The misty rain is piss-warm, offering no relief from the humidity that fouls the city. The clouds are a disinterested grey, sallow notes of yellow and green poisoning the sky above. It's afternoon in the First City.

The girl sniffs once. Her dark-ringed eyes shine with tears, tears she manages to keep from falling. Mostly. She's working her way down an alley, and she can't avoid stepping into the ever-growing puddles as she goes. Down, down towards the sharp white neon at the end. The yawning black door under the humming white letters. RATHSKELLER.

That's the name written on her inner wrist, though the rain's smeared much of it away. There was another name below that before, a man's name, but the rain's taken that away entirely. That's alright. She can remember that one.

She steps into the doorway and crosses a threshold, leaving behind the humid alley for the damp warmth of bodies. The air in here is oppressive with smoke and low, slow-grinding bass vibrating the walls. The sonorously slow-thudding beat is barely musical, it's seismic. The heartbeat of a dying world. It resonates through her skeleton, making her limbs and torso vibrate from the inside out. It locks her into the same frequency of the room around her, the same as everyone else in it. The snarl of bodies on the dance floor, people and not-people, dancing and grinding on one another. A sweat-slick churn of warm and roiling energy.

She ignores them. She tries to, at least. It's impossible to ignore something so massively present. So many bodies, swarming around her like bees. Like a flood. Some of them dressed, many of them not. So much skin and flesh on so much skin and flesh. Hungry, stupid parts of her yip like hyenas at the display, and she wants to hurl herself into the clutches of it all. Let it consume her. Let the riptide of it yank her below the surface. Fill her lungs with the sweat-hot stink of it forever. It would be so easy and it would feel so good.

That wouldn't be final, though, and she knows it. It wouldn't be enough, it won't ever be enough. She'd just linger like this, haunted and half-here. A ghost of herself. That's what she was already becoming. Withering away as this fucking city bit off pieces of her. Every day, one more. She needs to get rid of the thing that made her come here, made her think she wanted this. She needs to get the monkey off her back. She needs to forget.

The girls pushes her way around the edges of the floor, through wafts of scented smoke and grasping hands and leering eyes. She looks like she belongs here. Like so many of the patrons, she's dark-haired and fair-skinned and a little bit gaunt. A little bit hungry in the way that shows in the eyes and the posture and the quick, darting movements of the head. Hungry like a scared animal startling at every noise. Hungry like two steps above starvation. She looks like she belongs here, enough so that some of the dancers nod in recognition. They see a kindred soul in her, if they have souls left any longer. Many of them have certainly been sold already.

She finds her way to a corner in the back, a space that's nearly quiet. There's a man there, tucked away in a private little alcove of the club. Back here the strobing white light isn't as garishly bright, and the ponderously deep bass doesn't rattle the very walls quite so much. It's not a peaceful place exactly but it's sheltered from the storm of the dance floor. It's as close to peaceful as one can get here.

The man gestures in front of him. There's a nice chair there, an old-looking wingback with lush velvety upholstering and shiny chrome accents holding it together. The girl slips into it. She finds it hard to meet his eyes, and when she looks away the memory of his face immediately gets mushy and thin. He's average-looking, forgettable, and so she forgets him.

"Caleb?" she asks, recalling the name that someone wrote on her arm, and she forgets it once it's spoken. He makes a little sound of agreement, watching her. "I'm Julianna," she says. He seems like he knows that already. Did she already introduce herself? It's very hard to remember what's been said. She pushes a bit of wet hair back from her forehead. "I heard you could help people. People who need to forget things."

-----

Caleb, of course, is a demon. 

He's not a meaningful entity in the First City, not one of the deep powers that move the gears of its corruption. He is a striver, though. A scrapper. He has all the power in the world, but because the world loves a cruel joke, he can barely use it.

Caleb is a mnemophage. A memory-eater. He sustains himself on the thoughts of mortals, consuming them and making them forget. It's easy enough to take small bits without being noticed. When you leave a club in the First City and forget where you parked, or what song the singer was crooning as you left, or the name of that person you were flirting with, that might just be Caleb taking a little nibble. 

Bigger meals, though, he can't simply steal. To detach a meaningful, satiating memory, the owner of the mind must be willing to let it go. Caleb needs the consent of the one he's dining on, and that's not easy to get. Some in the First City do it for the novelty of it. On his best days, Caleb can wheedle some tourist into letting him take a bit or two, just for the story. The thrill of a real First City experience, dangerous and intimate. Think how many meaningless, unimportant memories are cluttering your head at all times. Wouldn't it be worth it to offload a few?

After all, you won't even know that they're gone.

Sometimes Caleb makes deals with the truly down-and-out. The First City isn't easy on mortals, and some people here would pay anything to scrub a few experiences clean from their heads. They come to Caleb tearful and begging, and because he's a decent sort, he helps them out. He's the one doing them a favor, really. And he doesn't even charge them for his services. Not much, at least.

So Caleb carves out a niche for himself, taking what meals he can as often as he can. He tries to get his name out into the world, baiting a hook that brings food to his doorstep. He tries to sell himself to the unsuspecting mortal masses of the First City, luring them in so they can offer him a nice, warm, wet bite of their past. 

-----

He nods, and Julianna can't quite remember the question she asked that prompted it. Talking to him is confusing because she's looking at his face and she sees him nod but she keeps forgetting she can see him. His appearance just won't find purchase in her consciousness. He's like smoke, constantly dissipating in front of her eyes, constantly reinvented by a fire somewhere she can't see. He says something and she forgets it immediately but knows what he's asking.

"Yes - I can pay," she says. She pulls out a small stack of bills. Hundreds. She offers it to him, and he takes it and stashes it away somewhere. She either doesn't see where or she forgets where instantly. It's very hard to know which. Can you forget something so fully that you never knew it to begin with?

She hopes so. That's why she's here.

"I'm not from here, from the First City," Julianna says. "I came here because... god. I don't even remember why anymore. I guess because I thought it'd be exciting?" She laughs bitterly. "It is exciting. It's always exciting. Too exciting. I can't get away from it. And it's eating me alive, and I need to leave. But... whenever I try to just, just go home, I..." She coughs, holding back desperate and frantic tears. "It's like all I can think about are the things that have kept me here. The drugs. The sex. The parties. The music. The... jesus, the people here. There's nothing like them back home. And that's good! People like this shouldn't exist. This place is wrong, it's wrong, it's appalling and warped and... but... I just, I can't, I can't pull myself away."

She sinks her face into her hands, adrift in the lonely sea of the true addict. She really wants to be free of this place, of its hold on her heart, of the corruption she knows is rotting her out. She wants that truly and fully. She'd give anything to cut away the tether on her heart, to scoop out the addiction under her skin. She tries, she tries, she tries so hard and so many times. But there's always one last jaunt, one last gasp of fun, one last hit. And one last one is never enough.

"So I just... I need to forget it. I need to forget the things that I keep coming back for." She shudders, remembering them.

-----

There was the girl with those long, elegant horns. She told Julianna her name, a thing of whispered hisses and sharp k's and t's. When Julianna tried to repeat it back, she'd laughed, and her laugh sounded like swords unsheathing. That girl's skin looked almost normal under the washed-out red lights of the bar. It wasn't until they were kissing in the bathroom that Julianna could see how crimson-red she was. How her nails and eyes were black, and her back was freckled with scales like an iguana. That girl licked her cunt so delicately with her long, forked tongue that Julianna thought she was going to die from the anticipation of cumming. Like her heart would simply burst from the elegantly torturous teasing of it.

There was the ogrish man-thing who worked security in the deeper, older part of the city. The part that Julianna was still scared to go into. The buildings there were imposing, impossibly twisted structures of wrought iron and black stained glass, and the shadows moved and twitched. The hulking brute had accepted a stack of cash from Julianna and a friend to accompany them through that bit of town. Several things had watched them come and go, whispering dusty siren's calls from the dark, but they hadn't dared reach out a hand or a claw or a tentacle to pull the girls in. Not with their protector there. The two of them held close to the creature, all nine feet and seven hundred pounds of him. When their little tour was over, he invited them back to his place - a rotting nest carved into the side of a collapsed apartment building. He'd offered them both a bump of desecrated cocaine, provided they were willing to snort the line off his impossibly thick cock. That turned into them both wild-eyed and frenzied, making out with his arm-sized member growing engorged between their faces until they were both lavishing tongue-worship over every thick veiny square foot of it.

There was the party in that hidden club where it's always midnight. No matter how long you stay, the time outside doesn't pass as long as you're dancing and fucking and losing yourself on the floor. There's people there who've aged decades and don't know it yet. They'll step out into a world that's vanished, bodies aged, confused and lost. It's a perfectly safe place to play in for an hour or two. Julianna's never spent more than twenty minutes, and even that was enough to be nauseating and electric when she left. She's been dreaming of spending a few hours there lately, just to chase the thrill of it. Just to see what would happen.

There was the vampire who's noticed Julianna lately. A dark figure who watches her while she drinks with dark, shining eyes. A silhouette she notices all around town. Never approaching, never beckoning, never speaking. Still, every time she notices them, they're lurking slightly closer than they were the last time. She knows they won't be able to really approach and contact her without her permission, of course. But she also knows just how readily she'd give that permission if they requested it. How could she not? She already finds herself seeing that shape in her dreams. She already daydreams about their teeth, and how they will feel when they open her throat to drink. How ecstatically grey everything will go in that moment. It must feel electric, she thinks. It must be such a perfect release. It must last forever, that blissful ecstatic charge that comes with the feeding. She needs to forget these things, these dreams, because otherwise she'll never stop thinking of them.

-----

"Can you help me?" she asks in a voice that's too thin to carry much hope.

Of course he can. 

He stands up, moving behind her chair. He tucks her hair back and puts his hands on her shoulders. Despite being wet from the rain, she feels warm to the touch under his cool and fleshy hands. 

"I'm going to take those memories from you, the ones that you're fixated on," he says. His voice isn't noteworthy at all. It's the sound of an empty room. It's the voice of a man in the middle of a crowd of thousands, out of sight and drowned out completely. It's too familiar to recognize.

He's already in her head, reading the topography. He isn't quite a mindreader, he can't see what she's thinking. Not exactly. But just like sensing someone's mood based on their facial expression, Caleb can feel her history from the geography of her thoughts. "I'll even do a little extra for you and take the memory of how you earned that money you gave me." He can see it already, it's so fresh. Newly inscribed in her hippocampus. She'd allowed a gang of Thousandcut demons to have their way with her for an hour. Bestial two-foot men with scaly skin and ragged nails and sharp little teeth. They couldn't really hurt a person, not very much, but they loved to try. A dozen or so of them would've stripped her naked and scratched and bit and yanked and poked every bit of her body that they could. Clambering over one another as she laid there, pretty pale skin abused by their endless hunger to mar and bite and inflict.

Yes. No reason she should have to recall that.

"Do I have your permission for that?" Caleb asks. Julianna doesn't hear what he's saying in words and phrases. She remembers that he said things and asked things, and she understands the content, but the specifics are vapor. Like recalling a dream. It's enough to have a conversation but it's ethereal, barely real.

"Yes," she says, as Caleb's hands caress her neck, and he opens up and gets to work.

-----

If you walked into the room at this moment, what would you see?

Nothing, at first. Not until you resolved the conflict.

The conflict of reality with memory. It's a powerful thing, and in this case, two truths would be creating friction as they opposed one another.

One truth: there is a monster here, deformed and insectoid, too large for the room. Its tallest points scrape on the ceiling and its horrible jaws open wide enough to swallow a human body in two bites. The bottom half of it seems to be made of tendrils. It's like the root system of a great tree, reaching and expanding across the floor of the room, clinging and climbing up the walls. There's a central stalk to it all, a tail or a centipede-like body or some other evolutionary mistake, you can't tell exactly. It's made of overlapping shells of glistening wet russet carapace. It's wound around the midsection of a pale, semiconscious woman. It has something like a mouth against her ear, a toothy ringlike orifice gnawing there. Penetrating somehow, in ways that don't make sense. A tongue extends from somewhere, too long, too motile. It's wrapped around her waist and her thigh and the end of it caresses the warm place between her legs, making her shudder and arch as the monster feeds.

Another truth: there's no such thing as a monster like that.

If you walked in the room right now, Caleb would help your forget the first truth and leave you with the second. It'd be a comfort. You'd just see what's actually happening - a man speaking softly to a young woman, holding her shoulders gently. Nothing more than that. 

That's what you should remember.

-----

Julianna stands up, legs shaky, as Caleb falls back into his chair. Oh, he's sated. That was quite a meal. The first three times Julianna had come to him, she'd been delicious, of course, but now things were starting to get really good. Now she was opening up deeply and he was getting to the truly gourmet bits of her.

He did as he promised, of course. He ate away as many delectable, tempting memories of the First City as he could find. Julianna would leave this place feeling like she'd really exorcised the things that had kept her here, like she was free. After all, she'd never had any of the experiences that tempted her so much. What could stop her from just going home now?

She didn't understand the nature of what lashed mortals to this place. It wasn't that they were chasing the memory of some former experience. That's how it felt to them, maybe, but the roots ran deeper. Julianna's here because she's the type of person who falls into holes like the First City. She isn't getting out. She'll pop her head into some bar on her way out of town, just out of curiosity, and she'll be bound to this place again before the sun's up.

Caleb figures he'll see her two, maybe three more times. By that last one there won't be much left for him to hollow out. She'll be a shell then, unable to remember what she once was. Just a husk, endlessly grasping towards whatever bit of pleasure she can find. Forever.

But for now she's optimistic. She doesn't remember failing before. She doesn't even remember exactly what she was doing here.

Caleb takes her hand before she goes. "If you get into trouble here, and you need to forget," he says, as he takes out a marker from his jacket, "here's where to find someone who can help." 

RATHSKELLER, he writes on her inner wrist, where the rain's washed everything clean. CALEB.

And he sends her on her way.