Chapter 655: Limited Edition Items

Along with the shipment of dresses, shoes, and accessories from [Vision], Lucas had also included some rather... special items in his delivery to the palace.

These particular items, a ’bonus gift’ as the boy’s letter had described them, caused even the normally bold and outgoing Third Queen to become embarrassed at the mere thought of wearing them.

Lucas’ tailor shop was basically the only place in the Rockwell Kingdom, or even the South-Central Region, where one could find new-style undergarments.

For the males, underwear was fairly simple, so no matter how many boxers and briefs were sewn in the clothing factory, they always quickly sold out.

It was the women’s underwear, however, that were really fought over.

Even plain, single-colour, purely functional female underwear was many times better than the traditional cloth strips, loose shirts and shorts, or just nothing at all.

Compared to those, a properly fitted bra and panty set was not only significantly more comfortable, they also provided far better support.

The partners of those women lucky enough to acquire one of these rare items also greatly appreciated them, though for very different reasons.

Lucas, however, wasn’t satisfied with just creating purely practical underwear, as he knew the real money in any kind of product was made in the luxury market.

And so, one day a few months ago, the young boy had very quietly slipped his two head tailors a booklet of sketches containing far more risqué designs, things he called ’lingerie’.

Was there an element of forward thinking and future planning on Lucas’ part when he did this? Preparing a bright and better future for himself and all mankind, emphasis on the ’man’ part?

Yes.

Yes, there was.

However, given his current age, and the fact that he was ’technically’ still single, it really was mostly a financial consideration for him.

For now.

Putting it in purely economic terms, if a plain-white bra made from high-quality fabric could sell for 1 Gold, then a piece of lingerie that could be used as ’bedroom battle-armour’ made from the same amount, or less cloth, could probably be sold for 10 Gold if it was advertised properly.

Of course, it was also more time consuming to make fancy lingerie, but it certainly wasn’t 10 times as time and labour intensive.

Lucas also didn’t plan on publicly advertising the existence of these special bedroom garments just yet, instead deciding to make them ’limited edition items’ available only to the wealthy and powerful.

This decision was one-part greed, one part practicality.

[Vision] was the hottest clothing shop in Misty City, possibly in the entire South-East Province, so despite several rounds of hiring and even some partial mechanization, the numbers of orders still far outstripped production capacity.

This was doubly so for the highest-end pieces as working with higher Grade materials was much more difficult.

In other words, even if Lucas wanted to bring lingerie to the masses, he simply didn’t have the manpower.

And so, after Lucas explained his intentions to Isaac and Felicity, charging them with executing this critical secret project, the pair of eccentric tailors immediately dove in and personally created several different prototypes, only involving a few others in the shop they knew could be trusted to keep their mouths shut.

Somehow, though, Louise found out about Lucas’ little side project, which he had actually separated from his [Allure] brand and was calling [Lust], for rather obvious reasons.

However, rather than condemning him as a pervert and forbidding him from ever getting close to her baby sister again, Louise actually threw her support behind the whole venture and even encouraged him to send a few of these garments to her mothers.

Now, why the hell would the First Princess do something so outrageous?

To help her future brother-in-law curry more favour with her mothers, and by extension, her father, of course.

Christina had officially become an adult, and while the Rockwell Family didn’t have a tradition of setting engagements for their children, that didn’t mean pressure didn’t exist for such arrangements to be made.

In fact, requests for Christina’s hand in marriage had begun appearing many years ago, even before the announcement of her immense Innate Talent was made.

If Lucas wanted to formally get engaged to Christina and stop all this nonsense, he was going to need her parents’ blessing.

From what Louise understood, Marianne, Natasha, and Cynthia all couldn’t wait to get Christina hitched to Lucas, as each one of them had an extremely favourable opinion of the young boy.

Her father, however...

Let’s just say, there was a reason why Louise had her first date only after she turned 40.

In any case, a couple days ago, when the three Queens opened the locked boxes containing the first official pieces from the [Lust] brand, they had been thoroughly shocked and even somewhat indignant when they saw the ’bonus gifts’ which had arrived together with their new dresses.

Needless to say, they were thankful they had followed the instructions written on the boxes and dismissed everyone else before taking a look inside.

Each of them decried the indecency of these ’base’ and ’low’ garments which were clearly designed to do nothing but drive men to insane, and Marianne, Natasha, and Cynthia all agreed to lock these vile things away and never speak of their existence again.

But like the story of Pandora’s box from the other universe, once these packages were opened, they could never truly be sealed again.

For the past few days, each of the Queens had, at one point or another, imagined what they might look like in such ’exotic’ armour, and tonight, having just won the rock-paper-scissors battle against her two Marital Sisters, curiosity got the better of Cynthia.

Quickly showering, Cynthia silently apologized to her sisters for breaking her promise before digging into the back of her wardrobe and pulling out a small locked box.

Needless to say, the lingerie itself wasn’t difficult for her to slip into; after all, there were only two ’official’ pieces and neither of them was particularly complicated.

Once she was finished changing, though, and she got a good look at herself in the full-length mirror in her room, Cynthia blushed furiously.

She thought she knew what she was doing before she started, but now Cynthia realized that this was a completely undiscovered world she was diving into.

For a moment, she thought about taking it all off and putting on something less ’indecent’, but the playful voice in the back of her head, the one that was eager to see just how stupefied Nathanial would be when he saw her wearing this, just wouldn’t shut up.

"It’s fine... Nathan has been having a hard time recently with those squabbling nobles..." Cynthia muttered aloud, seemingly trying to justify her actions to herself, "He could use a little boost... and this will certainly lift his spirits."

Well, it’ll lift something, that’s for sure, Cynthia thought to herself, her cheeks flushing even redder as her imagination began running wild.

It took a few minutes for Cynthia to return to her senses, at which point she actually discovered a second note in the bottom of the lingerie box, one which had the words ’additional suggestions’ written on it.

Reading these suggestions, which were supposedly meant to enhance the ’effectiveness’ of her current outfit, Cynthia nearly fell back into a panic, and it was several more minutes before she ultimately decided that if she was going to do this, she was going to go all in!

Now, most of the instructions left on the note weren’t possible to follow right now, but one of them was, so taking a moment to do just that, the Third Queen took several deep breaths and psyched herself up before very carefully walking over to her door, sticking her head out into the hallway, and making sure that no one was looking, especially not her two sisters.

Once she was certain the coast was clear, she snuck across the hall like a thief to her husband’s bedroom where she quietly lifted her hand and knocked.