I blinked, looking around, noting that even the regular dungeon notifications were glitching out more often now. The guild room was significantly larger than I had been expecting. It was a whole damn theater with red velvet chairs that looked as if it could fit five hundred people. At the far end was a stage with a single spotlight blaring down on it. The spotlight was the only illumination in the room.
It was shining down on the form of Porky, the left half of Corcunda, who lay on the stage.
Porky wore the same gimp suit as Corky, but his was white.
“Hello?” I called, walking down the center aisle. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and the sound of my footsteps filled the space.
“Hi. Can you help me?” came the voice from the stage. He had the deep voice of a mantaur, and it echoed in the large room. But it was muffled, too, as his mouth was behind a mask. “My, uh, zipper is stuck.”
The large man was on his back in the middle of the stage, and as I approached, I could see what the problem was.
The white gimp suit was covered in zippers. Ostensibly, the whole thing was designed to keep his guts in his body. There was a long black zipper down the flat side of his body’s cross section. This was the zipper that was stuck. It was stuck right at his lower waistline. There was a zipper from the top down and a second that came up from his crotch. The two met like a suitcase zipper, but a little bit of red bulging flesh appeared stuck there.
“It doesn’t hurt, but it’s really gross,” Porky said as I hesitantly approached. I had to move to the side of the large stage and find the grimy stairs. Dust swirled with every step.
“How long have you been stuck like this?” I asked, going to a knee.
“I... I don’t know,” he said. “If I stand and the zipper isn’t properly sealed, everything starts to leak.”
“What about food? Water?” I examined the problem. Sure enough, the teeth of the top zipper were firmly embedded in whatever this was. It looked maybe like a little piece of intestine. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out. It was sitting at a place where he couldn’t get proper leverage to move.
“I’m in a body-containment suit,” Porky said. “It keeps me alive. It has water recycling. I don’t eat. No, look. You gotta pull it up, but I can’t get the angle right. My top arm is too short, and I can’t bend without spilling.”
I had a weird flashback of helping Bea do this with a jacket after she had gotten her own hair caught in the zipper. I’d pulled too hard, and it had broken, which in turn had led to a three-hour ordeal where we’d had to travel to multiple department stores to shop for a replacement.
“Here,” I said, yanking on the bottom part. “I gotta pull it taut, and then I’ll pull it upward. Uh, this might hurt.”
“I can’t feel my insides so much,” he said. His top arm grabbed my arm for support. “My, my, aren’t you muscly?”
I yanked, and there was apop, and the zipper pulled free. A small amount of red watery liquid spurted out. I swallowed and then moved the zipper down, meeting the second zipper. The whole suit gave a flash.
Porky sighed with relief, then grabbed the two zippers and pulled them all the way down to the crotch. The half-mantaur awkwardly sat up.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you,” Porky said. “Help me up, if you would. Uh, welcome to the stage performance guild. I can see you have some rudimentary levels in performance skills, but the fact you were able to gain entrance suggests you have a lot of raw talent. And for helping me today, I will throw a few free skill levels onto your Razzmatazz skill.”
I stood, pulling the heavy man up by his lower arm. He was well-built and strong, but he wasn’t pure, corded muscle like most of these guys usually were. The half-mantaur split all the way down the middle was really difficult to look at, and it was even harder to wrap my brain around. The long black zipper line down the flat side of his snow-white latex suit was taut like a drumhead, but sometimes when he moved, I could see the organs within pressing against it, like they were trying to spread outside. The same thing happened with his head, where I assumed a half brain sat in his bisected skull. It looked flat, but things occasionally undulated within. It was really, really gross.
Even though his voice was muffled by the suit itself, his ability to talk was not hampered by the half mouth.
“Look, Porky, I need to talk to you.”
The half-mantaur froze. He hopped a few times to face me. He reached up and half unzipped an eyehole. A brown eye looked me up and down, and I suddenly wondered how he’d been seeing me up until this moment.
“I haven’t been called Porky in a long time.”
“Yeah, I figured,” I said. “Your other half has spent a long time searching for you, but he’s in real trouble, and he needs your help.”
“What sort of trouble?”
I spent a few moments explaining everything I knew about Corky, his other half. That he had left the Penis Parade to go searching, but he’d disappeared, only to show back up now. We didn’t know what was going on, but he was a part of the LadyDominators team, and he spent every race passed out in the back of their vehicle.
Porky nodded. “Female mantaurs donotworship Grull like most of our kind do. They are adherents of Enyo. Enyo is an unhinged goddess of war.”
The moment the guildmaster said that, I realized that neither she nor Corky worshipped a god.
“What about Grull? I thought all the mantaurs did.”
“I did once,” Porky said as he hopped backstage. I followed. He lit a lamp, and a dirty yellow light revealed the spartan, lonely world he lived within. “When I split, my devotion went away as well, and now I find myself wondering how I fell into such a trap in the first place. He’s a very unpleasant deity.”