<div class="floatright">(http://i.imgur.com/FdBqxim.jpg)<br/><br/>(http://i.imgur.com/1WWQkd0.jpg)<br/><br/>(http://i.imgur.com/UPnCTOy.jpg)</div><br/>Headmistress Ravensoul watched Pipa's reaction closely and moved close to stroke the contestant's face.  It was meant as a sweet and comforting gesture, hoping to ease the girls confusion.  Not girl, she reminded herself, woman.  Pipa was older than she herself had been when she'd entered the dungeon.  Only a few years younger than she was now in fact.  Yet those few years, the experiences of them, they held a lifetime of differences.  Ravensoul stepped back, turned and moved to the bookshelf again looking for a specific scroll.<strong>"Tell me Pipa,"</strong>she said calling over her shoulder,<strong>"What of your home town?  More women there then men I would assume, but other than your father, were there many men?"</strong>She of course knew the answer would be no, but not the exact extent of how few.<br/><br/>Pipa shook her head,<em> "No Headmistress, not many men at all.  Only about thirty five permanent residents, and a handful of others that came and went over the years.  Does... does this have something to do with my mother?"</em>Pipa asked the last bit hesitatingly.<br/><br/>Headmistress Ravensoul turned and smiled slightly over her shoulder and nodded,<strong>"Yes, but have patience..."</strong>Then turning back to the shelf she pulled a scroll from the rack unrolled it and then rolled it back up and set it back,<strong>"Where is it?  Hmmm so your town had thirty or so men at any given time, and how many women roughly?"</strong><br/><br/>Pipa stopped to think for a moment.  There had been the miners of course, the guards women, the teachers, the beurocrats, the general goods store owner and her family, she wasn't sure of an exact number.<em>"Maybe around two hundred on average, give or take Headmistress?"</em>she finally answered a little uncertain.<br/><br/>Ravensoul checked another scroll carefully, this one so old it seemed on the verge of crumbling in her fingers before she gently set it back and moved on,<strong>"Let me ask you this Pipa, does it seem odd that five sixths of your town was women?"</strong><br/><br/>Pipa shifted uncomfortably, sensing this was an important question from the woman's voice, but she answered honestly.<em> "Not really, should it?"</em>Of course it wasn't odd.  That was the way it had always been.  In fact it seemed to work out quite well, there were enough men to satisfy the women who saught out a man for a night, and her father usually had companionship more nights out of any week than he didn't.  While some nights there were no women he needed to service, there were other nights where he had several women come and go from his home.  Why should the ratio of five to one seem odd?  In Pipa's mind if there were more women her father might have been even busier, but if there were more men, he might have grown lonesome.  So no, in her mind it seemed perfectly reasonable.<br/><br/><strong>"Ah!"</strong>the raven haired woman cried as she turned around and gingerly carried an ancient scroll towards the desk,<strong>"I assume you are aware that in other parts of the mortal realms the ratio of women to men reaches almost two to one?</strong>"   Seeing the somewhat surprised look on Pipa's face she nodded,<strong>"It does, although I have been to a small elven village where there were only four men in the whole village, responsible for fathering the entire next generation for any elven woman who wished a child.  But that is not the point, this is." </strong>She carefully and slowly unrolled the parchment on the desk.  It was yellow with age, almost orange, and as she unrolled it small bits of dust and paper flaked off the edges.  She would have to see to having it preserved if possible, while it wasn't an important record, it should not be allowed to simply disintegrate after all.<strong>"I don't know if you can read dwarvish?"  </strong><br/><br/>Pipa shrugged,<em>"Only a few words, it wasn't really a focus of my schooling.  But we do trade with the dwarves, so..."</em>Pipa trailed off as she looked at the geometric writing on the ancient scroll.  Something about it was tickiling the back of her mind, something seemed off, wrong somehow.  Headmistress Ravensoul let her study it for a few moments silently, waiting to see how bright the young woman was, if she'd understand what she was being shown.  Finally she shrugged and looked at the headmistress, trying not to be distracted by the feeling of damp panties on her sex and the pale swath of skin showing through the woman's cloak.<em>"I'm sorry, I don't understand.  Most of these seem like they are names...but..."</em>She trailed off with another shrug.<br/><br/>Ravensoul nodded,<strong> "Yes, exactly, most of these are names.  This is a record from around five hundred years ago.  It's a record of the dwarven marriages, births, and deaths, that took place in the city of Haetiur for that given year.  You probably don't know that city, it lies west of us, or did lie west of us.  It fell to Pandora's armies of course.  Now tell me, what is it that you notice in this scroll that is odd, now that you know what it is?"</strong>Pipa bent over the desk again looking intently at it, but she couldn't see what it was that the headmistress wanted her to see.  She was about to say that she didn't know when Ravensoul said,<strong> "Focus, look at the names, let them fill your mind, use your intution.  What jumps out at you?"</strong><br/><br/>Pipa again turned back to the scroll and squinted, reading as carefully as she could, decoding the dwarvish runes one by one and trying to make sense of them.  Then she felt a touch, feather light, as the headmistress ran two fingers along the soaked panties that Pipa was wearing.  The headmistress's fingers slid along the material, stimulating Pipa's sex, causing her to gasp, her hips pushing back into the touch ever so slightly.  But the headmistress snapped,<strong>"Focus on the page, don't let this distract you, let it focus your thoughts!"</strong><br/><br/>Pipa swallowed a growl of frustration, how could she focus on some old parchment when she was being touched in such a way?  She wanted to pull the panties aside and have the headmistress plunge those delicate fingers...  She gasped.  The headmistress began stroking Pipa's clit through the damp panties, sending an electric thrill through Pipa's body.  Then like a bolt of lightning, Pipa gasped for a different reason and turned looking at the headmistress.  The pale woman smiled at Pipa's sudden realization as she brought her fingers to her mouth to lick the moisture from them.  Pipa blurted out,<em>"The names are masculine!  Not all of them, but so many.  So many dwarvish names written with the masculine format.  How can there be that many?"</em><br/><br/>Headmistress Ravensoul beamed at Pipa, such a clever young woman.  She carefully rolled the scroll back up and answered as she moved to put it back on the rack,<strong>"There are maybe a handful of beings left alive that remember the time before Pandora, ancient elves and dwarves, and they rarely deign to speak to outsiders anymore.  But we do know that before the coming of Pandora, the two genders, male and female were roughly in balance among most people.  Almost all marriages in fact were between a man and a woman."</strong><br/><br/>Now that did sound odd to Pipa.  Oh certainly a man could marry a woman, sure, but only one?  What a waste.  Most often it was two women who fell in love with each other and wanted to raise a family who married.  Sometimes more than two women, and she'd even known that the mayor of Oreford had taken a man into her marriage, along with two other wives.  But the mayor, she had money, she could afford to have married one of the town's rare men and share him only with her two wives.  To have a man alone, to yourself?  Pipa wasn't sure how she felt about that.  But the headmistress continued,<strong>"Over the centuries since Pandora has come to our world, the very nature of our world has been corrupted from what it once was.  Although now we get into a nature of discussion about what 'corruption' is, and that can be a very very long topic, one for another day.  Come let us finish our tea." </strong>She guided Pipa back to the chairs and settled her cloak about her as she sat.<strong>"Over four hundred years our world has seen relative peace and harmony, at the expense of contestants like you and I.  But over the last few hundred years more and more contestants have been making it through the dungeon, have been escaping on the reaping levels, have rejoined our world.</strong>"<br/><br/>She shifted in her seat slightly and took a deep breath, she didn't like talking about her corruption,<strong>"I escaped with very little corruption by some people's opinion.  But as it stands, I not only want sex, but I need it.  Like the stories of vampires or succubus who require blood or sex to survive, that is the curse of my corruption.  I grow weak if I go more than a day or two without an infusion of primal energy, generated by a willing partner.  Likewise there were some physical changes to my body, though nothing too overt." </strong>She twitched aside her cape then exposing her body and pointing to what looked like a small tattoo just above her right leg, very close to her close cropped pubic hair,<strong>"I still bear the touch of a mark wraith for example though it's effects seem to have ceased once I left the dungeon, I am not sure about it."</strong><br/><br/>She sighed and shook her head.<strong> "I am rambiling, I am sorry.  My point is that I believe your mother was the contestant Olivianna Taurose.  She was a skilled mage, a seductress, one who made her way through the dungeon with skill, magic, and seduction.  I am sure she was changed as I was."</strong>Headmistress Ravensoul leaned forwards and locked eyes with Pipa before adding,<strong>"and I would be willing to bet that some of that... corruption... some of her power, her lusts, some of what made her so special, some of it flows through your veins as well."</strong><br/><br/>She sat for a moment like that before sighing again and then leaning back, drawing her cloak back around her body and shaking her head slightly.<strong>"The real question Pipa is if I am right, if you are special because of your heritage, what will you do with that gift?"</strong>