There are regrets in life, and then there’s the soul-deep knowledge that every choice has landed you squarely in fate’s twisted little comedy club.  Dren Lor allowed himself a moment to contemplate some of those decisions, now, as he languished in this room with a delirious madman.  From the far wall came a brutal serenade, Klingon opera crashing into the room with the force of a wrecking ball and all the grace of a drunken soldier.  It was a battle cry masquerading as music.  A clash of blades, screams, and percussion, all of it deafening and unapologetic.  He was certain the racket clawed its way through the walls of their rented room, ripping into adjacent suites like a banshee on a drunken rampage.

“Computer, reduce volume by fifty percent!” Dren Lor shouted over the din.  The chaos bent slightly to his will as the volume yielded to a lesser evil.  Dren fancied hearing sighs of relief from an angry mob forming outside of their door.  It was a miracle none of the staff had yet barged in and dragged the both of them out to the streets by their ears.  Maybe the insulation of these walls really was that good.  The insulation in his skull certainly didn’t possess the same fortitude, by any means.  The cacophony had left his brain pulsing in its shell, raw and furious.  It felt like a quantum torpedo had smashed through his cranium to lodge itself in shards of bone.  The lingering ringing sensation was surely a sadistic countdown, a surge building up like a phaser set on overload.  With any luck, the final, glorious detonation would mercifully scatter his torment like debris across the universe.

The room’s other occupant unleashed a frustrated noise that was dark and primal, less a word and more a warning.  It was a guttural growl of a sound, as if language had briefly abandoned him.  “You filthy peta’Q!” Revek finally howled in a more legible form of communication.  “How dare you display such dishonor!”  The young Denobulan stood abruptly from the couch at the center of the room, stumbling with all the swagger of a drunken Klingon.  And sure enough, a drunken Klingon is exactly what had become the object of Revek’s fascination on this night, in a stroke of cosmic absurdity.  “Computer!  Increase volume by one hundred percent!” he bellowed.

Like an avenging spirit, the unholy racket of Klingon opera returned and surged to even greater heights.  It was louder than judgement day, and twice as cruel.  “Computer!” Dren shouted to be heard over the gale force.  “Turn off that god damned noise at once!”

Golden silence fell to replace the madness, the air now ringing only with the sweet hymn of nothingness.  This fleeting oasis of quiet was too much for Revek.  To Dren’s surprise he pulled out a knife, seemingly conjured from the netherworld realms like a magician revealing a dove.  The Trill recognized the Klingon d’k tahg when its secondary blades at the hilt snapped open.  “How dare you!” the Denobulan repeated again.  “This treachery will not go unchallenged!  The music demands justice!”  For the barest of moments, Dren was afraid his young companion just might shank him.

But Revek only stormed off in the opposite direction.  A mountain of golana melons sat in a bowl on a table at the other end of their room.  Their bulk threatened to spill over, a precarious display of decadence daring gravity to do its worst.  When they had first returned to their suite, the young ensign had contacted room service to demand an entire bloody orchard’s worth of the opulent fruit.  He boisterously announced their necessity with evangelical fervor, declaring their nourishment critical to the success of their mission.  The staff member at the other end of the connection was understandably confused at this overconfident proclamation, and then suggested the Denobulan might instead make use of the replicators that were standard in every suite.  But Revek had only shouted “That synthetic perversion is an affront to decency!” and demanded the real deal.  Dren suspected that after the poor soul on the other end of the line had broke the connection in annoyance, they’d gone straight to the replicators anyway in order to deliver this odd request to their door.  In the grand scheme of things, Dren had to at least give this inebriated lunacy a little credit.  It was helping to maintain the farce that they were eccentric, filthy rich, and decadent.  Who else would have the gall to brazenly act this way?  Revek was now carving at one of the melons with that ridiculous knife, his face portraying all the fervor of a crazed Dominion War veteran taking to the throat of a Jem’Hadar.  He brought a large, awkwardly cut piece of the fruit to his mouth, biting down with all the enthusiasm of a rabid dog tearing into a carcass.  Juices oozed from his lips like blood from a fresh kill, as if he were some half-starved ghoul feasting on a bloated corpse.

Dren found himself tracing back on this unraveling thread of insanity, trying to pinpoint just where exactly the wheels had come off this goddamn circus.  The one thing Starfleet Intelligence had been able to provide him with before they had set out on this farce of an assignment was a contact; Torlak, son of Rokar.  That Klingon bastard was exactly who had yanked the axle clean out from under them, sending this doomed cart careening off into the scene that was now playing out with Revek as a drunken mess.  It was an eventuality that Dren had seen coming a mile away.  You don’t just ‘meet’ a Klingon.  You tumble headfirst into a blitzkrieg of debauchery that starts with bloodwine, and if you’re lucky it won’t end in the sort of violence that one isn’t allowed to talk about in polite company.  But that didn’t mean any of this was easier to stomach.  He’d tried to synthesize up a neural suppressant, of course.  The best option would have been for Doctor T’Lan to whip some hypos up before they all had set off for Freecloud aboard that passenger ship.  But the fewer Starfleet issued things they brought along to risk exposing this pathetic charade, the better.  Dren and Revek could not risk coming into contact with the others until they had all completed the first phases of their assignments, so having her perform this task after they’d arrived to the world was also off the table.

Dren and Revek had stopped here at their suite before their meeting with Torlak, and the Trill science officer had done his best to make something himself.  The resulting neural suppressant was a nasty little chemical that screwed with your brain’s ability to recognize most intoxicants, turning you into a glowing beacon of sobriety as you downed even the nastiest of drinks.  But Dren was no medical officer.  He figured he probably overlooked some freaky little quirk of Denobulan physiology, and it had come back to bite them both in the ass.

Revek had latched onto the Klingon like a junkie to his first hit.  It made sense, though.  The young ensign had an obsession that bordered on pathological when it came to the experiences of other cultures.  That was what made him such a great communications officer.  Dren had to admit that the kid’s enthusiasm had only helped their cause.  Torlak was more than willing to indulge Revek’s lust for wild, untamed tales.  Starfleet Intelligence officers had arranged for this meeting to take place at some run-down dive bar called The Last Outpost.  The place looked downright post-apocalyptic.  Like it was some nightmare the proprietors had just woken up from, shook off, and then decided to keep around as a souvenir.  The floors were sticky, the tables were downright unsanitary, and the ceiling sagged like it had been built by people who didn’t care whether they lived or died.  The drinks were poured by a bartender whose face looked like a smashed potato.  The clientele looked like a hodgepodge of criminals, drunks, and outcasts with nowhere else to go.  Some of them drunkenly swayed to the low, relentless thrum of some alien instrument that sounded more like a dying animal being strangled.  Dren had been blissfully ignorant at that exact moment in time to appreciate that this particular assault to his ears was only the appetizer.  The main course of auditory violence would be yet to come, once he and Revek returned to their suite.

Torlak, that savage, had their gullets under siege.  He crammed mug after mug of bloodwine into their hands while he bellowed like a lunatic at a parade, spinning tales that grew more absurd with every roar and swig.  Dren watched in horror as Revek was dragged down to the depths of inebriation with the Klingon, his neural suppressant appearing to be nothing more than a cruel joke.  A placebo that did absolutely shit to keep the drunkenness at bay.  Dren wallowed in the terrible scene playing out in front of him until Torlak shoved that Klingon knife in Revek’s hands and began teaching him the fine art of disembowelment.  Deciding that this night’s madness didn’t need to turn into accidental manslaughter, the Trill realized he needed to shut it down and get them the hell out of here.  He finally barked out the question to the Klingon.  “What about the damn auctions?  What’s happened the past few days?  What’s coming up?”

Torlak paused in between explaining to Revek that he had two spleens and could afford to lose one if the young Denobulan accidentally stabbed him while practicing this devastating move.  The ensign was clutching the blade like a man possessed, as if it were a torch burning away all sanity.  The Klingon gave a grunt, reaching out for a moment to correct Revek’s grip on the d’k tahg.  “The auctions,” he said as though he were merely speaking about the weather, “are always happening.  But the one that will really get your blood pumping?  That one is scheduled three nights from now.”  Dren watched in amazement as the maniac casually gripped a corner of the table with both hands.  Without a second thought, he ripped a jagged chunk of the table off with a single, bone-rattling motion.  Then with a grace that could only have come from the edge of madness, Torlak slid the knife from Revek’s hand and set about carving the auction details into the piece of table.

He handed the fist-sized shard over to Dren.  The words were written in Klingon, he would translate it later.  “Can’t say that’s the most conventional method,” Dren quipped with a raised brow.  “But it works.  Thanks, Torlak.  It’s been, ah… an honorable night.”  It certainly hadn’t been a subtle one, and he wondered if this fact would also somehow rear its ugly head later on down the line.

The Klingon’s grin was a gruesome thing.  Sharp, crooked teeth.  Wild eyes.  He bellowed out a laugh that could have peeled the paint off the walls.  “Good luck!  Spend your latinum well!”  He slapped the blade back into Revek’s drunken hands with all the care of a man stirring antimatter into a quantum singularity.  “You hold on to that, boy!  And remember what you were taught this night!”

Yes, this was the moment.  That was why Dren Lor was now staring at an irrational Denobulan hacking away at fruit with a d’k tahg like he was in the middle of some twisted ritual to summon a god of chaos, and the melon was the sacrifice.  He wished he could get Doctor T’Lan to come over and administer something to sober the kid up.  But the rest of this ragtag crew would be waist-deep in the Hollow Sky right now, poking through its innards to see if they could somehow pull a name out of the ether and turn this whole farce into something that resembled a plan.  There was no use going to this auction if they didn’t even know what to look for.  He idly wondered if their night was spiraling into chaos with the same wild abandon as his own, or if they had somehow managed to avoid the endless pit of insanity he’d stumbled into.  It was probably a divine mercy in disguise that they were out of contact.  If Dren had any sense at all, he’d zip it about how he managed to drown Revek in booze for the second time in only a little over a week.