The occupants of the Gondola were momentarily frozen in a state of disbelief from what they had just seen, but a shrill cry from above immediately snapped them out of it.
"Help me, Salazaar! "Don't let me die like this!" Rofouscue wailed.
"Help me, Salazaar, don't let me die like this!" The creature called out as well, mimicking the speech of Rofoscue's cries, but with an altogether alien tone. Rofoscue's auricular enhancers were still in his ears, and each screech of the creature blasted his ear drums at a deafening volume.
He cried down piteously. "I am your superior!"
"I am your superior!" The creature screeched.
"Aaargghiee!!" Rofoscue screamed, from the pain of the aurial enhancers volume, roaring in his ears.
"AAAIRRGGHIEEEEE!!!" The creature screeched in reply.
Supervisor Rofoscue screamed out again in pain, which the creature was only too happy to mimic as they floated up together into the darkness, cyclically screaming and screeching in delight and pain to each other.
Salazaar stood for a moment, looking up and savoring the Supervisor's predicament.
"I've always wanted to tell him that shutting up would solve most of his problems." Salazaar mused out loud as he hit the control panel to stop the gondola and stepped up to Rofoscue's dais on the prow of the ship.
"Is that a sug?" Krasus asked. "I knew they could get big, but that one is enormous!"
"Yep, it's a Sug. Since the Drydellians keep the level dark all the time, to keep the employees and tourists in the partying mood, they are up there, thriving in the darkness and they can grow huge, with appetites to match." Salazaar said, as he took out a pair of worn night shades from his front pocket and put them on, flipping up the switch to activate their low light vision settings.
"If you don't save me, you are dead!" Supervisor Rofoscue screamed, having totally vanished into the darkness above.
"If you don't save me, you are dead!" The sug also called down.
"Aw, void take it." Salazaar grumbled, as he drew his emitter. He used the crook of his elbow to steady the large pistol as he lined up his dominant eye along the sight picture.
Moloch watched through his helmet's visualizer. At this point, getting off a clean shot would be almost impossible. Supervisor Rofoscue was still wildly thrashing around and the sug still had him firmly in his clutches as it serenely floated and screeched with delight at the prospective meal in its claws.
Salazaar fired. Given how far away the sug was, it was a one in a million shot. The first blast connected with the sug's gas bladder, as did the second, third and fourth. With a woosh, the gas rushed out and the pair began to plummet in a swirling fall of claws and robe towards the rockcrete pavements of the street below. The sug extricated itself from Rofoscue and extended its leathery wings to glide off and away into the darkness, this action sent the supervisor flying towards a small avenue on one of the higher commercial sections that were above the street level.
Salazaar lined up where he thought Rofoscue would land and deftly threw a levitation puck under him. Rofoscue hit the puck's forcefield which had been hastily tuned and it repulsed him harshly, sending him flying with a good deal of force through the glass window of a nearby pleasure parlor.
"AIIIIIEEEEEE!!" Rofoscue haplessly bleated as he disappeared inside the establishment.
Krasus started to chuckle and point, with the rest of the legionnaires.
"That was a bloody amazing shot Salazaar! If you manage to save him, I hope he gives you a proper raise."
"I doubt it." Salazaar said, as he moved to the controls of the gondola and set the craft down on the avenue waving the pedestrians and hover-trolleys around him.
He didn't wait for the stairs to unfurl as he leapt off the craft, his boots crinkling the shards of broken glass from the window that Supervisor Rofoscue had gone sailing through.
"Well, I'm not going to miss this." Moloch said and got off the skiff right after Salazaar.
"After a bollocking like that, I have to see if he managed to survive." Krasus said, and also disembarked the gondola right behind Moloch.
A spacey melody coupled with a meandering beat drifted out with rippling multicolored lights through the broken window. While Constable Salazaar had climbed in the hole after his master, Moloch was content to peer through the window and look at the scene inside.
Lounging around within the establishment were several dozen tourists lying comfortably on wide hassocks and propped up with pillows. There were several Drydellian employees holding bowls that swam with wriggling leeches in one hand and a pair of long tongs in the other. The tourists had leeches attached all over their bodies, but they seemed as if they couldn't be more comfortable.
As the leeches sucked their blood, the tourists made pleased giggling sounds, some stared at their hands as they waggled their fingers over their faces and others just fixed a faraway point on the wall with a slack jawed stare as silent tears rolled down their cheeks.
The employees had been in the midst of applying leeches or removing them from others when they had grown swollen with enough blood. The leeches would be put back into a huge bubbling tank, as they swam about in a swirling mass of thousands. When the window had shattered and Supervisor Rofoscue came sailing in, the employees had instinctively backed away to the periphery of the room, taking cover behind the patrons as they obliviously lounged on their couches.
Now the tank had another rather large occupant, a dazed and half submerged Supervisor Rofoscue. Salazaar had him by the collar of his robe and was trying to haul him out of the tank.
"Could you lend me a hand here?" Salazaar called out to several employees. They rushed over and helped him heave Rofoscue out of the tank and laid him on an adjacent hassock.
"This is Supervisor Rofoscue! If you value your lives, you need to help me de-leech him immediately!" Salazaar said. There was an audible gasp, and the attendants set down their bowls and rushed to gather around his hassock. Using prong zappers, they began sparking the leeches off Rofoscue."
"Fetch the reversal shot!" Salazaar said.
"There isn't a reversal shot, Constable. The Drydellians were going to engineer one, but they said it was a waste of ducats when the guests can just ride out any unpleasantries."
"Well, just get them off as fast as you can, so that the least amount of the leech venom gets into his system. Or it will be your napes and mine." The attendants obediently complied and removed the leeches quickly and efficiently plopping them back into their bowls.
One tourist with a bald head and thick red beard had a fat wriggling leech attached to his forehead right between his eyebrows and another pair attached to points on each side of his chest.
"I paid good ducats to come here and forget! When I forget I'll finally be happy!" He shouted at the Supervisor. Then he stood up and clumsily thrusted his hips at him with several powerful pumps.
"I paid good ducats for this!" He spoke. The tourist took a clumsy swing at the employee, the long leeches that were attached to his chest, swung about like a pair of weathered yak teats. He cried out as they bit down harder to accommodate his spastic lunging. The employee nimbly sidestepped the blow and the tourist plopped down heavily on his hassock, taking several deep breaths.
"Curse you Kleb, you side-eyed jinx monger. Soon I won't need revenge cause' the best revenge is forgetting... cause' the best revenge is forgetting..you." He trailed off and leaned back trembling. The leeches wriggled and pulsed as they grew plumper with each passing moment.
"Take it easy, my good Patron." Another employee in a white bodysuit said, fixing two more leeches to the skin of his shoulders with the tongs, while his long-crooked fingers held the bowl. "This should help you relax." He said soothingly.
"So, what exactly am I looking at here?" Moloch asked, waving his hand around the room at the leech-covered tourists, as the employees continued to remove the leeches from Supervisor Rofoscue.
"This is a psychedelic leech parlor. The Drydellians designed and marketed them to literally suck the bad memories out of you." Salazaar said.
"Well, the patrons don't seem like they are having a bad time, how does it work?"
"The leeches bite imparts a type of relaxing venom that does make you forget, however the Drydellians kind of oversold the bad memory's part, the leech's venom just seems to melt all of your memories."
"What light forsaken corner of Maja did you find these creatures in?" Krasus asked.
"We didn't. The Drydellians designed them. I remember they were so delighted that they had created a self-perpetuating intoxicant that could even be fed for free by the tourist's own blood."
"What will they think of next?" Moloch said with a sour laugh.
"That's not as funny as you might think. We all live in terror of whatever racket they might concoct next." Salazaar said.
When Rofoscue was at last deleeched, Moloch ordered two Legionnaires to carry him out of the parlor and back to the gondola, where they unceremoniously dumped him back on his dais.
The impact caused Rofoscue to begin to come around. Moloch, Krasus and Salazaar walked to stand over him. He stared into their faces with wild and unfocused eyes.
"This is Perfidy! Perfidy in the highest order! Fetch me my intelor pad Constable, for there is only one way to deal with this kind of betrayal!"
Salazaar looked around for a moment and then handed him his intelor pad. It was a shattered mess from his fall and consequent dunking in the leech tank, but it made no difference to Supervisor Rofoscue as he held the intelor and made some inputs on the dead and shattered screen as if it was on and working.
Then he relaxed as his head lolled around from side to side.
"Finally, justice is served." He said, gasping out the words. Then he closed his eyes, with his pad clasped to his chest.
"Do you reckon he's still awake?" Krasus asked, as he toed his arm with his boot.
"Maybe, it's hard to know how much leech venom got into his system." Salazaar said as he bent down draping an emergency blanket over the supervisor, to protect him from being chilled by his sopping wet robe.
Rofoscue's eyes snapped open, and his sporadic gaze was able to momentarily fix on the constable's face. "How are you alive? Your betrayal cost you your nape, and I saw that justice was done!"
Rofoscue nodded his head, rapidly blinking his eyes as he held up his fingertips and began gently tapping on the skin of his face.
"You must be a ghost! It comes as no surprise that you would try to haunt me Salazaar! It makes no difference for I'll never give her back to you!" Rofoscue said with a rapturous cackle. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he began clenching and unclenching his fists, breaths coming and going in short whimpering gasps.
Krasus looked down at Rofoscue. "Well, it looks like he is about to have the bad trip of a lifetime. Is it possible to overdose on psychedelic leeches?"
"I have no idea, Rofoscue is probably a first for testing the upper limits of their venom. I called for a medical drone that should meet up with us at some point, and then we can let the Drydellian doctors figure out how best to handle it."
Salazaar turned to Moloch. "I guess he is going to have to ride it out until then. Let's get back underway. We still have a schedule to keep."