Look for a travelling companion

You decide it's best to brace yourself against whatever humiliation you may have to face in order to find a travelling companion to watch your back while skulking around graveyards looking for clues. The gem of power is worth this small sacrifice.

Around dusk, you raise your hood over your head to avoid being stopped in the street on your way to a local tavern. You pull open the heavy wooden door, and are greeted with warm, stale air. Booze, pipesmoke, soot, and sex. This den of sin is covered wall to wall with people in all different states of undress, humping and writhing like so many maggots. You shiver, and hope to be inconspicuous enough so as not to attract any... unwanted attention.

The bartender, a man, is washing a cup behind the bar as you grab yourself a seat in front of him. His strange facial expression causes you to glance at what he's doing, and you realize to your horror he is actually stroking his cock into an empty glass. He catches your eye, smiles, and siezes up, shooting the back of the mug with spray after spray of semen. "Ahhh, just in time," he says. "What will you have?" He doesn't bother to put his flaccid cock away.

"Uhh, a light ale, please," you say. Naturally, he fills up the soiled cup with your order and sloshes it towards you.

"First one's on the house," he says, winking. You fail to be grateful, yet gingerly drink the beer so as to fit in to your surrounds.

Now, the purpose for your visit. You scan the crowd for potential mercenaries who might accompany you.

Notable figures include a tall but lithe man, nude from the waist down, stroking himself while watching others copulate; a burly fellow with pointed or docked ears pounding a smaller man in the ass; and a strongwoman servicing three or four men at a time without seemingly being tired out at all.