Sure it was sexy when she was seducing him, but he couldn't help but wonder why she chose that term at times. He may have been slightly shorter than most men in the area, and he considered his manhood fairly average, but he was far from what anyone could call "little." Wasn't he? When he asked she had told him it was because she was a few years older than him and that they were in fact about the same height standing, but the endearment still made him self-conscious at times. He preferred “darling” or even “pet” most of the time.

Confused and disillusioned, he soon fully awoke in his bed, sitting up immediately to scan his dark room for any sign of her. But as always there was none. For a minute he could swear he could feel his skin still tingling from her touch, and the small sheet he used as a blanket no longer covered him. Yet the sensations faded soon, and for all he knew he had pulled the sheet off in his sleep due to it being a warm night. His pants were on still, but then he thought he remembered the sensation of her pulling them back up before her visit had ended.

Regardless, the memory of her words remained clear in his mind and he remained convinced that it had not been a mere dream. He was also still hard, his erection straining in his underwear. Given what she had planned for him he guessed she wanted him to save up as much as he could, so he didn't bother to finish himself off and simply relaxed, thoughts of what the next day might bring filling him as he drifted back to sleep.

As Van set out from the village the next morning he considered how foolish his actions seemed, wondering out into the wilderness because a voice in his sleep told him to. Yet again he pondered creatures he knew about and how they could be setting up a trap for him and yet again he concluded that these events didn't fit with any of them.

Not that this meant it couldn't be a trap by some other being, and as much as he wanted to believe in Serafina he had brought along a hunting knife just in case he ended up needing it, whether for defense along the way or to help him get more food if he got lost somehow. Further, a small belt of forest lined the Great Labyrinths and was known to be home to a number of types of mamono that were known to snatch men on occasion. So while he bore them no ill will, as an extra precaution he carried in his satchel a small bag of peppers that had been ground up into a fine powder. Throwing a fistful of it in the face of an attacker was as effective against most mamono as it was against humans, that is it was effective enough to make sex be the last thing on a mamono's mind for a while. It was certainly better than trying to fight them directly. For while even a seasoned warrior might fall before a mamono's seductive wiles while he attempted to fight her, a coughing and gasping, temporarily blind mamono would be easily resisted or escaped from, and that's assuming she didn't simply retreat on her own

Of course its use also assumed you had enough time and ability to use it, so keeping yourself aware of your surroundings was of vital importance. Further a traveler needed to know to walk the opposite direction as soon as they got even a whiff of the sweet-smelling pheromones some mamono used to attract men, as if they didn't it wouldn't be Long before their will to defend themselves would be gone.

And of course the pepper powder didn't do much of anything to the more powerful and supernatural mamono types. Still, it was one of the cheapest defenses one could get against mamono and effective enough that most travelers swore by it.

During the hours-long walk on the Largely deserted dirt road Van had ample time to think on a number of things. His own feelings about being with a mamono were among the forefront of them. He had been sincere with Serafina, but he only now began to consider how Little actual experience he had with demihumans. His home city was unusual in being quite urbanized and far enough away from wilderness areas that many of the more nature-loving mamono steered clear of it. As for Van, he was quite sedentary growing up, rarely ever leaving the city, a fact which made Van's Love of nature a bit surprising to some.

And while people there were more tolerant of those who had positive views toward mamono, this didn't mean they actively endorsed relationships or close interactions with them. It was far from the rare and distant semi-utopias where humans and demihumans were said to live in relative harmony, indeed to ease Living together most of the mamono that did live in his city did so with a degree of secrecy, donning the guise of a human when in public and usually only revealing their true nature to close friends and lovers. There was at least one wealthy government official whose wife was rumored to be a fox woman of some kind from the Land of Zipangu. Certainly her husband was one of the main forces behind the more tolerant mamono-related laws of the city.

Of course Van rarely saw, let alone spoke with such high society types.

On the other hand he did come to hear gossip about a few cases of people who had gone missing over the years, their disappearances being blamed on succubi or dullahan as well as the more conventional causes of murder or simply running away from home. They were interesting stories, but mostly just hearsay.

Despite all this, one of his more memorable encounters occurred as a young teen when he was helping in his father’s shoe shop, a mere year or so before lack of customers and his parent's untimely deaths forced the shop to close. On that day a traveling lizardman (to Van the common name was misleading, he thought of them as “lizardwomen") by the name of Luise came in, wanting to surprise her husband with a pair of well-made shoes, ones fit for a warrior she made sure to emphasize. She stated that since her kind did not wear shoes, (their scaly feet being more than tough enough), she knew Little about what made a quality shoe, but surmised that like with weapons ones made individually by a practiced hand were superior to ones mass-produced with cheap material and assembly Lines.

Her confidence and coolheaded demeanor were infectious, his father getting over the shock of having a mamono customer quite quickly and getting to work on her request. Van himself was so enthralled by the appearance of the exotic woman that he ended up staring longer than he should have, to the point that the until-then stoic reptile woman smirked at him and said she was taken but to keep staring if he wanted to spar with her. That and one glance at the imposing blade at her side was enough to convince him to hastily apologize, but she Laughed it off remarking that she was used to being stared at and that looks like his were preferable to ones of disgust, fear or anger.

Emboldened, he began asking questions about her and her kind and soon

Luise had him listening with rapt attention to tales of her adventures around the world, the people and mamono she had met (and often fought) in her quest to become a truly great warrior, at times acting out the events with fervent, yet dignified flair.

Beyond that dignity though she turned out to have some comedic quirks as well, namely going on a five minute diatribe about her views on her nickname "Lulu." It seemed she was okay with her husband or friends calling her that in casual conversation, but objected to it in any interaction that was serious, and simply calling her “Lu” was an offense that usually resulted in the offender bleeding and Luise excusing the slight injury as a “reflex reaction." She was adamant that it was truly a reflex, her pride acting out on its own, and Van had to restrain himself to keep from Laughing at how serious she was about the whole thing.

He'd been a bit surprised by how her demeanor changed when she told him about how she had met her husband, blushing a bit and getting a dreamy look in her eyes as she recounted it. It started as a normal challenge to a young swordsman she had met on the road, but it had escalated to them fighting a grand battle that pushed them both to the very edge before ending in a utter stalemate, the pair coming to a mutual respect and admiration before, as she put it, "instinct" took them both over.

She refused to explain any further than that to Van's disappointment, and their talk ended abruptly as his father, a bit annoyed with him, let him know that his break time had ended quite a while ago. Luise had smiled and coolly took responsibility for detaining him, remarking that

Van was a “fine young man“ and giving him a kiss on the cheek goodbye that left the shocked Van stumbling about in a pleasant daze for a good ten minutes as he got back to work.

Luise had been one of the main reasons Van came to have such favorable views toward mamono. After meeting her he devoted most of his spare time to learning what reliable information he was able to get about the demihumans, while his adolescent fantasies began to include about as many mamono as they had human women. Yet in all that time he had never considered he would ever be in a position to actually wed a demihuman.