Lounge Lizards

Walk into a night-spot in Heliotrope or the City, or maybe even down in New Ylourgne, and you might unknowing rub shoulders with an ancient inhuman race. "Lounge Lizards," they’resometimes called derisively, but these sybaritic sophisticates have about as much in common with the various sorts of lizard-folk (gatormen, ciamen) as a movie star has with a skunk-ape. Unlike their brutish, reptilian country-cousins, they’re alluring creatures--but with a beauty alien to humanity--lithe, sensuous and gorgeously scaled.

They're great sorcerers who sometimes claim to have been the originators of the knowledge stolen by lost Meropis, or to have ruled the world of men’s apish ancestors--but they’re notorious liars, so there’s no way to know for certain. Some scholars link them to the Serpent in the Good Book, responsible for mankind’s exile from Paradise. Despite conspiratorial theories they probably don’t eat human flesh.  Probably. What's certain is that they're masters of magics of music, intoxication, sex, and illusion. They put their arts to use in their night world of jazz, liquor, and carnal pleasures--all in pursuit, supposedly, of some sort of mystical enlightenment.

Some former hangers-on of these serpent men (as they're also sometimes known) claim that they follow the pronouncements of a mad poet--the Lizard King--who performs at an endless party in his people’s ancient, underground temple. He recites in a husky, dream-darkened voice to the beat of bongos before enrapted human followers, swaying like charmed snakes before him.