Partyhea7en

"Isn't he the door?" Weft asked, wincing. The headache was getting worse, not better.

One of the nonexistent fluorescent antelopes swished its tail, considering its next move.

"Isssssthere a problem here?" Ishtar had materialised at Mhelarn's side, and leaned full-length against him while observing her other options. The yelper looked ill.

"He most certainly is not." Julia said, tugging at his arm.

"And, no, there isn't", she aimed at Ishtar, in a manner she hoped conveyed that she was not at all impressed by the Suitov shinanigans.

Pasht smiled and sidled up to Julia. "You look delicious," the vampiress told her latest toy.

It was always more fun when they could see what lay ahead.

Mhelarn wondered where he could lay his head. The room wasn't exactly spinning,but things were shifting and he was pretty sure they weren't related to him.

"Beer and butterfly," he mumbled,"bier and bigger flies." This was where he though it would have ended, for him and his habits. The last might change, given sufficient impetus.

The butterfly had him by the torso and was frighteningly strong for such a small (furry?) insect. Mhelarn resisted and then clung to it.

"Antelopes!" he shouted (one could say shriek, but that would be unkind), pointing to a corner of the ceiling. "They float!"

"They all float down here." he informed the butterfly, in a more indoor voice.

Lady Knight groaned and rolled over, making herself supine. "Loud bahstids bein' loud and shite. Buggery." She cut her hand on her sword as she sat up, swore so loudly that her head rang again, and carefully shifted her grip to the safer end of the massive weapon.

Pasht alternately sized up Lady Knight and Julia. The armed woman looked fully intoxicated, which could be fun, but Julia was trying to get away and that always added flavour. Mhelarn largely escaped the vampire's notice; she disliked finding hairs in mouth during or after feeding.

Besides, not that this would necessarily have stopped Pasht, he was occupied by an Ishtar. "They float, do they?" she asked, sliding a hand across the chest area. She hadn't a clue what he was going on about.

"Am I," said Weft very carefully and deliberately, "meant to be protecting the vampire and killing Julia? Or killing Julia and protecting the vampire? Or the way other round?"

And round and round, or at least that's how his brain seemed to be moving in his skull.

"You're covering me", Julia whispered urgently into Weft's ear, "but if you possibly could get away without killing her that would be infinitely preferable."

She was squirming under Pasht's gaze, but was determined not to be rude.

"Ummm, thank you for the compliment, I think. It's very ummm kind, perhaps, I think, of you to say so although I can assure you I'm really not delicious at all, in any way, and anyways I'm not that, ummm, forthcoming. I even have trouble at blood donation for a worthy cause so you see there's really no need..." she trailed off. Pasht was still staring.

Mhelarn surrendered to the butterfly (who didn't seem to mind being layered with hairs the hue of burnt autumn or moldy winter). Insects have 6 limbs and was she standing on two? He thought so, though the concept took several thoughts and those fought.

She must be a great tactician or prophetically abled.

Forewarned is fourarmed, after all.

He had no chance to survive. He made his time.

All his face was belong to hir(?)

"Come now, don't be shy," Pasht teased Julia. "I'm sure you're full of luscious flavour, just aching to be released -- unlike your sour guard there." The vampiress scowled at the very thought of Weft, but gamely continued.

Somewhere behind the ruckus, Lady Knight clambered to her feet amid much jingling chainmail. "Shaddup. Ah'm movin'. Go t' 'ell," she belched at her sword, who cleverly did not provoke her further.

Was the vampy tramp coming onto another woman? Weft let his disgust show. "Shouldn't we be leaving?" he asked Julia.

His head was pulsating, but only metaphorically. He put a hand to it anyway. (At least, he thought it was a hand. He couldn't swear it hadn't turned into a spool. Weft was not well.)

Bowman, perhaps sensing the tension and certain danger Julia was in, or perhaps just wanting the attention, decided to use the pause in the dialogue to leap out of Julia's hand. He sprang up to her shoulder and danced about a bit, puh-ing to the tune of Monty Python's Camp March.

You couldn't afford me dear, 2, 3,
I'll scratch your eyes out
Don't play the brigadeer
Game with us dear
We all know where you've been
You military fairy, 2, 3, 4

"...I think I'm seeing things," Weft finally managed.

He'd be in trouble. Visions were strictly forbidden to low order monks in non-licensed locations.

"Finest test, brewed the best,
quasi-halflife 'yond the rest.
it butterfly sicks,
and breaks physics."

Mhelarn was having a high old time. Emphasis on the first, for the third was doing odd things.

He somehow freed an arm and clapped the monk on the back. Then he wondered how he'd gotten across the room. Probably the hole in the ceiling. Or had he already been on this side?

"Sight is alright. Sound is profound. Wanna join me in a round?"

"A round of what?"

"Oh, you're a poet too," purred the butterfly, trying to get a tongue somewhere unexpected.

"Far fro it.", said Mhelarn, gamely trying to rhyme with a startled tongue and numb lips.

"I har'ly show it." he added.

"The roun's for song, sinsh the beer's free."

Pasht recoiled. Julia she could handle. A ballerina of uncertain mammalian lineage, however, confused the hell out of the vampiress, who hung back and stared until the dancing ended.

Lady Knight stared at Ishtar going after Mhelarn, then at Bowman. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, nearly blacking one with Moneymaker's pommel.

Five tries finally got her sword sheathed on her back and her hands free to grab more booze. "To 'alla-shun-aiee-shuns!" she bellowed, and tipped back a bottle. She attempted to drape her free arm on Weft's shoulder in a friendly gesture but missed. Badly.

"Giblets are red,
though slightly more blue,
I know it is meat,
but I'm not sure what I chew."

Mhelarn's voice was growing less slurred, but the whites of his eyes were not.

"Your turn," he said to the air.

Ishtar was beginning to think she'd bitten off too much herself. The concept of rhyming was foreign to a demonic language that functioned only on instinct and intent.

She tried her best, though.

"Uh...
Meat is organic, silicon is inorganic,
Silica-based lifeforms are boring and I like things to be fun."

"Sun is depressing,
because light has weight."

"It's truth I'm professing,
but can you relate?"

Mhelarn was grinning. Usually he had to worry about the rhyme scheme. But it all seemed to flow....

"Whoooah, the ceiling." The room wasn't spinning. Only melting.

"Strange I'm feeling."

Exasperated, the butterfly gave up this poetry thing completely. "So are you going to jump my bones, or do I have to do everything myself?" She squinted at his face. Oops, maybe she'd overdone it on the peyote...

Weft stopped scribbling on a napkin and handed the result to Julia. It was anybody's guess how he'd managed to make a mark with the handle of the spoon he was holding, let alone draw a picture. "Can anyone else smell cupric mordant, or is that just me?"

Julia took the picture and glanced at it momentarily; she didn't want to keep her eyes off Pasht for too long in case she came off a few pints lighter. But wait? Was it...?

Her head snapped back to look at the napkin. She stared at the drawing, then at Weft. At the drawing. At Weft.

Suddenly, she grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him furiously.

"Where did you see this? You have seen this dress? Where? Near here? Tell me! Now!"

When he didn't respond she pushed the piece of paper in his face and yelled "DRESS!"

Weft took it and looked at it, then turned it over.

"That's... nice," he said. "What is it?"

"It's a turn-over, right?" said Mhelarn, feeling hugely amused with himself.

"FLAKEY" shouted the 'wolf.

He stalked the butterfly. Difficult to stalk something that's two inches away from you, but he managed.

Then he bit.

Giving up on Weft and taking her chances with the vampiress, Julia turned to Pasht.

"Excuse me, this looks as though it may have been taken from a catalogue or something. Do you know anything about it?"

Julia had never come across a magasine with reptilian models before, but then again she'd never come across a vampiress, a hellhound or a monk that had clearly had a bit too much dried karpasieni either. Unfortunately, she had come across bouncing podocytes, or rather one specific bouncing podocyte, before.

"Don't you dare." she directed at Bowman, as he proceded to bind substances together in polkadots beneath his membrane and waved his processes in time to the music in Julia's head (which oddly enough, or perhaps not so surprisingly, he could hear).

Weft was seeing spots, but that wasn't surprising. Some of them seemed to be saying "puh", but then again, he didn't know how ambulatory spots were supposed to sound. Maybe "puh" was quie normal, and then he would only embarrass himself by drawing attention to it.

He attempted to pick Bowman up.

Ishtar, who knew how to give as good as she got, reciprocated Mhelarn's love bite with gusto.

Bowman allowed Weft to pick him up with no fuss.

"No, you don't understand." Julia was saying to noone in particular. "This is the dress... THE dress Shirley Manson wore in... oh, never mind what it is. Will someone just tell me WHERE it is?"

Weft stroked the blobby thingy, which seemed to be the least inexplicable personage in the room.

"Dressmaking I can do," he said. "I'm not sure where you could conceal a katana in that, but you'd be amazed how many throwing knives pouches I can smuggle in. Without spoiling the hang, too." His grasp of English was getting tenuous.

Mhelarn was feeling pretty damned inexplicable. There were other feelings too, but those can be left
up to the imagination.

The were really did wonder what sort of dream this would turn out to be, in the end.

If Ishy had her way, it wouldn't be an arid one. She backed up, collided with a table.

The paper plates, thermos flasks and other paraphernalia hit the floor, where one of the building's native wyverns pounced and made away with a scotch egg¹ almost as big as she was.

Mhelarn felt no need to change the momentum of the moment.

Unfortunately, he was running out of steam, or more likely, stream (of consciousness, naturally).

The world flickred and went dark. At least he'd remember it that way when he woke up.

He hoped the butterfly enjoyed the ale.

Meanwhile, whatever he was doing wasn't being recorded. Mhelarn was now offline and no longer an observer, though you could say he was in a collapsed state.

Since no mocking Muttcharacters were around to cover Weft's eyes from the dreadful making-out sights, he did it himself.

The palm of his hand turned out more interesting than the room. He wondered what would happen if he carded it.

Julia didn't know whether to believe Weft or not. Most things he'd said and done up to this point hadn't made much sense. Then again, not much had since she'd been here. Pasht had stopped talking, although if her attention was diverted by the hairy thing and the... butterfly (?) in the corner, then maybe Julia could just slip away.

The only problem was... well, what if the dress was really here?!

She sighed.

"Blow Shirley Manson for being such a dotty hottie and keeping me in this insanity." she muttered.

Feeling robbed of precious phospholipids, Bowman poked Weft's fingers with a process or two.