Chapter 101 – More Training With Sophia
"So Evelyn…" Sophia spoke up once the two of us were once more shut inside the privacy of her carriage as we made our way through the city, towards the Red Den. "Do you have any more general skills that you want help pushing past their bottlenecks while we have this time together?"
Hearing the ethereally beautiful woman ask me this, a perverted grin stretched across my lips. Thankfully, it looked like the lewd exploits during our commute to and from work weren’t just going to be a one-time thing, something that wouldn’t just help me grow stronger and more skilled, but would also be very, very fun.
"Umm, well. I currently have three general skills stuck at rank 15, sensual massage, sex toys, and vaginal intercourse. So really, whichever you think you could help me the most with would be great. Oh, and my fellatio general skill is at the rank 10 bottleneck, but I don’t think you could really help me with that much."
"You’d be surprised." Sophia giggled, arousing my curiosity quite a bit.
"In what way?" I asked as I leaned forward, closely paying attention. "Do you mean that you could help me quite a bit with just a few pointers, or do you have a class skill that lets you temporarily grow a cock that I could suck off for you?"
"If you have such a skill, would you please tell me more about it and when you got it if it's not too much trouble? I’m rather curious about what sex is like from the male perspective. In particular, how it feels when their cock is wrapped around a tight pair of lips, or balls deep inside the hot, tight warmth of a vagina."
Hearing what I was so shamelessly admitting to her, Sophia’s grin grew wider and wider. "I don’t have a skill, but I do have an enchanted ring that does something similar for a short amount of time. However, I don’t have the ring on me to demonstrate. I keep it locked up in my personal safe at the Red Den. The kind of enchantments required to make the conjured cock behave and feel like it was real was quite expensive, almost as much as getting my open-air bath made."
"Could I… um… Could I borrow it sometime?" I asked rather sheepishly, hoping that I wasn’t overstepping my boundaries.
"Hmm, maybe…" Sophia drew out her response, which in turn drew out the tension in the air. "But what good would there be in just giving you what you want? You should earn it."
Even before the woman continued, I had a feeling I knew what she was going to say. "It appears in my own desire to see you reach your full potential that I haven’t been true to my word, that I gave you an extra taste of my full capabilities last night when I was spanking you. So, I am thinking of amending our little arrangement."
"Instead of letting you taste my full capabilities whenever you want, if you become the most popular woman at my establishment, the jewel of the Red Den, I will give you that ring as a reward. Not just let you use it once or twice, the ring will be yours. Oh, but that’s only with the stipulation that the first time you use it is with me."
"Thank you; that sounds amazing!" I practically shouted, barely able to contain my excitement. However, that excitement began to dwindle when I began to wonder what this meant for me and Sophia having sex. Luckily for me, she wasted not even a second before further elaborating on that part of the arrangement.
"Oh, and don’t think that just because having sex with me is off the table as a reward, we won't be having sex anytime soon. In fact, the reason I am taking it off the table is because of the fact that there were several moments last night and this morning where I had to hold myself back, where I wanted so desperately to push you down and have my way with you but was reluctant to because of the reward I promised to give you."
"This way we can have as much fun as we both want, and I can even make any training I offer you that much more difficult. Speaking of which, if you're up for it, I think your kissing skill would be a good choice to train while we have this time alone." Sophia smoothly segued back to the matter at hand as she patted the cushion next to her.
Not wasting even a second, I darted over to the ethereally beautiful woman’s side of the carriage, wrapping my arms around her and going in for the kiss.
As excited as I was for this kiss now that Sophia said she would no longer hold herself back with me, it started out much like our time together in the carriage last night did.
As our lips locked and our tongues danced around each other, the woman took an occasional break from the embrace to give me advice and correct my form. Like a master teaching their diligent student, I quickly picked up everything she was telling me, and much like how I previously thought I was good at eating pussy out yesterday only to learn I had barely touched the surface of mastering that art, the same was true for kissing.
"Much like how you want to move your hands and touch your partner while kissing them, the same principle applies to the use of skills. You don’t want to solely be focused on your kissing general skill." Sophia began to lecture me a bit more when our carriage eventually came to a stop and the pair of us slowly made our way inside the Red Den. Sadly our training in the carriage didn’t last for that long as much of our time together this morning was preoccupied with our conversations. However, I had high hopes that the trip back tonight would be different, that we would have plenty of time to go at each other then.
"Not only can you use other general skills in tandem, like seduction and sensual massage, but class skills can also be used, like your stimulate and sexual empathy. I expect that before now you might have been using one or two in tandem, but the real key to pushing skills to their full potential and earning good experience to ranking them up is using as many as possible in tandem. Sometimes as many as four or five."
"On the carriage ride back to the estate tonight, I want you to try and use as many of your skills on me as possible, both general and class skills, all at the same time. If you can master this and put it to use while undergoing some more strenuous training, you might very well see great skill growth in your future." The woman finished explaining as we finally reached her office. "Oh, and before you go off to start working, there was actually something else I wanted to talk to you about before we got a bit distracted with your training."
"How would you feel about dancing up on the stage from time to time in the mornings, Evelyn?"
"Dancing…" I repeated in surprise as the images of all the half-naked women from yesterday, moving about ever so seductively on the stage in front of all those eyes, entered my mind. Something, which excited me greatly, to the point it would have flooded my poor panties with arousal if not for the fact they were already a mess because of all the kissing I had just done with Sophia.
"I know it's a bit early in your career for you to start going up there, but I think it could be good for you if you're interested. Since you wouldn’t be seeing clients while you were up there, you would get a small number of coins as compensation, and you would only do it for a little every morning until you are eventually ready to dance in front of larger crowds. But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. I just thought this could be a good opportunity for you. After all, dancing in front of the larger crowds is a surefire way to get more popular with the clientele."
"No, I’m interested… It's just…" I said, feeling a bit hesitant to go up there without the confidence and support that a general skill focused on such things would offer me. "All my general skills slots are taken, and I don’t have a general skill focused on dancing. Would it really be worth my time to go up there when it wouldn’t give me experience towards ranking up one of my skills?"
"Even without a dancing skill, going up on the stage is a good opportunity. Not only is it a good way to let potential clients know your name so they can request you, but you could probably get some experience toward ranking up your seduction general skill as well." Sophia reasoned, during which I realised that I never actually told her I had the seduction general skill.
She must have worked out that I had the skill just by observing me. What other skills does she know I have that I didn't tell her about?
"And of course, if one of your general skills is lagging behind, not seeing much use, you could always replace it with the erotic dancing skill. If you need that other skill later, you can always take it again when you have more need of it." She went on to suggest.
"I do have the dagger skill, but it hasn’t progressed past rank 3 since I haven’t had much time to practise with my dagger," I said while trying to remember where my dagger even was.
The last thing I could recall involving my dagger was when Sophia had her maids take our belongings inside after Vel and I first arrived at the estate. Presumably, my dagger was in my bedroom with the rest of my belongings, but I didn’t actually know that for a fact since I had yet to go in there since coming here to this city.
"Let me guess, Damien was the one that suggested you take the dagger skill?" The woman quirked an eyebrow at me as she asked this.
"Yeah, that’s right."
"Oh, that sounds like him." Sophia laughed, more than a little amused to hear this. "My brother took after our father in that regard, always wanting his children to have a way of looking after themselves even if they weren’t focused on fighting. In fact, my father made me devote a lot of time to mastering the daggers myself. Since you are dating Velyna, I assume he wanted you to be able to defend not only yourself but here as well."
"But as useful as it is to know how to defend yourself, I’ve never really had to use my highly ranked dagger skill in full. The bare necessities of knowing how to use a dagger are all you really need to know when it comes to defending yourself. As long as you aren’t trying to actually kill someone or go dungeon delving there's no real need to have the skill. Much of the time just visibly having a dagger with you is deterrent enough to stop most looking for trouble. Even then the city is rather safe as long as you don’t go looking for trouble."
"That said, keeping it or getting rid of it is your choice, I won’t force you to do either. But if you do want to replace it, know that getting the skill again the next time you have the available general skill slots, and ranking it back up to rank 3 won't take that long. It would take even less time getting to that rank again now that you are already fairly familiar with its use."
"Okay, yeah. I think I’m going to swap out my dagger skill for that dancing skill you suggested. What was it again, erotic dancing?" I said, feeling secure in my choice since I was getting the advice of someone so much more experienced and talented to help me out.
"That's right." Sophia nodded. "In an hour or two, after your first client of the day, I’ll get Arriana to teach you the basics of erotic dancing back here in the privacy of one of the less full storage rooms that many other workers use to practise or warm up while the stage is occupied. That way, you will hopefully have enough experience to earn the skill before going on stage."
"But don’t worry about messing up and making a fool of yourself on stage. The mornings are for training and giving the less experienced workers time to grow accustomed to everything, something that the clients who come here in the mornings know as well as we do. Not that such a thing stops them from being captivated by the dancing. Hell, you could fall flat on your face in the middle of your dance, and that wouldn’t stop a client from hiring you as soon as you got off the stage. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happened or even the second."
"Thank you, Sophia. Not just for this but for everything you’ve done for me since coming to the city. Between you and the rest of your family, I could not have asked for better people to help me out and show me the kindness that you have." I said completely and utterly sincerely.
"I ah… I don’t know what to say to that…" Sophia stammered and blushed, which was the first time I had seen her really react like this since she was normally so composed. "I appreciate your gratitude, but this was just the way I was raised, and I expect it is similar for Damien. Our father raised us to be kind people who looked out for those they could. Not to mention, you are dating my niece, so we are kind of like family."
"Anyway…" She quickly changed the subject as she opened the door to her office. "I should be getting to my work and you should be going to get changed before finding a nice client to hire you. Best of luck, Evelyn."
"Good luck to you too, Sophia." I called out in turn moments before the two of us parted.
While the ethereally beautiful woman shut herself inside her office to do whatever it was that she did at work, I found my way to the changing area of the establishment, where I quickly found myself something to wear. Although I had lots of fun in the white dress and pearl panties that I wore yesterday, I thought that it was best to mix things up.
As such, I soon came walking out onto the main floor of the Red Den, dressed in only a black thong and a very sheer shawl, underneath which my ample breasts were covered by nothing but a pair of nipple pasties in the shape of a love heart. It was a very scandalous outfit, one that barely met the Red Den’s policy of not revealing too much while walking the main floors. Not to mention, one that easily drew the eye of potential clients, to the point that finding my first client for the day was a trifling affair.