The temple of the goddess of Debauchery was an impressive building with so many colours and gaudy, lewd and explicit decorations it was frankly impressive. There was a clear theme. Every single coat hook was shaped like a dick and for the first few minutes, it was funny. Then it wasn’t. Then it was just how coat hooks were shaped.

Arne had spent all day after the Peace-incident, while Toog was mage-sitting Dia, getting a feeling for the Temple of Debauchery …and desperately needing a bath. He had done some quiet sneaking around to get an idea of who was where and when. The priests and priestesses were remarkably easy to avoid here, from a thieving perspective. Nobody seemed alert or worried about intruders, even in the priests’ private quarters. The biggest threat to stealthy endeavours was the amount of sex and self-pleasuring, sexual and otherwise, and combinations thereof happening everywhere on temple grounds between basically everyone.

And then he’d asked about their orgy services and found that you just had to put your name on a list and join up for the sensuous pleasure evening celebration. And yes, of course he could bring his two partners and a big bowl of water.

o-0-o

“Yes, we can bring a blindfolded woman in a box. It is literally just going to make us fit in better!” Arne promised when he was debriefing that evening while all of them sat on cushions around a low table eating a dinner of a local type of pink riceflowers and dark lizard meat in berry sauce.

Dia muttered something under her breath. “Just do it quickly!” she then shout-snapped at Toog who looked at her questioningly.

“I know,” Arne said, and then realised Dia most of the time couldn’t hear him when he didn’t shout unless ‘Chuckles’ had decided to laugh quietly for a while, but that was a rare occurrence. “I have a plan!” he yelled, gave up on Dia and turned to Toog. “We are going to what the temple of Debauchery calls a sensuous celebration. We just need a solid wooden box, a couple of handspikes and I need to be drugged, so I don’t succumb to the ritual.”

“Alright… I’m sensing there are some rough workings you aren’t explaining.” Toog looked at Dia who stared blankly back and just made a ‘can’t hear you’ gesture by her pointy ears and sighed as she went back to her food. Remarkably more quiet right now than was the norm, Arne thought, almost proud of her display of self-control.

Arne nodded towards the door and he and Toog left to go outside.

“Can you do the ritual?” Arne asked when they were thoroughly out of earshot on the other side of the door.

Toog stared blankly at him.

“You said you had written the death crab ritual down while being a watcher,” he elaborated. “So, can you do it?”

“Ehh, I guess, maybe? I’m not sure it’s as simple as just saying the words, but I can let Dia read it if nothing else. She can probably do it. …You understand that it summons a death crab? That thing which we are trying to avoid, right?” Toog looked at him, brow wrinkled in thought.

“Yeah, I get it. Thank you,” he confirmed, “but here’s the plan; we go to an orgy to power the ritual, call a death crab, stick it in a box, go to the highest ranked priest of Debauchery we can find, slap the death crab on them and tell them to figure out how to remove it and all its Chuckles-variants, safely or we will keep death crabbing them.”

Toog nodded slowly, not meeting his gaze. “Do you remember that time with the priestess and the ehh…” Toog did a noncommitting gesture towards Arne's eye while blinking, which forcibly reminded him of the fishing hooks. “I told you not to antagonise a tentacle thing?”

Arne didn’t bother responding, but just indicated with a hand gesture that Toog should get on with it.

“Antagonising a goddess by killing her priests… No, no, I’m not against it,” Toog held up a hand to stop the protests before they happened. “I’m just saying it needs to be done …tactfully, you know?”

“Absolutely! You remember that time I had a network and people I could rely on?” Arne asked. “Well, from where I’m seeing this, everything I had to lose is lost, and Debauchery is deeply useless to us and she can, and probably will, go fuck herself. So since this plan is what charm will get you, I say we either proceed to try to weaponise the death crabs and make them work for us for once or you come up with something better.”

“Well, we could… ask?”

“Nope! Not doing that again!” he stated with finality. “I’d rather go with a mad plan we at least have some control over than letting another temple tell me wonderfully edifying facts about my soul to aid my personal growth while making me suffer! I am done!”

Toog just looked at him for longer than was comfortable. “You’re really weird, you know.”

Arne held Toog’s gaze, unsure how to proceed. “Got a better plan?” he settled for. “Excellent, I didn’t think so.”

o-0-o

Arne closed his fingers around the bandage on his arm. Toog had cut him and smeared the wound with a grey powder before bandaging his arm. Almost immediately, a sort of pleasant heaviness had invaded his body, like the warm feeling of slowly resurfacing after a deep, deep sleep. He didn’t feel completely surefooted, and all colours were incredibly vibrant, but he and Toog had carried Dia in the box with the bowl and the two hooked wooden spears for splicing ropes and hauling fishing nets over the railing.

All his movements felt slow and sluggish while they unpacked, Dia sitting blindfolded and unable to assist. She and Toog had studied the death crab chant earlier. He sat and looked at the spectacle as the two poured water in the bowl as the other celebrants arrived in the large, gaudily decked hall. There were pillows all over the floor and along the walls were myriad strange implements for fastening, hurting, and pleasuring. Some were swings with intricate straps, some were implements or machineries attached to the wall.

Judging from the range of participants in this daily sensuous pleasuring ritual to please and celebrate Debauchery, this was going to be strange. One man arrived with a large fish. The temple of Debauchery apparently made novice priesthood available as assistants, because a young priestess in the gold and turquoise negligee that seemed to be a favourite among the priesthood came in with an elderly obese participant and a large cake and proceeded to lift up her skirt before the ceremony.

Arne looked around. People were either dressed up, dressed down, ready to pleasure themselves or someone else or sitting with temple licenced male or female prostitutes and various kinds of stimulants.

Sitting around a bowl of water with a blindfolded woman and an ambiguously gendered person while being drugged was easily the most prim and prudish life choice in the room.

o-0-o

“Help, help, there’s a tentacle monster!”

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o-0-o

“Alright, so it didn’t pan out like I expected,” Arne said. “But never mind. Now we are smarter and more experienced. We will go back tomorrow. Nice work wiping the tentacle popping up off on the guy with the ferret, Toog.”

“No problem, Charm. I’m a people person, too,” Toog said smugly.

“So, now we just have to figure out why we got a tentacle and not a death crab.”

“Maybe people didn’t have enough sex?” Toog suggested. “I mean, a lady almost sitting on a cake while some old guy jerks off, I’m not sure that powers it enough.”

Arne just shook his head, caught between impressed and incredulous. “I mean… fish guy! I don’t even know how to put words on that… but they wouldn’t be heavy enough to death crab, you’re right.”

“I figured it out!” Dia yelled over the private din in her mind. “It’s the smell. That’s what the laurel is for.”

“They only eat people smeared in laurel oil?” Toog shouted. “That seems too easy.”

“They only eat people smeared in laurel oil. To make them go down easy? I don’t know. They don’t really eat them, do they?” Dia shouted back.

“No, wait. Earlier, we orgied while the officiants did the normal chant that makes people horny,” Arne began, forcing himself to not wonder how a horny-making tentacle chant could have become normal. “And probably at the same time, the other priests in the room with the pool were calling up a death crab. Maybe it isn’t just that a random wishy-washy orgy has to happen, but that it has to happen with the ritual? Can that be true? That the ritual funnels the power to the …death crab?” He shrugged and looked at the others. Then he shouted the whole sentence again so Dia could hear.

“Yeah, that sounds like it could be. But the laurel too! I’m pretty sure,” she shouted back. And then added a snarling, “Shut the fuck up, I can’t stand your gods-damned laughing!” followed by an inarticulate scream.

“So, what do we do tomorrow? Do we still go to the Debauchery service and then just do the horny ritual first?” Arne asked.

Toog nodded. “I guess we just have to find some laurel-scented oil, then.”

o-0-o

Arne had spent the day before the sensuous evening ritual working through the marketplace of Estrin like a common thief. It was humiliating having to go for cash rather than sitting back managing acquisitions, sales and fencing of valuable objects and smuggled goods, but he didn’t know any fences and had no connections in Estrin that he felt sure of. Besides, by now, anyone who knew him would also know what happened to his people and be reluctant to deal with him if not downright hostile, hoping that someone who wanted him hurt this badly would pay a good sum for him.

No, definitely, lifting purses like a street urchin was his only recourse for supplementing his funds; a necessity since Toog was broke and he suspected Dia didn’t really understand money. She was probably used to just minding her own business and killing people if she wanted their stuff. Besides, pickpocketing his way through a crowded marketplace meant he didn’t have to sit around listening to Dia as she slid further into madness, muttering and screaming at the laughter in her mind at random intervals before suddenly snapping back and having a normal conversation. It was unnerving.

The day had brought a decent amount of cash, everything considered, and before heading back to get the other two, he bought several bottles of laurel essence and some oil. That would have to do.

o-0-o

It had been disturbingly easy to get a room full of Debauchery’s finest most devout adherents to let Toog and Arne rub them in laurel-scented oil before the ceremony. And Dia, blindfolded, sat by the bowl of water, demure and modest, waiting for the action with just a few tics and muttered comments. And it was an experience he never wanted to have again. Ever. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Arne was aware that he had gotten off easy, since the drugs Toog had given him again made every movement and happening slightly sluggish and fuzzy. The thought of sex was interesting but not enticing.

And when Toog and Dia began the horny-chant, Arne just sat on the wooden box they had brought, slowly twirling a wooden handspike, gaze firmly fixed on the water bowl. And then, as Dia made a sweeping gesture of her hand while chanting …movement in the surface of the water. Ripples spread.

A pale, awful finger-leg emerged. Then another. Arne got to his feet, staring at it. As it… as it wiggled weirdly. Finger-legs searched the rim of the bowl. It wobbled a bit. The pale appendage seemed to claw at the rim for a little while, almost in annoyance, and then it retreated under the surface and was gone. For a while, Arne stood still as Toog and Dia still sat, engulfed in the chant and not paying attention and everyone around him were orgying, screaming and moaning like their life depended on it.

He tapped Toog on the shoulder with the handspike. Then he tapped Dia. It took a little while, but then both of them snapped out of the trance. Toog looked around and up at him, Dia adjusted her blindfold.

“Minor detail,” Arne said. “The bowl was too small for the death crab.”

o-0-o

“Gods-fucking-damn-it!” Dia screamed. “We are not waiting one more day! I am not waiting one. More. Fucking. Day. I can't stand it. I will go mad!”

Arne felt a slight warbling in the air as Dia ground her teeth and clenched her fists, and he knew she was seconds away from just sucking the life out of everyone there.

“Dia! Dia.” He quickly grabbed her hands and spun her around, so she had her back to his chest, arms crossed in front of her. It had worked back in the temple of Peace, and he hoped it might mean she killed those in front of her and not him if it didn’t. “Don’t worry. It is just a minor setback. We will go quickly and get a big enough, death crab sized bowl and then come back and try again,” he said soothingly. “We are not abandoning you just because you are crazy. Don’t worry. The Vampire made sure that wasn’t an option.”

“Fuck you and your whole face!” Dia screamed.

Arne wasn’t sure if it was directed at him or Chuckles in her mind.

“Fuck you!” she repeated. “There are no more orgies tonight. I am stuck–“

“No, no, no. We are going to fix this.” He looked at Toog who was sitting cross-legged on a bench in a side room of the temple, idly spinning a string of polished cherrywood anal-beads around.

“Sure,” Toog said. “We can …I guess we can just go hire some people?”

“Yes, and I will book us a nice room and make sure whoever you get, Toog, can be lubed up in laurel from head to toe. It will all be fine.”

Arne felt Dia relax in his grip and slowly let her go. Weaponising death crabs was best done at night anyway. This might not be the worst thing to happen.

o-0-o

It really was the worst thing to happen, Arne thought. He had now seen some pretty horrendous orgies, but this one by far topped it. Toog hadn’t bothered going far for the orgy participants, so right now the hall in the temple of Debauchery that Arne had just rented was full of the local hoboes of the temple district. The homeless people were for certain the reason the Family had instituted the giggle-grope fountain, Arne thought. The pong was fierce, and the orgy crowd confused, but Arne had begun the whole thing by quickly reapplying a healthy dose of Toog’s drugs to the wound on his arm and then rolled out the keg of personal use lubricant, which he had mixed the laurel essence into.

…Then Arne stepped back and let culture run its course. He stepped back physically. As far as he could get. And looked out a window. And drew his mask over his face. And hit his head on the wall a couple of times to remind himself that this was not an orgy he needed to participate in, as Dia and Toog began the chant over a bowl of water, this time of a death crab friendly size.

After a while, when he was certain he wasn’t suddenly going to run off and get naked, Arne turned his gaze to the twenty-two naked hoboes, who were doing their very horniest to get the orgy going, but the copious amounts of lubricant and complete lack of traction were complicating matters considerably.

Arne stared blankly at the slippery spectacle for a long while as it slowly gathered… not speed, but enthusiasm with every syllable of the chant. He concentrated on the heaviness in his body, the fuzz in his mind. Keeping the laughter down.

Which failed. Hard. Arne wasn’t actually certain if he was laughing or crying or just both, but the violent emotions had somehow breached the dam and flooded forth and he ended up just sliding to the floor, gasping for breath while the fabric of the mask absorbed his tears. Every time a naked body slipped away from another because nobody could really get a grip on each other, the cycle of laughter started again until he had to simply hide his masked face in the crook of his elbow when the chant changed.

He felt heavier, as though the drugs had a second stage of crushing sluggishness, or maybe it was just the emptiness which the laughter and the tears had left behind that seemed to slow him. But when he made his way to the bowl, careful not to look around him, he saw the finger-legs poking up, the foreboding ripples, and with blank determination, he plunged the handspike into the water at one side of the bowl and grabbed a spider leg probing the other, and in a splash of water he lifted the pale, fleshy horror up, threw it in the waiting wooden crate and slammed the lid.

Then he sat down on the crate and had a slow think. It seemed like the creature was actually bound by the laws of this place. Not its own. If the size of the bowl here was a hindrance to it. It seemed unreasonable to him that a thing from another plane of existence should be limited by something so mundane. He thought about that for a while, not looking around. Then he realised that Toog and Dia were still chanting and tapped them with the handspike like he had done a few hours ago.

This time, though, the creature in the box was going to finally give them a little bit of leverage.