The tent was dimly lit and had a polished marble floor and dark, wooden-looking walls. There was almost no furniture. A simple wooden desk sat on the side of the room facing where we had come in. A massive map of what looked like dimensions filled the wall behind it.
A woman sat at the desk, not looking at us at all. Whatever had Aahz and Tanda so worried about being here wasn’t clear on first glance. The room felt odd, but not threatening, besides it being a hundred times larger than the tent holding it. We all stopped a few feet in front of the desk, with Aahz clearly in the position to do the talking.
The woman looked up at him and smiled. She had deep orange eyes and a pug nose that looked more like a hog’s nose than anything like Tanda’s. I had never seen a demon like her before.
“Yes?” she asked.
I almost fell over backwards. Her voice was deep, rough, and clearly that of a man. It was with the voice that I actually looked at her. Or him, as I was coming to realize. I had no idea why I had thought he was a woman. His arms and shoulders were built like a man’s, and his brownish hair was cut short. Yet I had sworn, until he spoke, that he was a woman. Just thinking about it was getting me confused. Aahz got right to the point.
“We are looking for directions to a dimension called Vortex.” The man who sort of looked like a woman smiled at Aahz. Now he was back to being a woman again. And his pig nose had vanished, leaving a wonderful pointed nose and red lips. And as I watched her face shifted slowly. The transformation was amazing. Her eyes changed color, from orange to blue, her skin darkened, her cheeks rose, and her hair grew to her shoulders.