Welcome to Purgatory.
If you’ve made it as far as the black glass doors, you knew what you were looking for, the unremarkable staircase tucked in among the dance studio and the tattoo parlor and Big Boy Massage. Or maybe you felt a call, the way others have before you.
And you aren’t an officer of the law with surveillance or worse on his mind, because if you were, you couldn’t make yourself descend the stairs. But if you’re a square-jawed detective and you’re not quite sure why you came, you might find someone who’s been trying to get an appointment with you for the last few hundred years.
Open the doors. Let your eyes adjust to the dim light, the occasional pulse or flare or strobe. Let the driving beat from the dance floor settle into your bones.
Take in the huge tank, past the doors and around a corner. Stare in wonder—or in something else—at the erotic ballet of Purgatory’s famed mermen. You can buy tokens to toss into the tank, to tip the performers. Pick your favorite, if you can: an R for the tall blond-crested god, an M for the handsome ex-Marine whose single leg seems right and perfect and graceful in the water. Or, as most patrons prefer, an L for the stocky bald bear who finds his own performance in the tank as comical as the eager onlookers find it arousing.
Make your way to the bar, and place your order. Watch the play of light under your glass, the dull red flames that come from nowhere and create no heat. And sometimes the flames leap and writhe and flare orange and yellow and sometimes a brilliant blue-white that leaves you blinking.
You’ll find out what causes that, eventually. If you’re among the lucky few.
Don’t see anything you like at the bar? Work your way through the crowds on the dance floor, to an alcove just past Purgatory’s infamous cock pit. Stop there if you like, for a few minutes, and enjoy the view; anyone who ventures into that black leather playground knows he’s on display and loves to show off. And no matter how loud the music gets on the dance floor, you can almost always hear the groans and the cries from the pit.
Once you’ve had your fill—if you ever do, the owner is reported to be thinking about adding some high-tops to the corner by the alcove to accommodate watchers wanting to make a night of it—the shallow steps rising out of the alcove will take you up to the VIP suite overlooking the action below. A discreet tip to one of the young men at the head of the stairs will see you escorted to a table; another long-dead Founding Father speeds the delivery of a bottle of champagne to your table. And if you’re fortunate and favored, Falcon, the suite’s exquisite hostess, will deliver it herself.
The suite has its own bar, too, of course, manned by a silver fox uninterested in flirtation but so affable in deflecting passes that even his most ardent admirers don’t mind that he’s straight. He’s family—his son gave Purgatory to his son-in-law as a wedding gift. And when the former Marine first sergeant finally grew sick to death of retirement, his son-in-law convinced him to take up a new occupation. The tips are incredible, and the way the suite is set up, he can’t see when his son and son-in-law take to the dance floor or the cock pit. Which, he figures, is just as well.
Purgatory is full of stories, told and yet to be told. See the redhead in the silk robe, the one who looks like he needed a fake ID to order that drink in his hand, disappearing through a curtained doorway leading off the dance floor, walking backwards to catch one last glimpse of pure sex with curly blond hair wrapped around a pole on the stage? He’s at the heart of both kinds of stories. His past left him with a longing for the kind of delicious ornamental bondage his partner’s waiting to administer in the dungeon on the other side of the curtain. And his future is going to see him trained into the ranks of the keepers of his race’s history and magick.
Oh, and his trainer? She’ll be in for a surprise or two herself, courtesy of the silver fox upstairs. Purgatory seems to attract the unexpected.
Keep an eye on the bar downstairs.
On the special nights, when the mermen are lost in one another and the untouchable Falcon is nestled in the lap of a dark handsome man with wandering hands and the owner and his husband are learning one another’s bodies by touch in the cock pit... and the redhead is bound to perfection and pushed past the limits of pleasure... the light in the bar, not fire at all but the tethered lust of a master mage, flares up.
And the back door of Purgatory opens, the door into the Realm, and the Fae come through, called by living magick and pure desire. They have legends of their own, new legends of Purgatory and its sweet decadent pleasures, and they come willingly to sample those pleasures when summoned.
Anything can happen in Purgatory.
Welcome.