Pick your poison

You close your eyes and take a moment to collect yourself, doing your best to focus your head as the sensations of your aroused body threaten to make coherent thought impossible. A combination of Alina’s concoction and her actions has left your body almost buzzing for attention in a way you’ve never felt before. Your pulse throbs in your throat... and other places... whilst the aches and pains and much of the fear you’ve experienced are submerged under the tide of hormones surging within your blood. Something within you, a last speck of calm and logic perhaps, screams that you need to find an escape before your will or your sanity are overwhelmed.

There is a click somewhere beneath you, and suddenly the bench you are still bound to begins to move. You open your eyes hurriedly and realise that you are not alone. The light remains dim but a monstrous shape stands at a set of levers nearby. It is a squat humanoid shape with a misshapen head which makes you recoil in alarm. It is only when the angle changes as the bench begins to turn and smoothly along the floor tracks, the at the shifting shadows reveal that the head is in fact a large mask. It is shaped like a court jester's cap and covers the wearer's face entirely, giving them a sinister fixed leather grin. Only the wearer's eyes are partly visible, glinting darkly through the deep holes in the leather. Beneath, it's body is loosely shrouded in worn motley coloured silks. The sinister figure says nothing, simply watching as it pulls one lever then another, directing the mechanics of your bench at something around walking pace out toward the curtains surrounding your section of this larger room.

You slide through a curtain gap feet first and find yourself in a tight circle of cloth concealments. The bench starts to rotate on the spot, not quite fast enough to make you dizzy but certainly quickly enough to be disorienting. The strange clanking noises and growls you heard earlier are louder here. On your second whirl around strange crystals flicker to life in the ceiling. One is a green colour and illuminates a crudely drawn orc head on the ceiling roughly opposite the direction you entered as far as you can make out. To the far right of this a blue crystal illuminates the simple ceiling design of a single teardrop shape of possibly water. The final crystal opposite this is red, shining onto a sketchily drawn chair.

A rough growl by your ear makes you start. The voice of the "Jester" is harsh and strained and says only three words. It's scent is old sweat and leather.

"Make. Your. Choice."

Your brow furrows as you ponder why on earth your enemies would leave a decision to you. You can only conclude that it doesn't really matter to the outcome what you choose from their point of view. But perhaps the choice itself gives them some kind of information? Your eyes flick to the ceiling symbols turning past you as you try to decipher them, the ever present floating orb making slow orbits around you.