Lisa notices the adventuring party rising from their chairs and sweeps over to collect the small pile of weird coins they'd left on the table. The elf and the walking arsenal drag the inert body of their wizard while the dwarf cleric shakes his head disapprovingly and mutters, "Lightweight."
She sidles up to the warrior with a big smile and asks, "Hey, big guy, need a bed-warmer?"
He chuckles and replies, "Already got one," and pats the unconscious spellcaster's back.
The elf smirks and comments, "You two are adorable. How about you carry him yourself, lover-boy." With that, he lets go and flies up the stairs, barely touching the ground as he calls back, "Dibs on the single!"
"Fucker," mutters the warrior as he tries to reposition himself before the cleric takes pity on him and lends a hand.
Lisa watches them ascend and biters her lip. "Bugger," she mutters under her breath. Her little stash is smaller than she hoped it would be by now, even with the tip, and she honestly wouldn't have minded the ride, if the bulk of his armor reflected what was beneath. She turns back to the table, cleaning up their mess, until she notices something left behind where the wizard had been sitting -- an ivory tube with arcane markings hangs from his chair by a simple leather strap.
"Huh," she says to herself, carefully removing it and slipping it under her skirt, discreetly checking to make sure she is not seen. She finishes up her work, shoo's out the last of the locals, and settles up with the owner, Bill, before climbing the stairs the three floors to her room in the attic. She lets out a long sigh once the door is closed behind her and then sits on her bed and pulls out her slate and cash box. She is happy to have her own room, even if it isn't much bigger than a closet and the sloped room made half of it useless for anything but sleeping.
A few minutes of scratching with chalk on the slate confirm her earlier despair. She isn't even a quarter of the way to her goal. Tossing the slate onto the end of her bed, she pushes the box back into its hidey hole with her foot and falls backwards onto the bed, clunking her head on the sloping ceiling on the way.
"Fuck, ow," she says pitifully, then remembers her find. A moment of rummaging under her skirts produces the tube and she momentarily wonders if it would serve as a fair supplement for a gay warrior before popping the end cap off and sliding out the scroll within. The light in the shadow of her bed proves insufficient for examination so she hauls her tired body back to a sitting position and scoots a little closer to the oil lamp.
"Whaaaat the hell is this?" she says to herself, trying to make out the infuriatingly arcane font of whatever sorcerous douchebag penned the thing. What prompted her comment though, wasn't the words as much as the pictures and diagrams, which depict in excruciating detail a well-endowed male devil standing in a summoning circle with a prostrate naked woman on the ground before him. "Kinky shit," she mutters, then begins to make headway with the script.
"Well, looky here," she says and grins, leaning into the lamp to get better light. She reads the entirety of the scroll three times to make sure she's got it right -- a ritual for entering into a pact with an infernal creature. Everything needed to summon and bind a devil to negotiate for arcane power. "This," she says, flopping back on the bed once again, "This, is my ticket out of here."
Lisa doesn't feel at all guilty about stealing the scroll since the ritual specified this particular devil was only interested in entering into bargains with females. When the adventurers leave the next morning, they don't even look for it or ask after it. Of course, they may be distracted by the constant whining of the hungover wizard. The dwarf seems to take inordinate pleasure in noting that he could fix it but feels that it builds character.
"Fuck you and your character, Karl," the wizard spits as he stumbled through the door and then shrieks at first exposure to full sunlight. His boyfriend gently puts his great metal helmet over the miserable spell-caster's head.
"Thanks," comes his muffled response.
Lisa spends every free moment she can get for the rest of the day gathering up all the weird shit the ritual requires. Despite her excitement at finding a shortcut to vast arcane power, she worries a bit that she'll spend the rest of her life shoving toads up her twat and snorting bat guano. Hopefully, she thinks, direct investment from dark creatures will let her have a little more dignity than she's observed in the more traditional practitioners of the arcane arts.
When the day's work is done, instead of going up to her room, she tells Bill she's going to putter around the kitchen and slips out the back door. Snagging a hooded lantern she's stashed behind the woodpile with the rest of her occult paraphernalia, she heads off into the dark woods behind the inn. She's not without trepidation. The forest isn't a safe place in the daytime, much less at night, despite the assurances of her best friend, Steve. Elves have a weird relationship with nature, so he doesn't think of hungry wolves or territorial bears as mortal dangers as much as testy neighbors. Thus, his opinion on the matter wasn't very reassuring.
She doesn't have to go very far, though. The clearing she was heading towards was convenient and reasonably safe, which is why it was frequented during the day by horny adolescents. Rural life didn't afford much privacy, so if you wanted to get it on with the hot milkmaid, you either risked discovery in a barn or took to the woods. She knew from experience that bears were preferable to gossip and public shaming, even with her sideline in casual prostitution (which, honestly, Bill was happy to ignore if he got his cut).
On arrival, she clears out a wide space of discarded clay jugs smelling of the local hooch and lost undergarments, and begins to set up the ritual in the dim flickering light. The noises of the forest make her jumpy but she resists the urge to rush, knowing that, as in baking, precision was essential to wizardry. At last, she stands over her work and nods to herself.
"Not half bad," she mutters, and starts to undress. She is a bit sarcastic about the nudity requirement, half suspecting that it was something the author put in for his or her own titallation, but was still unwilling to deviate just in case it actually mattered. She notes the state of her nipples and wishes the night weren't quite so chill.
"Let's do this," she says and begins to speak the incantation, which she's been repeating in her head all day. The words feel weird on her tongue and saying them out loud feels vaguely ridiculous. The nudity doesn't help, either. However, the silliness fades as her efforts get results. First, the circle emits a dim red light and wisps of smoke start to rise from its interior. Second, there is a whining sound, like hot metal immersed in cold water. Lastly, Lisa begins to feel warm, like the air is heated from early fall to mid-summer and then on to where it feels like she's in front of a bonfire.
She intones the final words while prostrating herself like in the picture, "I summon thee, Barry, Prince of Hell!"
There is a crack of lightning and a peel of thunder and the interior of the circle erupts into blue flames in which appears the shadowy form of a devil. As the fire dies down, she is able to get a good look at him as she stands. He's incredibly handsome, despite being red with horns and a tail. He's also just as naked as she is, which makes her feel a little less awkward despite his raging erection. He raises his clawed hands to the sky and throws back his head and laughs.
"Yes! It is I! Barry of the Lower Depths! Lord of the Pits of Lust! My appetites are legendary throughout the mutliverse --" he bellows, lowering his eyes to gaze upon her nakedness.
"Actually," she interrupts, "Could we just get to business? I have to work in the morning."
"What?" he says, sounding deflated. "Seriously?"
She nods.
"Alright," he says, shrugging, "You're looking for the usual pact?"
For a moment, the surreality of having a contract negotiation in the woods in the middle of the night, naked, strikes her, but she manages to reply, "Yeah... well, if the terms are right. The scroll was a little light on details."
"Well," he says, looking around the clearing and poking at the ground with his cloven hooves, "The terms are negotiable." He grins and not in a pleasant way. I occurs to her she didn't really notice the goat legs before but decided they didn't really detract from her initial assessment of his attractiveness, which makes her wonder at her own predilections. "Soooo..." he prompts.
"Sorry, I was distracted," she replies, blushing.
"I know, right?" he says with a huge grin, gesturing to his cock with both hands.
She frowns and stammers, "No... not... nevermind. Yeah, I want to get some damned power. Sorcery, demonic investment, whatever you got."
