Larry is quite interested in the magazine lying on the ground. Perhaps a bit too much for his own good, really. He grabs the thing and starts perusing it, only the tiniest sliver of self control preventing him from letting his mouth swing open.
"Hmm. Just one? Please inform of us of your findings, dude," Halesey says, mildly disappointed. He tries to summon a barrier of hairy mafiosi once again.
[Halesey's affinity roll: 5]
As per the will of their master, a line of hairy mafiosi materialize around Larry in a protective cordon, looking very watchful and not distracted by the gentlemen's literature at all. Better guards you couldn't get even if you looked.
Larry, meanwhile, is quite excited by his findings. Namely, the fact that the woman on the cover is prominently featured in the magazine itself in the middle of various scenes - half-naked atop some sort of temple Larry doesn't recognize, completely naked in front of what appears to be a court of shades and demons, almost naked while committing acts of grisly violence on various groups of people, and many variations in between those themes. The woman seems supernaturally, bewitchingly beautiful to Larry, and it's all he can do to not just gawk at her continuously and obliviously. Seriously, he's seen pretty girls and beautiful women in his life, though not usually up close or in person, but this is something else entirely. Leagues beyond what he thought possible, really. What he's looking at is perfection itself. Judging from the various captions along the way - captions that appear to be written in an alien language at first, but become readable within a few moments - the woman is apparently named Inanna. And boy, are there a lot of images of her here. There's a way greater picture density in this mag than Larry would expect, to be honest. And the centerfold of the goddess is absolutely exquisite - something Larry would be unashamed to post on a wall, really.
He is interrupted in his appreciation when he flips a certain page - the fifty-sixth altogether. Judging by the text, it seems to feature somebody else - Tiamat, the text indicates. As for the goddess featured... erm... well, she has a tail, a thigh, lower parts which shake together, a belly, an udder, ribs, a neck, a head, a skull, eyes, nostrils, a mouth, and lips. She also has insides (or possibly entrails, Larry isn't sure), a heart, arteries and blood. And... that's all he can really say about her. Now he feels all confused and unsettled and whatnot. He flips forward, realizing there's no fewer than 22 pages of Tiamat here. Good gods. He decides to skip all that, and get to the next feature, which seems to be of the rather dark realm he previously spotted in Inanna's section. This focuses on a much grimmer, less strikingly beautiful woman who seems to be named Ereshkigal. She is altogether less naked in pretty much all of her pictures, and yet there seems to be something about her that piques Larry's interest. The look in her eyes, he thinks. It seems quite compelling. Almost as though she's actually looking at him, in fact. Before it gets too creepy, Larry shuts the magazine. He thinks he's seen enough.
All in all, this magazine seems to contain a great deal of material - much of it superb, some of it extremely creepy. And all of it highly fascinating in its own way.
* * * * *
Mr. Lee's Pawn Shop is, in a way, the center of the Lower Esplanade. For one, it's quite a landmark of a building - one of the oldest buildings currently in the city at a whopping 427 years old, and holding up rather nicely despite its great age. It's also a very popular hangout for the non-affluent and unsavory residents of the Lower Esplanade, which is to say most of the ones actually walking out in the street. But most of all, it's an establishment run by Mr. Lee, who is by all accounts a man you should listen to, or so common wisdom goes. He's been getting on in the years, and nobody really remembers what it was that made him so famed in the neighborhood, aside from the rather old, who don't seem willing to say. Regardless, he seems to have projected a reasonable aura of respectability in the neighborhood, even if nobody knows why exactly one should respect a man in his fifties who hardly leaves his store or home anymore.
He's so averse to leaving, in fact, that very few people who don't frequent his store have actually seen him for the past couple of years. Within the ever-broadening category of people who have
never seen the guy are
Mr. John T. Deschutter,
Mr. Samuel Bornhast and
Ms. Clair Malk. Evidently, though, he knows who
they are, though, as they are greeted by a strangely identical sight when they each exit their respective homes in different parts of the Lower Esplanade this strange Saturday evening - a tall, dangerous-looking black man dressed in fairly nondescript street clothes looking straight at them. Before any of them can say anything, the men give a message.
"Hey, Mr. Lee wants to see you. Follow me."
Author
Topic: The Forgotten Art: Approaching the Nexus (Read 256952 times)