Deep in the Orange, behind the paper screens and clubs and brothels and perfume-clogged perversions of village traditions, the black heart of Dynasty’s undercity operations hides like a concrete spider in gluttonous heaven. Its web is the promise of fantasies that snare flittering prey who stray too close to the district and its citrine allure. Its camouflage is a lucrative theft of culture ripped from faraway lands. Its myriad victims are kept in cages with constantly-shifting prices that reflect the market value of their bodies, ignorant of the broken souls within.

Women, girls, boys, men; I see them all as my silent guide leads me down the Orange’s main boulevard between clubs pumping out heartbeat music and servants with exotic class combinations who draw less scrupulous passerby into one of the many pleasure dens of the redlight sector. The dens are built from wooden supports and enclosed with paper walls behind which silhouettes engage in two-dimensional foreplay for the sole purpose of drawing in more patrons.

The buildings all say the same. More. More. More. Enough is never enough for the people who think a place like this should exist.

The Orange guzzles on anything it can take. I’ve been here before for university parties and trips with classmates to the clubs, though always reluctantly. I’d be lying if I said the clubs were insulated from the mass exploitation that happens here. Everyone knows what happens here. I’m no exception. I used to turn a blind eye to what happens in the red lights to my right, justifying it with the knowledge that there was nothing I could do about it, even if I disliked its existence. That was a long time ago. And the longer I spend down here, the more I understand just how deep the roots of corruption grow. No one willingly chooses to suffer here. Those who do quickly regret their mistake. But by then, they’ve fallen into the spider’s honeyed web. Their contracts are signed. There is only one escape after that, and it yawns voidlike and endless under every one of the concrete bridges linking this debaucherous parasite to the rest of the undercity.

Maybe it was Mori who finally broke the dam in me. I used to think she was wrong to hate the champion for not doing more to fix this place. But these people are his people just as much as anyone in the overcity or the villages. Should he have done more? Could he? Fang has ruled the Section for two decades. I was watching him fight before I could even form words. I know he’s not a man to let injustice lie. Or do I? I only really know the fighting devil the cameras see. The one they don’t might let Dynasty exist for the same reason he hasn’t moved against Shimano Heavy yet- a soulless justification that the best ends justify any means, and the betterment of the many is worth the suffering of the few.

I can’t say I agree anymore.

Hazy incense and flesh-hued lanterns finally give way at the core of the tower block. I cast one last look up to the distant ceiling of the Vents and the higher towers before ducking into a concrete core paved clean by utilitarianism. Some things never change. Rare scantily-clad servants from the pleasure houses dart past delivering pilfered ID cards and chaincodes to hacking dens. Off-duty bouncers and syndicate fighters lean against the walls smoking designer drugs or losing themselves in JOY projections, not even reacting to my passing. When we pass overcity moguls adorned by more indentured slaves than rings, my behemoth of a guide always moves to one side, stoically waiting for the hall to clear. I shoulder my way right through them without care. One of the fat bastards recognizes me and even tries to shake my hand. A hard look sends him scurrying right back towards wherever the hell he was going in the first place. I remember his face before he disappears.

The destination of my invitation is a small, unadorned door near an intersection split between secret lifts to the surface and docks that process illicit goods at every hour of the night. A handful of attendants wearing village-style shadesilk robes speak in low murmurs beside it, clearly waiting to enter. One, a cream-haired woman in her twenties with those entrancing Iros eyes, glances up at our approach.

“Destra the Crusader, what a surprise.” Her greeting smile is all fangs and tongues. Two of them, and I think I see a third lurking near the roof of her mouth. She’s Modd-classed as well. “I thought you were still serving Krevax in the Golan. What peculiar fortune must have brought you back here.”

Destra, if that is the brute’s name, doesn’t seem a creature capable of breaking character. He stands silently and waits for the Iros to move from the threshold. She only reluctantly steps to the side with a demure bow, eyes finally dancing their way in my direction.

“…And with such special company for the Executor. Might I ask the occasion?”

Brushing past her without reply, the behemoth taps his JOY against a pad beside the door. The metal slab slides to one side, revealing a cramped antechamber with a single dim light and an identical door waiting ten feet away at the foot of a rust-colored rug. He sweeps through like a pendulum, tattered black cape swishing in his reptilian wake. I follow a pace behind, not bothering to answer the Iros out loud. I’m sure my head is betraying a thousand secrets to her on its own.

A telepathic chuckle flits through my ears at the thought. Ten thousand, and not one of them worth learning. Such rare honesty for so popular a man. The Iros’ voice trails out of my mind like a reticent fingertip, leaving a sensation like lips brushing over my own as it departs. Have fun with my master, Showmaker.

Six inches of solid steel ends the psionic tampering when the door seals shut behind me. Destra’s ghostly JOY unlocks the next, opening the entrance to a low-ceilinged chamber that more resembles a botanist’s laboratory than the office it claims to be. One impassive look from his unyielding helm bids me forward. I take the invitation after only a moment’s hesitation. I can’t back down now. Jolie would chide me even for that small uncertainty.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

More weathered carpet covers the floors of the office’s various chambers. Several different rooms are visible to me as soon as I step through the door. Haphazard scientific equipment and wild vines that would give Fang and his bonsai trees an aneurysm sprawl on shelves between unfilled, meter-tall growth pods for newborns and stacks of paper sheeted with mathematics bordering on the arcane. Even stranger decorations adorn the central room. A masterfully painted star chart of a foreign sky dominates the cramped ceiling. Bas-reliefs of the eighteen classes hide behind the vines in precisely-spaced increments, each ending beneath the faint lines of a constellation.

A thousand aesthetic voices clamor for my attention at once, and my first experience with the director of their choir is a pair of tiny, stocking-covered feet. Small as a child’s and patterned in black and subtle white, the feet kick idly in the air behind the back of a tall leather chair while the syndicate lord they belong to continues a JOY call right through the interruption of my entrance.

“Yes yes, that’s what I’m saying,” the feet declare in a singsong voice, paddling in opposite directions. “Big money, big prizes… big money.”

Encryption garbles an unenthusiastic reply on the other end of the call. Destra seals the door behind me, leaving me to survive the office alone. I actually miss his presence. I felt like I understood him. At least, as much as a man can feel like he understands a brick wall.

A tittering giggle echoes from behind the desk. “Whatever, mhm? The flamboyant one has finally arrived. I must be going.”

And with a click and a hum, one of the underworld’s most powerful inhabitants spins to face me. And the difference between us could not be more comical.

Executor Tanis is more a parody of a child’s imagination than an actual human. Not even breaking five feet, she- if it is a she- is tiny and aberrantly inhuman, subconsciously insidious in a carefully cultivated way that evokes the primal paranoia of an empty house; the fearful thought that a door might be unlocked. Nothing concrete to be scared of, nothing on which to latch the unease her presence incites, yet it exists all the same. Small idiosyncrasies about her shift whenever I stop paying attention to them, only to return to their original shape right as I glance back. Or maybe they’re not changing at all. The imaginations of my mind, thinking a coiled snake is beginning to shift in the corner of my eye; yet when I focus on it, it hasn’t moved a hair.

Slippery marbled skin, thin limbs and childlike features make the Executor’s general shape beneath a simple black shift with exaggerated, draping sleeves. She has no mouth behind the veil that covers the lower half of her face. Five large, drooping fleshy tendrils rise above her head in a starburst shape, merging into a single contiguous flap of skin that washes down her small back like a meaty slab of hair. Three vast eyes watch me without blinking. Two hidden behind a black blindfold that shimmers like it was woven from the Abyss itself, and the third a vertical slit in the center of her forehead that encapsulates every spectrum of silvery color as it spirals from iris to pupil. The pupil shifts as her nose bunches up, matching quirking lips that suddenly appear as she smiles upwards and two dainty, gloved hands fold flat like a table beneath her chin.

“Hark! He arrives like a truant schoolchild late to midterms,” the Executor purrs, voice a dual-layered tone that airily wends its way through androgyny. “I hope Krevax’s stodgy brute wasn’t too cold of an errand boy, hm? I would have sent one of my Iros, but they can be such unruly children at the worst times. Running amok like little horny puppies the moment you let them off their leashes.” Her one visible eyeslit narrows to humorless line while her smile stretches even further. “Then again, I’ve heard you are quite good with children.”

Opening with threats, then.

The ludicrously prolonged third-eye wink that follows makes the Executor’s intent eminently clear from the first word. I’ve stepped from a fighting square straight into another battlefield of an entirely different kind. This one’s no sparring match, either. I barely know what it is I’m dealing with. All the more reason to listen to my gut and fire back on all cylinders.

“If you want to play, let’s play,” I say, coming right up to the desk. Crimson hair spills over my shoulder as I lean my head to the side. “I came here for a reason, and it wasn’t to let you talk circles around me. You know something I want to know. I’m sure you had your own reasons for bringing me here, too. So let’s play a game. Winner takes all.”

Tanis’ third eye blinks twice in surprise. “A… game?”

“That’s right.”

“You are invited to the den of a criminal mastermind, surrounded by the dregs of your peers and the heinous result of their primal urges, and you wish to play. A. Game?” Tanis’ smile contorts into an amused shape when she kicks back in the leather chair, tittering out an amused laugh. “To even suggest such a thing would require bravery bordering on madness, which you seem to have in spades. Or is it clubs?” A playing card flits into her fingers seemingly out of nowhere, slowly turning over to face me. The jester of hearts. “Red seems a little more you.”

A familiar grin begins working its way back onto my face. “So I’ve heard.”

“I’ll humor your proposal because it’s clever, mhm? I do love a good game. Entertainment is so terribly hard to find when you’re surrounded by dullards like I am. This city is a neon dump. No one has a sense of fun here! Always saying no, never saying why shouldn’t I.”

Kicking up from the desk, the Executor floats up into the air completely unfettered by gravity and rolls over onto her stomach, head supported by a tent of elbows and hands. Small kicks of her feet bring her blindfold to an even level with my eyes. Then she prowls, rolling over onto her back while circling like an airborne shark. All the while, I feel nothing of her presence in my kinetic sense. There’s not even a single ember of life energy in the creature before me.

“A game,” Tanis purrs. The word drips like venom in the stretching silence. Then two gloved hands clap together just out of my sight, and the Executor’s singsong voice returns. “I knew you would understand me! Tell me then, little hero, what shall we be playing?”

I turn and sit on the edge of the desk, watching the aberrant Executor tread air like water. “It’s one my sister and I created as children. We still play it now, but only when we’re drinking.” I smile as a recent memory from Jolie’s last birthday intrudes on my thoughts.

“It’s called Truth Hour, and it’s a game you can only win by sharing secrets.”