The girls turned around and climbed on the stairs, Linn having a slightly confused face, Sylvia was just as neutral, while Fedora shrugs and scoffs.

  -“Well, guess it could’ve been weirder…”

  The doors to rooms 1,2 and 3, were all different, room 1 had a thick metal door, door 2 was a beautifully sculpted wooden door, and door 3 was a sliding opaque glass door.

  -“They do seem to love variety…so which one do you want Sylvia?”

  -“I’ll go with 1”

  -“That looks more like a prison cell to me but, your choice…what about you Linn?”

  -“I suppose I like the second one the most, I really like the design on that door, and it must’ve taken the sculptor a lot of time and effort to make it.”

  -“Hard to believe that someone would still manually sculpt wood…anyway…see you later Sylvia”

  -“Rest well”

  Linn and Fedora walk into the second room, while Sylvia walks inside the first.

  Fedora and Linn’s room was beautifully decorated, not a single corner was left empty, everywhere you looked there was a piece of decoration, carpets, symbols, handmade artifacts, dream catchers, anything you can imagine. The entire room seemed to have been made for someone very artistic, imaginative, full of wonder and creativity. Hues of woody brown, dark green, yellow hints here and there were everything in that room.

  Fedora looked around just as amazed as she was when she first entered through the big door of the guest house.

  -“My god…what kind of naturalist freak stayed here? It feels like I could find marijuana under every blanket and crystals for astral projection in the toilet…”

  She walks lazily towards one of the bunk beds, and drops right on the bottom bed of one of them, on the beautifully decorated sheets.

  -“These things are so old fashioned it feels like I am sleeping in a museum…my grandma used to have them all over the place…I really like them…”

  She says as she gently ran her hand over the seams and patterns on the green bedsheet.

  Linn looks around just as Fedora, but with a more gentle and understanding gaze.

  -“It really is nice…they must’ve really liked nature it seems, I’m glad for them that they managed to make themselves such a nice room.”

  Fedora stretches in the bed and looks at the bed above her.

  -“So you wanna sleep above or below?”

  Linn looks at her and makes a hand gesture of slightly raising her hands, as if that is not for her, her eyes having a look of modesty as she has them closed.

  -“Oh no no no, I cannot sleep on bunk beds, the top one terrifies me…I don’t like to sleep so high up…I think I’ll sleep here.”

  Linn sits down on the other bunk bed which was parallel to Fedora’s, her hands at her sides.

  -“Like this we’ll both sleep on the bottom beds so if you want to talk to me we can look at each other easily!”

  Fedora smiles while looking at Linn.

  -“That sounds great! Maaaan I’m so sleepy…”

  Fedora says as she lets out one big heavy yawn and stretches once more.

  Seeing her yawn, Linn happens to do the same.

  -“Copcycat.”

  Says Fedora as she notices Linn yawn with the side of her eye.

  Linn laughs softly.

  -“You got me red handed!”

  They both giggle together and each lay in their bed to rest for a bit before dinner.

  Sylvia enters her room, the heavy metal door closing with a deep bass sound. She looks around, the room was very minimalist, everything made only for utility with 0 sense of aesthetics, the windows were small and square, the beds white and lifeless like a hospital, hues of black white and gray dominated everything in that room. The walls were a washed out gray, the floor tiles a darker shade of gray, the ceiling pitch black, the beds all white and the wooden frames all black aswell. She sits down on one of the beds, and takes off her military leather boots, neatly arranging them next to the side of the bed, she lays down, resting her head against the cold blank pillow.

  Her mind was empty, the lifelessness of the room didn’t bother her one bit, to her it was just a room, an enclosed space with only the purpose of providing warmth, shielding and a place to rest and satisfy your bodily needs. She stares blankly at the ceiling, her shiny grey eyes piercing deep into the dark matte of the tiles. Her hands rest intertwined over her stomach, her 4 ponytails cascading around her head on the cloudy pillow. As she was staring at the ceiling, the lights off, her vision started to have kaleidoscope-like shapes and colors around the edges of her field of view, she does not react, she keeps just as still and uninterested. Minutes pass, yet she hasn’t blinked once, her vision now a dance of abstract colors and shapes from having stared in the same place for too long without blinking once. She could hear her blood flowing, the watery gush of her blood pushing against the walls of her arteries deep inside her ear. The patterns in her sight seemed to flow in a weird waltz to the music of her blood flow and the empty ringing in her ears.

  Her trance is instantly shattered when she hears a knock on her door.

  -“Miss Sylvia! Dinner is ready! Would you like to join us?”

  It was Mechka, her joyous humble voice was easily recognizable.

  Sylvia blinks once and stands up at the edge of her bed, the beautiful rainbow in her vision was gone and the empty noises in her ear vanished aswell.

  -“Sure, I’ll be there soon”

  She says calmly, no emotion in her voice whatsoever.

  -“Alright! We’ll be waiting for you!”

  Mechka goes to knock on the second door aswell.

  -“Miss!...”

  Her happy and joyous tone drops nearly instantly when she realizes she actually doesn’t know the names of the other two girls Sylvia was with, what a shame she has to bear, her own guests and she did not ask for their names. She quickly recomposes herself and tries to improvise.

  -“Ladies dinner is ready! Would you like to join us?”

  Fedora looks up from her bed with a curious face, then back at Linn.

  -“Dinner? I mean…I’m not that hungry, but the night is long…what do you think?”

  She says, looking at Linn.

  -“Well…based from what I’ve seen, it looks like Mechka worked very hard on the food…I guess we should go and at least try the food, to not be rude…they might think we think they are dirty or don’t trust them if we don’t want to eat anything they made…”

  Linn looks to her side as she says this while sitting at the edge of her bed, having sat up when she first heard Mecha knock on the door.

  Fedora shrugs, and sits up too.

  -“Yeah I guess you’re right…let’s go, hope it won’t take too long I’m so tired…”

  Fedora clears her throat and says in a slightly louder voice.

  -“We’ll be there in a minute!”

  -“Alright, we’ll be waiting for you!”

  They both get up from their beds and head downstairs to the dining room, meeting with Sylvia as she too just came out of her room.

  If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  Fedora looks at her, half interested, half mocking her for her choice.

  -“So how’s your room? Enjoying solitary confinement?”

  Sylvia doesn’t even look at her, she adjusts her clothes, and closes her door.

  -“It’s just a room, has everything it needs. What about yours?”

  Fedora huffs.

  -“Besides the fact that it looks like a terrarium it’s alright.”

  Linn keeps silent while watching the two of them talk, not wanting to interrupt their conversation.

  The three of them walk down the concrete stairs towards the dining room, towards the Victorian wooden door Mechka came out of when they had first arrived.

  -“Why is it so cold in here…I thought it’s a guest house not a refrigerator for to keep us fresh meat.”

  Linn laughs at Fedora’s joke, and takes off her Azure blue coat.

  -“Do you want my coat? It looks like you need it way more than I do.”

  Fedora giggles, and takes the coat from Linn.

  -“Oh my days thank the heavens, actually, thank you Linn, now I won’t be frozen beef…I could go 3 steps back and take mine but I like yours better.”

  Linn giggles again as Sylvia walks in front of them, completely uninterested in their conversation. She opens the luxurious wooden door, and behind it, laid a huge regal dining room. The floor made out of shiny cream marble, engraved with gold and a beautiful gigantic red carpet laid from one end of the room to the other. Above them were 3 huge chandeliers which held actual candles. The table in the middle of the room was alone the most sight catching element, made with nearly the same shapes and patterns of the door they had just walked through. A beautiful tablecloth, covering the entirety of the absurdly large table. The walls were full of beautifully painted paintings which all looked to be hundreds of years old.

  But despite all of the extravagant elements in the room, Fedora was left completely puzzled by one and one thing alone, that dining room in itself, was probably twice the size of the entire building. Her mind was in full disbelief, how can a room inside a building be bigger than the building itself? They didn’t descend, so it wasn’t some underground bunker, and neither did they go to another building, which would have needed to be enormous to be able to have such large rooms.

  She looks left and right to Sylvia and Linn with a confused expression, her forehead wrinkling slightly from the frown, her mouth slightly open from confusion, and the left corner of her lip raised from a disgust of this strangeness.

  But despite her discomfort with this, neither Linn nor Sylvia seemed to actually notice this.

  Sylvia was already taking a seat at the table, and Linn was still looking around and admiring the decorations.

  Seeing this, Fedora decides to just ignore the fact despite its absurdity.

  She takes a seat at the table, next to Linn. It was odd, that table could easily host 100 people, yet only 3 seats were taken. She looks at the paintings once more, and another thing bothers her, she couldn’t recognize any of them, she wasn’t an art critic or an artist, but even she knew quite a few famous paintings, and she would expect such a place to indeed house famous paintings.

  They all sit down in the corner of the table, Sylvia taking the seat that was at the head of the table. Linn sits on the right side, and while Fedora initially went for the chair on the left side of Sylvia, across from Linn, she quickly goes to the right side aswell to sit next to Linn.

  -“Hope you don’t mind if I sit here!” says Fedora happily, giggling.

  -“Of course not!” says Linn sweetly with just as much warmth in her voice as Fedora.

  The food on the table, was just as weird as this whole masquerade. One dish was French, one was Italian, one was Spanish, one was Japanese, one was Chinese and so on. The table was filled with food, from one end to another, even though there were only the 3 of them at the guest house.

  Fedora extends her hand and goes for some kind of soup, picking up one of the fancy golden spoons on the table.

  She looks at it all around examining it, her face a bit surprised at the amount of luxury of a seemingly poor village.

  She was about to start eating, but she notices she had no bread around her, and she never eats soup without bread.

  Looking around the table, she finds the closest bread basket to be just in front of Sylvia.

  -“Hey Sylvia can you pass me the bread?”

  Sylvia looks up from her steak.

  -“Sure”

  She barely pushes the bread basket towards Fedora.

  Fedora reaches over the table towards the bread basket, but just as she does so, Sylvia pulls it slightly towards herself. Fedora reaches further, Sylvia again pulls it even more towards her.

  Fedora reaches further.

  Syliva pulls it even more towards herself.

  Fedora had her tongue out in the corner of her mouth laser focused on getting the bread basket.

  Linn was looking at the two of them giggling while eating out of her bowl.

  Creak.

  Fedora’s mouth makes an expression that screams nothing else but “I messed up”.

  Her chair rolls behind her and she falls under the table, her bowl of soup spilling all over Linn’s beautiful Azure blue coat.

  -“Fantastic…”

  Says Fedora climbing up from underneath her table as she waves her hands around to dry them from the soup.

  Linn laughs loudly while Sylvia smiles.

  -“If anything, it’s her fault Linn…I didn’t mean to mess up your coat…”

  Linn laughing, she waves her hand in a “relax” gesture.

  -“Oh don’t worry it’s fine, that stain was so worth it!”

  Fedora kept trying to wipe the coat with some tissues from the table.

  -“Now you’re against me aswell? What did I ever do to you?”

  Linn laughs again.

  -“You know what…I’ll eat something else….uhhh…”

  She looks around on the table and finds some Japanese noodles with chopsticks next to them. She drags her bowl in front of her and picks up the chopsticks.

  She tries to eat using them, holding one chopstick in each hand and trying to pick up noodles one by one.

  -“How do these even work…”

  She turns her head to look at Linn who was already eating some noodles with her chopsticks, and she sees her literally crocheting the noodles with the chopsticks and showing them off to her.

  Fedora places the chopsticks on either sides of the bowl in disappointed disbelief.

  -“Bullshit.”

  Linn laughs out loud again.

  -“Come on it’s not that difficult!”

  Says Linn.

  Fedora leaves her chopsticks on the table and exhales.

  -“You know what, I have hands for a reason.”

  Fedora rolls up the sleeves of her coat and she picks up a bunch of noodles with her hand and eats them.

  Sylvia looks at her with a smile.

  -“How barbaric.”

  -“How about you just mind your own plate well mannered princess?”

  Just as she was criticizing Fedora, Sylvia picked up a glass of what looked to be mint tea and she drinks about half of it in one sip.

  Her face starts to turn red as she kept swallowing again and again.

  Both Fedora and Linn look at her confused.

  -“W-What was in that glass?”

  Says Sylvia in a suffocated, strained voice as she was coughing.

  -“Wasabi water why?...you drank it?” Says Linn.

  Sylvia nods as she kept coughing again and again looking for a glass of water through all of the stuff that was on the table.

  Fedora burst out laughing and she smashes her fist on the table.

  -“HAHAHAHA! Oh and they say karma is not real…”

  Sylvia manages to find a glass of water and she drinks it in one large sip.

  -“Why would you dissolve wasabi in water…”

  -“It dilutes it so it isn’t as spicy…” Says Linn in a low voice.

  Just as they started to eat peacefully and in silence, Mechka and some other people walk in through the wooden door.

  -“Good evening once more Ladies, we are so pleased to have you dine at our place, we thank you once more from the bottom of our hearts for your service today!”

  Around Mechka were 8 other people, unknown If they were male or female, adults, teenagers or kids. They were all wearing long black pieces of material that covered their entire bodies. Around their ankles, knees, waist, neck, shoulders, elbows and wrists, there were tight circles seemingly made out of a smooth dark wood. The 8 of them were arranged 4 on the left, and 4 on the right. The material covering their entire bodies had no holes for eyes, nose or mouth. They all bow at the same time as Mechka.

  Sylvia yet again, has no unusual reaction to any of this. She wipes her mouth with a napkin.

  -“We thank you for your hospitality.”

  Fedora sees the 8 people around Mechka and she stops mid bite, she did not know how to react, or if to react at all.

  Linn watches them, and her eyes seem to widen more than usual, her legs crossing, aswell as her arms, as she looks back into her bowl.

  After a few more seconds, the 9 of them exit the room, leaving the 3 of them to finish eating.

  Fedora remains stuck in the same pose for a few more seconds as she looks at Sylvia and then at Linn.

  -“What the fuck?”

  Sylvia sniffles looking at her steak.

  -“Who are we to judge their traditions or clothes.”

  Fedora exhales and continues eating.

  A few minutes later they finally finish eating and walk out of the large dining room.

  Fedora stretches with her arms above her head.

  -“You know what I was wondering…how the fuck did Mechka know that Sylvia was in room 1 and me and you in room 2?”

  Says Fedora as she looks over to Linn.

  Before Linn can answer, Sylvia points to something behind them. The two of them turn to look, and on the wall above the receptionist, there were images with their faces next to the room they were in. Then Sylvia points once more, to a camera in one of the corners of the ceiling.

  -“I can’t wait to be out of here…”

  Says Fedora as she sighs and walks first up the stairs.

  Sylvia opens the door to her room.

  -“Goodnight”

  She says right before closing the heavy door with a loud sound, not waiting for a reply from either of them.

  -“Goodnight!”

  Says Linn in a positive tone, facing the lifeless chunk of metal.

  Fedora rolls her eyes when seeing this, snapping her nails once.

  They both enter their room, and Fedora instantly jumps into her bed.

  -“Ahhh finally…that was the weirdest dinner of my fucking life…at least the food was good…can you please lock the door shut? Thoose people gave me some awful creeps…”

  -“Sure thing!”

  Says Linn as she turns around and locks the door, pushing on the doorknob 4 times to be sure it is indeed locked. She takes the key and hands it to Fedora.

  Fedora takes it and puts it on the nightstand next to her bed.

  Her head looks up to the bottom part of the bed above her, but in reality, her eyes were following Linn, watching her movements as she was adjusting her hair, her blue braids moving in hypnotical fluid motions, glowing in the moonlight that was shining through the pieces of the mosaic window that was in the other corner of the room. As she watches her, Fedora realizes she didn’t have her coat on.

  -“Oh right, here, thanks.”

  She says as she takes off her stained coat, giving it back to Linn.

  -“Oh don’t worry, you can keep it for tonight, I’m not cold, and I know you get cold easily.”

  -“If you say so…”

  Fedora puts her coat back on and lays back onto the bed. Linn does the same.

  Fedora kept squirming and jumping around in her bed, when she suddenly stops, feeling something hard against her back.

  Her eyes turn wide, and she lifts the mattress by pulling on its edge.

  She lifts her gaze and looks at Linn with a devilish smile.

  -“Oh you won’t fucking believe what I found.”

  Linn looks at her with a curious look.

  -“Hm?”

  Fedora’s smile widens further as she slowly pulls out a half full bottle of whiskey from under the mattress.

  -“Holy fucking jackpot.” Says Fedora.

  -“It’s probably spoiled…who knows for how long it’s been there…” Says Linn.

  -“Whiskey has around like 40% alcohol…it’s genocide for bacteria!” Says Fedora as she waves the bottle left and right.

  She opens the bottle and takes a sip, she swallows, and coughs twice.

  -“H-Holy shit it’s in perfect condition! HAHA I knew this room was gonna be fun stuff! Want a sip too?”