Stepping through the portal exposed me to a couple of very fun facts about Eastport and one or two less fun facts. The main fun fact that I definitely wanted to highlight before shit got dark was that Cafe Ouroboros was actually a cover for a magical speakeasy. That portal felt like walking under a waterfall, and on the other side there was a snazzy nightclub waiting.
Patrons of various different species were all intermingling and finding tables around what appeared to be a dance floor hanging from the center of the club, completely enclosed with glass like whoever was meant to dance there was going to be put on display. I wondered if it could be filled with water, because I heard about this one dive bar in downtown Eastport that did mermaid shows.
It would be kind of neat to witness one with a real life mermaid instead of a human actress wearing a fish tail. All the booths were leather, the tables were covered in red table cloths, and cocktail waitresses flitted around distributing drinks and meals.
I don’t think even my time in the Bureau’s HQ properly prepared me for the sheer variety of other species that existed in this weird new world I was living in. Logically I knew that the conflux of six separate alternate dimensions would surely produce a great deal of opportunity for evolution to run different courses, I just hadn’t ever seen this many non-humans all clustered together in one space.
This was the first time since Hilltop that I spotted other dino-folk than that triceratops dude, and I think I lucked out. There was this absolutely yoked humanoid T-Rex-looking guy who was just on a whole other level. Nine feet tall, easy. Human bodybuilders could never measure up to this dude. He had three or four different monster chicks draped over him like ornaments.
There was this one woman tucked into a corner booth who was the single most gorgeous feminine figure I had ever seen. All she was wearing were these sheer strips of cloth that seemed somehow magnetized to her voluptuous form, or at least that was my best guess because they did not seem secured to her in any fashion, and she had these massive white wings splayed out over her booth as she sipped some golden liquid from a chalice.
Honestly that was just the tip of the iceberg. It was a real third eye opening experience.
But I had a job to do, and I needed to stay focused.
Time for the less fun facts. First off, portals sucked. It felt like my insides had been thrown down an active garbage disposal and spat into a bucket of molten lava. Three steps into this hidden nightclub, and my hand shot to my stomach.
Tabitha came up to me, appearing as if from nowhere and clutching her stomach too. She had ditched her glasses and concealed her badge the same as me, and she was wearing a pair of ruby earrings that were just as striking as the red wristwatch I had taken from the guy in the cafe bathroom. I wondered if there was some sort of theme going around, what with the red tablecloths and the red dresses being worn by all the waitresses.
A human cocktail waitress flounced up to us and offered us a tray with two shot glasses filled with some smooth golden liquid. “Ooh, I sense a pair of first-timers with us today. Feeling queasy? Just a side-effect of being portalled ‘cross worlds. Here! Nectar from the World of Gods. First shot’s always on the house.” She fluttered her lashes at both of us and we both did not even hesitate to drain the glasses in front of us.
I didn’t know what Tabitha was thinking in that moment but the way I saw it, we were surrounded by monsters who were all the apex predators of their own food chains and thus perfectly capable of killing us about a hundred different ways, each. Using poison seemed like a waste.
On top of that, my stomach already felt like it was counting down from thirty, and reaching zero seemed like a one-way-ticket to the underworld. So I snagged that nectar and tilted it back without any regrets.
That first sip of nectar felt like I was standing back on the riverbank with Hannah. It tasted like Tabitha’s lips. As it splashed across my tongue it reminded me of the velvety smooth skin of Io’s perfect breasts. The aftertaste alone was like the intense feeling of relief that came a few nano-seconds after Io and Tabitha finished sucking me off together.
My eyes closed and I found myself humming the tune to one of my favorite songs, a wide smile forming before I could even think to stop it.
“Oh wow,” I sighed.
“You can say that again,” Tabitha agreed.
The cocktail waitress giggled and collected our shot glasses. “Glad you liked it! Welcome to Club Ouroboros, our show starts in ten so y’all might want to find yourselves a seat as soon as possible. My name’s Cassidy. Holler if you need anything on the menu. And if you see something you want that’s not on the menu, you can let me know about that too,” she gave me a little wink and trotted off in her skimpy little outfit.
She had a very cute, extremely grabbable ass and an adorable smile. But what caught my eye were her tattoos. This girl was positively covered in ink. It was an aesthetic which seemed totally at odds with the 1920’s speakeasy vibe both she and Club Ouroboros were giving me, but she made it work.
“Eyes front, hotshot,” Tabitha reminded me.
I cleared my throat and nodded. “Right. Shall we find ourselves a seat?”
We snagged an empty booth and the first thing I did was casually place my smartphone on the table, allowing Io to witness what was going on all around us via her camouflaged drone.
Io quietly thanked me for including her.
When she swung by shortly after we sat down, Cassidy was kind enough to bring us some menus. She was all smiles with a side of cleavage when she was talking with me, but barely spared Tabitha a glance. We asked for some simple soft drinks and an appetizer to start us off while we waited for the show to start, and she assured us that we were just going to love it.
As she trotted off I shook my head.
“What? She seemed nice,” Tabitha teased. “Maybe you should get her number?”
“Oh yeah? What power do you think I’d absorb from her, bubbliness?”
Tabitha gave a little half shrug as she pretended to look at the menu. “I mean… don’t remember saying that all the girls you fuck have to be about the powers. Sure, she’s plenty bubbly now but I’m kinda curious to know what she’d sound like gagging on your—”
All the lights in the club suddenly dimmed and a voice began playing out of a vintage PA system. “Ladies, and…other dangerous animals, welcome to Club Ouroboros! Our show is about to begin and you are in for a treat tonight! From the crowded streets of the Mortal World we bring you savagery! We bring you brutality! We. Bring. Entertainment!”
Two circular panels in the ceiling suddenly spiraled open and two humans fell into the enclosed dancing stage. One was this scrawny guy who looked like he needed a nice meal and maybe some IV fluids because all of his ribs were showing. The other was this kinda pudgy older lady. Both of them were naked. It was not pretty.
All of the other patrons across the nightclub leaned in, their drinks and food forgotten for the moment as this entertainment, whatever it was, was about to begin.
“You know the rules, contestants. Only one of you leaves that cage alive. Now, FIGHT!”
The scrawny guy’s skin flew off as a werewolf form erupted out of his skin-n-bones figure. He was taller and thinner than Tabitha, and his fur was patchier, but the resemblance to her other form sent shivers down my spine. In the same second, the old lady suddenly hunched over and swelled to twice her size, dark fur obscuring her features completely as antlers sprouted out of her skull and her mouth elongated into a snout.
This is the second part of the not so fun facts. Club Ouroboros’s main attraction?
Monster cage fights. To the death.
Werewolf versus wendigo, begin.
The wendigo ducked her head and charged with its antlers, forcing the werewolf to dive to the side and lash out with his jaw. His teeth clamped down on one of her hind legs and a deep reverberating growl filled the nightclub as he bit down as hard as he could and savagely wrenched at the leg.
Down she went, dark blood soaking the floor of the glass cage as she screeched in agony and swiped at him with her oversized claws. Deep gouges appeared in his flanks and he shed fur and red blood as she kept trying to remove him. Yet still he remained right where he was. Ripping, snarling, and biting down for all he was worth until he managed to bite her leg clean off at the knee and leave her bleeding out upon the glass.
He retreated with his prize and spat it out against the glass as the crowd went wild with cheers of, “First blood! First blood! First blood!” They seemed to be egging him on. Rooting for the werewolf.
But the wendigo wasn’t finished. Not yet. Down a leg and an awful lot of blood, she curled herself into a fetal position, making herself appear small and weak. The werewolf fell for it, padding over to her and going in for the kill.
A sharp snap echoed through the club and a hush fell over the crowd.
The wendigo had reached up and snapped off one of her own antlers, wielding it as a shiv that then drove it right through the werewolf’s throat when he went in to execute her.
I thought the crowd went wild over the leg. I was so wrong.
“Death! Death! Death!” they chanted.
Tabitha reached across the table and held my hand, her eyes full of fear as she stared at the werewolf now choking on its own blood. The severed antler was lodged inside the wound, making it impossible for the werewolf to heal, and the wendigo clambered on top of him and plunged one of her clawed hands into his chest cavity.
A loud strangled yelp filled Club Ouroboros.
Three long seconds later the wendigo lifted up its hand to display the heart of her werewolf foe to the crowd. Deafening cheers and applause filled the club as she climbed off of her victim, who shrank back into his human form in death, and brazenly showed off her trophy.
Tabitha looked away from the glass cage, looking a little green.
And that was when the bidding started.
“By the stars,” Io whispered in horror.
After an intense round of bidding, the heart and the leg were brought to the winning tables upon big platters. Both the winning patrons and the monsters sitting nearby looked absolutely thrilled to be devouring the spoils.
Mr. T-Rex gobbled up the heart like it was a donut hole. Just popped it straight in his mouth, bit down once, chewed for maybe half a second, and swallowed it right down while making eye contact with this big rhino-looking guy sitting a few tables away from where Tabitha and I were sitting. They were the two largest monsters in the place so I figured there was some unspoken rivalry between them sheerly on principle.
I wanted to get the fuck out of there.
One look at Tabitha’s green features and I could tell she and I were on the same wavelength. We had seen enough. In the same instant we both started moving to get out of the booth and two things happened at once.
The first was Cassidy arriving with our appetizer and her bubbly personality.
The second was a jolt of tension surging through my newly-formed psychic connection with Tabitha. Her feelings were not of fear but of something akin to betrayal, anger, or disgust. Something personal that randomly reminded me of what she had said about never fitting in with any of her old partners. Mixed with the nausea from witnessing a fellow werewolf get his heart ripped out, I was genuinely surprised Tabitha wasn’t vomiting right now from how much her stomach was roiling.
Just as quickly as the psychic surge came, it evaporated; leaving me back in my own comparatively calm mind. After tasting what it was like inside of Tabitha’s mind I couldn't help feeling like everything I experienced was muted. I’m not sure I liked this discovery.
Cassidy fawned over us—mostly me—for a bit longer than was necessary and promised us that the next fight was going to be something even more spectacular than last time around. She then flitted off with a flirtatious wink and an invitation to, “Enjoy the show,” as she turned around to show off her ass once again.
But the minute she turned away I turned to Tabitha. “What is it?”
Her eyes conveyed a volatile mixture of emotions as she answered. “I’ve just spotted two of our coworkers over by the bar. They don’t look like they’re having any trouble adjusting to this place’s…entertainment. In fact they seem quite comfortable. Almost like regulars.”
Since the bar was behind me, I pulled my glasses out of my pocket and handed them to her, darting my eyes over my shoulder and subtly tapping my ear. Tabitha took the hint and donned the glasses, tilting her head so that Io could get a good view of the bar. She grabbed the smartphone for good measure and pretended to be reading something off of its face.
“Oh, not good. That’s Agent Philips, Tabitha’s former partner. And at his side? That’s Agent Blitz, the guy whose ass you kicked on your first day at the Bureau. People are still talking about the fight, Ryan. You made a strong first impression.”
I remembered Blitz. And I knew of Philips, but I’d never met the guy.
Some naive part of myself wondered if they were just here to stake the place out like we were, but Io and Tabitha were both acting like this was bad news, and I still didn’t have an angle to see what was going down.
What I did have an angle on was round two of monster fight night. They dropped a little girl and a little boy into the cage, both fitted with collars that shocked them unless they fought one another, and something inside me awakened.
I’m going to tear this whole place down.
I slid out of the booth and reached for my weapons.
Tabitha must have caught a psychic flash from me because she moved out of the booth in the same instant that I did, only instead of grabbing her guns she rushed towards me and planted a kiss on my lips, doing her best to push my hands away from my guns. “Not here,” she breathed, “there’s too many. We’d never make it out of here alive. Stand down, Agent. That’s an order.”
I broke away from her kiss and leveled my gaze at her. A fury was building up in my chest that was going to need an outlet soon. “Fuck that, Tabby. Those are kids,” I hissed back, both of us keeping our voices low so as not to attract too much attention.
“Yes. But we need a full task force to take this place down, not just the two of us. We need a plan of attack.”
“From where I’m standing, ‘attack’ sounds like a great plan,” I spat, my eyes drifting up to the glass cage where two monster-children were beating the shit out of each other for entertainment.
Io cut in. “Reconsider, Ryan. You’re surrounded. You and Tabitha need to get out!”
“Shit,” Tabitha said, full-volume. Her eyes were looking over my shoulder, towards the bar. “We’ve been spotted. Cover’s blown. Go loud!”