Chapter 5 – Welcome to Trenton

(Short chapter this week, next week should be interesting through.)

“Welcome to Trenton,” said Ben as we entered the city proper.  There were nodes at the outskirts of the town where a small cluster of barns resided that looked like Chris’s workshop.  There had only been workshops there, so I had followed him with some interest into the demon’s largest city on Ordinal.

Today has been full of disappointments.

“I expected more from the city,” I offered as we left the first barn and walked down the long street, on either side were more barns.  I suppose I could be generous and call them workshops, but that wasn’t the vibe they were giving off.  Each structure had been made as simply as possible, and bore what amounted to the laziest sign they could manage to indicate their function.  Everyone of them was a body shop of some stripe.

The demons didn’t even bother with clever names. Chris’ body shop was called Body Shop #12, and to the left and right were shops eleven and thirteen. I stopped counting at twenty.

“Our city does what it needs to,” said Ben as we continued down the road.

“Where are the houses?” I asked.

“Houses? No one lives here,” said Ben, “this is a demon city.  There are some learning annexes at the center of town along with the club.”

“Where do you live then?” I asked as we passed another set of barns.  The city was literally a crossroads with barns on either side of the road.  I didn’t quite understand why the city was an X, but the workshops were going steadily downhill as we walked towards the center of town.

I’d seen run down places in the news before, heck I’d seen run down places in Ohio.  This was worse.  It was like no one cared.

“There is a place in the center of town,” offered Ben with an eye roll.  Check that, one of his eyes is just rolling all the time.

Shart was apathetic to the human condition, but this was strangely even worse.  They had a place with seemingly no oversight and instead of building a palace with blackjack and hookers they built a rundown shit hole of a town that no one seemed to live in.

“Are there more cities,” I ventured as we crossed the halfway mark towards the town center.  My administration skill had been posting the value of the various buildings in town and they started upticking again.  That meant the edge of the town and the center of town were valuable, but the space between was not.

I walked faster, easily outpacing Ben so I reached the center of town first.  There were a handful of demons here, in the town center of the largest demonic city on Ordinal.  One of the demons looked at me and frowned.

“You are going to be late,” he yelled before stepping into what appeared to be a dingy classroom next to a large coffeeshop.  Across the street was another coffeeshop.  On all four corners actually.  I stared at one for a long moment, my Demonic Lore having difficulty processing the script of their language, or at least I thought I was reading it wrong.

I didn’t get the chance though as nearly a dozen demons left the coffeehouse looking wrong.  They were sculpted to look like humans but had done a particularly bad job.  Ben shuddered slightly.

“Poor bastards,” he said as he stepped out of a coffee shop.  “That one doesn’t have a mortal rig, I’m going to check the next one.”

Sick fascination caused me to step closer to the dingy glass that looked into the room where all the demons had walked.  It took me several moments to process what was going on in there, as a room full of human form demons were trying their best to act ‘human’.

I read the entrance, it was called “Hentai School, advanced sexual education for future summoned demons.  Attendance is mandatory.”

Badgelor hopped down, “I’m out, I’ll catch you later.”  With that the traitor vanished into an alley leaving me standing in front of the building.

“You’re blocking the door,” said a large demon doing his best to appear as a handsome human male, I thought.  His beard went to just below his eyeballs, and then up both sides of his head.  “You are going to want to work on that skin though, I think all humans have more facial hair than that.”

“They have it sometimes,” I replied.

“Oh, thank Michael,” said the demon as he shoved me into the classroom.  “I was afraid no one was going to have any idea how humans actually operated again.  I’m sitting next to you.”

I was unceremoniously deposited in the first row of a deceptively large classroom where a lone succubus with breasts so large they were comical was looking at a diagram of human genitalia on the board.

The rest of the classroom was somehow worse.  None of the demons here understood how the base biology of an organic being even worked.  At some point you had to realize demons were not ‘organic’ beings at their core.  They did not know this stuff, nor did it come to them intuitively at all.

“Can anyone explain what this is,” asked the apparent teacher.

I waited, this train wreck was sad and depressing.

After ten seconds of all the demons getting increasingly desperate, I finally raised my hand and said, “Those are pictures of a penis and vagina.”

There was furious scribbling.

“Oh, thank Michael, an expert,” she spat abruptly sitting down.  “Do you know how they are used?”

I looked around the room full of deformed humans and sighed, “Yes.”

Chapter 6 - For Johnathan - The Hentai School