Demon Queened Ch. 21 - Sex Stories

Demon Queened Ch. 21

... to the people! And this shop actually helped a lot with that!"

"Is that so?" I asked her, returning her smile with one of my own as she squeezed my hand and pulled me forward, towards the shelves. Whether her smile was as forced as mine, I could not say, but if Lucy wished to put forth a brave face for the sake of the public then I would do my best to help her uphold that facade. I only hoped that she would be able to express herself more fully when we were alone.

"Uh-huh!" She gestured to the shelves with her free hand. "The owner - Carrie - buys her stock from adventurers. Everything on these shelves came from another city. Some of them are even from other countries! Which means even the little things we recognize could end up with big differences! Like..." She scanned the shelves for a moment. "Like these skewers!"

I followed the trajectory of her pointing finger with my eyes, and landed upon a pair of skewers completely unlike the ones that we'd just burnt. Wrought of metal instead of carved from wood, their ends had been twisted and turned to form simplified versions of animals - a chicken and a pig.

"I've only ever seen skewers used in street food around here," Lucy continued, her smile brightening just a touch further. Becoming, in my eyes, just a touch more real. "But in other cities, they're used in fancy restaurants! And it's the same with other cooking instruments, too! Not to mention clothes, farming implements, smithing techniques, and so much more! ...

... Wherever you go, things will be different than where you were..."

Lucy's gaze swept across the various items on the shelf as she led me down the stacks, her focus lingering occasionally - on a sun hat, a hoe, a pair of ornate chopsticks with white flowers painted upon their surface. "My whole world, back before I became an adventurer, was just the forest, that village, and this city... But when I came here, and looked at all the stuff on display, it made me realize that the world is so much bigger than that. That there are places, more different than I could ever imagine, out there... And that they're filled withpeople who are different, too! People who think differently than me, and do things differently. People I wouldn't be able to understand if I just stayed in town and trained like Father Tuffel wanted me to. That'swhyI became an adventurer - so I could go out, and meet those people! So that I could find out what sort of people made this stuff, and work to become the sort of Heroine they needed me to be! And do you want to know what I found out?" "What?" The question wasn't a perfunctory one. Curiosity laid laden in the single word, alongside a touch of amusement as the corners of my lips turned upwards. I was being pulled along by Lucy's enthusiasm. And, much to my own surprise, I didn't mind it.

"That people are just people! Which... is sort of obvious, I guess, but... There's more to it than that?" Lucy's brow furrowed in thought, as for the first time I watched ...