This Mine Of Mine

Instead of bringing education to his fellow kobolds, Thuk discovers the benefits of mining. Explicit.

Thuk was a rare thing: a kobold with an education. He'd been part of a scavenging clan when he was younger, and then one day it just wasn't enough for him any more. He'd spent a year away from home, learning all that he could, and now he was trying to bring that knowledge back to his fellow kobolds. It was about as easy as breaking through a dungeon wall with his head.

The latest kobold settlement Thuk had tracked down was a mine, hidden deep down behind crevasses only the wiry little lizards could slip through and worming its way throughout the depths of the mountain. They mined the ores and gems that hid in the stone, and traded them with the creatures that lived higher up for food and small trinkets.

Thuk slid down to sit beside his bag and pulled out a scuffed and scraped book--a human-made one, for teaching basic math. If he could get these kobolds to think about their mining in terms of math, they could trade more wisely, improve their quality of life, and live more easily.

He sat in one of the common areas spaced throughout the mine, places that had been thoroughly mined to the point where they were rooms large enough for storing tools and laying out beds. Their beds were ragged cloth maps, already secondhand by the time they had traded for them.

A small, loose cluster of the miner kobolds lounged around on the mats, doing little of anything important. Their clothes were as ragged as anything else that wasn't their pickaxes--tattered cloth, brown and caked with dust to the point that it looked like a shed skin that was still clinging to their body. The cloth scraps really only kept them warm; they didn't even cover them up completely. Even an outsider who didn't know how to tell females apart from males by the size of the knobbly crest of horns would have been able to tell male from female, because they just let everything hang out.

Thuk hadn't forgotten what it was like to be a kobold, but there were certain things from the wider world that he had taken to well. Proper clothes were very good--he wore a tunic and breeches bought from a halfling merchant. Decency was also good, because it gave you a time and a place to think about serious matters, and a time and a place to think about pleasure.

Thuk didn't feel the inherent disgust that an outsider might when he saw that one of the miners was on top of another, huffing eagerly and grinding their hips against the other's. He was, however, disappointed. He'd been here for two days, and he hadn't been able to break through their one-track minds yet. He was too different from them, with his grassy green scales and fresh, washed clothes, compared to their dirt-brown clothes and skin and, well, everything.

He got to his feet with a deep breath, and wished he hadn't breathed in deeply. The smell of sweat and musk and deep rock dirt was tough to deal with after such a long time spent above ground, in the fresh air.

“Yit, I want to show you something," he said, tugging on the shoulder of one of the kobolds watching the others fuck. Yit seemed like one of the smarter ones, and if he could get through to him, there was hope for the rest of them.

“But me watching," he said, then sighed and shuffled over to the other end of the mat, toward Thuk. “What you want show me?"

Thuk opened up the human math book and turned to an woodcut of apples. “If you go and mine, and you get three rubies one day," he said, tapping a box with three apples in it. “And then the next day, you get three more, that's six, right? One, two, three, four, five, six."

Yit stared at the picture, either thinking hard, or not thinking at all.

“So if you go and mine, and you get two rubies one day, then two more, how many do you have?" Thuk asked.

“Me have two?" Yit asked, as if he was trying to figure out the purpose of all this.

Over the next half hour, Thuk kept working with Yit, but no matter how hard he tried, Yit's skills at anything other than sheer counting stopped at about eight.

“This dumb," Yit said, fidgeting in place.

“Would you rather be mining, or doing this?" Thuk asked. Yit didn't even take time to think about it.

“Mining!"

Thuk sighed and shut the book. “I don't get what you like about mining."

“You have try mining?" Yit asked.

Thuk shook his head. “No, I haven't." As soon as he said that, Yit was on his feet, grabbed one of the mining picks, and brought it back to Thuk. “You take, you try!" he said.

“Okay, okay," Thuk said, taking the heavy pick from the miner and slinging it over his shoulder to support the weight. He let Yit scoot back over to the rest of the group, which had all started to pair off while they were talking. Thuk didn't want to sit around and watch that, so he dropped his math book ontop of his bag and headed out into one of the tunnels.

He wanted some peace and quiet to think about how he could approach this. They were so focused on their immediate desires that they didn't bother thinking in the long term. What could he really do about it, though? If they weren't willing to listen, maybe he needed to just move on. He wanted to help his kind, but he couldn't help them if they were only interested in mining and fucking.

His nose led him down the lesser-used tunnels, away from the familiar yet slightly nauseating musk. In the older tunnels, there were no other miners, so the smell of silt and bedrock pervaded the air, a scent cold like water but dry as stone. The musk kept reminding him of sex, and that reminded him how single-minded they were, and so the lack of it was refreshing.

He had to admit that as much as he deplored their state, the clan of miner kobolds seemed content. They could be more content if they were smarter, but they didn't seem to have a bad life. Mining all day just seemed like such work.

Thuk still had the extra mining pick tossed over his shoulder. He hadn't wanted to just put it down and offend Yit, even though Yit probably wouldn't have noticed. After learning manners aboveground, it was hard to unlearn them. But he had a pick, and there he was, deep in the mining tunnels. He had never mined before, since his clan had been scavengers in a dungeon, and he just wanted to know what it was like. He had an idea, but he'd spent the past year learning things, and this was an opportunity to keep learning.

He lifted the pick off his shoulder. It felt a bit heavy to move, but the miner kobolds all had more sinewy builds than his bony frame. He pulled back half-heartedly and clunked the flat of the pick against the wall.

The exertion of carrying the pick around and hefting and swinging it got Thuk's heart beating and made him start to sweat. He didn't realize the smell he was breathing in freely now, the scent of his own exertion, was the same sort of musk that he'd climbed down here to get away from. He took a deep breath and set the pick down for a moment to flutter his thick tunic for some cool air against his chest.

If he was going to give it a try, he needed to actually put his heart into it. He gripped the pick tightly, reared back, and brought the point down against the stone quick enough that it made a ringing PING! and knocked a clump of rock down to his feet.

There was a little jolt of excitement that leaped down the pick and into his chest. Thuk straightened up for another swing, and he missed his mark, but there was another sharp one as his pick hit stone and sprinkled little rocks at his feet. Thuk had never had much muscle, but his biceps twisted and his shoulders bulged, thin and wiry, but tight and tense as he reared back and struck again. He hit the divot he'd made, deepening it. The pick rang softly after the strike.

A small grin was working its way across Thuk's slender snout. He propped the pick on one shoulder and held it with one hand, wiping the other on his pants, then switching, so that his palms weren't too sweaty to hold the grip. As he tugged at his pants, his thighs tensed. He had the beginnings of an erection--probably from the exertion, he thought.

He swung the pick wildly over his head and brought it down hard, knocking out a chunk of rock big enough that he had to shuffle to the side to keep it from landing on his toes. He laughed to himself, planted one foot on the chunk, and swung at the deeper stone.

The smell of silty dust was strong in the air, stirred up by his strikes and mixing with his own musk. Like the dust was starting to coat his skin, his dull green scales were yellowing, looking darker and dirtier with grit. In the dark, his color vision was limited, so he didn't know the difference.

After another swing, Thuk paused to tug open the chest of his tunic some more, giving his body room to breathe. Though he hadn't been rough on it, there were worn holes and threadbare patches that made it look older and rattier than it was. As he picked up the pick and struck the rock again, the holes widened and new ones split open and the hems of his pants frayed further.

He couldn't explain it, but he was getting a delight out of each time the pick struck stone. Maybe it was the way it rang out, a slightly different note each time, or maybe the jolt that bounced back through his tougher, more sinewy arms and into his compact chest. He breathed in after each strike, and the tunic's neckline tore open further, giving his chest room to rise and fall with his breaths.

He was damp with sweat, and he was hard, too. He couldn't explain that either, other than that it felt good, rubbing against the inside of his pants, flexing slightly with each swing of his pick. He had to be pent up after spending days watching the other kobolds fuck openly--that had to explain it, right?

He closed his eyes and imagined himself and a female kobold mining together, then setting their picks down and she bent over in front of the wall and they were both damp with sweat and hot with musk. Or, coming back to one of the communal rooms, laying down on the bed, grabbing one of the other kobolds and wrestling until their wrestling became fucking.

Thuk grunted softly as he shook himself out of the multiplying fantasies. It was hard; his mind chugged through the reasoning slower, like he was tired and wading through cold water and just wanted to rest. He had slipped into an instinctive mode, standing in a relaxed stance, driving the pick down into the rock again and again.

He paused for just a moment, sparing a hand to wipe his face, then went right back to swinging. “Something's...nnngh," he started to say, interrupted by a throbbing swell between his legs. “Me getting dumber," he said to himself. He was losing the things he'd learned during that year aboveground, and he couldn't help it. The ideas just seemed so distant, so...not important to him.

His pants were more akin to ragged shorts by now, and the growing rips in them were slowly disintegrating the fabric. As they wore away stitch by stitch, only his tattered and torn tunic remained to cover him. It draped down low enough to reach his legs, but with his stiff shaft springing up, it couldn't hide it. He was out in the open, completely exposed.

He wanted to pull his hands off of the pick and run away, but he just couldn't. He needed to keep mining and he was horny. He needed to keep mining because he was so horny, maybe. He could feel the energy leap down through his tight, hardy muscles, down his torso, and right to his groin. It just felt so good, like what his body was built for, with its small stature and tight sinew. He could imagine what it would sound like with a whole crew all picking away, the kind of songs their picks could make.

Thuk looked around for something to help him, a pit to throw the pick down, but there was nothing, just the tunnel and so much rock to mine. He shook his head, trying to keep it off of that sort of one-way thinking. He looked down at himself--he looked sturdier and less brittle, still thin and scrawny like all kobolds, but packed with enough strength to mine now. His tunic was practically just rags by now, hanging off his shoulders and giving him the barest coverage possible.

He reached up to his chest and touched a mark that had worked its way into his scales, like a small brand in the shape of claws clutching a gemstone. He'd asked the miners what it meant and they'd said it was their clan symbol--he'd guessed it represented one of the dragons that lived higher up that they traded their gems to.

As he touched the mark, a sudden heat rushed through him and his legs felt weak. His thoughts were spilling over, like there wasn't enough space for all of them. He was dizzy and his cock was throbbing insistently, but his instincts told him to grip the pick tight and keep mining the stone.

He struck the rock again and a burst of pleasure hit him. There was nothing wrong with mining, Thuk thought. It felt good, and it meant they could get food and things from the monsters above, and...again, he got the feeling that something was wrong, but after each swing of the pick, that feeling was weaker and harder to think about. He just wasn't smart enough to hold big ideas like that in his head.

Thuk was panting softly--not from the exertion itself, as it was routine enough, but from the feelings that mining was giving him. He swung, split open the rock, and his cock throbbed. Again, and he felt his body getting closer to the edge. Again. Again. Again! The pick stuck in the stone and he let go. He clutched at his cock instead, holding it, feeling it build up inside of him.

“Ooh...WAH!" he gasped. His hot fingers gripped his shaft tightly, trying to hold it as his cum spurted in front of him. It splashed out onto the rocks, the head of the pick, and clung slightly to his hands as it died down to a warm, pleasant feeling resting low in his chest.

Thuk wiped his hands on his rags, then tore off a small chunk of fabric to wipe down the side of the pick. If anything was important to keep in working order, it was their picks. The muddy brown kobold slung the pick over his shoulder easily, and as soon as he had caught his breath, he set out jogging down the tunnels, using his nose to lead him toward the communal rooms. Mining and fucking were the two things on his mind, and he'd be happy no matter which one his new clan would have him do.