aw! Thank you Abby!”

“Darling!” said a voice from the doorway. I turned, and there was Zargaza, in a very tight leather bandeau top and a very short leather skirt.

“Uh, hi Zargaza, nice to see you.”

She strode forward. “I heard Kendala got a kiss.”

“Yes. Did I violate some orc custom?”

“I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to fuck her,” Zargaza said.

“I’m a little odd,” I said.

“I don’t know why you’re so reluctant to fuck me,” she said, moving closer.

“Just getting to know you better, that’s all.”

“How can you get to know me better when you’re hardly ever here?” She brightened. “But then, that’s why you’re here now, isn’t it, darling?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just passing through.”

She rolled her eyes. And then she grabbed me and kissed me, hard, pushing her tongue between my startled but not completely unwilling lips.

She let me go after a few minutes. To be fair, I could have teleported away at any time.

“You just need me to be the aggressor,” she said. “I get it now.”

I shook my head. But then I wondered. One of the draws to poly, for me, was the idea that my partners were happy for my happiness, whether that occurred with them or with someone else, and I could be the same for them. But another was variety. Some people needed more of it than others. The other women I knew let me take the lead – even Xyla, most of the time.

So I smiled at Zargaza, and said, “I’ll stop in on the way back.”

“Way back from where?” she asked.

“Secret mission,” I said.

“Oh. A big secret?”

Gren made a gesture to indicate about a foot long.

“Ah,” said Zargaza. “One of those kinds of missions.”