"We should wait until you have adjusted, shouldn't we?" Karyu asked desperately, as his Rider, Luka, began to press herself upon him.
Luka, her mind burning with magically induced lust, stepped authoritatively toward Karyu. "I am your Rider," she intoned, "and you will satisfy me if I have a need for it, dragon!"
This was very unlike Karyu's Rider. The Rider Karyu had known would never use anything but gentleness and compassion with him, and the demon now standing before the dragon was nothing like his Rider. His Rider might be trapped behind this succubus somewhere, but he...she...was clearly not in her right mind. "T-t-t-this isn't you, Luka," he stammered, backing away as the mad woman pressed herself up against him. "Y-y-y-y-you are...not well!"
Luka planted her foot forward one more time, but as she did, she stumbled weakly into a fall, dissolving into tears. Luka was not accustomed to being a woman, and emotions that remained hidden for a man bubbled directly to the surface for a woman. Frustration that she would have once hidden behind a frozen mask or a sneer turned directly into choked, helpless weeping. "I am sorry," she said repeatedly. "I am so sorr----ry" she kept saying, clearly not sure whether she was apologizing for her attempt to bully Karyu, for her tears, or even perhaps--in the circular manner of irrational emotions--for continuously apologizing. Luka was beginning to appreciate that women needed to control their emotions more, not less. When emotions tended to come gushing out like this as soon as they were felt, just having them at all meant they had to be dealt with directly.
As Luka began to get a little bit of control over her lust, though, Karyu lay down on his belly next to her, and he lay his great, massive head over her lap in the comforting way that a dog would for its mistress.
Luka gratefully flung her arms around his neck and clung to him for a long while as her body made itself a little sick with a mixture of frustration, fear, and remorse. Moreover, she was angry at herself now for being weak. "I have to be able to take care of you, Karyu," she said. "I have to be strong."
"It is my place to be your strength," Karyu said firmly. "I am your force. I am your fire. Let me be your strong back, Rider. Trust. Please, trust."
As Luka's storm of emotion passed, she smiled in a watery sort of way, and she patted the dragon's cheek. "Yes. Of course, I trust you, you silly drake. But this must be hard for you. Aren't you gay?"
Karyu shook his head. "On a scale of zero to six, I am a four, maybe a five. Hens are not the first that I look at, but once they get me started, I enjoy them quite a lot, especially if I have the scent of another drake in my nostrils."
Luka laughed awkwardly. "Perhaps, then, we ought to join Vrack and Anija for one of their many sessions. Often as they fuck, they surely couldn't object to sharing one or two rounds with us, huh?"
Karyu rolled his eyes. "I will admit that two drakes that decide to be together are not often exclusive, but if they are, they do take it seriously," he scolded her.
Luka immediately felt a little ashamed for the remark, and again, she found herself sobbing a little bit from the quick expression of emotions caused by her new body. Once she got control over herself, she said, a little more practically, "Well, maybe we could use their bedchambers while they have taken a break to argue for awhile instead of fucking."
Karyu found this suggestion to be incredibly funny, and his great, vermilion body heaved with deep, rumbling giggles for quite a while before he stopped. Yes, Luka was just as much of a dork as Luke. It filled Karyu with endless sunshine and happiness to realize that his Rider was truly still there.
After a while, the rest of the Crew joined them, including Avelia. As Luka described her experience with feminine emotions, Avelia laughed out loud. "So you thought that some of us were ice-queens because we liked being that way?" The hilarity overtook her for a while. "Dear, we have to be a little cool, or we'll never get anything done!"
Anija chuckled softly. "Being a drake does have its drawbacks," the scholarly-looking azure drake said, "but...it's a lot more relaxing."
Frustrated, Luka asked, "So how do I do this ice-queen trick, so I am not blubbering constantly?"
"By being a woman for a while," Avelia said firmly. "Trust me, it's not an easy trick to learn. Good...Luck."
Luka took her total hopelessness of getting any other answer in very good humor. She was still naked, but among the Crew, she didn't feel naked at all. She realized that the Crew was more like family than family. They were more like friends than friends. They were her comrades in arms. She found herself weeping quietly about this for only half of a second, and she brushed the emotion aside. "Thank you for understanding, Avelia," she said.
Avelia gave Luka's naked body a looking over, though. Luka was as much of a woman as Luke had been a man. Where Luke had been a tight, muscular person with a body perfectly sculpted for being the Rider of a dragon, Luka's body was like that of a highly athletic cheerleader or Olympic gymnast. She had muscle in all of the right places for a woman, and in spite of being stronger than most women to a very high degree, the muscle only made her look all the more spectacularly feminine, just from how it sat on her body. She was going to look like a most incredible vixen, perched atop her dragon. "You are a little under-dressed, though," Avelia pointed out.
Luka had a "doh" moment. "Then bring me my tunic," she requested.
"Are you sure?" Avelia replied. Avelia was dressed in very piratical attire, consisting of high boots and a Renaissance-style bar-maid's outfit. While most women would have insisted that she was dressed like a very immoral woman, she would have answered, of course, that she was hardly trying for being moral, being a corsair that rode dragon-back. For a woman to wear only a tunic, though, was a little more progressive than she had ever considered.
"Well, it's what I am used to!" Luka said petulantly. "I want to stay wearing my old clothes!" she whined brattily.
Vaestro, though, had already thought ahead before Luka had even gone through with the change. "You will need one your own size!" he laughed, reaching into his leather satchel and tossing Luka a brand new tunic that was cut for a woman. "I argued for half a day with the tailor about the political repercussions of making this silly thing for you, so you had better thank me." Vaestro, being a natural spy, consequently had impeccable social skills and very good foresight.
As Luka eagerly donned the female version of the Roman-style military tunic, it only enhanced the sense of her looking a lot like a modern-day cheerleader, except for the thick and utilitarian leather belt. The tunic, while it was admittedly revealing for a woman from a very conservative culture, was also incredibly practical and designed for someone that would spend her life flipping and leaping about. It would cause a scandal, to be sure, but for a woman that was going to live as a warrior, it really made an incredible amount of sense. "Oh, thank you so much, Vaestro! How do I look?" she said, posing in the costume.
"Like a total whore," Vaestro said with the jocular humor reserved for conversations between fellow members of the Crew. Anyone else that had said it would have been in some amazing amount of trouble.
"Perfect!" Luka said blithely. "Now, did anyone think to get me a new set of high-lace sandals?"
Oops. Everyone had forgotten this. An extra trip to get some new footwear would have to be made later, then. Ah, well.