We arrive just outside of Chucks Vegas on the island of something-or-other. The island has changed; it is always night out, and covered in magical neon and elaborate carvings. It’s surprisingly clean and feels oddly safe; there are five major casinos here in Disgraceland. We are beckoned to Chuck’s Damnation Palace, a square tower covered in illusionary flames.
Olen: “Why hello! You’re a particularly large horse… person. Person-horse.”
Adonis introduces himself, and his priestess Domino takes an immediate interest in Olen. Adonis is a centaur; Olen is half-demon; and Possum is a halfling riding on a giant, ridable raccoon. Adonis immediately bends down and tries to kiss her hand; she hisses at him. Adonis: “One of my best lovers was a halfling; it was quite a summer.”
Other travelers have come up beside us; it’s a cross-section of the multiverse. Adonis is a Jensen-worshipper, and his followers immediately spread out. It’s maybe a thousand people, plus demons and devils flitting around as if they live here – which they probably do. Olen starts trying to get people to invest in shitcoin.
Chuck appears in a flash of purple lighting: “Welcome welcome welcome creatures of the multiverse! I cannot explain how happy I am to have you all here at opening night of the Sin Thread here at Disgraceland! This is Chuck’s Damnation Palace! Here you take part in all kinds of entertainment. There’s a party at Azrael’s Club Blood later this evening, so come join us for the blood rave. Entertainment-wise we have one of the best shows on the strip: Povian Pie, the story of Geddy Lee Geddy. Next up we have the Balaalgio Inferno, for the fancier of you; there’s a wonderful show called Z by Cirque du So-Lame, wonderful show, demons, zombies, wonderful fun. Abs of Steel, the Pit Fiend Follies, I put that together for a friend. That’s where our pit fiends show you their moves.”
Somewhere in the background: “Fuck you man!”
“You can stay in any one of these. The Mirage of Madness, a personal favorite, with the Mind Flayer Mentalist, great show if you love magic and such, plus a bunch of other fun stuff. Windigo Resort and Casino, it’s absolutely the place for luxury and relaxation. It has the hellfire spa, the gladiatorial illusion, Payne Newton’s Danke Shien for Your Souls show. Our final casino is the Luxurious Pyramid Scam, which holds the Green Gill Group and the Divas of the Depths. We also have Malkenthet’s Pleasure Den, available in any casino from any room, you just have to get in – and I will teach you how. It’s run by Malkenthe the demon goddess of succubi – there’s nothing like it in the multiverse.”
A succubi queen in an incredibly gaudy leather dress appears next to Chuck. “All are welcome at the Please Den, and should you be ready we will take you all the way to the end.”
Chuck picks up: “Inside the Pleasure Den, there’s a Raucus Review – the Thunder from Down Underworld.”
Malkenthet makes her exit.
Chuck: “Welcome all, welcome all, I do have a one-on-one special greeting with some of you. Now, we know some of you came alone, so we made some arrangements. You’re all enchanted to be part of greeting groups. They’re your safety buddies. Speaking of safety, I did mention the arena earlier. So if anybody starts a brawl or even dies, we have ways of taking care of that. So the other part of this enchantment is, if you start a fight with anybody here you automatically get teleported to the arena; there will be betting, and you can bet on yourself before you start. Lots of shops, check those out. And the winner’s circle! Ever wanted to play like you couldn’t lose? There you go. There’s also the High Roller’s area if you want to buy your way in; just see your local High Roller Rep. This is my buddy Balaam–” He summons a pit fiend in a double-breasted suit.
“Um, Hi guys!”
“Have a fucking great time!” yells the vampire, and then vanishes in a puff of smoke.
Olen: “So we’re just stuck together, with no regard for social class?”
While we’re talking, the other groups poof away. “I want to see Abs of Steel,” Adonis says, and then we poof away – the last of the groups.”
“Oh heyyy,” says the white-haired vampire sorcerer, “I’m going to do your orientation! And what is your orientation?”
Adonis bows respectfully, and Chuck congratulates him, and then us, for being Number One on his list of people to invite. “Alignment,” says Chuck, “doesn’t matter here. We’ve designed a place that’s just fun. Some of the do-gooders would have a problem with that, but here’s the thing: nobody cares.”
He’s trying to sell us on the idea that we’re special, hand-chosen by Chuck himself. He wants us to be his eyes and ears; this is the dry run for his opening, and he needs it to be impressive. He’s made some commitments to get the place hooked into the Sin Thread. Anything we hear, and demon or devil can hook us up with Chuck. Might take a little bit to get back to us, he’s got a lot going on.
Adonis’ disciple Venus uses Disguise Self to make herself look paler and less alive, adds black lipstick and lots of eyeshadow. Chuck is definitely interested, but he continues: “So if you see something, say something. Second thing,” he flips his hands and produces three poker chips with his face on them. “These are Chuck’s luck. These’ll be what you show to anybody if you want to get in touch with me.” Mistress Eden, Adonis’ Pixie Dominatrix catches the coin and looks it over. Possum creeps up on her, thinking she’s food; she turns invisible.
The coins also let us re-roll a roll once per session; flip the coin for a 50/50 on a skill roll twice a session; and add a D4 to any roll once per session. It also lets us open a door to Malkethet’s Pleasure Den once per session.
He intoduces Balaam, his pet pit fiend, and this spindly, threadbare gentleman, the vampire Jafreeze. He tried to steal Chuck’s business once, and now he’s… like this…
We need to decide where to stay, and we settle on the Presidential Suite in Chuck’s Palace. Venus stays with Chuck; the rest of us are teleported down to our new sweet suite. It is a five-bedroom palatial suite; there’s a kitchen with a trash slot. Unfortunately, it goes down to a fire pit, so Possum can’t sleep there.
Adonis starts painting tiger stripes on himself in preparation for going down to Club Blood. Olen looks around the room, and Mistress Eden starts searching around the room as well. Adonis starts talking about the esteemed Crotchbra family from which he comes. His grandfather was the one who invented what centaurs now call the crotchbra. What really makes it such an achievement is the quick don-and-discard mechanism.
Mistress Eden finds the room’s extradimensional safe. She also finds this weird U-shaped thing on a base that starts trying to talk to her when she picks it up. Olen finds the Welcome book, including the room service menu. He sets it aside because he has no attention span.
Adonis takes a sudden interest in the individual rooms, and walks into one… it immediately adjusts itself to his desires: a centaur-sized bed, heart-shaped; a bathroom with an extended shower, a bathtub large enough for coupling; and a teeny little pixie bed for Mistress Eden. Possum gets a sort of dirty, cramped little lair. Olen Mosk’s room suddenly looks like the bridge of a Star Destroyer if you made it into a bedroom.
Mistress Eden, being the brains of the operation, starts going through the Welcome Book – including the menu, which is ridiculously expensive of course. However, as she’s looking things from Chuck’s Damnation Palace, they start getting crossed through and zeroed out. She thinks anything we order here is free.
Adonis contacts room service and orders some of everything. Before long they’re rolling trays and trays of food into the room. We don’t feel super overfed, even though we’re eating a lot. The alcohol works just fine. Adonis finishes up his tiger stripes, while Olen changes into his noble clothes and Domino straightens him up, makes him leave the Sad Clown brooch behind. Meanwhile Kitty, one of the priestesses, uses Disguise Self to look much more like a raccoon or at least a cat-person, and then goes in and tries to talk Possum into looking nice.
She… ends up talking to the raccoon. But, by the time she’s done the raccoon looks like a show poodle. Possum: “What the FUCK did you do to my raccoon?” Kitty, suddenly realizing that the Possum has been napping in the corner this whole time. “Um… friends?”
Possum: “What did you do to Nibbles???”
Domino, however, manages to fix Olen’s hair into a suitably Zoolander style. Adonis: “Now that we look good, we can hit the town! Let’s roll out.” The one thing we really need to attend is the Blood Rave.
We leave the room, and discover that there are only a handful of other rooms up here. There are other suites, but they look like they’re smaller than ours. Still big, but smaller than ours. We make it to the center and find a bank of doors; there’s a button beside it labelled “summon”. We press it, and a door opens. There’s a zombie inside standing on a glowing golden disk. We march the whole troop inside, and the elevator expands to fit.
Zombie: “FLOOR ONE!” The door closes behind us and the zombie flips a switch. The disk plummets from our floor to the bottom.
And then it stops and the doors open, revealing the vast, elegant expanse of the lobby. Zombie: “TIP!”
Adonis punches him.
We are all transported to the Windigo Grand Arena and Sportsbook. Adonis and the Zombie are in the arena; the rest of us are in the audience. It is absolutely a coliseum-style setup. Adonis starts galloping around trying to work up the crowd. The rest of us got box seats up in the Sportsbooks; there are snacks, drinks, Elon asks about the odds, understands nothing the goblins tell him, and bets 100 gold on the horse… person… personhorse. Almost everybody is betting on Adonis.
The zombie in the bellhop uniform swells up into this hulking zombie; it walks over to Adonis and swings at him but misses. Adonis disengages, and starts galloping around working up the crowd. He gets some traction, but a lot of people aren’t really paying attention.
The zombie lumbers after him, and Adonis finally moves to engage it. The zombie punches him on the way in, but Adonis moves to grapple and successfully grabs him. The Zombie tries to break out but fails, so Adonis has him grappled. Adonis makes a big show of it, and is fairly convincing; the crowd gets a bit more involved. The zombie tries to break the grapple but again fails, and Adonis pins him.
Adonis tries to rip his arms off… and does. He disengages, and gallops around the arena waving the arms. One of the arms promptly punches him in the eye. He throws the arms into the crowd, but they hit a wall of force and slide down to the floor of the arena. Adonis pulls his chain out, and goes back to attack.
The chain whistles out, and cuts into the zombie; he then backs up. The zombie comes towards him, and Adonis swings the chain again, doing rather more damage. The zombie tries to bite him, and succeeds. Adonis steps back and attacks him twice, destroying him.
“I’ve got a winner!” shouts a voice. “It’s this guy!”
We’re immediately teleported back to the elevator, but now there’s a sign on the door that says, “Out of Service”.
So now the other guests are kind of pissed at us. Adonis sees a golden star appear in front of him that says, “1x.” Adonis: “Um… could you heal me?”
Possum stops to have a conversation with her raccoon. “I will heal you if you agree to wear that crotchbra on your head for the rest of our stay here.”
He asks one of the service imps if there’s a place to get healed around here. Turns out that the drinks on the floating trays are whatever you most desire, which for him is healing potions. Olen is meanwhile sipping champagne and adderall. Olen redirects him to the Thunder from Down Underworld Revue in the Pleasure Den.
Adonis starts asking the most voluptuous bystanders he can find where there’s an entrance to the Pleasure Den. Adonis puts the mac on, and she is eating out of his hoof. Her name turns out to be Gemini, and she’s happy to join us in going there. She leads us up to the mid-level lobby and right to the entry to the Pleasure Den. Gemini is riding on his back and rubbing his nipples.
Jensen will smile upon this day. As we enter into the pleasure den, we feel a wave come over us, and all of a sudden everything is cool and Olen suddenly develops a bit of a swagger; it feels like he’s back in college. We’re not sure why exactly, but it’s probably some kind of charm spell.
There’s a reception area with a bunch of different doors leading off of it. There’s an older-looking succubi in a red sequined dress. “What room would you like?”
Adonis: “The one you, me, and Gemini are going to.”
She’s not having it, though, and Adonis’ attempt to use his Chuck coin falls flat.
Her: “I do see you have one of those tokens, though. Flip!”
An imp flies over.
“Flip, can you please take these people to their table at the show?”
“Yes Ma’am, I certainly can. Y’all are going to love this show! Follow! Follow!”
Adonis is pretty sure Gemini can last long enough to get to the show. The imp produces platters of drinks; jello shots for Adonis and champagne for Olen. We’re still passably sober, though.
We get set up in a premier table with all the priestesses. Adonis orders the tapas, while Olen gets a “shark coochie” board – basically a sushi sampler – and Possum gets a bucket of trash. It’s almost showtime.
Gemini leans in on Adonis; she’s startlingly strong, and Adonis is starting to wonder about her. His entourage remains oblivious, and Olen is distracted by Domino, who is now under the table.
The show begins, and sure enough a mirror ball descends from the ceiling, though without anything to hold it up. The house lights go down; then the spots hit it, scattering light everywhere. A brass band swells up, raucous and fun. A woman comes down on the sparkly ball, and begins singing. Olen and Possum are utterly fascinated by this performance. Glamouried, in fact.
Adonis notices that Satine on the ball is just hoovering up money from everybody who’s been glamoured. Adonis overhears the imps bitching about their jobs. “The Sin Thread’s not enough, I think it’s just going to be more work for us, and not any more money.” Domino, fortunately, is keeping Olen’s attention on her. Adonis doesn’t think it’s even really a spell; just an influence that encourages people to give.
Then it goes into the revue: pit fiend drag burlesque with standup, chorus lines of dancing incubi, sucubi dancing in their inimitable fashion. People start to snap out of it as the show continues. People start to leave as it nears the end, and Adonis goes to find a room to have his way with Gemini.
Adonis settles in and removes his crotchbra, then waits to be admired. Mistress Eden waits in the hall with Olen and Possum, while Gemini admires the goods and then displays her own. It is… sizeable. Adonis is very confused, and begins praying. Still, the worship of Jensen requires that one be open to these experiences, and the encounter proceeds.
Afterwards, Gemini falls asleep and Adonis heads out.
He’s just emerging when the Blood Rave announcement fills the air. Olen asks about a magic shop, and learns that there is one in the Mirage. Possum, who grew up in the sewer here. Turns out there’s a room where people’s sizes adjust for each other, and Olen wants to put Mistress Eden and Adonis in that room in hopes of creating a tiny little centaur with fairy wings.
Adonis stops to seduce someone else, and asks her about the blood rave in mid coitus. She doesn’t know, but she’s having a great time. It’s the hottest party on the strip, but that’s what she knows. Afterwards he asks a dealer, who tells him that it’s a who’s who of everybody who matters. Possum asks this large, bearded-devil bartender. “Oh yeah, man. I’ve heard that they’re going to be crazy here. We’re talking blood rain, free champagne bottle for everybody, and if you go to one of the succubi waitresses and say ‘blink twice’ you get two bottles – you didn’t hear that from me. I hear the blood comes from Povian children.”
Olen, meanwhile, wanders into the bar and finds a guy in a hoody, Olen: “So, are you ready for the blood rave?”
“Ah, you have found me!”
“Oh yeah, I’ve been looking for you.”
“Wait, I have been looking for you!”
It’s Alexej. He’s left Fanaxia to warn us that something’s wrong in Disgraceland. Chuck has been doing lots of things with the Abyss and the Infernal plane. He doesn’t quite know what he’s gotten himself into. There is “trouble in, how you say, paradise?” He came to warn us about the Sin Thread. It connects all points of sin and debauchery through the multiverse, and they’ve established connection to Sol Povos here. This might be a little bit of a problem. Chuck has a couple of enemies; Alexej doesn’t know who they are. But apparently we’re part of the plan.
He wants us to keep an eye open at the party, but keep our mouths shut so we don’t swallow the blood; he was never here. There was an orphanage that went missing; Olen manages not to say, “Well I guess that’s one less burden on society.”
We share our information and head into Azrael’s Club Blood. It’s a weird mix of Hellraiser and a Rob Zombie film. There's a glaabrezu DJ, an incubus doorman, who escorts us to our table. We have a private seating area with curtains around it, and Adonis starts scooping up champagne bottles. Our table is really close to a huge table up next to the stage. The DJ’s nearby, there’s plenty going on… We see clusters of people we saw earlier, groups of devils and demons talking to each other. We also see a giant covered in ice that’s just… huge, monstrous, and wrong. He comes up to the table right next to the DJ, along with Incubi, Succubi, and Pit Fiends in a very mafioso sort of way.
There’s also a handful of demons that we haven’t seen before.
Adonis immediately stands up to go talk to him.
“If you do not get out of my private space, I will have you torn limb from limb for eternity, and you have a lot of limbs there buddy.”
The music revs up, and all of a sudden Chuck appears at the DJ stand. Venus is with him, and she is looking hot in a black vinyl outfit. Chuck takes over the music booth, and as he does so… Mistress Eden starts tugging at Adonis. She slaps him across the face, grabs his nose, and angles him around to where he can see in the middle of the dance floor a handful of critters: a wide circle of lemures, flanked by more powerful demons. They make a beeline for Chuck, in a conspicuously aggressive fashion.
Adonis moves first, and whips out his bow and shoots at the one in the middle. He hits, and also yells, “Chuck, watch out!”
The thing in the middle is a devil of some sort, Olen thinks. Possum fires off a light crossbow, and kills one of the lemure. Olen drops Mirror Image and starts towards Chuck; he gets about halfway there.
The demon phalanx marches closer to Chuck; they’re moving through the crowd with some minimal subtlety.
Adonis fires off another arrow and misses the devil; he fires a second time and also misses. Mistress Eden casts Otto’s Irresistible Strip-Dance on the central devil, gets past its magic resistance, and and runs the hell away as it starts dancing.
Possum casts Lightning Storm… just as the blood rain starts. It’s an amazing effect. It hits the dancing devil in the middle, gets past his spell resistance, and shocks the poop out of him. He’s still looking pretty solid, though. Olen continues moving towards Chuck, and warns him that there are devils heading his way.
Chuck: “Dude, you’re bringing me down!” He keeps spinning records.
