"Seven minutes in heaven? Really?"
"It'll be fun!" Cheery beamed from under her beard, the rest of the group shooting her identical confused looks.
"...How, exactly?"
"Maybe 'traumatic' is a better term..."
"No, I used to play it when I was little, with all the other kids," Cheery continued excitedly. "One of the great memories of my childhood."
"All the other kids? Wouldn't that be a tight squeeze?"
"Not really," Carrot and Cheery replied in unison, in the innocent voice of one whose sarcasm-muscle had woefully atrophied. "Sometimes the holes were big enough to hold fifteen of us at a time," Cheery added helpfully.
Unsurprisingly, a very long silence followed that revelation.
"...I think you'd better tell us what this game entailed," Angua quickly said, "because it doesn't sound...exactly like what we're thinking of."
"At least, I hope not," someone yelled from the other side of the thin door, from the bar proper. Snickers followed. Angua opened the door a crack and glared. The snickers melted and dropped like nougat stones.
"Well," she began, "we would pack a load of us into a small cupboard, and one would have an axe with a rubber head, and we'd be in there for seven minutes, and you had to try and avoid getting hit by it. It was two points for the back, three for the head, and five for somewhere around the -"
"-definitely not the same game."
"Though one of 'em once said she woulda liked to hit me with a blunt object afterward," Nobby leered.
"I don't doubt it. So, are we going to play Cheery's version, or the one we're all more...intimately familiar with?" Angua regretted her word choice as soon as it left her lips, hastily flicking the nearest shiny thing in Nobby's direction to distract him from whatever half-baked innuendo was rising like already-stale bread in his mind.
"Well, we don't have a rubber axe," Carrot mulled. "I suppose we could - no, that could get nasty -"
"Let's just do the regular one," Colon sighed, nursing a glass of dark liquid over the fuzzy haze building in his temples. "We'll get it over with quicker, and there'll be less chance of..."
"Blunt force trauma?"
"Nah, I was just going to say getting hit by an axe."
"...Right." Angua was starting to wonder why she'd agreed to this in the first place. "Somebody give me a bottle." She deftly span the bottle in her tapered fingers, so deftly that Carrot wondered for a second if it was a good thing that she was clearly practiced at it. "Nobby."
"What?" Nobby bolted upright with the expression of one who now has the pocket contents of an unscrupulous magpie.
"Go hide in the closet."
"Why?"
"Because it's the best place for you," Angua muttered under her breath. "You're doing Seven Minutes in Heaven."
"Oh." Nobby's little eyes glowed and he practically skipped off into the closet, practically skipping with glee. Angua had a nasty feeling he was hoping she'd be his...closet-mate. She flicked the bottle and closely watched where it landed, deliberately flicking it a little further when it passed dangerously close to a bright-eyed curious Carrot.
"Sergeant?"
Colon glanced up from the amber depths. "What?"
*awkward silence*
*poke*
"Get off, Nobby."
*poke*
"Get off, Nobby."
*poke*
"Ge-"
"'S borin' in here."
"Yep."
The cupboard was near pitch-dark, save a small strip of light that beautifully illuminated Colon's belly and Nobby's face. In practice, that could likely be construed as blasphemous towards all poetry, ever.
"Umm..."
"What?"
"Nothin'."
Another long expanse of quiet followed, Colon fiddling with his oversized thumbs, Nobby staring at the ceiling of the cupboard and trying to visualise Colon as someone a little less...Colon.
"Nothing?"
"Yeah, nothin'."
Maybe that vampire chick, with the fondness for bootlaces -
"Nobby, the chess pieces, really?"
"What?! I - I didn't -" Nobby's split-second mind struggled to associate bootlaces with that voice. To be fair, most would.
"Nobby, they're in your back pocket."
"How did you -"
"It's a small closet."
"...Right."
Ridiculously small, actually. Nobby's arm was crushed against the cupboard wall, his other arm pinned by Colon's large frame.
"I was going to put 'em back -"
"I know."
(Colon always 'knew.')
"How much longer?"
"Five minutes."
"Eh, fuck it."
Twenty minutes later, Angua stared wistfully at the door. Everyone else had slinked out to dose up on alcohol, except for Carrot (Carrot just went where people went, mostly) and now she was here, alone, on the most awkward floor she'd ever sat on. The noises emerging from said cupboard had gone from niggling to gradually inescapable, and she was starting to think that interrupting them would be a very bad idea at this stage.
"Hey - are you -" She meant to call out, but her survival instinct turned it to a croaky whisper. "Christ, I hope I'm drunker than I thought," Angua thought desperately to herself.
A mutter shot out from the crack in the door, and the words 'Nobby' 'dress' and 'gnnh'* were practically unmistakeable.
"Right...okay...I think..."
Without a moment's hesitation, Angua vaulted out of the window and landed on the cobbles on four paws, quickly discovering that no, not even a change of species could deaden those mental images.
*There are many translations of this. All mean roughly the same thing, whether during sex or whilst being crushed by a large oil tanker: "A little bit to the left, please."