Chapter 7
Wistia led me into an alley and down a set of stairs to a speakeasy with a drab, signless door.
Inside, two stages were surrounded by tables and chairs.
On one stage, a woman reclined, resting on her elbows, while another woman knelt to lick her.
On the second stage, both women were on their knees.
One was behind the other, eating her out.
“Interesting choice,” I mused.
“Too much?”
“Not at all. I just didn't expect it.”
Wistia picked a table toward the back, and I noticed how quickly she slipped into a depth of ease I had yet to see. This was a safe place for her, and she seemed particularly interested in the two girls on their knees.
“I didn't think this would make you uncomfortable,” she said.
“I feel very at home, actually.”
“Good. I don’t know anyone who knows how to appreciate this kind of entertainment. The women in my party are disgusted by it, and the men turn into feral dogs. Those aren’t the moods I’m looking to soak in.”
“What moods are you looking for?” I asked.
She thought. “Unjudgmental pleasure. I can sit back and appreciate the art, and nobody cares who I am or why I’m here.”
“No one in your party gives you that?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me about them. What kind of adventurers am I crawling with?”
“You still want a dungeon tour? With the craziness on the first floor, I’m not confident we are qualified to be guides for the rest either.”
“I’m not worried about deciding that tonight,” I said. “Besides, I'm always curious how other parties operate.”
“Well, I don't think we do anything all that different from any other party. Klein and Zane frontline. Hixxi is a ranger, so she's a bit of a floater. Higcliff and I are on offensive magic, and Gale is on support.”
“Been running together for a while?”
“We were separate parties at first, but then we both had a few members drop out of the life. We combined who was left. Me, Gale, and Klein had been with each other for five years by then, and it's been about two years since we linked up with the others.”
“Working out?” I asked.
She bit her cheek. “It's been okay. I really liked the party I started with, but drama ruined it. I don't know that I'll ever find something like what we had, you know?”
I really didn’t know. I never had something like that to know what it felt like to lose it.
“Do you think about your old party often?” I asked.
“Every day. Have you ever had big disagreements with your party? Sometimes I wonder if I’m overreacting or am too sensitive.”
The girls on the stage rotated positions, so everyone got a turn. It was always heartwarming to see fairness in the workplace.
“My frontliner stabbed me once,” I said. “No, that's not a joke. It's a true story.”
“Like out of anger?”
“Yep. We worked it out.”
“By fucking?” she guessed. “No offense, but I've heard a lot of stories about you, and they all come back to that.”
“Is that why you made sure I knew you weren't interested in anything physical?”
“We’re working together. I don't mix those parts of my life.”
“You've never had a party member fall for you?”
She blushed a red so deep it was visible in the low light of the club. “Dungeon crawls make people loopy… and horny. That's why my first party fell apart.” She looked around, looking desperate to get away from this topic. “Anyway, you want some dreamdust?”
“Sure.”
As Wistia waved a waitress over, she asked, “So why are you really here?”
“I'm opening a bar.”
“In Minsic?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “You will think I'm crazy, but I'm opening a bar with entrances in every dungeon.”
She stared blankly at me. “What are you talking about?”
“That's why I didn't bring it up. No one will believe it's real until the doors are open. I need a tour of the dungeon to find a place for the teleporter.”
Wistia sipped her wine. “I don’t get the joke.”
“Soon, there will be a bar only available to adventurers who can reach the deep levels of dungeons. That place will have rooms, food, drink, and girls. Someone running the 10th floor of Grubiit can share a game of cards with someone on the 9th floor of Borja. They can have a bath and a warm bed too.”
“That sure beats dried jerky,” Wistia said.
“That’s the idea. I’ll buy you a drink when you visit for the first time.”
“It’s still hard to believe.”
“That doesn’t offend me.” I gestured toward the stage. “Do you ever join or do you just watch?”
“Wouldn't you like to know?”
“You probably pretend to be dominant but secretly want to be pinned down and torn apart.”
Wistia recrossed her legs to the opposite side but didn't say anything.
“If your party wants an extra perspective on how to get by the dragon, I'd be happy to help,” I added. I liked flirting with a beautiful woman, but the sooner I delivered justice for Horpus’ niece, the sooner I could get back to my party and our real work.
“You do have a reputation for solving tough fights,” she said, a finger on her lip as she considered the offer. “Okay, tomorrow morning at the guild hall.”
“Great,” I said, standing. “I'm pretty tired right now, though.”
“Aww. You're going to leave me all by myself?”
“I already know how your night ends.”
“I don't get it.”
I came around behind Wistia's chair and leaned down to whisper.
“When you go home tonight, you'll picture yourself up on that stage. You’ll imagine your face pressed into that sticky floor, your naked ass up.
My dick is so deep that it hurts exactly how you like.
The crowd of people around the stage sits back to watch how your face changes when I thrust into you.
“If that gets boring, you can picture one of those girls sitting in front of you, holding your head at their favorite angle while you lick her, and I keep fucking you. Thank you for the evening. Goodnight.”
She recrossed her legs again. “Goodnight.”
I met Wistia's party at the guild hall early the next morning. When I came in, a man with a bald head and a sharp black beard stood.
“You and I should talk,” he said, indicating with a glance that he meant in the hallway away from the party’s private meeting room.
“Sure.”
Outside the door, the adventurer leaned in. “I gotta know, did Horpus send you?”
Ah, this must be Higcliff. “Alexi asked me the same thing. What am I missing?”
He stared me down. Sense Weakness said that his biggest vulnerability was rejection, and that tracked with what I knew of him already. That weakness was why I was here to see him in the first place.
“Is there something I should know?” I asked.
“No, not really,” he said, relaxing. “I had a disagreement with Horpus recently, and I've been worried he might have taken it hard.”
Calling the matter with Horpus’ niece a “disagreement” was appropriately disingenuous for the kind person I expected this mage to be.
“Hard enough to send me here to what? Beat you up?”
“Yes.”
I looked Higcliff up and down. “No, I think I'll pass on picking a fight with you.”
Higcliff laughed and clapped me on the back. “Likewise. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about this dragon.”
He held the door open for me to let me go back inside first.
Was Higcliff smart enough to pretend he wasn't threatened to get me to drop my guard?
I really didn't want to give him that kind of credit, but assuming I fooled him completely would be akin to self-sabotage. I had sated his worry for now, but I needed to be vigilant. If he got the idea to kill me before I killed him, I couldn’t allow myself to get caught flatfooted.
When we finished all the usual introductions, Zane, one of the party's frontliners, stood in front of the chalkboard. He was a muscular, good-looking blonde with a hard jaw and aesthetically pleasing beard stubble.
A simplified version of a village map was drawn on the board already.
“This is the new first floor,” Zane said, his voice a little raspy. “Parts of this are probably not accurate, but this is the best version we have so far.”
He pointed to one side of the city and then the other.
“We need to get from here to here without drawing the dragon or getting swarmed by the stone zombies. The way I see it, letting another party draw the dragon’s attention and then running for it is the best move.”
“Except that's how one of the wipes happened,” Wistia said. “One party was the distraction while another bolted for the second floor. They ran into each other because of the monster spawns, and both got roasted.”
“That's more an issue with dungeon traffic than the strategy itself,” Higcliff pointed out. “Trying to cross at a slower point in the day probably ups our odds with timing alone.”
Zane thought. “Yeah, I think that's a fair point.”
An idea hit me that was so good I had half an erection already.
“The quality of the distraction might be a variable we can control,” I suggested.
Every head turned to me, confused but curious.
“If the distraction lasted longer and was more reliable while also less dangerous, the quick cross tactic would be the best option, right?”
“Do you have an idea for how we accomplish that?” Zane asked.
“It's not a permanent solution, but I have constructs who might do the job. I’d like to see how they do against a dragon, and their performance will give us a relative idea of how strong the dragon is.”
Zane looked at the board for a minute before shaking his head. “I don't know that we should try a strategy we can't reuse. This problem will still be here when you’re gone.”
I countered, “Or maybe we learn something from this that points us to a better solution.
We've all bitched about not having enough information. On top of that, if this gets us through, no one else will have a way to get themselves across. That makes the dungeon exclusive to the brawlers until someone else figures out a solution.”
“Whole dungeon to ourselves does sound nice,” Zane said. “Are you charging us for the constructs?”
“Nope.”
“That makes things easy for me. Anyone opposed to this?”
No one spoke up.
“When will the constructs arrive?”
“I can have them ready for the morning.”
Zane nodded approvingly. “Sounds like a crawl to me.”