The bartender, crying, scooped up a few handfuls of the dead DJ and rushed outside.

The others all started grabbing nickels and were helping Dong put them back in the sock, though dozens of NPCs had grabbed some and run. There was a nasty tear in the fabric of the sock, but it was mending itself. The sock, however, didn’t seem to be going back to its giant size, no matter how many nickels people put back in. The coins were absolutely everywhere.

I called Splash Zone for help, but he didn’t answer. He and the others were still in the Desperado Club, so I had Tipid run over. He and Bucket Boy grabbed the still-unconscious unicorn and lugged him back toward his garage before the bartender could gather some friends.

The bar stank like smoke, and I didn’t know if we were going to get kicked out, so we had to do this quickly. Prepotente was in the middle of raiding the bar while Dong, the skeletons from the Bleak Congregation, and a few of the other regulars finished cleaning up the nickels.

I eyed Dong warily.

Carl: I gotta read the room first, but I don’t want Dong screwing this up. If I say the word, you gotta get him out of here.

Imani: I’ll keep an eye on him.

Donut sat sullenly on the edge of the stage, a sour expression planted on her face. Mongo was snuffling about the bar, occasionally licking random puddles of blood and beer and gremlin guts. He had straw all over his face from where he’d bitten one of the scarecrows. Dekoki the kappa had regained the ability to move after the Minister of Blood-Letting poured a beer into her head bowl, and Louis was helping her reapply her Saran Wrap as she profusely apologized to Donut. She’d been knocked over when people lunged for the coins.

I spied Jurgen trying to come speak with me, but Florin held him back. That likely had something to do with Lucia Mar. I held up a finger, telling him I’d talk to him soon. “I’ll get back as soon as I can,” I called, moving for the door to the guild.

“No,” Jurgen said, moving out of Florin’s grip. “I will join you in the guild.”

“You can’t,” I said, pulling the door open. My voice was still high-pitched. I moved into a menu, and it wouldn’t let me turn it off, but it was about to time out. I coughed a few times, waiting for it to clear. “Look, this is important, too. We need this if we want to deal with the problem with the kids.”

Jurgen was stopped at the entrance like he’d hit a brick wall. He grabbed me by the shirt, preventing me from going all the way in. “There is a goddess threatening to kill all the children.”

“I know,” I said, gently but firmly removing his fingers from my cloak. “But the only thing we can do from this side is try to talk Lucia into taking a deal. If she takes a deal, she’s off the playing board, and those children are safe.”

I hope, I didn’t add.

“I need to get out,” he said, a hint of panic in his voice. “Send me out via the Pineapple place, too.”

“You can’t,” I said, looking him up and down. “I’m sorry. You worship Donar. They said you can’t go if you worship a god.”

“They said those of us who worship gods can’t go or they say they don’t want us to go?” he demanded.

That was actually a good question. Akuma had said he didn’t want the eyes of gods on that place. He’d said that if one worshipped a god, entering the area would instigate a smite. But was that true? Was it just a way to keep certain crawlers out? I didn’t know the answer.

I thought again of Akuma’s insistence that we kill two teams. That had been a lie, so I knew we couldn’t trust him. But what if he was correct about not wanting gods there? I had no way of knowing, and it was frustrating. So many now worshipped gods, and if this was truly an escape, we needed to know.

“Wait, what sort of god is Donar anyway?” I asked, pausing. I was making a running list of all the gods I’d heard of. I was placing them into a chart, moving each one into a different category based on their affiliations and skills.

“Donar is a god of thunder and lightning. This version is much the same as Thor. But manlier.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Is he sponsored this season?”

“No. I am no idiot, Carl. I wouldn’t be dumb enough to worship a sponsored god. I⁠—”

“Has he given you any lightning spells?”

“Ya. A few. It doesn’t matter. Listen, Carl,” Jurgen said, lowering his voice, “I gotta tell you something. It’s Heidi. . . . I used to be able to talk to her, but I haven’t heard her in a while. I think something’s wrong. I think she’s in danger. She is all I have. She’s pregnant. I have to get to her.”

I gently pushed the large blond man back. “I promise you, Jurgen, I’m doing everything I can. You and Prepotente need to focus on surviving this next race, and then we’ll figure it out. That’s the best I can do for you right now. I promise.”

He opened his mouth to say more, but I disappeared into the hidden guild.

Entering the Stage Performance Guild.

Please come in, performer. You are welcome here. See the guildmaster for the services o-o-o-offered.

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 prone 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 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 a pop, 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-man 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 Lady Dominators team, and he spent every race passed out in the back of their vehicle.

Porky nodded. “Female mantaurs do not worship 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 he 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.”

“You’re telling me,” I muttered.

There was a dirty mattress on the floor and a pile of old dungeon newsletters sitting next to it. He quickly shoved them into a closet so I wouldn’t see them.

He grabbed a tattered, unenchanted scarf off the bed and pulled it over his half-neck.

“Still,” he continued, “the lady-mantaurs prey on vulnerable mantaurs. They practice domination and submission magic. They will drain my other half just before their races, which will render him utterly submissive. But since there are two of them, it is too much, and it will make him unconscious. This will increase their stats for the race.”

I nodded. I figured it was something like that. “He’s going to die this next race if we don’t do anything about it, and if he dies, you’ll never get reunited.”

“If my other half dies, I die, too. I’m glad you came to me.”

“Wait, I didn’t know that. I have a fleshmancer waiting outside. We need to get you out of here, and then we’ll need to break Corky out of his garage before the race starts. Once we do that, we can run the ceremony to get you two reunited. We only have two hours, so we gotta move fast. Does that sound good? Will you go with me?”

The strange creature just stood there for several moments, swaying back and forth, while I held my breath. He spent a minute contemplating the stained bed, and I wondered how often people came in here. How long had Milk spent alone in that lonely guild? This was an NPC, but still . . .

Porky’s white latex suit made creaking noises with every small movement.

“Of course I’ll help,” he finally said. “You’ll have to hire me as a temporary mercenary. Or you can just . . . manhandle me out of here. But I’ll help, especially if that means I will get reunited with my other half. It’s been so long. It would be nice to not have to lean against everything again.”

I let out a stream of breath. That was a lot easier than I had thought it would be.

“. . . And I’ll need your help, too. I want you to help me find and kick the ever-loving tar out of this stripper I know. The one responsible for all of this trouble in the first place. His name is Dong Quixote.”