159: Rumors
“Woah!” Rafaelia gasped, eyes wide and mouth agape, as she looked at Y’Shatara’s handling of another no longer welcome guest. The fox girl then turned to Beatrice and said, “I think that she desperately needs a good dicking.”
“And I think that you better keep such comments to yourself unless you’re looking for a similar treatment,” Beatrice said to Rafaelia quietly, turned around, and went toward the stairs that led to the upper floors where Ember and Olivia were supposed to be.
As they walked past the tables, Beatrice was met with many lecherous gazes from men as well as a few women, but nothing more than that. Beatrice’s body was mostly covered by her grey old cloak, but even that could not hide the fact that her breasts were no smaller than the barmaid’s and the beauty of a succubus was in a league of its own if her [Unnatural Beauty] passive was anything to go by.
Meanwhile, Beatrice took note of the strange game that was played at some of the tables. The players each had a set of wooden “cards” face-down on the table in front of them in a row, partially covered by a cloth. The cards were worn and scratched all over the place, and it looked like the players kept trading the cards with their opponents, picking one at a time until they found another pair of symbols and threw that pair down to an ever-growing pile on a table.
It didn’t take long for Beatrice to figure out that the main skill in the game was finding the card they needed from the other player’s row relying on the marks and scratches on the backs of those cards that were slowly revealed over time.
“Do you know what the payment was?” Rafaelia asked Beatrice as they approached the stairs. It looked like the fox girl had precisely zero interest in the games she had probably seen a hundred times over.
After thinking for a second, Beatrice said, “There’s little chance of it being just gold.”
“No chance,” Rafaelia nodded. “Gold and trinkets have been plummeting in value for over a year now. Made even worse when the palace treasures flooded into the city.”
“Were they stolen? How?” Beatrice asked as they both walked up the stairs to the second floor.
“Who knows?” Rafaelia shrugged. “I didn’t care enough to ask where my gifts came from.”
Beatrice had a feeling she knew what kind of gifts Rafaelia was talking about. If what the fox girl confessed about her past was true, it was unlikely she was left without compensation for all the dick sucking, even if she never directly asked for it. The succubus did wonder what the fox girl did with all her gifts since Rafaelia did not have any visible jewelry on her person.
“I haven’t exactly been to many royal palaces,” Beatrice said. “But it was obvious the local one had seen better times. And if the palace was not simply ransacked, I don’t understand why would the king need to give or trade away any of his wealth for anything in a closed city that he controls. Unless he doesn’t—”
“You were in the palace!?” Rafaelia asked with surprise and amazement.
“B-briefly, once,” Beatrice answered, realizing that she would probably not get much or any useful information from this commoner fox girl.
“What was it like?” Rafaelia asked and tugged on Beatrice’s cloak as her excitement grew. “Is it true that the king’s brain has been infested and taken over by demonic parasites?”
“W-what?” Beatrice stopped in place, a step away from the second floor
“Isn’t it?” Rafaelia asked fervently. “I heard that the king’s body and mind have been possessed by Demons. That he turned into a senile lunatic who snorts demon powder off his daughters’ asses as he fucks them in hedonistic orgies! And anyone that opposes his rule, the king sacrifices to the demons from Beyond in bloody rituals where the royal family cut open their victims alive and bathe in their blood and guts as they fuck for the glory of the demons!”
“... O-oh?” Beatrice did not know how to answer such wild accusations against the king. But then she thought back to her meeting with the half-senile King Selirius, the way he acted, how he talked about and treated one of his daughters. Beatrice wondered what Princess Mary had to go through to end up the way that she was, and had to concede that there might have been more truth to those embellished hell-stories that Rafaelia had heard than Beatrice was comfortable acknowledging or even imagining.
“The king... Did not seem well adjusted,” Beatrice said as tactfully as she could to avoid fueling unproven rumors while also not defending a king that probably belonged in a mental institution or rehab.
“Ha! I knew it!” Rafaelia shouted triumphantly. “Lucy owes me some pussy licking!”