Orgy-exhaustion was a very real thing one could suffer from. The thought of going back and getting stuck in yet another lube-smeared bout of life force theft with random strangers was, obvious risks aside, unattractive. Arne was a bit disappointed in himself, but in the end decided the theft of life force was probably to blame, not the sex itself.
So stealth had been his best option and while Toog did Toog-things and Dia played with her new imp, Arne had spent his days preparing the assault on the Family’s house in Rasheed from a distance. Rather than break into the house itself, he had broken into the houses nearby and kept an eye on people and windows.
Since he might as well accept the charm title, Arne had also made a point out of befriending and chatting up a few of the Family cultists, learning about the goings on and rough layout of the house. Fortunately, the house was a good deal smaller than the Arabesk one, and he ended up bribing the deliveryman from the bakery that delivered bread to the Family to let him assist so he could get a discrete view of parts of the inside of the building. Then he had the amazing idea to hire someone to go and participate in the orgy and report back on the layout of the building. It panned out well. Surprisingly.
Feeling not terrible about his knowledge of the Family’s house and not having put himself at risk, Arne prepared for the absolute awfulness of having to present this to a paladin, two insane people and a pet devil. Not to mention the holy lube weapon conversation he was about to have with Toog, since neither of them had access to the fancy weapons the paladin did.
o-0-o
The way to the inner sanctum was open and unimpeded. They walked right in, past the giggle grope fountain, into an open dining area and further on to the orgy hall to what they assumed was the priests’ antechamber.
Arne, mask drawn over his face and all senses alert, kept to the shadows and cast careful looks into the ceiling as they approached. Dia walked ahead and was by far the noisiest member of the group. Wisely, if Imp was tagging along, he was invisible to protect all of them from the paladin’s knowledge of him.
Dia stopped for a while before the door to the priests’ chamber as Arne and Toog silently took up positions pressed against the wall on either side of the door. Arne knew that this would make him just a shadow in the darkness and behind the mask he watched how the paladin looked worried, knowing this was far too smooth and practised a manoeuvre. Seconds later, Dia raised her hand and knocked, stepping back a few paces until she stood shoulder to shoulder with Sir Garrett.
The door opened inward.
Garrett blinked, and his eyes took on the uniform golden hue that Arne had seen during the trip here, and he whirled around to where they had come from as Dia braced herself to do what Dia tended to do.
The sound was overall mostly wet when the creature, more a hideously inflated dark ball of pulsing tissue than anything else, dropped down from its perch above their exit to the dining area.
Arne’s first instinctive reaction was to throw the lightstone in the air and suppress a gasp when the stark light bathed the creature in bluish, awful radiance.
A dark, gurgling voice came from several orifices on the pulsating, inflating and deflating thing, opening like puckered sphincters and gushing out sound. A whitish fluid accompanied the speech as the thing rolled closer to Garrett, towering at least a meter above him and several to either side. “You attack us again, bothersome little vermin. How many times must you be told that the Primordial Powers were old when your world was young!”
Arne heard the sound and understood the message, but half of his mind was struggling to work out how a creature that had nothing but buttholes all over its mass and no discernible head was capable of speech. How had it been sitting in the ceiling? Where had it hidden? He was completely certain his obsessive distrust of his surroundings had bidden him to study the ceiling above the door as well…
He struggled to shake the questions, anatomical, horrific, and otherwise, off, and for a moment got stunned into further inactivity when the creature attacked, lightning quick, rolling towards Sir Garrett who had drawn his sword in a flash and slashed out to meet the incoming monstrosity.
Finally, shaking himself from his reverie, Arne approached the battle. It was impossible to know how the monster sensed anything, so any approach would do. Although he didn’t relish the thought of letting his blades connect with the monster’s bodily cavities.
o-0-o
How it happened exactly was beyond him, but suddenly Toog was next to him, jumping up the creature’s body and getting a grip on a puckering orifice, hand buried in the leather sachet that held the blessed lube from the temple of Debauchery in Estrin. An apparently powerful series of punches later, the creature closed its orifice around the bag and Toog dextrously jumped backwards. Not quickly enough, though. A flap of the creature’s body surprisingly shot out, impacting heavily and impeding Toog’s unscathed flight.
o-0-o
“Gods fucking damn you, Garrett, you were supposed to run and get the other paladins!” Arne shouted and jumped back, narrowly avoiding a swooping flap of skin. As the monster became slowly but inexorably damaged under the onslaught, it seemed to unfold itself and become even quicker and more agile as it used the flaps of skin as a form of muscles to propel itself dextrously around.
Somewhere behind him, Dia was screaming in frustrated fury and Toog had decided to keep a distance to the creature, settling for throwing a wealth of random objects ranging from decorative pots of oil to the now classic potted plants.
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“I can’t hurt it,” Dia screamed. “It’s enough!”
A burning potted plant sailed into the messy fray of the paladin’s sword and shield, Arne’s lube smeared short swords and the creature's flailing flaps. The flying pot clipped the side of Arne’s head and he had to sidestep at the same time as the creature, apparently tired of Toog’s projectiles, ploughed forward.
Off to the side of the room where the windows to the garden were, Arne saw a bright light suddenly flare when plants burst into flame and heard Dia scream, “Suck roof, ass ball!” seconds before the explosion of energy hit the stone ceiling above them.
o-0-o
Behind him came a howl of fury and pain and Toog shouted, “I’m covered in lube, how am I supposed to get you free!” while Garrett next to him again managed to divert the attention of the dark mass of anger, assholes and acid every time it lunged for Dia lying prone under the rubble, Toog trying to extract her or Arne who had given up trying to hit a blind angle on the eyeless creature and just concentrated on stabbing and slashing all he could, while he kept shouting for Garrett to get the damned paladins.
The way this was going, it wouldn’t surprise him if Garrett went and died in a puddle of acid and the paladins blamed any possible survivors. From the sound of it, that wouldn’t be Dia or Toog.
o-0-o
It hurt to breathe, and Arne had only gotten up from being pushed violently onto a pile of debris that had fallen from the ceiling. He clenched his jaw against the pain and heard Garrett have the disgusting audacity to shout, “Get up! One of your friends are down!”
Furious, he got to his feet and ran at the beast, dodging under its flailing flaps that now seemed more like flat tentacles, reaching ever farther, while Garrett tried to keep it busy.
And finally, he saw an opening. One of the sphincters had gaped open and deep within the hideous depths a slimy thing moved and rotated. A dark, enormous eyeball with a square red pupil stared out of the sickly folds of puckered flesh.
Before he could think, Arne ran at it and plunged one of his short swords into the gaping cavity, feeling something give with a wet and sloshing pop. A wave of icy agony hit his flesh and he let go of the weapon with a gasp and tumbled backwards a few paces until he came to the pile of rubble and tripped, as the agony fully registered. He didn’t want to look down at the wound on his arm, but he was very certain the faint burned smell that permeated over the sulphur from the creature’s wounds were his leather jacket and skin underneath.
The way the monstrous thing collapsed in on itself was incredibly revolting to behold, and its own acid immediately began to devour it, leaving behind only more and more colourless skin.
Garrett withdrew, panting, his shield now hardly more than a few boards held together with a metal strap and his face and neck bloody and battered. His armour, just like Arne’s, was eaten at places where acid had begun to corrode it.
Arne stared at the dead monster and then down at Dia on the floor. She was wedged under a rock, but he knew she had been alive under there earlier because he had heard her furious ranting.
From the distance came Toog’s voice, “Help, help, there’s a tentacle monster and it killed all the priests.” Arne winced and didn’t look down at his arm. He pressed his lips together, waves of hot agony shooting through him, and he let go of his remaining blade and pressed his wounded arm against his body slowly.
“Here, let me help,” Garrett said, suddenly right in front of him.
Arne looked up. The paladin was uninjured and only appeared ruggedly tousled in the glow from the lightstone.
The pain in his battered body gathered into one singular emotion and that emotion held Arne on his feet. “What the Hells was that!” he shouted. “You were supposed to run away if we saw the monster! What if you had died? Then your friends wou–“
“You don’t leave allies in combat,” Garrett just said calmly and reached out to put a hand on Arne’s shoulder.
“Stop using disgusting, foul language! I am not allied–“ he cut himself off gasping for breath when the blessing of Justice hit him like a wave of all-permeating anguish before it finally subsided and his flesh mended, ribs grew together, and his vision stopped being blurred with pain. “Consent is important!” he snapped when he had taken a deep breath and Garrett let go of him.
“Dia, I think she’s unconscious,” Garrett said, on his way over to where she had fallen. “Good work getting the killing blow in.”
“I didn’t kill Dia…” Arne commented dryly.
Garrett gave a quick, involuntary laugh and together they removed the heavy piece of ceiling that had hit the life mage.
“Give me a sucking hobo to rip apart right this godsdamned minute!” Dia screamed the second she came to, and Arne felt a delicate balance shift entirely when he saw the expression of deep disgust and overwhelmed confusion on Garrett’s face.
The paladin had quickly withdrawn from Dia after healing her.
“What did you do, Justice Boy?” Dia demanded loudly. “What!” she looked from Arne to Garrett.
Arne shrugged. Garrett looked briefly at him with a puzzled and uncertain look in his eyes. Then he turned to Dia. “What is that thing that has attached itself to you? That thing you carry around with you?”
Arne couldn’t decide if the problem was Chuckles or Imp, but both options were horrible.
Dia was standing there, panting and furious with the blood from her newly healed headwound still adorning her darkly golden skin and the once white funeral dress she wore.
“What do you mean!” Dia opted for snapping. “And don’t ever heal someone without permission. It was like groping my soul with your filthy justice hands! Dis-gusting!”
“Dia!” Garrett said. His voice wasn’t loud or threatening but Dia and Arne both froze. In the silence, a disgusting low pop was heard from the gently disassembling body of the sphincter blob they had fought and the faint sound of Toog’s voice echoing through the dining hall from the entrance, calling out for guards to help contain the tentacle monster.
Garrett stared at Dia for a long while and she stared back, increasingly sour-faced.
“I can help you contain it,” Garrett finally said in a quiet voice. “Justice can bind the foul being, so it won’t bother you anymore.”
“Right,” Dia huffed. “What’s the price then? I just have to become a paladin and shout ‘die, evildoer’ at people minding their own damned business? Pfff!” She spat on the ceiling debris that had fallen victim to her powers and gotten its vengeance on her.
“You have some rope on you, right? A leather string?” Garrett asked Arne.
“Ehh, look, I’m flattered but maybe it can wait till the next orgy?” Arne suggested and saw the paladin just shake his head with a little grin in the corner of his mouth and hold out a hand expectedly.
“What?” Dia said loudly, clearly trying to drown Chuckles out.
“You know what, I actually do have a length of leather string right here.” Arne fished a length of leather string lashed together out of a belt pocket and held it out.
“Right next to the lockpicks, I see,” Garrett commented conversationally.
“Just crime, Garrett. I don’t need to explain it again, do I?”
“Thank you,” Garrett took the string and turned to Dia. “Hold out your hands, please.”
Dia crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. “This is a new version of ‘die, evildoer’ but I’m still not buying it.”
“Dia, I swear to you in Justice’s name that she can bind the thing that haunts you.”
“What?”
Garrett sighed in the same way Arne had done many times in the last months. “Justice can help you!” he shouted. “She can silence the foul presence, but the price is that you cannot kill anyone unjustly. No innocents may die by your hand!”
“Gods fucking damn it…” Dia muttered loudly under her breath. “Fine, do it. Hear that? You are going to get slapped down by Justice. And I’m allowing it,” Dia screamed at the voice in her head, “because that’s how much I hate you!”