Untitled Work (futa x male eventually, little-to-no-sex, low fantasy setting)

Story by XTheObscure

This is the very beginning of a story set in a fantasy universe of sorts - if I continue it. I'm mostly posting it here because I don't know where else that I have an account on I can put a fantasy setting that A: has an odd and a bit fetishistic take of some species (particularly elves and goblins) and B: At least starts in a location that is modeled loosely after the 1940s-70s Midwestern US and industrial regions of northern England.

Prologue

If it were alive, the Oliphaunt would have a long memory. A bar so old it was once a tavern and inn, what was once a way-station for travelers and a convenient starting point for adventures (big and small...mostly small, to be honest) now served as a watering hole for factory workers. The town of Greaves had grown up about the Oliphaunt; it was now a city of sixty thousand with two paper mills, a steel mill, several brickyards, many machine shops, a flouring mill, and a candy factory. The place was once a tiny dot surrounded by a vast wilderness marked 'Here There Be Dragons' without any irony, now it was the intersection of three provincial roads and a freeway was under construction not five kilometers away.

However, though there might be electric lights rather than candles, and the clientele might include more machinists than adventurers, but the Oliphaunt still served the same fundamental purpose: A place to drink. Never an evening went by when the bar lacked customers of all shapes, sizes, and colors.

Dave looked into his rum-and-soda. His buddies weren't happy; the steel mill wasn't doing well and rumor had it a shift was going to be cut, putting them all in danger of being laid off. Nobody wanted to bring it up, so they just didn't talk and quietly drank their drinks. To his left, Bill was gulping down entirely too much stout for his own good; to his right, Bjorn had given up his normal cocktails in favor of a full glass of whiskey, and was also drinking a bit fast, even getting whiskey into his beard.

Dave himself wasn't quite as depressed; nothing said the factory would be laying off computer-men, and anyway industrial control system management was a growing field. Some of the others in the bar might have a grudge against an agent of automation, but not Bill or Bjorn, they were nice guys (well, Bjorn was a nice Dwarf) and anyways most everyone liked to blame the big bad bosses, not the slightly-higher-paid guy who went for a drink with you on Friday evenings. But he was still a bit down; he had no one to talk to and having half a drink had rendered him dangerously philosophical.

What's his life like? Every day, long hours programming the computer system that made Jorvik Steel's mill in Greaves operate, as his drinking buddies worked in the foundry. Taking instructions from the plant engineers on what needed to be computed, translating it into computer instructions, punching it into tape, telling the girls who physically handled the hardware what adjustments needed to be made, then feeding the punched tape into the machine, waiting for the machine to make its calculations (hoping that the machine didn't choose to malfunction - a vacuum tube burning out at the wrong time could be disastrous), retrieving the output tape punched by the machine, translating the results into something that could be understood by engineers, and handing it off to them. It paid well and was honest enough work, but.... honestly, it was kind of dull after awhile. Yes, he had friends, but really all they did was come here and drink, and maybe attend a football game (which Dave found drearily dull, to be honest - two mobs of men kicking a spherical ball around). He wanted....well, excitement or adventure. Maybe at the very least someone to come home to? Was even that too much to ask?

Dave looked over at the small stage where the bar's band was playing. The regular band was on the instruments - old blind Ben on the piano, Rr'x'ss on saxophone, and Giacomo on the drums - but the singer was new. She was tall, lithe, pale, and - there was no better word for it - enchanting. Her long, flowing, shock-white hair, ruby eyes and a smile which could melt wolframite. And her voice....Dave was at a loss for words. He found himself staring at her. It took him quite some time to notice that her delicate, gentle ears ended in graceful points, though if he were thinking he'd probably have realized what she was by now. But he didn't really care. Two orcs were fighting in the back of the bar over something trivial; Dave didn't care about that either. He barely noticed when the bartender replaced the drink in his hands with a fresh one.

The spell was finally broken by Bjorn, who had noticed where Dave's attention had gone. "Lad, you know she's an elf right and, well..."

Dave looked over at Bjorn and said. "Of course I know. I'm not blind and I passed biology." He paused for a moment, then said. "She's still...intoxicating."

Bjorn simply shrugged and went back to drinking,

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