What was going on inside of Voluptua’s sordid mind? Her sexual interlude with Tarin had passed from her mind, as sexual interludes tended to with Voluptua. By the time you figured out why your pants were off, she was on the prowl for her next victim.
But Voluptua, soaking erotically in an erotic bubble bath, was experiencing an unpleasant sensation, which was not something that happened very often and least of all in Voluptua’s specially engineered bathtub.
Volptua spent most of her time avoiding boredom. She had no moral conscience, but more problematic for people around her was that she was very extremely gifted at avoiding consequences. Metaphorically speaking, she had spent centuries firing guns in the air and watching, with interest, as bullets fell on other people. Indeed, sometimes she created diabolically unfortunate situations for the expressed purpose of amusing herself by avoiding the consequences.
But, she reflected, playing idly with a pet water snake, the plot had thickened like a belligerent custard. Setting aside the whole problem of Fr. Freudian Displacement, there were now four people who could affect the future of the undead world of darkness. And between those four, there were a limited number of relationships which would be beneficial to her interests. A union of Tarin and Lucretius would be disastrous. On the other hand, while Tweedledick and Tweedledum (as she thought of Roquefort and Lucretius) kept each other out of trouble with their own incompetence, they left Tarin free to fulfill all manner of prophecies, especially with a priest on her side. And if Tarin killed Roquefort, there would be no one to distract Lucretius from being a massive bother.
The hub, nub and crux of the situation was Tarin. I ought to have killed her instead of having sex with her, Voluptua mused, but she had seemed so delightfully confused and disturbed. At the heart of the matter, Voluptua enjoyed trouble too much to dispatch her enemies when an easy opportunity presented itself. Villains, as James Bond could have told her, tend to have this problem.
It occurred to Voluptua that she had promised to rescue Fr. Stephen. With Tarin. But Tarin had left in a flurry of sexual confusion and unnecessary accusations, culminating with some rather cutting personal remarks about Voluptua’s character and the ludicrous claim that she could rescue Fr. Stephen better without the help of “a malevolent, manipulative sexual predator and slut.”
Voluptua resolved to rescue Fr. Stephen anyway, because if there was a question of his being in any way useful she wanted him where she could see him. He might know more about the Wooden Stake of Etc than he was letting on.
Besides, rescuing someone from the Dynamic Duo was like rescuing candy from a moist, succulent baby.
Voluptua found them outside the Temple of Prophesy (mysterious Grecian temple on a barren moor, always surrounded by thunderstorms and the distant howl of wolves) arguing.
“How did you manage to drag her along?” ranted Lucretius. “Send her back to her parents! She’ll slow us down!”
“Shan’t,” said Roquefort. “You’re not the murderous tyrant of me.”
“Well, a quick bite and then back to her den of cheap body spray and futile dreams. But no more,” snarled Lucretius, rife with homosocial anxiety.
“May I interject that this is highly immoral?” interject Fr. Stephen. “Plow ye not the grassless furrow. Sup not of the young and the breastless. Leviticus, something something,” he added hopefully.
“I’ll plow the furrow of your face!” said Roquefort, and stood back with the air of a man who has really laid down a zinger.
“Roquefort,” said Stephen, “that was not actually a counter-argument.”
“Oh, hark at him! First name basis, eh? Kidnap a man for a day and he’ll think you’re friends for the rest of your life or teach you how of fish,” gabbled Roquefort.
“It was a bit familiar,” agreed Lucretius. “Look, why not--- oh hell, hell hell hell hell hell. I was just wondering how, how possibly, this night could reach below the absolute nadir of crapnitude, but now my eyes have been opened.”
“How are my favorite boys?” said Voluptua, sweetly.
“Voluptua!” said Roquefort, “this is a pleasant surprise.”
“Don’t talk to her,” muttered Lucretius. “It encourages her.”
Voluptua’s chief redeeming features were that she was very good-looking and very interesting to be around. It tended to bring out the worst in people. Lucretius, however, spent quite a lot of time in hell, where there were large numbers of very good-looking and very interesting women, and frankly the novelty had worn off after a few centuries. Really, though, he hated her effect of Roquefort, which was invariably bad. Like most things without a noticeable penis, Volutpua was one of Roquefort’s weaknesses.
At that moment, thunder clapped. Voluptua was about to suggest, by way of a distraction, that they actually enter the Temple of Prophesy, when Tarin the Righteous leaped out of a hedge, gleaming with chain mail and righteousness.
There was a moment of awkward silence in which they all regarded each other with animosity, confusion and sexual desire (the latter emanating mainly from Roquefort) before Tarin broke the silence, by saying, in the voice of one who feels she ought to say it, “Stephen! Thank God you’re all right.”
“I can’t tell you the day I’ve been having,” Stephen said.
“Well, that’s all right, I’ve come to rescue you,” said Voluptua, generously, and was greeted with a chorus of objections.
“Hahahahaha.”
“Wouldn’t go, mate. Out of the frying pan and into the fire of unadulterated liscentiousness.”
“Hahahahaha,” repeated Roquefort, irked that no one appreciated his sarcastic laughter.
“Don’t go with her! I’ve come to rescue you!”
“Hehe. Quite good that, old girl. Rescue. Is that what they’re calling that. Oh deary me. I’m tearing up with mirth,” continued Roquefort, determinedly.
Another malignant silence followed, as everyone was aware that a nasty argument was about to ensue and nobody wanted to start it, be on the same side as Voluptua, be on the opposite side of Voluptua, or catalyze another endless, sexual-tension filled squabble between Roquefort and Lucretius.
A diversion presented itself in the form of a previously unnoticed figure.
“Like, seriously. Are you really a vampire?” Katie gasped, awestricken, staring at Voluptua.
Tarin, Stephen, Lucretius and Roquefort then experienced the rare pleasure of seeing Voluptua disconcerted. Anyone would be put off, confronted by someone who appears to have dressed up as you. Voluptua stared, gobsmacked at what appeared to be a grotesque and rather hopeful parody of herself.
“Yes,” she managed. “I’m Voluptua. Charmed, I’m sure.” She extended a smooth white hand and shook Katie’s bony, silver-ring encrusted one.
“Gosh! I’m Katie. I’ve been trying to get people to call me Jadine, but it doesn’t really stick. How do you get people to call you Voluptua? And how to you get your hair like that? Are you Rocky’s girlfriend? It’s okay if you are, because I really totally feel like we’re going to be Best! Friends! We have sooooooooo much in common.”
“Voluptua… is my name…. Rocky? Girl… friend? Best... friend? Rocky?”
Tarin barely contained a snort of laughter, only because she felt bad for the poor girl. Lucretius, a creature of a nastier persuasion, chortled freely. “Rocky! Oh it’s too good! To think I’ve let him call me Lucy all of these years! Rocky! You were right, old thing, we must keep this one around!”
“Now, now,” said Roquefort nervously. “There’s no need to be assigning hasty titles like ‘girlfriend.’ Plenty helpings of Roquefort to go around.”
Katie was not tuning in to the basic tone of this conversation. “I. Love. Your. Dress. It’s sooo legit! Is it custom made? Do you dance under the moon with your sistern?”
“Sistren,” corrected Fr. Stephen helpfully, “ A cistern is a well.”
“He does this too me, too,” said Roquefort, whose talent for derailing conversations was second to none, “had a whole conversation about dormice and he was claiming I was talking about doormats.”
“You’re thinking of witches,” added Tarin.
Voluptua was recovering. She generally disliked having other women around, unless she was in a certain mood, but the advantages of being trailed by someone who is a much less attractive version of yourself were swiftly presenting themselves. Also, Roquefort seemed fond of her, and she liked a nice bargaining tool.
Roquefort, for his part, was not entirely out of the loop. He could tell from Voluptua’s face that Plans Were Hatching and unless they immediately and intimately involved the lower half of his body he was having none of that. “Lucy,” he hissed, “let’s drag the priest into the temple and get some nice hot prophesies.”
Lucretius, who had been trying to make suggestive eye-contact with Tarin for the past few minutes, and who was having no luck, nodded. They each grabbed one of Fr. Stephen’s arm and bolted for the temple, moving as only a demon and a vampire can. They were aided by a complete lack of resistance on Stephen’s part, since Voluptua’s creepy expression gave him the willies and Katie was the most irritating person he had ever met. Tarin, he felt, could fend for herself.
Voluptua looked after them, lazily. She could catch up in a hurry, if necessary.
“Don’t worry, Stephen,” yelled Tarin, “I’ll come rescue you... again!” She couldn’t feel right about leaving Katie with Voluptua.
Katie was positively glowing. “God, men, eh? Always…” she fumbled, “Always rushing off unexpectedly into Grecian temples, right? No sense of community or fraternity of sisternity.”
“Quite,” said Voluptua, who was always up for a little cheerful misandry, however ill-directed.
“Look here,” said Tarin. “I don’t like you, Voluptua, and you don’t like me, and we had sex, but I really feel we should follow them and find out what they’re up to.”
“Yes, better get those sillies out of trouble, that’s what we always do,” blathered Katie, happily ensconced in an imaginary sisterhood. Then she rethought. “Sex? Oh my God, really? I’ve always been, like totally bi-curious!” She turned her innocent interest to Tarin. “Are you a vampire too? I love your chain mail!”
“I’m a vampire slayer, you idiot,” said Tarin, losing patience. “Tarin the Righteous, descended from a line of vampire hunters sworn to rid the earth of the foul fiends that plague its very soul.”
“Oh,” said Katie, turning to Voluptua, “is she our enemy?”
Voluptua and Tarin exchanged a rare look of camaraderie. “Temple, then?” said Voluptua, bleakly.
The three prophets sat cross-legged in very high thrones. Wafts of smoke drifted up from the incessant fires of burning leaves at their feet.
“Bay leaves! How Delphic!” squealed Katie.
“Katie,” said Tarin, “those are not bay leaves.”
Lucretius and Roquefort were encouraging Stephen.
“Go on, Father Whatnot! Ask them whose got the Wooden Stake of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and Sometimes Y,” said Roquefort, eagerly.
“And be quick, or else we’ll all be in Estonia pretty shortly,” added Lucretius, who did not share Voluptua’s open mind about recreational drugs.
“I thought demons spoke in all tongues?” asked Fr. Stephen, absently.
“Tongues is not the problem,” said Lucretious. “Bloody annoying is the problem. The tall skinny one on the left speaks only in classic rock lyrics. The one with crazy hair in the middle can only quote Fox network television, and sometimes Comedy Central. And the woman on the end speaks only in the most pretentious literary references possible.”
Fr. Stephen nodded. He knew this. He’d met the prophets before. “Greetings, O Those On High,” he said, amicably. “How have you been?”
“Better to burn out than to fade away.”
“Your music is bad and you should feel bad!”
“And I, I took the one less traveled by.”
Fr. Stphen nodded sagely. “Really? Well, I can imagine. I’ve been rather busy myself. Look, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question?”
“Bucket of truth,” conceded the mad-haired individual beneficently.
“What are they saying?” hissed Roquefort.
“They say its nice to see me, they’ve been keeping very busy trying to remember where they put their feet, and of course I can ask a question, but I might not like the answer,” translated Fr. Stephen.
“I knew we were right to kidnap him,” beamed Roquefort.
“One of your better ideas, old fellow,” said Lucretius.
“Guys, you don’t happen to know who’s got the Wooden Stake of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Sometimes Y, do you?”
This provoked consternations, or as much consternation as was possible for people who are on a transcendent plane of reality.
“And the walls came down. All the way to hell,” posited the lanky one.
The woman bristled. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment! Love is not love that alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove. Friends, Romans—”
“Parliament actually has five houses,” interjected the third, tentatively.
“You can’t start a fire,” countered the man on the left. “You can’t start a fire without a spark.”
“Woob woob woob!”
Fr. Stephen sighed. “They don’t know. But then can give us distinguishing characteristics.”
“Well get them,” snapped Lucretius. “God, I can feel my mind dissolving.”
The mad-haired one grudgingly admitted, “Kiss my shiny metal daffodil.”
“Hear it not Heaven, thy misters have done it! Oh, for a voice of thunder,” opined the woman.
“She was a fast machine,” added the man on the left. “She kept her motor clean.”
“Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”
“Godamnit, Any Poehler, no one knew what red wings were until you invented them!”
“Sky rockets in flight. Afternoon delight.”
“Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, lady, would be no crime.”
“Ah,” said Fr. Stephen. “Well, thank you for your efforts.”
“Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table.”
“What do they say?” said Roquefort.
“And does it mean anything?” added Lucretius.
“Hmm, it will take some extrapolating, but--- um, does anyone remember where Tarin or Voluptua have gone?”
“Well, buggery, buggery dock,” said Roquefort, “they’ve sippadeared. Disappeared. With my dinner.”
And indeed, the cistern had fled the coop.
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