<br/>Aria smiled somewhat naughtily, twirling a bit of rope in her hand; it lightly flicked over her own shoulder like a flail, then Kass's. " 'Twould be my pleasure sometime."  While the bardess spoke to the girls, she remembered the recently-pillages manacles and used a set on the bound woman.<br/><br/>The naked acolyte giggled nervously as Kass cleansed her, and giggled again as the bardess squeezed her rear, making no move to draw away as she listened with the other two. When called beautiful, her posture seemed to lift, as if to present herself in the most attractive possible light, smiling with her breasts lifted high and her hands on hips just so.<br/><br/>She introduced herself as Acenith, the girl who'd been fanning the impostor as Sacmis, and the date-bringer whom Kass had seen first as Arsinoe. Although they were not full-time or primarily servants of Rana, it was true that they had each served her at various capacities and times, as well as the blonde man and other more senior priestesses they were shared with, a it were.<br/><br/>While the first squirmed rather contently in Kass's grip, she and the other two spoke and pieced together aloud what they could: during the last night, another acolyte, who thought she had food poisoning or some other nonfatal stomach ailment, had ventured out into the olive grove where the statue stood to pray to and suck upon it. Finding no relief, she went back later in the name to try various oral techniques, and finally hoped to learn something by casting a detect magic orison on it.<br/><br/>The statue did register as magical (possibly because it had been given a magic aura for just such a reason), with an aura which was reasonable given the nature of its powers - but, she had later confided to a friend in the story, who happened to have previously cast detect magic orisons on the real statue, simply for magic practice, and knew its aura to be different.<br/><br/>This discrepancy was confirmed by others who knew had divined the real statue's aura in the past and went to divine on the new one, and a few clergy claimed to recognize subtle differences in the workmanship. Someone woke Rana, who cast the Sending after a scouring of the grounds yielded no obvious clues. Although none of the girls had been following Rana about the whole morning, they agreed that the most likely time and way for her to've been alone to be snatched and replaced was when she and some other clergy began spreading out alone to cover further afield of the temple in the so-far-fruitless attempts to find footprints or something. Or perhaps when alone in a midden, were a snatch sufficiently quite.<br/><br/>'Rana' had then recently approached Acenith and then the others, claiming she was exhausted from casting divinations in vain, and that they must not let anything derail their daily pursuit of the true understanding of pleasure. Thence had begun the decadence Kass and Aria had walked in on with. Arsinoe.