This was probably the most entertaining request that hit my inbox during Eldarya Sin Week May 2017. ^_^ The prompt? What happens if Ezarel chooses to write hentai fiction (i.e. smut) about himself and the Guardian?

Writing is an outlet, isn't it? So my guess is, the steaminess of Ezarel's smutty writings is directly proportional to how many headaches he receives in a single day.

In my mind, Ezarel gets a lot of headaches. Valkyon would be proud. ;)

The Alchemist's Notebook

Everything that could possibly go wrong with this synthesis had gone very wrong. Or at least, that was what the half-pint of rancid amber liquid sitting in the final distillation still seemed determined to tell them.

The lab now smelled like the bottom of a fresh ogre pit. After seeing a fifteen-ogre orgy, and then a geriatric dragon coming in at the last moment to piss on everything.

"Cernunnos' prick!" Ezarel huffed, or as much as he could with two cotton wads rolled up and stuck into his nostrils. "It'll take days to complete aerate this place!" With a sharp jerk, he tore the last curtain off its rings—stained with sour fumes– and heaved it into the arms of his lab assistant. Which were currently stacked chin-high with all the other unlucky fabrics that had been near enough to collect the smell of their final product.

"Don't be so dramatic: it won't take more than four if we scrub the ceiling," the Guardian quipped. Ezarel shot her a look over his shoulder, but with the collar of her shirt pulled over her nose and mouth, he couldn't make more of her expression besides the deadpan stare of her eyes.

Really, if she made one more smart remark now, he would add 'look for a new lab ass(istant)' to his ever-burgeoning list of things-to-do. No joke.

The batch of banana oil they were synthesizing would have been worth at least a few hundred maana, seeing as a few drops could be used from anything for rich food flavoring, to tactical diplomatic gifts, to inexpensive lures and diversions for hostile faeries with a weakness for the rare fruit, to an artificial alarm pheromone that could galvanize the entire hive of Spadels kept at the corner of HQ's gardens in event of an attack.

Now all they had to show for a dent in their budget and a day and night of distillation, titration, desiccation, and more distillation was… half a pint of 'eau-de-ogre'. Almost literally. Maybe worth ten maana per grenade, if he bottled it right.

"Optimism. Great. Why don't you go infect the people in the laundry-room with it? They of all people would appreciate it," the Absynthe Guard chief shot back. He squatted, opened one low locker near the emergency wash station, and rummaged for the strongest detergent this lab had produced, cooked up exactly for occasions like this. "Maybe then I'll be able to figure out exactly which dozen steps went completely wrong."

"You might want to start by checking the second condenser," came the quick reply from behind him. In the shadow of the locker, Ezarel felt a twitch rise from below his left eye. If there was ever a prize for 'least able to take a hint'… "The first product looked all right, but we changed shifts when the second was distilled. It could have been burnt–"

"I'll be the judge of that, apprentice. Thank you." He loftily rose, turned, and heaved the dense wheel of soap right into the mass of curtains the Guardian was carrying. She wobbled once to the left, but stayed upright. He was mildly impressed. "And try to make yourself look decent before bothering the char-women at this hour. We've got a reputation to uphold on this floor."

His glacial blue-green eyes flicked once, pointedly, at the space where her shirt used to be before she drew it up over her nose when they cracked the seal of that noxious flask. A good six inches of bare stomach was now showing, adorned with the small, whimsical six-point head of a black orchid curling coyly below her belly button, before disappearing under the hem of her trousers. Its twin was inked onto her lower back—he had seen it too, winking out at him through the chaos that erupted in the lab after the first fumes of eau-de-ogre assaulted the air.

The Guardian duly unmasked her nose, the hem of her shirt whispering down over her tattoos like a curtain call, and edged to the door. "Sorry. Not all of us could pull off the stuffed-nose-look as well as you. Good luck with those notes." She lingered just long enough for him to catch that humorless, sideways smile, and the tactical twitch of her nose, before she slipped out through the door.

"And you're no prize yourself, ex-human. You're fired!" Ezarel retorted at the swinging door. Its expression remained as wooden as the woman who just walked out. She must have heard him, and knew as well as he did that that was the sixth time he used that line on her this week.

With a scowl and an appropriately-dark murmur, he tore the damp cotton balls out of his nostrils and snorted, then regretted his actions in the next split-instant. The lab still reeked, and the aerating orb was already spinning at full-force from the ceiling, pulling the air around it into a spiraling gust, and ushering it out through the opened clerestory of windows that ran along the azure-washed upper walls. Now holding his breath, Ezarel scooped up their abandoned notebooks from the polished marble counter and retreated into the safety of his office, out through opposite corner of the rancid-smelling lab.

Once the three-inch oaken door thudded shut behind him—reinforced with help from his personal cache to ensure maximal privacy–, the first strings of wire-taut tension running through his spine finally loosened. The past few hours emptied out of him in a sigh. Blinking tiredly through the foxfire that washed down like pale summer light from the wing-sized mushrooms terracing the mock wall columns, Ezarel crossed his office, dumped the notebooks on the corner of his desk, and finally peeled off his lab-coat. He saved one mournful glance at the pristine gold threads, now smelling like something Jamon might wear after a bad day. Chances were he'd have to take it to his private cleaners later; he didn't trust the El char-women with his personal threads. Ezarel tried bundling his long coat into an approximate square, gave up after three seconds, and stuffed it whole into the launderer's sack from the top of the armoire, before drop-kicking the bundle inside.

Now that that was over with, it was time to unwind. Screw what he said to his own assistant: he was not in the mood tonight to parse through thirty-plus pages of notes and calculations to divine the reason for why they produced ogre piss instead of liquid gold. And she wouldn't be back for a while, if she was negotiating with sleep-deprived laundresses at this hour.

So he allowed himself a slanted smile. From the back of the armoire's top shelf, Ezarel drew a porcelain vial and carefully uncorked it, wafting the first notes of sweet, froth-light musk half a foot away from his nose. The nerves lining his nose and throat piqued at the soft tumble of aromas in ambergris; a delicious, lazy warmth washed down his chest and navel. It was worth the expense to synthesize this perfume in his lab; he felt his mood stretch expansively, and beneath it, the stir to write again.

Whistling a jaunty tune, he brought the bottle back to his desk, poured the tiniest dash into the outer ring of the candelabra, then lit the heads of the hydra-like contraption with a striker. As warm, ambergris-scented tongues of flame rose from the corner of his desk, Ezarel unlocked the third left-hand drawer, reached into the very bottom, and retrieved an undated lab notebook. He flipped quickly through half its contents—deliberately left blank—until he found where he had left off, just past the middle of the notebook.

This unassuming book was his novel that he had been working on for the past year: purely a private, freewheeling project that he never intended to publish. The main reason: it was filthy stuff. Smut from beginning to end. Sordid fiction. An eyesore to any half-decent literary critic. Some of the chapters were plain disgusting.

And all of it revolved around an earnest, but bumbling young alchemist named Nephelê- whose infuriating sense of humor and charisma were only partially explained by her strong human roots- and her boss: the brilliant, dashing, wickedly-witty forensic master alchemist known only as 'Lord E'. Or sometimes just 'E'.

Ezarel was dead certain that this book would never see the light of day. He'd make sure it burned before his own funeral.

Truthfully, he never saw himself as a writer of erotica, until the Guardian did the improbable and proved she had the skills, the humor, and the thick skin to be his lab assistant. After that first week, once he understood that he'd be rubbing shoulders with her for at least seven hours a day, five days a week, not counting accidental run-ins during weekends, he knew he needed a discreet outlet to keep himself on-kilter.

Tonight was a fine example of why he needed this writing project on the side. Because Ezarel was exhausted, saddled with hair that still reeked of ogre-dragon-piss, and ticked off at himself for wasting valuable reagents and a whole day and night of distillation because he wasn't paying attention. (Though his assistant was the less experienced one and thus 95% likely to have made the first critical error, he was ultimately responsible for this fiasco because he didn't catch her.) And if that wasn't enough to make him consider an early retirement, something in him was itching for a chance to soundly put his impertinent, cheeky, maddening aide in her place. Inside the safety of these pages.

Not to mention that those twin orchid tattoos, peeking out like little enigmas from that sliver of skin above her hips, were haunting his mind's eye.

So Ezarel turned to a fresh page, wetted his Seryphon-feather pen in ink, and began.

She was pushed up against the shadowed wall of his office, a figure tortured by ecstasy, her thin, diaphanous gown drawn high and immodest over her straining hips. With one hand, her employer pinned her slight wrists to the wall; the other fingered her vigorously, tortuously through her flimsy underwear.

Nephelê writhed under his hands, gasping helplessly, lips already flushed dark with arousal under the pinpricks of foxfire that found them between the mock pillars, one bare thigh hooked helpless around his arm. "Gods, E…! Won't you stop? I haven't seen you for days!"

But E simply smiled, and took his time with her. After what happened tonight in his lab, she needed to learn this lesson for sassing him, for allowing herself to be so distracted, for failing to take adequate notes and pre-calculations of the reagents beforehand. She was lucky that he figured out just in time which reagent she had added in critical excess; that he had corrected her mistake before the hour was out and saved several hundreds of maana-worth of rare and expensive reagents.

"Now is that the right tone to take me with me?" he breathed against her ear, her skin prickling where his words blew upon them. "You've been working for me long enough, Nephelê."

His lab assistant swallowed, her eyelids shuddering at that pulse-quick dig his fingers made into the damp core of her panties. "I'm… sorry. For what happened tonight. It's just that I– oh gods." She sagged against the wall, suddenly boneless, at the rhythmic jab of his fore and third fingers into the yielding center of her womanhood. "E, if you keep doing this, I'll never finish…!"

"Keep it short then. What was it that compromised your usual stellar attention to detail? Hmm?"

Her pulse leapt, hammered double-time in her throat as his fingers dug and spiraled into her, the slick folds of her sex quivering, clenching futilely through the moist fabric of her panties. "…You! It was you. Damn it, E, I'll have to quit my job because of you! I can't possibly concentrate if you're always so close."

And with that his fingers stilled their assault. Only just. They rested, pressed patiently against the warm mold of her womanhood as she drew a long, tremulous breath through her mouth, lips still quivering from the force of her arousal.

"So I thought. Go on."

At last, she opened her eyes, directing that unfathomable, impossible gaze at him. "You know it's my dream to be an alchemist that El will remember. But it's just not possible if you're there with me."

At the dangerous shudder of her eyelashes, E's heart constricted and he pressed himself full against Nephelê, silenced her with an urgent kiss, a moan of longing trapped behind her lips. And he broke away only just, his mouth mere fractions of an inch away from hers. "Don't say that," he murmured low against her lips. "Don't ever say that. You know that I'll teach you everything I know. I'll give you all the time you need, but you have to stay patient. Even with what happened tonight, I never regretted taking you on as my—"

The point of his quill stopped, and hovered jerkily above that final 'y'. With a grimace, Ezarel made a curt dip into the inkwell and crossed out the last several lines with one long, deliberate stroke of his pen.

He dumped the quill into the pot like it promised to stain his fingers, and drummed them testily on the table, willing that collar of heat around his neck—and lower down– to simmer to nothing, and let him think rationally. More or less. Given his kind of situation.

That was four and a half lines of pure sentiment. Unforgivable, even for a filthy book like this that was guaranteed to cause an apoplexy in its first reviewer.

After two minutes of drumming an old, childhood rhythm on his desk, listening to the secret hiss of vanishing wax, Ezarel picked up his pen, dabbed rolls of ink off its nib, and started again.

E looked at her for a long moment, assaying that wide, guiltless stare, and chuckled darkly. Her breath hitched when he pressed himself full against her, those bare, pliant breasts pushed almost flat and imprisoned under the span of his chest, her lips quivering from the hair's breadth of distance between them and his, kissed by only the warm, tantalizing gust of his answer.

"Only a truly great alchemist has the strength of mind to ignore the paragon of temptations next to them, when there is knowledge to seek. Like I do with you. Every day, every hour, every minute. In my lab, you're just another colleague: sexless, neutral, inert. Funny to watch, sometimes. But here, in my office, when you're dressed like this—"

His hand slid up, lightning fast from the converge of her legs, up under her translucent gown, across the shuddering plane of her stomach, and fastening around the side of her breast, squeezing tight. Nephelê jolted against him, nipples hardening, tender face flickering shut for a heartbeat as a soft moan broke from her throat.

"—There's a very different kind of knowledge that I seek. I want to know what you'll say when you cry in surrender, the pitch of your voice when you hit your climax, the myriad ways your body will contort under my touch before, and after, I enter you."

Her eyes fluttered wider still, dark with want, her heartbeat thundering against his ribs. Her breath held the song of lust.

"Now you know I'll be happy to teach you how to switch, seamlessly, from one path to the other. If you stay long enough. I imagine it'll make things easier for both of us going forward. What do you say?"

Her eyes were on his as she shuddered to her core, and nodded.

"An excellent choice," E remarked, as his hand flew down again and snapped off her underwear, tossing it aside onto the floor of his office like yesterday's fears. She gasped again, her body drawn taut against him, as two of his long, dexterous fingers plunged into the slick, naked folds of her womanhood, deep into her core. Then the breath fell from her in a long, liquid moan as he dug into her, her hips sinking and rocking willingly into his hand.

Inside the steaming, velvety warmth of her depths, he circled deep. His breath was heavy with want, with singular focus, as he crooked his fingers to touch that elusive, perilous bundle of nerves far inside the wall of her womb. And as he did, his thumb pressed cunningly, teasingly, into the delicate nub at the entrance of her womanhood. At this double-assault on her most electrifying places, Nephelê cried aloud, breasts shivering, arms tensing overhead, thighs spasming as her body curled forward helplessly into his, hips jerking up. And in that fierce, split-second thrust of her hips, her svelte thigh slipped from darkness into the pool of light from the amber-lit fungi spiraling up the adjacent pillar. And his sharp eyes noticed something strange.

"Now what's that I see?" E asked, mock surprise peaking his voice. Then more curtly, "Lie down on the floor. Let me see you."

He released her wrists, and she obeyed, slipping down onto the floorboards on her back, parting her thighs to his eager eyes directly under the summer-washed light of the bracketed column. E knelt before her, one hand pressing into the soft flesh of her upper thigh, the other pushing that cumbersome gown high to her stomach. And then, after a moment's reflection, wrenching down the loose collar of her dress as well, freeing those shivering breasts, checking for more surprises. There were none around the dewy skin of her breasts, but he tweaked one nipple all the same with his deft thumb and forefinger, a sly smile quirking his lips. Nephelê jerked once again below him, groaning in frustration, her thigh shuddering from where he held it splayed open. Her hands reached for his shoulders, but he pushed them back with mock outrage.

"Tsk! Are you trying to distract me from my investigation? When I'm going through all this trouble to know you all over again? If you don't keep your hands to yourself, I'll stop."

"You always take too long," she mewled. But she desisted, leaving her arms passively overhead, as his sure hands braced her thighs open, savoring the tender skin of her inner thighs.

He flicked his trademark smile at her. "That's because I'm thorough."

And E's eyes fell to the surprise she saved for him: orchids and lianas, tattooed black, curling coyly, sinuously from just below her navel, down across her hip and across the inside of her left thigh, beckoning him to the hallowed space between her legs.

His fingers lightly, reverently traced the intricate chain of flower-and-vine from her navel, down the flesh of her left thigh, to the entrance of her temple, and then, without a word of warning, massaged the core of her womanhood. Not penetrating, not delving inside her, but playing the moist surface of her inner lips with the flat of his fingers, circling around to her center of pleasure at the apex. And she shivered from head to groin in want, eyes fluttering closed, breathlessly whispering his name, nipples stiffening, stomach clenching, hips rolling with the motion of his hand, toes curled helplessly above the floor. But her arms stayed obediently overhead.

And just as suddenly, his hand left her sex, to trace the second line of jungle lianas curling almost unseen across the inner flesh of her right thigh, disappearing into the opposite direction. She blinked up at him, a complaint brewing on her lips, when E remarked, his eyes bright with this new mystery, "There's been an interesting complication. Turn around."

Once again, Nephelê obeyed, turning her chest and stomach to the floor, her face resting in the fold of her arms as he angled her hips high into the air, the full curve of her buttocks pushed up to him. Her breath was heavy with want now from how much he had teased her sex, teased her, as he again parted her thighs from behind to follow the second curl of orchid vines. They twisted sinuously, artfully away from the opening of her womanhood, up around the curve of her right buttock, ending in a defiant bloom at the triangle of her tailbone.

E's fingers were still caressing this final whorl of blossoms as he grinned. "You've been busy this weekend, haven't you? Now where did you get this delightful idea? And do I have to start making calls to find out which sly bastard helped you?"

A fiery blush washed down her back in answer. "I couldn't imagine going to anyone but our friend in the clinic. She's the only one who could trace night orchids without scarring the skin or mutilating the design. And besides…" Here she finally turned to look at him, eyes lidded in shyness, cheekbones stained red. "I remembered that you love orchids."

E, his heart hammering in his throat, his arousal pressed hard against the front of his trousers, answered by pressing his thumbs into the flesh of her buttocks, then circling them quick around the points of her pelvic bones, drawing a surprised gasp of pleasure from her as fire swept across her skin in the wake of his sly thumbs.

"Well you've earned a little reward tonight," he breathed, his eyes roving, memorizing every inch of her. And his fingers plunged again—three digits strong—into the glistening folds of her womanhood, pumping into her sure and deep as a full groan erupted from the base of her being, and she buried her face into her arms, exhorting him between labored gasps to go on, her sex tightening and flexing around his fingers.

And go on he did. One hand freed his arousal from the trappings of his clothes and before she could beg again, he suddenly withdrew his fingers, and filled her instead with his length, his desire. Her head jerked up in a flash, surprise and pleasure seared into the arch of her back, into the dangerous shiver of her lithe hips, into the cry of his name as it spilled high and tight from her lips again, then petering out as he held himself still and sure inside her. And when that first electric wave ebbed, he fastened his hands around those hips, steadied them, withdrew, and pushed into her deeper still. She fell moaning back to the floor, boneless, her hips held upright only by him, burying her face into her arms, the shape of his name all that was left of her voice.

"Would you consider staying on?" E gasped. With a smooth stroke, he thrust again into the velvety core of her sex that was already clenching tight around him, pulling him dangerously, inexorably into her depths.

She whimpered, pushing her buttocks back, harder against his hips, straining to get closer still to him. Her first answer was lost, muffled into the fold of her arms, in the curl of her groan.

"What was that you said?" E grinned from behind her, and he drove into her again, in two fast bursts, hitting her relentlessly right against that secret spot.

Her back arched, spasmed, the violent wave of pleasure suddenly bearing her head up to the surface, to gasp, "Yes…!"

"Now that's exactly what I want to hear," he breathed, his hand curling hard around her hip, the other diving below her waist to toy with her sex from the front. And he speared her again from behind, her sweat-slicked back shuddering with every snap of his hips, her moist core flexing with every pulse-quick roll of his fingers below.

Her breathless gasps strung together in a sinful rhythm on the floor of his office. Timed to the snapping of his hips, twining with the moist slap of his member striking sure and deep into her greedy depths, broken by the pitched rolls of his name, moaned low, agonized, then pulled taut and strained, and breaking off again in a fast pizzicato of choked gasps as he led her again into a new crescendo of pleasure, breaking the barriers of her being and filling them both with the wild, formless storm of ecstasy as a noiseless thunder clapped around them and the world dissolved in a flash of–

"Ez, I found something! Open up!"

Ezarel jumped three inches in his seat as a series of smart raps rolled out from the other side of his oaken door. He glanced down at his lap, then swore heartily at the determined erection tenting his trousers, and the long tunic over it. The rapping on his door persisted.

"What did I say was the first rule on working in my lab?" Ezarel snapped back, in what he hoped was the verbal equivalent of winter sting. His head of his arousal bobbed treacherously against his thigh.

"To check and double-check for trouble. Which I just found," came his colleague's flat voice. "Don't you want this for the report?"

"You lose. The correct answer is: don't bother me in my office. Under penalty of death by acid-bath."

There was a pause. Then the gold-plated door handle, to his astonishment, jerked down. And swung inward. The Guardian stood framed in his doorway, grimly holding up the crystalline, angled head of the condenser like an instrument of death.

Through the sudden ice filling his cheeks and the tips of his ears, Ezarel mentally cursed every god he knew for not reminding him to lock that expensive door. As nonchalantly as he could, he crossed his legs under the desk. "I expect you to report for your scheduled acid-bath tomorrow. Three hours after sunrise."

"Very cute. But before you try to dissolve me, you should consider replacing this condenser." She strode unselfconsciously into his office, straight to the side of his desk, and held the angled glass tube before his eyes. Amidst the firestorm of ice and panic besieging the nerves in his face, freezing his limbs into a mockery of the 'zealous academic' position, Ezarel's wide eyes noticed—mechanically—that there was a hairline crack near the seal of the tube. Invisible until the Guardian turned the instrument just so above the flames of his candelabra.

"…Well damn it," he managed faintly.

"That second product would have burned within a few hours, instead of heating gently. If we're lucky, this might explain all the other anomalies we noticed…" And her eyes, like due consequence, fell on their unopened lab books perched on the edge of his desk. Then to his undated notebook still frozen and splayed open under his hands. With writing on the wrong side. The criminal condenser descended slowly to his desk, settling like an afterthought. "What have you been doing while I was getting chewed out by the char-ladies?"

"Journaling," Ezarel replied promptly, righteous mobility returning to him from the neck down. He snapped the book shut, but he kept his legs crossed under the table.

The Guardian remained where she was by his right elbow, and treated him to one of her long, indecipherable looks. It took him a moment—through the sudden vertigo in his head– to see that she, too, had gray rings under her eyes.

"If you're going to bitch at me in our lab during our overtime," she finally said, syllables falling like leaden slabs, "at least make it a challenge for me to return the favor. Good night, Ez. Enjoy your journaling."

The space under his ribs stung with the point of ice when his aide turned on her heel and headed for the door. Pride be damned, Ezarel finally rose from his chair, propping up his forgotten notebook on the desk as a cautious shield, and called her by her name.

When she paused by the door, her only answer a sharp look over her shoulder—not unlike the ones he liked to give her, noted that unhelpful voice in his head–, Ezarel searched for his voice. Grabbed it, and wrest it struggling out of the safety of his throat.

"…Thank you. That was a good job you did, tonight. Despite… what turned up in the still. We can turn it into something useful, somehow. And I do appreciate you bringing this to me." His hand swept, unseeingly, in the direction of the broken tube. "If I was being a bit insufferable tonight… well, then I apologize. It was never anything personal. You are, despite some of the things I might say from time to time… …. one of my better aides."

For two full beats, the Guardian stared at him as though she had seen a blemmyes sneak in and take his place, talking to her without a standard-issue head. Then, without warning, came a flash of that daybreak smile. His pulse caught, then hammered triple-time in his throat.

"Well that's going into my journal tonight. Or else I'll forget this as a dream."

Ezarel's eyebrows shot to his hairline as the points of his ears burned scarlet, tinged with white. By the time the gamut of mental imagery cleared from his head, the Guardian was gone, the door swinging into its rightful spot behind her. The whorls in the wood laughing at him.

His knees saw fit to buckle him back into his chair, the front of his pants loosening mercifully for the final time that night. His not-so-innocuous notebook rose, opened, and dropped over his head, hiding it under its eaves. The final fumes of ambergris and candlewax curled into his nostrils.

Maybe this book's funeral pyre was just around the corner. Because by the end of this year, she was going to be the death of him.

FIN

Disclaimers:

- The alchemical procedure here is actually based off a standard (college) organic chemistry method of synthesizing the ester isopentyl acetate (aka banana oil). Which is in fact the alarm pheromone of the honeybee. (Though in this story, I traded bees for Spadels, and put an entire hive of them in HQ's gardens. Pity the invaders who try to lay siege on HQ.)

- Whenever you write about yourself, you tend to take some 'creative license' on how great you are at sex (among other things). Ezarel is no better than the rest of us. ;) Lord E's sarcasm is the only part that's true to life in his, uh, writing exercise.

- In the game, Ezarel probably doesn't have a notebook filled with smutty fantasies. Again, this is just a pure (fun) writing exercise about a writing exercise.

- Also, I like to imagine that Ezarel has a private office attached to the laboratory, being the head of the Absynthe Guard. And that he probably has a taste for tree-hugger, er, au naturale interior decoration. Including bioluminescent mushrooms (that save him quite a bit of maana on lighting).

If you enjoyed reading this piece (and even if you didn't), feel free to leave a review. I'm always open to feedback. :)