Hotel de Lune sprawled over an entire block, roughly two hundred paces to a side, and was seven storeys high, or at least, the main building was. The compound had five distinct buildings, each one at least three storeys high. The one that was right of the main one was the parking complex, though considering the nearly empty fields around the hotel, Yuriko wondered if that was even necessary.
They walked towards the reception lobby, the camera crew followed behind them while the producer/director led the way. Yuriko felt an ominous and disquieting air that grew just a tiny bit more intense the closer she came to the buildings. She wasn’t sure what it was pointing to so she resolved to remain vigilant. Not that she intended anything otherwise.
The hotel’s reception lobby was actually on the second storey, and there was a ramp that allowed vehicles to reach the front door. They walked up the ramp now while Yuriko looked at the plaza it surrounded. There was a fountain there, or what should have been one. It was a depression half-filled with stagnant water, and the buzz of annoying bugs had been quite prevalent. Thankfully, none of the critters survived brushing against her Anima, but she heard the other two girls complaining of mosquitos. The spotlights the crew set up were focused on the decaying facade and drew even more flying bugs whose shadows danced in the air.
“The staff hid several…treasure chests…yeah, let’s go with that…within the hotel. Each one contains a prize, not just for you, but also for a chosen charity,” Joe announced as they assembled in the lobby. “You will form pairs, though this time by choice rather than chance, then you may begin. The exercise will last for an hour.”
Before he even stopped speaking, Michael had already positioned himself beside Yuriko and he asked as soon as he could, “Do you mind being my partner?”
Alexis, behind him, threw the young man a sour expression, and even Zachary had a reaction.
Yuriko nodded. “Sure, I don’t mind.”
Before either boy could turn to the other two girls, Christine huffed, “Haley, let’s go together.”
“Alright.”
Haley giggled, leaving the two boys slackjawed. Michael chuckled and Yuriko snorted in amusement as they moved towards one of the indicated start positions. The cameraman assigned to them was a slightly chubby man with curly brown hair and beautiful green eyes. He nodded nervously but held his camera with steady hands. Another staffer handed Yuriko and Michael a cylinder with a light bulb at the end—a flashlight—each. Yuriko thumbed the switch and was rewarded with a high-intensity beam of white light.
“Start!” Joe yelled once everyone was in position, not that they actually ran.
“Should we explore the main building or check the others first?” Michael asked.
“Let’s look in the other buildings,” Yuriko decided. “Seems the others want to look here first.”
“Agreed.”
He didn’t quite take her hand, but from the way he hovered, he wanted to. Yuriko held in a smirk, not wishing to tease or be seen flirting openly. She was rather conscious of the camera pointed at her face, too.
The cameraman, Victor Reed, had his own light, but Yuriko flicked her flashlight on as they went through the rather labyrinthian hallways. The floors weren’t quite caked in dust, but visible footprints remained. The walls and the corner of the ceilings had cobwebs, and she detected not a few arachnids hiding from their presence.
While they walked, Yuriko examined the odd feeling she had since coming into the hotel. It wasn’t dread, nor was it Chaos, or any kind of overt danger. Rather, it felt as though things were poised to happen; potential that could just as easily fall to ruin and destruction as it could be harmless.
They made their way into the inner courtyard and the breeze stirred the weeds. It was cold for a mid-Fire night, and both Michael and Victor shivered. The far building seemed like a likely place to check, so she headed that way. The courtyard also contained several pools and pavilions, though the former were empty or filled with stagnant, algae-covered water. As they crossed the centre, Yuriko felt a sudden spike of anxiety that forced her to stop. She felt at the precipice of a cliff, a single step away from falling.
“Scared?” Michael asked, though she felt him shivering, too, from the cold or from nerves, she wasn’t quite sure. She did notice that the hair at the back of his arms was standing stiff.
“Something’s wrong,” Yuriko muttered, but the foreboding feeling had passed. She shook her head and continued walking.
“Superstitious? Ah, you’re in the Occult Research Club, so I guess you are?”
Yuriko sniffed. “Hoh, how do you know that?”
“Ahahaha, Evan was part of the varsity, after all. He told us about it. Before he turned crazy anyway.”
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“Hmmm, I see. Makes sense, I suppose,” Yuriko said absently while she spread her Anima perception as far as it would go. She didn’t detect anything untoward, but when she activated her Enhanced Sight and cycled through Chaos and Elemental Sight, she detected a higher-than-average amount of ambient Chaos and elements. As well as a hint of daemonfyre energy. In fact, the daemonfyre was growing thicker by the second, but she couldn’t trace where it was coming from. “There’s trouble,” Yuriko said grimly.
“Why do you think that?” Michael’s voice was doubtful, but not quarrelsome.
“I…” Yuriko paused and looked at the camera. Anything she said would be recorded and probably shown. “Are you broadcasting or recording?” Yuriko asked Victor.
“Recording,” the cameraman said, “but the boss might change his mind. Not without warning. Streaming a reality show isn’t done.”
Yuriko’s lips twitched at the thought that something called a reality show was really nothing more than a carefully curated and manipulated experience. She shouldn’t be surprised, considering that she had watched Luvblooms’ previous seasons and also other shows.
“Lily?” Michael asked, and Yuriko frowned at the use of Lilibeth’s nickname. They weren’t close enough for that, and from the look on his face, he realised his misstep. “Ah, sorry.”
“Hmm.” Yuriko shook her head and nodded towards the far building. “Let’s continue.”
No sooner had they reached the building’s lobby than Yuriko froze again. She activated Chaos Sight and saw the wisps of daemonfyre rising from the ground. Her Anima perception streaked towards the source, but the touch seemed to accelerate whatever it was that created the energy signature.
Lines of daemonfyre and some other kind of energy she couldn’t identify, or even see, really, but could only intuit from how the daemonfyre and Chaos wove around it, streaked across the air and formed a dome that contained the entire hotel.
“What’s happening?!” Michael yelled even as Victor stumbled from the sudden tremor.
“Swarmfodder,” Yuriko muttered as she felt the sudden displacement. Her true body, for a moment, seemed ever so distant, the connection between incarnation and true stretched out almost to the point of snapping. But before anything could happen, and because of the fact that both bodies were her, and it wasn’t as if the true body held her consciousness and remotely controlled the incarnation, everything remained in synch. However…
She could feel the flow of time passing faster right where her incarnation was. Her mind stuttered for a moment, and a spike of pain stabbed into her brain before she adapted and everything grew smooth.
Time in Hotel De Lune passed nearly twice as fast as it did for her true body in Lyma Station, and since nothing was really happening there, Yuriko settled into a meditative state and focused and smoothing the flows, and hoped to ease the pain the temporal distortion created.
Yuriko shook her head as she glanced about. The skies remained the same, but the buildings of Hotel De Lune looked to have aged centuries. The walls crumbled, and ivy crawled up the remaining walls.
“Ahh!” Michael and Victor yelled as both fell on their knees.
Yuriko caught Michael before he fell on his face, and Victor with her kinesis before he did the same. Thankfully, his camera was secured via a shoulder strap, otherwise it would have slammed on the ground, potentially ruining the expensive piece of equipment.
The ground quaked for a couple more minutes, but the two young men’s condition was strange. Michael fell unconscious, while Victor struggled to keep his eyes open, then both men began to shake. A quick check with Elemental Sight showed her that streams of energy drilled into their bodies: Michael’s sternum, and Victor’s eyes. The two twitched and shivered, and moaned in pain—or was it pleasure?
Several minutes later and the shakes receded, but by now, Victor was unconscious, and neither was waking up. Yuriko stretched her perception back towards the main building. It was just within reach if she deformed her Anima, and she quickly found the other two pairs and their camera crew members. Alexis was conscious, but Zachary and their camerawoman were not. Christine, Haley, and their cameraman were all knocked out on the concrete floor of the main building. She couldn’t see where the director and the rest of the staff were; she assumed they’d left the region.
From how the staff members were affected, she ruled out that this was part of the show, though she didn’t know if any of the staff members outside, or even Joe, were involved in the clearly anomalous event. She touched upon the fabric of reality, though it was harder for her weaker Anima than her true body’s.
“An interstitial space,” she muttered. They weren’t on the prime material plane, but they weren’t within the dreamscape or the other major realms. Rather, she could feel her body was physically here. It was actually akin to the Chaos Founts found in the gaps of reality in Bresia…though it felt…different. In what way, she wasn’t sure, but she was certain there was something different.
Ah, it was more stable. Chaos Founts felt jiggly to her senses and if she stretched her power, they inevitably collapsed. Not so, here.
Either way, she needed to get to the unconscious people, as she didn’t know what kind of danger could be found there. Though if she based it on rumours…well, it was said that the hotel was built over mass graves from the Great Unification War, right?
As if to confirm her guess, she sensed movement. Not from the cast and crew, but at the edges of her perception.
“Abyss,” Yuriko muttered when the moving thing came close enough to sense. As she surmised, it was a thing animated by the hostile air and supported by the rumours and beliefs of the area. It was a walking corpse.
It shambled towards her, though it couldn’t be faulted for doing so, since its broken femur and knee jutted out from its flesh, which surprisingly, didn’t look rotten. The flesh was grey and there was no blood seeping out of wounds, but the clothes, which looked like those in movies depicting an era hundreds of years ago, were stained crimson. It also carried a musket—a long gun, smoothbore, and fired round bullets rather than the normal modern shape—and a handaxe.
Yuriko sighed as she flicked her finger and sent an Invisible Edge. The flesh golem lost its head before it could take another step, and it collapsed. Did that do it? Huh. Nope. Whatever animated it managed to stitch the head back onto the neck, and since her cut was so clean, it had little trouble reconnecting. So she crushed the head with her Animakinesis instead, and that seemed to do the trick.
More came out of the ground, however, and she perceived some approaching the unconscious girls.
On the boys’ side, Alexis pointed at a nearby flesh golem and unleashed a scintillating bolt of lightning from his fingertip, his face a mask of anger and disdain. Gone was the shy young man and in his place looked a battle-hardened fighter.
Shrugging to herself, Yuriko picked up the two fallen boys and trotted towards Christine and Haley.