Tomboy Island

“The volcano,” Alex said. “I think we have secured enough ground now. Let’s see what that is about.”

They began their march towards the source of the soot and heat. The heat of the tropics increased, but the Necklace of Regulation prevented that from affecting them. They only had to watch their step, though that got easier as they got closer to the mountain.

Out in the ash fields, the veins of magma beneath the earth were hidden by stone and soot. Close to the volcano, the rock flowed openly on the surface, following channels that eventually disappeared beneath the earth.

“This is some grade-A magical BS,” Kiara remarked.

Alex grunted in agreement. Granted, volcanoes were not an area of expertise of his, but he was at least certain that it wasn’t normal for lava to just continuously flow like that. It continuously spawned from the miniature mountain, ran like viscous water, and yet did not heat the ground to any bothersome degree.

They walked on flat, black stone now. It was cracked in many places, a once level surface shifted into a multitude of different elevations and crooked platforms. It all surrounded the volcano.

Up close, it looked a lot larger, yet it was still an objectively tiny ‘mountain’. It went only 25 metres up, consisted entirely of black stone, and the lava constantly spilled down the sides in channels carved by time.

“The lava elemental that attacked me yesterday is probably the source of this endless stream,” Alex theorized. From what he understood about magic so far, it still operated according to rules. Esoteric rules, yes, but cause and effect were still in place.

“Sounds like a reasonable assumption,” Kiara said.

They walked around as best they could. Bridges and narrow gaps allowed them to cross the lava streams here and there. Alex had expected something of note to happen when they got there. Instead, it was just… a volcano.

He kept his hand on the Necklace of Regulation. The air outside the temperate bubble was extremely hot. Without the magical item, they would have needed to weave in and out of the area, recovering like one did after a trip to the sauna. He preferred not putting himself and his women through that ordeal.

Just as he was starting to think that there was nothing of value around here at all, Ashley found the entrance.

“Hey, uh… that looks interesting,” the reporter said, pointing them all at the stone archway.

It was a lone mark of light grey, hidden between cracked platforms and overhanging, black rock. The volcano seemed to have grown around that gate, an impression that only grew stronger Alex approached. Strings of cooled rock hung, hardened, above the upper edge of the tall entrance. The ground consisted of reinforced tiles that had survived the shifting of the ground. The same was true for the hallway behind, a slanted corridor that lead into the earth beneath the volcano.

“Another dungeon?” Alex guessed, then chuckled. “Feels weird to say that in real life.”

“Our entire life is weird now,” Kiara remarked.

“Fair point.”

Janette stood next to Alex, her cold gaze glinting with a competitive desire. “Are we heading inside?”

It was still early in the day. They could, conceivably, descend and at least clear a decent amount of the space. Then again, he was making assumptions on how deep it went and what they would find down there.

Alex thought about it for several moments, then nodded. “Let’s explore this.”

“A-are you sure?” Ashley asked. Her cautious tone reached his ears just as Janette hugged his arm. The dryad clearly approved of his decision. “Is that, uhm, wise?”

“We have plenty of time,” he responded, “and we are plenty prepared, I think. If that turns out to be wrong, we’ll find out.”

“Let’s just hope there’s something valuable in there,” Kiara stated.

They advanced into the corridor. After the first metres, Janette pulled out the glowing crystal stored in the gauntlet. It’s golden light pushed back the darkness. It was not as efficient as a flashlight, but it was more than enough for them to know where they were going.

The first corridor opened up into an underground chamber. Like the land around the volcano, the chamber was broken and mismatched. The same went for the adjacent corridors. Dereliction had made it a labyrinth.

“So, uh, where do we go first?” Ashley asked. “This seems confusing…”

“It is for now,” Alex agreed. He gently removed Janette from his arm to inspect markings on the wall. They were carved in that now-familiar mixture of Greek and Aztec designs. “This place is manmade, however. Even if the pieces have been shifted, the puzzle has a set outcome.” The pilot turned back to his women with a confident smile. “I am good at keeping locations in my head.”

“No kidding,” Kiara muttered in earnest appreciation. She wasn’t all brattiness.

“I hope we find water somewhere down here,” Janette said.

“Want to get his dick clean that badly?” the ginger dwarf asked.

Janette shrugged carelessly. “He’s our Master, he deserves to cum often and hard. Evelyn is entirely right on this front.”

“Y-yeah, if Alex does all the work then we can keep his balls empty!” Ashley agreed.

“I suppose if you put it like that…” The trio gave his halfmast a hungry look. He would have been at full erection already had it not been for the continued layer of abrasive dust on his man bits

“For the first time since landing, I wish I had clothes, so this situation could have been avoided,” Alex lamented, as he lead them down the first corridor. To put a map together in his head, he needed to get a minimum of the layout scouted.

“If you could have clothes or some magical item that just let you wash anywhere you are, which one would you choose?” Janette wondered.

“The cleaning, obviously,” Alex responded. “I am very appreciative of the nudist life. I would only allow clothes in the direst of circumstances.”

“Allow, like you can tell us not to wear any?” Kiara started in a mocking tone, but ended up voicing it as a question. “Would you like us to be naked forever? Your readily accessible free-use slaves?”

“Yes,” Alex answered without a second of hesitation.

“...I suppose that is the adequate repayment for being our go-to for all of our problems,” Kiara admitted. With a smug smile, she added, “After all, you thrive in providing for us, right?”

“You heard of that already?” the man of the island asked.

Janette swung the light crystal around, illuminating a craggy wall. The room they were currently in had been split, one half shifting so much upwards that it was no longer accessible from its other half. “Tess and Jane made sure everyone heard.”

“Good girls,” Alex said, happily. He wanted all of his haremettes to know what he was about. “Obviously, if you don’t want to become that submissive, you can stop wherever you want. I just wanted it to be clear that I am very comfortable with the position I am moving into.”

“I loathe relying on people,” Janette stated immediately, only to shoot him a smile. “You are the exception, Master. It’s… soothing to know there’s someone that will spoil me.”

“...please protect me, I am small…” Ashley muttered shyly.

“Louder, I can’t hear you, my little mouse.”

“P-please protect me, I am very small!” the Asian reported shouted, pale cheeks red with embarrassment. “I’ll rely on you, Master! I h-hope this chatty sex slave will b-be able to make you happy!”

“You already are making me a very happy man,” Alex assured.

“Yes, yes, we all sign our autonomy away willingly to the big, muscular, kind and yet endearingly sadistic titan of a man,” Kiara drawled, the sarcasm failing to paint over her true feelings. “I am just soooo reluctant about giving everything I am to a man that treats me right and can beat a gorilla in a fistfight.”

“And I am just so annoyed that I have to do my duty as a man and protect my gorgeous and capable tomboys,” Alex returned in kind.

Their banter continued on, while he guided them through the corridors. Scouting became puzzling became resolution. The upper floor was symmetrically built. On a top-down map, the mirroring axis was horizontal, located right north of the entrance tunnel. Having found that pattern, finding the staircase downwards was only a matter of time. Several of the corridors he wanted to use had been turned inaccessible by the drifting rooms. At least the exploration yielded a couple of other results.

“Shiny little things,” Kiara purred, rolling the stones between her fingers. They did not appear particularly rare, but they were nicely cut and had survived the ages down here, courtesy of being rocks. The dwarf had taken an immediate liking to them and kept carrying them on her person.

Alex hoped they would find more interesting items deeper down.

___________________________________________________________________

Alex had descended into the guts of a structure many times before. He came from wealth and though his parents had always made clear that wealth would go to his older siblings first, he still had spent much of his childhood inside large structures. As children were wont to do, he had managed to find his way in the cellar of an expensive school, explored the undergrounds of mansions, and, when he was older, he had walked through the supply tunnels beneath an airport or ten.

The complex they descended into reminded him of those dives. The decoration and such above were all stripped away, forgotten in favour of brutalist efficiency. It was hot, like it had been hot in the cellars of the structures with their old, poorly isolated piping.

Here, too, there were pipes. Except those pipes weren’t just poorly isolated - they were leaking red-hot lava. It was an esoteric network, knotting along the outer walls of the corridors. The superheated liquid covered much of the floor, though ancient spill mechanisms were somehow still working. Molten rock flowed off into grates, leaving thin strips and pockets that they could walk on.

“Why would they be pumping molten rock through pipes?” Kiara asked the question on everyone’s mind.

“I don’t know, some ritual?” Alex suggested.

“I doubt it.” Janette put her hand on the wall. When she drew it back, her fingertips were covered in fresh soot. “There was a fire in here.”

“I mean… duh?” Kiara gestured at the glowing lava all around them.

The dryad gave the dwarf a long, disappointed stare. “If there was a fire, it means that this place was not built for extreme heat.”

“We have heard of other places where the safety mechanisms they once built failed, so that’s not the only valid theory,” Kiara countered.

Alex listened to them both while he and Ashley had a look around. The piping had been utterly wrecked by the shifting of the rooms. Slow, gradual drift had torn the metal open.

Once more, the man of the island reached for the necklace. ‘I wonder how far it can be pushed,’ he thought. So far, he had only relied on its temperate bubble and avoided testing whether his feet would survive a toasting.

A valve above a stream of lava made it tempting to test if the necklace could protect him from more. The metal was every bit as hot as the molten rock beneath it. Though there was nothing to actually force him to use it. There were many other ways to find out what this place had been for. Technically, he didn’t have to find it out at all. The path ahead was difficult, but there was a path beyond these pipe-marked corridors and chambers.

“I feel like you’re having stupid guy thoughts,” Kiara called out to him. “The ‘could I turn that big rock into little rocks by headbutting it’ kind.”

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?” Alex cried out in protest. “Nooooooooooooooo.”

The tone made Janette raise an eyebrow. “What were you thinking about?”

“I was just considering if I could touch that valve without burning my hands by limit testing the Necklace of Regulation.”

“...”

“...”

“...Uhm… Master…?” Ashley timidly raised her voice. “You were… considering touching… scalding hot metal?”

“Well… when you put it like that…”

“See, this is why men don’t live as long as women,” Kiara pointed out.

“To be fair, I would be taking that risk for you.”

“There are risks you take for us and then there’s risks you take because you think it’d be funny. I may have been a virgin, but I know men well enough! Even when you are smart, you are stupid.” The dwarf crossed her arms on top of her breasts.

“I was just thinking about it,” Alex assured her, then cleared his throat. “Let me use the smarts without the stupid then.”

He tilted his head back and put his engineering knowledge to use. As a pilot, he was no actual builder or crafter, but he had been schooled in enough about the fields to understand the machines he had been operating. Not necessarily something that would have helped with magic under normal circumstances, but this seemed to be a sort of midway point between science and supernatural.

“The pipes… are going in and out of the walls,” he said and pointed everyone at a few examples of where the cracked architecture had put to the surface pipe segments that should have been hidden. “And there’s magma coming out of the holes in the wall as well… i think Janette was onto something. Lava wasn’t what these were meant to carry.”

The dryad took the victory with a haughty smirk. She would have grabbed Alex’s arm again, if they had enough space to walk side by side. The quartet followed the narrow path between the magma spills as Alex searched for more answers.

He found it in a cold pipe. By happenstance, that particular bit of metalwork had not been exposed to the lava. The top had, all the same, been cracked open by the pressures of the shifting underground. Inside the tube was water.

“I think this may have been a central heating complex,” Alex presented his theory. “The magma was supposed to remain contained and heat up water. Maybe all of the lava veins in the surrounding land are all of the burst pipes.”

Kiara tilted her head one way then the other. “Could be… but then why is there magma in the pipes now?”

“Listen to what he said,” Janette interjected. “If the magma was used to heat it and the pipes got damaged, the magma would fill the pipe. Over a long enough timeframe, it fills all of the pipes.”

“Precisely,” Alex said. “Now, if I am correct, then all of these are the pipes that would connect to the outside… so if we follow them…”

The logic eventually brought them to a massive cylinder of a glass-like crystal. It likely had once held the water reserves of the location. Now it was only filled with lava and trapped steam. The molten rock was visibly flowing upwards through the pipes. Something put pressure on the entire system, ensuring that the heat continued to flow.

Conversely, the room was not hot but chilling cold. Four massive totems in the corners of the chambers each operated as a cooling rod strong enough to cover their surfaces in frost. It looked like some emergency factor had activated and failed every bit as miserably as everything else.