Seconds after swallowing the capsule I’m consumed in a cozy tsunami of warmth and horniness. I’m still aware of the imminent mortal danger I’m in, what’s at stake here, that I’m very deep in enemy territory, that I’ve lost everyone I cared about in my life–I just don’t care! Everything feels so warm, so peaceful. Euphoria is conquering every inch of my body as the floating feeling infects every nerve… and now, when I look at the dance floor… there really aren’t any unattractive terrorist cultists here.
The thirty seconds I’m frozen in place absorbing the Rapture is apparently an unacceptable period of time spent not raving, as Arthur gently nudges me in the back towards the dance floor. The pulsating red ambient lighting is especially otherworldly in the center, like I’d just stepped into an alien mothership during a twisted religious mating ceremony. Stepping into the mass of bodies only makes things more surreal as dozens of beady little glowing red eyes curiously survey my unfamiliar form. As I force my way deeper into the cloud of bodies, I eventually get to where I can’t even see the edges of the room anymore, only dancing and grinding cultists in all directions.
I almost trip over something at my feet and back up to see the outline of a busty, nude cultist with glowing blacklight-blue hair on top and down under riding a shirtless tattooed-to-hell-and-back muscle god cultist’s cock. The fluids being produced at the, uh, point of entry glowed white in the blacklight, splattering all over the fucking place with each violent slam of their bodies as she rode him like a cowgirl on a rodeo clown (the spectacle lacked the finesse of bull-riding) which made observing their tangled bouncing mass of limbs feel less like watching a couple of hot young cyberpunks have sex and more like watching a giant alien spider drunkenly vomiting its webbing whilst devouring itself. The fact that I had countless nanobots in my bloodstream rewriting my brain to be a mindless sex freak and wasn’t the slightest bit aroused says a lot. If anything, it retracted a little bit. Oh no, was this what Woodstock felt like? Burning Man?
I step over them, high enough to think this was all hilarious, and start waving a hand over each of their masked faces, but even that elicited no reaction: once they’d locked in to the pleasure of anonymous rave-floor cult-sex, everything in the outside world totally melted away and they were stuck in an overwhelming, orgasmic trance. I feel a leather-gloved hand rub my right shoulder from behind, and turn around to see a very toned, well-built, shirtless cultist with tight leather pants stepping closer to me. I try very hard to not look at the impressive bulge or the washboard abs but I’m closeted enough already without being on the fucking horny pill, I can’t help it. He notices me staring and motions for me to go ahead.
“It’s alright. I was like you too. You can be yourself here. Go for it, if you want it. Indulge.”
I never thought the first time I’d fulfill my very gay desire to lick someone’s rock hard abs would be at an anonymous vampiric sex rave in an underwater terrorist cult’s party dome, but I can’t say I’m disappointed. I lift the mask enough to expose only the bottom half of my lusting face. His six-pack glistens in the light with the thin film of sweat he’s accumulated from his frantic freestyling, and the slight saltiness sends shivers through my spine. I’m starting to get hard, and the mental barrier that society has built into me (the ‘you can’t just start sucking somebody off in the middle of a rave’ one) is fading fast, especially since that’s happening literally everywhere here around me because everyone is a hot masked cultist on fuck pills. I pull his sweats down and feel my heart beat out of my chest. There’s nothing under them, and it’s big. I’m mesmerized in spite of myself; all my senses dancing as I explore it thoroughly with my hands and tongue. I feel like I’ve barely gotten acquainted with it when it violently explodes all over the floor: his Rapture-boosted libido pushed him to his bursting point in less than a minute.
Unfortunately, I barely have time to revel in the moment when I hear someone shriek “HELP! WE’VE GOT ONE DOWN!” The music almost instantly stops, and the light normalizes slightly. I sigh and rise to my feet, my head still spinning with arousal and with gnarly nanobots in my head, and I race-stumble as much as my drugged ass can through the crowd to the source of the sound: just my heroic instincts, I guess. A small gaggle of concerned cultists are in a circle at the other end of the dance floor with a blonde bottomless cultist babe in the center, her eyes rolled back into her head, a naked man kneeling beside her weeping and babbling incoherently about how he didn’t do it or something and to not kill him. “What the fuck happened?” I demand, screeching to be heard over the pounding bass.
“They were banging and on Rapture and she’s losing it,” an onlooking cultist shouts back. “It happens. That’s why you can’t let it get the best of you, or take too much too fast.”
I lean over her and check her carotid for a pulse. Oh, she’s got one alright--and it’s spiraling out of control, so fast I can’t count the beats, and she’s breathing just as hard and as heavy, her neck thrown back in overwhelming painful ecstasy. It’s like she’s having an endlessly escalating eternal orgasm that’s completely frying her mind, but the pleasure seems to be somewhat subdued by the fact she can’t breathe and her heart’s about to explode. “What do we do when this happens, again?” I ask the onlookers, trying not to sound like a total outsider.
“Not much we can do, maaaan,” another male cultist squeaks. “Someone lets themselves get too taken away on Rapture Red, it consumes them: they know the risks and if it overcomes them, well, that was the price they paid for the ultimate ecstasy. It’s like in Hellraiser, mannn, you can’t have all the pleasures of heaven without the pleasures of hell.” One thing’s for sure--if I’m gonna take on Kilroy, it’s gonna have to be before this shit kicks in all the way for me, or I’m screwed. I’m not exactly Mr. Impulse Control to begin with, here.
“That’s fucking bullshit,” I spit in reply. “You mean to tell me every damn person in this room is on a drug that can kill them any second, and there’s no way around it!?”
“Most of us manage to keep enough control to hold onto reality and life,” a woman Skull chimes in. “I guess that danger is part of what makes it so goddamn erotic.”
“So you mean to tell me that there’s NOBODY in this sorry excuse for a nightclub that can save someone who’s undergoing this?” I snap back at her.
“Well, there’s only one being in Neptune who can perform miracles, and he’s--”
“KILROY!” I hear the rest of the cultists shout out. I look up to see smoke pouring from the mouth of the giant skull centerpiece at the back of the room, its eyes strobing red as a shadowy form emerges from the mouth and the techno fades into a dance remix of a song from some NES game. Castlevania, I think. What the fuck was that song called agai--
Oh, right. Bloody Tears. Ha-fucking-ha, Kilroy.
“Welcome!” a booming, deep robotic voice calls, startling me since, you know, “robots” haven’t sounded like that in over a century or so. The shadowy man walks from the skull’s mouth and into the open air, slowly descending with his arms extended in Christlike fashion, landing right behind our huddle. He’s below average height, to an extent where there’s no way this could be some kind of Pneumat-like suit: he’s got to be an ART (slang for a fully ARTificial human). Or rather, they’ve got to be an ART. No way to tell gender, but the woman who’s been in the cult longer than me said ‘he’ so we’ll go with that for now. His body is a sleek black-and-grey metal exo-skeleton-like structure with a tuxedo-like flair to its shape, ending in gloved perfectly-human-shaped hands: it reminds me of the Hardsuits from the old anime Bubblegum Crisis more than any real ARTs or Pneumat suits I’d ever seen. The tech was miles ahead of anything I’d ever seen.
His head is the strangest, a stylized polygonal (looks like it was made to run on a Nintendo 64) bleeding skull with glowing red eyes/tears. It sits inside an open-faced stylized kabuto (samurai helmet) resembling Darth Vader’s helmet, but with a phoenix emblem in the center and with the back-and-around-neck-part (called a shikoro, Tela would later tell me) looking like its wings. So I guess the most accurate way to describe it would be a polygonal-glowing-eyes-crying-blood-skull-phoenix-Darth-Vader-samurai-helmet. Quite the mouthful, but quite the helmet. It’s slightly hilarious and thoroughly horrifying.
He walks with the swagger and purpose of a god and certainly has the aura to match: an immeasurable pressure infects the room as he sets foot on the ground, and every ounce of arousal in me is replaced with reverence and fear--it’s a sensation I’ve only felt once, when I went face to face against Old West (the leader of the Wild West Syndicate) and it almost stopped me in my tracks back then. The cultists also fall hushed in his presence, the haze of drugged horniness replaced by one of worship.
Kilroy approaches the fallen girl (who’s beginning to spasm uncontrollably like Nyugen in her last moments) and raises one hand, spreading his fingers as his eyes flicker slightly, not unlike when someone with a NeurOS runs calculations on their ContNETS. He slowly lowers his hand over her face and then commands, “REFRESH.” The moment he says this, his eyes flash blindingly bright red, every other LED surface in the room following suit, until the whole room is consumed in red and nothing can be seen through it.
As the crimson glow fades back down to normal levels, the eyes on the woman’s mask are now visibly black, their glowing ceased. I check her pulse again--none. She’s dead. I check for breathing--dead. Suddenly her bosom fills with air with a pained gasp, and her eyes glow red as she gets up from death like a baby waking from a nap, pulling herself confusedly to her feet and trying to remember why she’s half-naked in a room full of cultists. She falls prostrate before Kilroy as soon as she notices him, weeping in awe and gratitude.
The crowd erupts into cheers as I stand slack-jawed, awed into silence. My vision shifts back to Kilroy. He just reset her like a damn computer: from a state of near death, through death, back around to life, with a sweep of his hand and a single, booming word shouted through that horrifying mask. Can he really control reality? What kind of fucking cult is this? What IS Kilroy, even!?
As if sensing my curiosity, he turns to face me–oop, now the entire room has followed suit. Who is this, they seem to be asking, and why does our god care about him?
“Detective Blake, I presume,” the rumbling computerized bass voice booms, and my entire body surrenders instantaneously. I stand in shocked silence for what feels like an eternity trying to figure out if this is my end or a new beginning. Murmurs from my fellow Skulls grow deafening. “SILENCE!” the voice again commands, hushing the room. “But not you, Detective. I want to hear from you. Am I correct in my assumption of your identity?”
“Y-yeah,” I reply, my words forcibly and barely dribbling from my trembling mouth, a sensation not unlike trying to piss after sex.
“So you admit it; no undercover bullshit!” he replies. “In that case, everything is ready--you’re going to become an official Skull tonight!”
“I thought I was one already, when I got the tattoo!?”
“It’s one thing to be a member of Bloody Tears,” he booms, “many, many up there are. It’s another thing to be given refuge in this Neptunian nirvana of mine, to be a SKULL--to become a blood brother!” The crowd erupts. I’m nervous, which, considering I’m still under the happy-sexy-pill’s influence, means I’d be having a full on panic attack normally. “Our energy, all of us, will become one, and you can draw on our power as your own! Where Telecom and the MEZU Council draw their power from darkness, let us draw ours from brotherhood!”
Kilroy takes my hand and gently guides me over to the blood-moat at the base of the giant skull emblem, right where the waterfalls from the eyes come crashing down. Kilroy calls for Arthur to bring him a knife--oh god. Kilroy turns me around to face the audience and booms, “WHAT DO WE GET FROM SKULLS?”
“BLOO-DY TEARS! BLOO-DY TEARS!” the audience booms. He lifts his right hand, motioning for me to do the same, and at this point I’m not sure if I’m proud or excited or scared or horny or what, I just know that this is a night I’m not going to forget (this time).
“Repeat after me, Detective. I, Detective Blake,”
“I, Detective Blake…”
(For simplicity’s sake, I’m just going to post this all as one quote instead of the back and forth. You’re smart, you can follow that, yeah?)
“...swear by the blood of the eternal river, by that life-filled elixir which breathes consciousness into this lifeless skeleton I call a body, to join the eternal brotherhood of the Skulls, to serve Lágrimas de Sangre with my life and my body and my soul, to grant my blood and my desire and my power to overthrow our corporate oligarchs and restore true freedom, to use the ancient magick of the past coupled with the technology of the present and the future to restore the former glory of sentience which the ancients understood and which our overlords have blinded mankind from, and to unlock the secrets behind the quantum program we call this existence and the operating system we call reality as we rewrite its code for the glory and love and freedom of mankind and the discovery of the astral heavens beyond.”
Holy shit. I guess the “Skulls” here are the group that “take it seriously” as Chad put it. Sounds kind of badass, though, I’ll have to admit, but at its core, it’s still an Anti-Telecom terrorist organization, which means I need to take it down… somehow. Probably.
Right?
“Now, Blake… you will prove your loyalty by allowing me to perform the sacred initiation.” Oh fuck. That’s right. ‘Bloo-dy tears.’ The crowd begins that chant again as Arthur brings him the knife. Kilroy approaches me and places the knife under my left eye, slicing my face all the way down from just under my eyelid to my cheek--FUCK does it hurt! (Penis-owning peeps in the audience, have you ever got caught in your zipper? Imagine that but it’s your whole face.) As blood erupts from that incision, he switches to my right eye and repeats the process. I bite my tongue to endure the searing pain, my real tears mixing with the blood as the crowd cheers uproariously. As my bloody tears splatter across the floor, he quickly turns me around and forces me onto my knees, letting it flow into the ocean of blood beneath me.
“And now,” he continues, hands reaching up in dramatic excitement, an absolute natural at working the crowd, “it’s time for him to drink of the life.” Another Skull brings Kilroy a skull, an actual skull this time. Kilroy dips it in the river of blood and then brings me back to my feet, removing my mask with his free hand.
“To cement your undying loyalty to us, to prove that our blood pumps now through your veins as yours does through ours, to bind your etheric signature to this brotherhood, you will drink of the blood of the masters before you, including my own. At that point, there is no going back.”
“So how do I like not get a dozen diseases from this--” I whisper to Arthur.
“The LEDs are Hyperviolet,” he whispers back. “Anything unsanitary is constantly eliminated. Nothing but pure life in that cup. You could shit in it and not get sick.”
“Yeah but nobody’s like, actually shit in it, ri--” But before I can finish, the ‘cup’ is offered to me, so I nod and take it from Kilroy. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit, I’m drinking the blood of a bunch of cyber cultists from a human skull, this is the most metal I’ve ever been and ever will be. I chug the noxious concoction, nearly vomiting as the thick, salty, unholy phosphorus forces its way down my throat, but at the end I raise the skull above my head victoriously and let out a primal shout as Kilroy places my mask back on. The LEDs in the eyes of the mask flash the signature pattern the BSes produce and the crowd goes absolutely wild. For a moment I forget I’m here undercover--this is fucking awesome and I’m not even sure what I was so afraid of--
“Now come with me,” Kilroy whispers to me as the cheers begin to settle. “I have a few questions I’d like to ask you… questions that will determine if you ever see the sun again, my dear Detective!”
–and now I remember.