THE WEEK OF THE COMET
or How I Became Teratosexual
*
Chapter IV
==============
Bravely I ran out of sight and the bravado dissolved into the pitch blackness I found there.
A few strides behind me, the square of light of the doorframe. Before me, some hundred yards below, a vague oval of hazier darkness. It was a pretty damn long shaft, dug into the rock, and the slop was unforgiving. No handrails, no lights. Couldn't see my feet.
I know this descent had some kind of symbolic value, like a leap of faith into the unknown, but I took my phone and turned the torch on. Sorry but I ain't spraining an ankle just cause you've read Joseph Campbell.
There were no surprises, though. No collapsing floor, no booby traps, no rolling boulders, nothing to slip on but my own sweat. It was just exhausting. But less than when I'll climb it back up.
For a moment I thought I was gonna regret not wearing clothes but the temperature actually rose as I went down. A dry heat, the kind not even the movements of your limbs can ruffle, and which made itself very clear once down the stairs when I passed under a carved arch and found myself in a cave where breathed air was a warm touch in your lungs.
But what I saw took my breath away.
A dome two hundred yards in diameter, easy, and so high my torch couldn't reach the top. But I didn't need my torch, that's the thing. This barren cave was teeming with life. The slime creatures were all there, hanging out, groups, loners, busy bees, some were sticking to the walls like flies, and they were glowing like neon lights. The whole place was illuminated.
Some of them noticed my presence, and excited to see me among them, they gathered into a welcoming crowd as I stepped in and my nude body suddenly was black and red. A few paces further and it was black and lime green. Countless slimes, countless colors creating these orbs of saturated hue as bathing as the heat.
"Hey guys, I... um..."
Didn't really know what to say. Didn't really know what I was doing here. What I was supposed to do.
I looked around at the weirdness of the place and situation.
As far as my sense of space went, the place, which I would eventually call the hub, was a perfect circle. Yet the shape didn't seem to have been made by hand. Couldn't see any decorations either. It was a natural cave into igneous rock; but interspersed along the circumference were openings. A dozen. Some were natural galleries, some man-made doorways, all leading into pure darkness.
It was exciting, uh? Just from there my mind was already racing. Did all the Basalt temples have secret underground tunnels? They were supposed to be simple, humble people; that stairway was a pharaonic job. It didn't add up. Or did they build a temple over it only to
pretend
they were Basalt cultists to protect their find?
Whatever this find was. The creatures? Did they worship them?
Are they guarding a treasure?
Or are they the treasure to be guarded?
I didn't know the first thing about the Basalt religion. Didn't even know whether
they
called themselves that, or archeologists had coined the name.
Anyway, the important word here was treasure. And semen. And super cool super secret lair with cyberpunk lights, and doors aligned there to be explored. Everything was so convenient. Some kind of mindless euphoria took me suddenly, having crossed the curtain of reality into mystery. And since I didn't know where to begin, I did some shit.
The part of the hub I couldn't see was the ceiling, as none of the creatures would crawl higher than a few feet, and my brilliant idea was to shout and wait for the echo, like I was a fucking bat or something.
Normally I would have balked, because of that legend that it could make stalactites fall down and kill you. Is that even a legend? Well, I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted.
"
DALLAS SUUUCKS!
"
And it was thus confirmed. Echoey. Huge. So high it probably reached the surface layer. But I didn't make the dome collapse, no one got impaled by a stalactite, instead I got struck down, caught in the middle of my shit-eating grin, struck down by a response. A shout back. Like a tidal wave of some giant Hindu 'om', deep, sustained and extremely loud, which swept me to my knees, arms covering my head.
You ever heard the pipe organ in a cathedral? You ever heard blue whales? You notice how I'm comparing it to sounds so powerful and so beautiful we have a tendency to associate them with the sacred?
And you've probably noticed how I try to maintain some suspense around what I knew then and what I know now. Well, to this day I still don't know where this sound came from.
It was too monumental to be an æsyrja. Maybe fifty of them? I don't know. Honestly I don't wanna think about it.
As suddenly as I had been tackled by sound waves and cold sweat, I found myself back in the atmosphere of silence and heat, and red, green, blue light. The little gals were still coming to me, joyful, curious and disorderly, unbothered that Big Daddy Slime had done a soundcheck from the depths.
Me, I was not so cheeky anymore. I received their fanfare without uttering a word. Heck, I would never as much as fart inside this freaking cave.
As I eventually decided to stumble forward through the quiet fuss there was eventually a discernible sound. A movement actually, a clear, organized line, separating from the crowd that was gathering around me. It was a group of baby slimes and their respective "moms" heading to a doorway on my left. From behind the rocks blocking the threshold I could hear the cute, lively sounds of a nursery. I could have gone and have a peek, say hi to Gary, but I knew that if I'd only just
tried
to go near this room they'd rip my head off and go about their day.
So I went on with my tour, feeling like a float at a Thanksgiving parade. I set out for the center of the dome, afraid that the openings were off-limits. And also because I had spotted something there. You see, there was nothing in the hub, no draft, no water dripping, no ores in the walls, and definitely no signs of past human activity besides the carved doorframes.
But
. At the center I found four perfect rectangular slots in the ground. Two-by-six, twenty-inch-deep, forming like a truncated X.
Now
these
were definitely man-made. And a totally different technique than the one they had used for tunneling the stairway. Much more advanced. We knew they had rock-cutting lasers around the time before Butler but how could these people have afforded one?
And fuckin' why do they look like empty graves?
I stood inside the X and looked around me. Just a flat expanse with a clean bedrock floor, I mean no mold, no algae, no sharp edges. In other circumstances I would have taken my shoes off because I was sweating in my socks.
But I had no idea what I could and couldn't do. Or rather, I didn't know the protocol to get to the moment where I would have my dick sucked. Was I even here to get my dick sucked? Or loot their treasure? Or have a drink with four mummies.
I looked at the concentric circles of blobs, of which I was the awkward centerpoint. I tried to gesture something like 'Am I supposed to go somewhere specifically?' which looked pretty much like ¯(°_o)/¯
Shieeet, the software can do ASCII?!
Big Pinkie bumped my ankle.
"Ouch, what th--" I bit my lips in fear of another sonic retaliation.
She started biting my shoes like a dog. Without growling, but repeatedly, with a very expectant demeanor. So I got the message.
Again I could only gesture. 'What is it with you guys wanting me butt naked like that?'
Not that I minded. I enjoyed being the nudist adventurer, with my backpack and my shoes, it looked so goofy it was actually hot, but I could never refuse anyone asking me to strip.
There was something ceremonial about my nudity, I got that, just like with the æsyrjur. And whatever the purpose... Well, I didn't need any purpose. Naked is the default character design for me.
I squatted down and before untying my shoes I put my glasses in their case. I was myopic, so in a dark cave it wouldn't hinder me much.
I left my backpack in one of the sarcophagi. They didn't seem to mind. Kinda reassuring, I guess. Don't want a curse on my ass.
Then I stood back up, bare soles on hot ground, and realized I was surrounded by people who had explicitly asked for me to be naked.
My ego made a rough estimate. One hundred and fifty.
I had been in front of more people than that before (last summer, World Naked Bike Ride in London), I had been in a sex orgy before (a story for another time), but this was different. Hundreds of individuals were thinking my nudity right now, my body. Mine and only mine.
And usually, my exhibitionist mind in a fairly hot body was spectator of my spectators. But right now, under those circumstances, I couldn't be. I was down there with them. I was looking at my body, with them. Because the moment was about it, not about me.
And it wasn't about the size of my tits either, or the aesthetic of my dick. It was about what my body represented. And this I had to offer to them.
Yeah, it was different. New.
I got aroused.
Not erect. Just this gut sway, stuck between fear and discomfort and anticipation.
I turned around slowly, so they could all see me. Like an object.
Like a sacrif--
Fuck.
Shit.
They had tested me, lured me here, taken the children to bed, and now I was standing in the middle of tombs.
Like a sacrifice but like, symbolically, right? Not for real. Haha. Because, I mean, sure it's a lot of ceremony for a blowjob, but just ritualistic silliness, like rush week or something. Right?
The slimes in front of me parted to form an alley leading to one of the apertures at the far end of the hub. With their glow it looked like an airport runway at night.
Shit.
Fuck.
I was about to really walk that thin line now. You know, the one where danger turns me on.
I walked. And I tried to make a little sense of all this.
They wanted something from me. Something important. So important they had shaped a ceremonial to receive it as a group.
They
could become a group around this ceremonial. Around this something made symbolic.