Dungeons and Dalliances

7.26 – The City of Eros III

"We're coming up on the city center now," Acacia said.

With their arrival into the most relevant part of the City of Eros, they had started seeing other delvers. And indeed, while there wasn't the bustle of a true city, especially not one like Aradon, it was still shocking since they were in the dungeon. So even seeing a handful of people walking around casually was a surreal experience. It was supposed to be rare to meet a single other delving party: knowing she was on a floor where hundreds congregated was almost as hard to digest as the first few times she'd ran into encounters under Lust's influence.

A good portion of the delvers were dressed in … interesting gear. Natalie understood why Acacia had thought they weren't new to the city; her own pink armor fit right in. While nobody else was wearing erotite, it seemed, they were in various states of undress. Flimsy dresses and lace robes for the mages; leather bras that nicely accentuated tits for the medium-armor rogues; and for the heavy-armor wearers, outfits similar to Natalie's own, though of varying colors and inappropriateness. Frankly, Natalie's was still on the higher end of revealing. She was the Paladin of Lust, after all; these people were just here being exposed to the Passion's influence in part.

There were plenty of men in similarly inappropriate outfits. Lust's domain hardly affected only women, that was just Natalie's preference. Natalie hardly flinched at all the abs, arms, and chests on display—and asses in a few cases, since the men weren't immune to some of the lewder outfits either—and a part of her could even admire their physiques in an abstract way. Mostly Natalie just found the situation surreal though. And her attention was predominantly distracted by all the female assets on display, so ignoring the men was easy.

Acacia led them to the Palace. The Palace was the eminent structure in the City of Eros, situated dead in the center—presumably; she didn't have a top-down view—and was constructed of white stone with gold and purple accents. It was a gaudy construction, extravagant in a way even places like Tenet couldn't match, and also enormous: the building dwarfed them, and the front double doors were nearly twenty feet high as Acacia led them in.

"Like I was saying," Acacia said, "I super recommend you pay for rooms in the Palace. Not only are the assignment boards here, so you'd have to make a trip every twelve hours anyway, but the creature comforts are worth one token per day. Ah, you two did bring Tokens, right?"

"We had to fight our way here," Natalie said. "So yes. We have some. Could we share rooms, if we wanted to?"

"No, actually," she said. "One room per person. Visitors are fine though."

"How is that enforced?" she asked. "How does payment even work?"

"You're about to see," Acacia said.

And indeed, Natalie's words were already trailing off, because Acacia was leading them to a desk situated off to the side of the enormous palace entrance. The administrative-looking outlet seemed misfitting of the rest of the environment, as if it had been plopped down there afterward.

"Good morning, young ladies!" the woman made of metal said. "How can I help you? Signing in?"

"An automaton!" Natalie said. "In the dungeon?"

Automatons. They weren't extremely rare beings, at least not for delvers, who frequented the Exchange—a place Natalie and her team had been using less often than most, admittedly. There was also the Bestower, but she was a special automaton, the one who granted classes upon a person's eighteenth birthday.

As far as Natalie knew, no one had ever seen an automaton inside the dungeon. If there had been staff manning this strange city, she would have expected it to be someone like Malice. A repurposed dungeon soul.

Was that what automatons already were, though? Or were they something else? Where did they fit into what tiny fraction Natalie understood of deeper dungeon lore?

Did Malice know? Natalie affirmed to herself that she would definitely be bullying the wolfgirl for more information when she got back. Maybe she should have earlier. Just, Malice had made it clear the information was valuable, and wanted to be properly 'convinced': she couldn't extract everything all at once. It was an odd sort of game the wolfgirl wanted to play, but any of her insight was invaluable, and honestly Natalie was a bit happy to play it. Making the hellhound squeal was a definite exciting pastime.

"These two are new to the City," Acacia explained. "They'd like to buy rooms for the night." She paused. "Uh, right?" she asked them.

"Yes, please," Natalie said, a bit by rote—still gawking at the automaton. Most of the metallic creatures were androgynous by default. This one was not. In fact, she was one of the bustier girls Natalie had seen. And she had clearly defined nipples, a shade bluer than the rest of her metal skin. Natalie's eyes could help but linger lower, having to lean just a tiny bit forward to peek across the desk, and she saw, yes, the automaton had a pussy too.

What would fucking an automaton be like, Natalie wondered with some incredulous hilarity?

Had its nature been altered by Lust as well?

Or had the dungeon fabricated one from the ground up, and this was a dungeon soul inhabiting what delvers already associated with cheerful servility? Natalie paused; that made enough sense that suddenly her incredulity faded. Maybe this wasn't a real automaton at all, just like this wasn't a real city at all. Just manifestations of magic, brought to life by the dungeon.

Still. Fake or not, she was fairly certain an automaton had never been seen in the dungeon. So it was still incredible.

Vanetta also assented to checking out a room. They each passed over a token and were given a key, along with directions to their rooms in the same wing of the palace.

"And remember, violators of agreed-upon policies will be pilloried in the town center and assigned to free-use duty for other Citygoers," the automaton finished cheerfully.

"A-Ah, right," Acacia stammered as Natalie and Vanetta's eyes went wide. "That doesn't happen often. There's so few rules, staying in your room past sign-out and not assaulting other Cityfolk is basically the only ways to actually have the guards come down on you. You can pay in advance too, if you don't want to worry about that."

Vanetta hastily handed over two more tokens, and Natalie did the same. The automaton smiled brightly at them the whole time, either unaware or uncaring of the insanity she'd just spoken.

"Really, the only people being pilloried are the, um, intentional violators," Acacia said, her face turning bright red. "S-Some of the girls—and guys," she muttered under her breath, "like the idea, I guess. And it enchants Tokens, like almost anything does, here. Quite efficiently too…"

"Free use?" Natalie said a bit faintly.

The heat on Acacia's face said it was exactly what it sounded like. "People are actually pretty decent here, despite the insanity of the City," she said. "If someone gets pilloried and they didn't mean to, there's always volunteers to stand guard and protect them. But … like I said, it's almost always intentional."

"That's … good," Natalie said, and though it was a mortifying situation, she was a bit proud of her fellow man, the basic decency shown there. 

"Alright," Acacia said. "I'll show you your rooms and the assignment boards, then I'll leave you two to your own devices. Follow me."