Location: Crossed Swords Inn & Tavern: Private Rooms (2F)
Interacting With: Everyone, whether he knows it or not.
The distress had moved to his lower abdomen now, a beast fighting for egress. It had become pain, actual pain, far from being merely uncomfortable as earlier this evening. This seemed to always happen when he moved to another area. He had suspected that it was the change of location; new food and methods of preparation seemed to throw his intestinal balance off, despite the fact that it was one of the very things that drew him ever onward to new locales.
Oddly enough, when he personally used new techniques, it didn't seem to bother him quite as much.
Postulating on the root cause of his disturbance did nothing to ease the present situation, however. He knew what was to occur next. All he could do was brace for it, and put his mind in a happy place. Perhaps it for the best that Brighid tactfully withdrew from his clumsy attempt at first-meeting coitus. He had no desire to kill her.
Keystone held his hands out in front of him, still seated in the warm water of the brass bathtub. He closed his eyes and let out a massive exhale, centering himself for the fight to come. The pugilist bulwarked his nerve and tried to offload the pressure in a light, sustained release.
He failed.By the second of the first breach, Keystone knew that he was doomed to failure. The constant shoving against his colon wall, equal in ferocity in all directions, lay contained in too small a space for too long to go gentle. What began as a nonosecond of barely noticable squeaking exploded from him into something monstrous. Something worthy of poetry, dark and terrible. A battlecry of the sadistically faithful against the onslaught of the righteous. His ass
shouted.
The rectal roar deepened in intensity, displacing the warm water under which it struggled. the mere shock of the first moment of this constant, unabated arseblast moved the once cleansing liquid away from Keystone, simultaneously slamming his back flat against the tub wall. The blow knocked the wind from the battle-hardened fighter and forced him to grab the rim on either side of himself, his iron grip the only thing preventing him from being propelled from the 20 gallons of ass soup he steadily and involuntarily brought into being.
Keystone gulped and horked for air, giving frantic prayer to gods he didn't fully support to allow him the regained use of his lungs. Slowing his mind, he opened his airway seemingly by way of pure willpower, and took in a chestful of sweet, blessed air.
Except that it wasn't.
His dietary choices, and the methane based horror of their escape, had turned the atmosphere of his bathing room toxic. If not deadly in their own right, the noxious Thunder From Below coupled with the warm, wet environs mingled together in ways perilous for sustained human activity. This tainted, but life-sustaining air was the only thing keeping Keystone conscious, though it threatened to take said consciousness away at any moment.
He knew then the awful truth of this - Keystone, Slayer of Undead, Warrior of Slums and Badlands, Protector of Innocent(ish) Barmaidens, Weilder of Righteous Fury and Master of Unarmed Combat, must fight. Fight for his very survival. Fight for the lives of those who he would one day save. He must fight, lest the darkness take him, and claim any who approached Room 2F unawares.
"I made you, you bloody Arse Demon!" he shouted over the ongoing underwater hamflappery, determination and rage building within him,
"You're my task now, me old beauty! RAAAAAHHHHHHH!" Below, in the common room of the Tavern Proper, one could plainly hear the Battle of 2F taking place, but no one thought much of it at first, let alone understood the nature of the noise upstairs. Keystone's roar, and what followed, brought conversations and music to a sour halt.
Drawing from his experience studying under Shou and Xiang Masters, Keystone steeled his resolve, flexed and released his sculpted abdominals in such a way as to center and steady his physicality. A lesson about force and direction crept into his thoughts, as taught by Grandmaster Feng, martial artist and philosopher of great renoun:
"When traveling down angry water, one will lose control fighting against the current. Instead, endeavor to move faster than the river. Only then will you be able to steer your boat away from the rocks."
A moment of clarity hit. He knew what he must do. The Juggerfart continued, but instead of attempting to contain, Keystone redoubled his roar into a cry of defiance and bore down, forcing his angry ass air from his body with the control of a trained aesthetic. It was then that the Pillars of Heaven shook. As did the Crossed Swords.
A concussive wave, part flatulence and part harnessed Chi, radiated outward from Keystone, knocking unsecured knick-knacks from their resting places inside the room. The roars, both his and his ass's, grew to kaiju-esque proportions and took on demonic undertones. Keystone paused for breath. The fart did not.
The sound was the trumpet of a screaming elephant, held underwater and thrashing in its death throes. A deafening, bubbly, bass staccato, scream-murmuring through cloudy oil. The constant, unabated horror reserved for an afterlife of judgement, a sound which drives the sane to madness and the fractured to perfect alignment. A noise that sent all non-sentients scurrying for dear life for miles around, invoking a fear so primal as to not have a proper name in any of the languages of Men or Elves. Horses neighed fearfully, bucking against their handlers. Trees cried blood. The First Seal of Armageddon started to hairline.
The Kraken had been released, and it was
angry.
Slowly, laboriously, painfully, Keystone recovered himself. He noted with amazement that his tub, while emptier, had not been befouled. The surviving pugilist climbed unsteadily from his place of battle, changed into fresh clothes, and clasped on his bracers. His drink had somehow survived the brouhaha, a fact for which he was particularly grateful.
Keystone sat on his bed and poured a glass with an unsteady hand. One drink down, he opened the shutters to his window, hoping the night air would carry the brunt of this remaining nightmare away.
Satisfied that no one would die, the Errant Monk donned his layered leather coat and trudged back downstairs, hoping there was still an opportunity to enjoy the evening before the inevitable happened - the same inevitable thing that always happens when he graced an unstable situation with his company.