Althos quickly discovered that the crowded streets of Undermoon were lined with quiet gossips. He discovered this as he and his worshiper, the witch named Qu'Ren, draped an arm of hers around one of his. The deity didn't mind this, and in fact, being the center of attention openly and publicly as he and Qu'Ren were at that moment was kind of exciting.

He heard a series of comical whispers, as he was led deeper into the city by one of the newest members of his unusual religion.

"Qu'Ren and a man? A newcomer to the city no less?" Whispered a female dark elf and noted local gossipmonger, her voice filled with the excitement of having discovered a new scandal. She quickly rushed to all sorts of lurid conclusions, her own cheeks coloring as she pictured the pair in undignified positions, engaging in carnal delights. She openly stared at them, and Qu'Ren actually smiled at her and waved. Althos laughed at this, but only internally.

The gossipmonger had just left a small indoor marketplace, leading several newly purchased slaves of various races by tugging at cruel leashes made of what Althos realized was freshly shorn orc flesh, riddled with pain-inducing enchantments.

The slaves who slowly walked after their new mistress were a racially diverse group. There were dwarves, goblins, and even a healthy-looking human with the build of a trained soldier from a country with an effective military, all wearing assorted rags and terribly damaged clothes.

The gossipmonger herself didn't find Althos' form particularly attractive, because she preferred that her men be slender and delicate looking. She knew of Qu'Ren's proclivities for lumberjack types, with thick arms and even thicker abdominal muscles.

Minutes later, Althos heard another fascinating whisper. This time it wasn't a woman who whispered it, distracted by the beauty of Qu'Ren, but rather a man who recognized the attractiveness of Althos' muscular form.

"He's not bad looking..." Whispered a male dark elf who sat at a restaurant Qu'Ren and Althos passed by. The elf's eyes boldly explored Althos' muscled form. This comment and the gaze of the elf stood out to Althos.

The god subtly touched the elf's mind out of curiosity to see what sort of memories and experiences made him brave enough to say something like that, enabling him to not see a lot of the elf's other memories in exchange for finding plenty of memories related to sex and sexuality.

The dark elf's mind was littered with hedonistic memories of sensual indulgences that involved a variety of partners, male, female, and even a small number of sexual experiences with creatures whose genders weren't as simple as "male and female". The deity was only able to experience some of them in the instant that his mind touched that of the elf, but it was enough.

This was fascinating to Althos, as the deity had little experience with creatures whose sexual preferences extended beyond experiencing attraction to members of other genders. He knew such creatures existed but hadn't met them until that point.

The dark elf was named Rinor, and the deity quietly committed that name to memory. Althos knew that in time, he'd be able to experience the breadth of those memories himself, once he was recognized as the city's patron god and its overlord.

Minutes after Althos first touched Rinor's mind, while the god was still lost in thought, Qu'Ren nudged him and pursed her lips, using them to point straight ahead. Althos recognized that this is her way of getting him to refocus. Of course, Althos was already aware of what she wanted him to notice: the pair were about to enter the city's grand marketplace.

Stretched out before them stood a gigantic open-air bazaar, and for the next few kilometers, Althos' vision was dominated in equal parts by impressive crowds of dark elves and their assorted slaves, and by the imposing sight of innumerable stalls, stores, and collections of items for sale properly stored underneath colorful tents.

A cloying, powerful scent filled the air around the elf and the god. It filled their nostrils and coated their tongue. It's a thick scent that came about as a fusion of thousands of bodies, only some of which were hygienic or even perfumed recently, and as a result, the scent they created when brought closely together was an unpleasant one.

The area was also incredibly loud. Althos could make out and process hundreds of separate conversations in over a dozen distinct languages, only some of which the deity had heard before. He could understand each word the people spoke around him in a distance that equaled hundreds of meters.

Even before he actually entered the market, the deity heard bits and pieces of juicy gossip that were quite fascinating to him.

Nearly a hundred meters away from the god stood two fellows who were underneath a thick, rainbow-colored tent, watching a reptilian humanoid cook a thick piece of meat. Two elves salivated over the food, watching it with ravenous eyes. From where he stood, Althos couldn't quite identify the sort of meat the chef was cooking, but that wasn't what attracted the attention of the god anyway.

Althos had heard one of them utter the word "Asylum", and that drew the god's mental gaze. He knew what an asylum was, because of Milene's memories.

And that knowledge, made him have an interest in the city's asylum, a dismal place that housed a litany of dark elves who suffered from mental illnesses to an extent that they were deemed dangerous in a society made up of wicked creatures pursuing wicked goals. He wanted to see first hand what sort of foul, wicked dark elves were kept in such a place.

The deity listened as the two elves spoke to each other. They to each other whispered quietly, careful to keep their conversation unheard by others.

"The Moonlit Asylum? What's happening to it?" The one who spoke had a fearful look in his eyes, something Althos could only tell by using the same magnifying-glass like spell he used to spy on the servants in Qu'Ren's estate.

"Something that the guard captain wants to keep under wraps. The place is under quarantine. It seems that the guards who are guarding the place have been guarding it for a few days now. But... they can only keep this quiet for so long."

The one who just spoke was the taller of the two elves, he wore the plain robes of a normal commoner, but he had dense muscles that were more like Althos' muscles than the muscles of other dark elves.

The deity suspected that the elf was a monk, presumably a disciplined member of a local order that sometimes purchased medicine from Milene. Of the elves Althos knew, she had the most knowledge about the order of skilled hand to hand fighters native to the city of Undermoon and she also knew that most dark elven cities housed an order or two of the fascinating fist-fighters.

Althos figured he should pay the Aslyum a visit, at some point in the future. During the days of peace in the chapel in Infernius, the young god realized that he had begun to walk down the path needed to influence the domain of madness, and he knew that the Aslyum was a place that housed those who were deemed mad.

This is good to know... I may pay the Asylum a visit soon. He thought, intrigued by this bit of gossip.

Minutes later, the deity heard another bit of fascinating gossip.

At that point the young god was already inside of the marketplace, accompanied by his ever-present guide. The two of them had wandered close to a small goblin who was in the middle of a ferocious debate with a dark elf wearing the dark uniform of one of the city's few academies of magic.

"You... try... to... rip me off!" Shouted the vendor, her purple eyes aglow with rage as she mentally readied another verbal "barrage" to lob at the young dark elf. The dark elf stood her ground, her clothing billowing around her as she looked down at the tiny goblin and called out to a tiny fraction of her power.

"Listen here you little savage!" She said, her anger unbecoming of a young, possibly noble dark elf. Her azure-colored eyes were glowing with annoyance, and Qu'Ren watched their interaction with undisguised interest. She was close enough that both of the creatures were aware of her, but their anger was getting the best of them and they hadn't actually checked out who she was, only that she was there close to them.

Althos could hear them but was indifferent to their discussion. His attention was focused elsewhere, farther away.

Across the paved street from where Althos and Qu'Ren stood at that moment was a tiny, open-air smithy. The smithy was open-air, and the face of the business was a dwak, a member of a mutant race that split off from dwarves when the species was divided over whether or not to venture the world above, the land of skies and dreams.

One of the eye-catching features of the creature was its eyes, or rather what it had in place of eyes. Rather than have multicolored eyes, with different parts being different colors like most other humanoids, the dwak had crystalline orbs where its eyes ought to be. Althos looked at the thing, too far to be seen by him, and noticed that this particular dwak had dark sapphires where its eyes ought to have been.

The dour-faced fellow was clothed in a soot-covered apron and his bearded face was covered in sweat. He was focused on the work in front of him, rather than his acquaintance; a young orc covered in the same sort of organic, chitinous armor that the guard who had interrupted the god earlier was wearing. The orc was waiting for the older dwarf to finish sharpening his blade and spoke to fill the air. Sparks flew off of the blade as the dwarf held it against a spinning wheel.

While waiting for the dwarf the orc spoke in the common tongue of the world beneath the world, his throat uncomfortable producing the range of sounds needed to speak intelligible words. "The captain of the guard is doubling the number of guards stationed at the city's dungeon." There was an emotion in the orc's voice, a tremble of excitement.

Althos wondered why that was, and fortunately, the old dwarf was both well-enough to hear the same tremble and also curious enough to wonder the same thing. The dour-faced dwarf spoke and the emotion in his voice revealed a rather venomous attitude "Do you care to share why that is, or do you want me to die not knowing the answer to this mystery?"

Althos grinned at this, liking the quick wit of the elderly dwak. He listened as the orc chuckled, the creature's status as a slave-soldier apparently not depriving the being of a sense of humor. The orc began to speak again.

"It's because we're beginning to prepare for this month's sacrifice." This was news to Althos, which meant that it was most likely news to his dark elven followers. He knew what it meant though.

"Oh? So we're preparing ourselves to try and summon a big one?" The dwak asked the orc, a glint of curiosity readily visible in the thing's crystalline eyes.

The orc nodded and grinned at the dwak. "Yep. We're hoping the sacrifice will be enough to call a greater demon to the world. We've got a few... choice sacrifices this month." There was a certain hunger in the voice of the thing when he said the word "choice", and Althos wondered why that was. But more than that, the young god wondered what about the sacrifices necessitated the sort of protection these particular sacrifices were to be put under.

The deity considered just reading the mind of the orc but then realized that this would make a fun test for his servants. So the deity did a really quick mind-reading of the orc, just to make sure he knew what at least one of the sacrifices would be.

The deity didn't get to see words when he read the mind of the orc, like he usually did when he performed surface level mind-reading, but instead, he saw an image.

The image that entered the deity's mind, copied from the mind of the orc, was of an inhabited prison cell. The prison cell itself was thin and dark, only barely large enough for a thin humanoid to have a few meters with which to move around, possibly to prevent muscular atrophy.

The cell contained a single inhabitant, a thin and unhealthy looking elven man, dressed in dirtied yet opulent looking robes. In the image in the deity's mind, the elf glared at his captors, his eyes and his skin were both equally pale. The look in his eyes revealed a certain strength of spirit, yet what skin was visible to the orc from whom the image was sourced was bruised and looked harmed.

The elf wore an unusual piece of jewelry, a sort of eerie pendant that placed a thin emerald square in the center of the elf's forehead. The thing seemed to cover the elf in a small, fading barrier of grass-green energy that the still image in Althos' mind only barely captured.

Althos, while still peering at the mental image, realized that the creature he was looking at was a non-dark elf. This was a bit of interesting trivia, and Althos knew that he'd be able to test the abilities of each of his dark elven followers by challenging them to uncover this juicy bit of information.

He quietly composed a simple message and sent it to each of his worshipers within the city. It was a quiet, simple test of their skills. They were to find the identity of the sacrifices the city guards were hiding from the people. The deity withheld that he already knew the identity of one of the sacrifices, and pretended that this would be new information for all of them so as to get them to take it seriously.

It took the three elves a few moments to respond to the message, with all three informing their master that they'd make it a priority to find out who or what was to be sacrificed.

The deity would spend the next two hours cavorting around the marketplace with his guide. He quietly started playing a role, upon observing the behavior of other heavily built males in the marketplace. More often than not they were the muscle of more daintily built women, guarding their mistresses and intimidating the rare few people with the backbone to resist the wills of the matrons of dark elven society.

Althos passed the hours acting as both a protective muscle to the witch and as her new lover, occasionally being the recipient of public displays of affection. A handful of those displays left lingering marks on the deity's skin, with her lipstick staining the deity's cheek, and his neck.

At some point, the deity made the choice to embrace it, and by the time he felt satisfied with his initial exploration of the city he had become the source of a lot of tales, a few of them being wildly blown out of proportion and hinting that the young god was a sort of lovestruck brute entranced by Qu'Ren's beauty.

Althos internally laughed at those rumors, not minding that some of the elves in the city thought that he, a god, had a childish infatuation with the odd elf he had lured into his service with the promise of power.

So today I went to a new city... I encountered a lot of new creatures... I left a big impression on a number of city residents... All in all, not bad for just a few hours of work.

The deity then felt that it was time for him to go home. He had gained a lot during this little excursion, learning a lot about the city he sought to conquer. When he and Qu'Ren had almost returned to her estate, the same place that her nephew and niece lived in, he informed her that he was about to head home.

This provoked another pout from the witch, but she didn't object to it. The deity grinned at her, and spoke just before he vanished.

"I actually had fun today. I won't forget our little trip. I learned a lot, which was my objective, and it was fun to practice acting. I may come back sometime, but get your relatives and work on converting this city. The sooner it becomes mine... the sooner shapeshifting becomes yours."

And seconds after that the deity was gone. He had wordlessly cast an advanced teleportation spell and vanished, returning to his home base in the second layer of Infernius. Qu'Ren was alone once again.

That was quite fun and with that, I can guarantee everyone will be talking about me for a few weeks at least... The witch's selfish thoughts were etched on her face, but she was alone so no one saw them. She grinned greedily as she reflected on the victories she had achieved today. She would think about them the rest of the way home.