Celestia had found a kindred spirit in Oliver. The leanly built, green kilin’s humor was so dry that it was hard to recognize, at first, that he had one, but a playful personality was really hidden beneath Oliver’s frozen demeanor. As Oliver left from the inn to see some old haunts, Celestia bounded off after him, still bouncing around him and gushing conversation.
“So where did you have your first kiss?” the little, pink, teenage kilin girl said excitedly.
“In my parents’ home, when I was an infant,” Oliver replied, “and I don’t actually remember.”
Celestia giggled. “I mean with a GIRL like me, silly!”
“I suppose that I was disappointed with my first one,” Oliver riposted, “My first one I enjoyed was with a drake.”
Gazing sidelong at Oliver with a smirk, Celestia purred, “Ah, so you are more like Oakmoss, huh?”
“Not entirely,” Oliver deadpanned smoothly. “I had a wife for five years,” he explained. “I might have liked her in a better life, but my mother had, according to her tribal custom, arranged a marriage for me when I was only twelve. The arrangement had been presented to me, as well as the unfortunate girl, as a chore, which one should not necessarily enjoy but which one should be punished if one would not perform. The girl was, quite naturally, unhappy, and because pure human tribes regard kilin, like any mixture of human and non-human lineage, as being preposterous and ugly, she loathed her existence. She was certain that fate had punished her by forcing her to marry a monster. We kissed and held hands with each other in public, but we could otherwise hardly bear to touch each other. Eventually, she was crying without stopping even for a little while, and I was only continuing to work in order to keep enough mead around that I could forget that I existed.”
“That sounds very sad,” Celestia said unhappily. “And it’s far too young to be having to grow up!” she added.
“My mother’s tribe are, like most pure humans in this land, deeply unhappy people,” Oliver said. “I broke up the marriage to try to salvage the last of my wife’s fading sanity, and the conservatives, among my mother’s people, triumphantly used the failure of the union as evidence to reinforce their people’s hatred of kilin, which ultimately led to me being driven into exile. I tried making it in a city and was quickly caught up in some bad habits. Eventually, I was lying half-dead in a gutter in soiled, torn clothing, and I was quite sick. I was rescued by a longma.”
“Longma?” Celestia asked.
Oliver nodded. “A race of shapeshifting dragon-horses that can disguise themselves as anything, although they prefer walking in anthro form. Traditionally, they train their children as assassins, so they learn to be so light on their feet that they can walk across water. It was from him that I learned my trade.”
“And did you kiss?” Celestia asked, with a hopeful smile.
Oliver smiled and nodded. “There was plenty of that, yes. Like all of the other things my master would teach me, those skills have served me well...with male and female lovers, alike.”
“Have you ever thought about getting married?” Celestia asked.