"Hey... Clarice... you good?"

She awoke with a startled jump as a gentle hand and gentler voice roused her back to awareness. She righted herself up from the slump she'd scrunched herself into and pried weary eyes open, getting a good look at her friend and co-pilot as he brought a cup of coffee to her with his free hand.

"I know we've been pulling a lot of overtime, but I didn't think you were that bent out of shape. Here, drink this, my treat," Blake said as he gingerly withdrew his right hand from his shoulder, and pressed the warm rim of the coffee mug up to her lips with his left. As the rising steam of the rich bitter stimulant wafted up and over her head, and its deep dark aroma graced her nose, she was overtaken by a simple, all encompassing need to down the whole thing in one go.

I needed this.

It burnt a bit, still fresh from the pot no doubt, but that fact barely registered as she savored the hit of caffeine. She hadn't had any of the sort in too long. Far too long.

"Thanks Blake... um... wait..."

As her senses were stimulated, and awareness returned to her foggy mind, Clarice took stock of her surroundings. A half-decent hotel room, the sound of heavy rain pattering against its single solitary window, out of which a faint glimmer of lamplight shone through into the dim interior. Two beds, a TV, a minifridge and coffee pot, a washroom door to the right of the room's entrance, flanked to the left by a simple closet.

And, of course, a little tea-table with two chairs to each side, both of which were presently occupied by the pair of pilots.

She'd been holed up in worse places over the years. If anything, the aggressive averageness of the impromptu accommodations were off-putting in its own unique way. Not bad, not good, just.... there. Plain, out and about, like a tree in a forest, or a cave in a mountain. Within the concrete jungle, it was just another spot to take shelter in, till the storm passed them by.

"Airport just rang my mobile, it looks like the weather should clear up in a few hours. After that, we'll be back in the air."

"Uh-huh.... great..."

Clarice got up and strolled over tot he coffee pot, filling her cup back up and sipping another hit of the dreary brown ambrosia. It was cooler, almost pleasantly so. If this place was just a bit more spruced up, she'd probably have tried her hand at whipping up some homebrew iced tea with it.

A few sugar packets, some ice, maybe a hit of cream... ugh, great, now I'm making myself hungry.

Their employers didn't really cover amenities when something like this happened. Usually, when they were stranded, they'd be sent to the most cost effective hotel in the immediate area to wait out whatever bother was keeping the flights grounded, then shooed out to fly at the exact moment the skies cleared back up.

And Clarice was stingy with her free money.

By God was she stingy.

Especially when it came to overpriced hotel minibar snacks.

Even so, she was craving something, anything, to satiate the grumbling pit her stomach had become. So she grit her teeth, knelt down, opened up the minifridge and pulled out a so-so egg salad sandwich.

"Alright... not what I was expecting... but it'll do."

As she took a few testing bites of it, she was pleasantly surprised to find it decently edible, and slunk off to her bedside to lay down and get her fill of food and drink.

"Hey, Clarice, just so you know, the TV's out. I blame the storm myself. Shame. I was thinking of sampling some of the cable channels, see if there's anything that'd make for a good movie night when I get back home."

She had to stifle a chuckle at that. Blake was a fan of most anything, and his kids were much the same way. His wife was the only one in their family with a critiquing bone in their body, and Michelle was, as a rule, happy enough if the rest of them were happy.

"Too bad. You'll just have to go look up the top ten lists like usual then, eh? Or maybe just close your eyes and play roulette with whatever streaming services you've bothered to sub to this month?"

"Tsk tsk tsk... maybe don't throw stones from that glass house of yours. I swear girl, I'd never met anyone so in-love with overbudget blockbusters before we ended up in the cockpit together. Cripes woman, you know that there's more to life than action, sci-fi, and fantasy?"

Clarice scoffed at that slanderous insinuation.

"Comedies. I also like comedies. And the odd horror, if it's handled in just the right way."

"Yeah, you do. What about other stuff though? Romances, drama's, thrillers, musicals! I can understand your dislike of sitcoms, but musicals? Who doesn't like musicals?!"

"...if I wanted to listen to music, I'd just listen to music. And, hey, I don't hate them! I just don't really gel with them, y'know?"

From the look on his face, he plainly did not.

"Whatever...."

Clarice finished her snacking, laid herself flat on the bed, nested her head against the so-so pillows, and stared straight up at the white ceiling.

She breathed steadily, rhythmically, mind fluttering from stray thought to stray thought.

She wasn't entirely sure why.

No.. no... I do...

A part of her did.

A nagging echo in the back of her mind, one that grew louder, clearer, the more she tuned out from everything else.

Voice wasn't really a good description. Neither was feeling. It was more than either, yet similar in both respect. A flickering dream that fought to make itself know, yet remained just a candle wavering in the wind amidst the ceaseless hustle and bustle of her every waking thought.

Or something like that.

I'm really not good at this existential stuff... or maybe I am... what does it matter? What's even the difference when you get right down to it? Things are real, or they aren't, there's no in-between. There's nothing to think about. There's nothing to consider. One or the other, so, which is it?

She shut her eyes tight, let her thoughts drift out of mind, deafened her ears to all save the sounds of her own body, packed her every perception inwards... and then... she opened her eyes back up.

The room was different.

Kind of.

It was like a funhouse mirror reflection of the hotel room she remembered. About as milquetoast and austere, similar layout, similar furnishings, yet with a presentation that couldn't be more different.

The room was lit by flickering torchlight, old fashioned gas-fire fair encased in glass housings like something out of the nineteenth's century, yet dressed up as dead ringers for value brand lamps. The freezer was bare and metal, a frosty haze emanating from it, with a few button shaped markings glowing upon its scuffed and scratched surface. What had seemed like a television at first glance was naught but a dressed up portrait, an inky black painting laid upon a glossy canvas, housed in a box bedecked with half-hearted tacky ornamentation.

"Where am I now? A LARP event?"

The thought was a fleeting one. She only ever did a scant few months of LARP after high-school, when she had the free time and inclination to try something like that between her schoolgirl days and the endless drudgery of her airliner career. And the few events she did go to didn't look half this nifty when they were actively trying, which was rare.

The ceiling looked like a cave roof painted white, the walls had a similarly natural pattern, yet, were obviously covered over with cheap wallpaper decorated with nature imagery. Weird nature imagery. Like someone tried drawing a forest from a half remembered secondhand description.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

The closet and bathroom were another matter. Rising out of bed and walking over, both had been obviously cut into rockfaces. The former was a simple sliding door made of an impressively lightweight alabaster glazed clay with a mirrored finish. Pushing it back, it glided in a manner that suggested generous oiling on the top and bottom of the frame it was set in.

Inside the closet, she was happy to spy her shoes... pants... shirt...

Wait... am I...

She didn't waste any time crawling into the snug storage space, closing the door behind her, and getting dressed back up. To her delight, the clothes had been given a deep clean, and whatever nicks, tears or fraying she'd wracked up had been fixed up good as new. It even had a pleasant scent to it. Like soy sauce mixed with vinegar that had been soaking in pure sugar for a good long time.

Fully clothed, she slid the door back, and went towards the bathroom, which was a more traditional hinged doorframe, albeit one of pure steel. Twisting the nob and pushing it back, she was greeted by a vividly colored tiled washroom, with a shower chamber housed in a black glass frame on one side, a glazed clay sink with a brass faucet on the other, red and blue glass beads set on the switches for hot and cold water... or so she assumed.

Then there was a simple hollowed out alcove set between them, within which sat a spiral staircase, and above which was a sign that read, in plain English - [Privy Chamber]

"Soooo... a toilet... neat..."

She turned away and closed the door behind her, then turned towards the entrance door. Another metal one, though, on closer inspection, it looked and felt like simple pig iron, thick and weighty as a vault door. She turned the lever on the rotund thing and pulled it back.

On the other end was a ladder, set with nails into the stone wall of a spacious enough cylindrical pit hole, a chandeliered lantern dangling high above on the ceiling like an oversized fuzzy star, swaying gently.

She didn't waste any time climbing up it, the cold smoothness of the ladder rungs chill to the touch like a streetlight in the dead of winter. She was amazed that her bare skin didn't freeze to any of them, and made her way up quickly as could be.

She raced back down when she saw something inhuman starting at her from the far side of a cavernous passageway, bright bulbous neon-white eyes drinking in the sight of the airline captain. It took only a few curious steps towards her before she descended back down, having walked close enough to one of the sparse lantern-lights to make out its rugged gray hide and elongated proportions. Not that it was skinny, far from it, despite its height and length of limbs, its body proportions were thick with muscle, thicker than any spot on her body, and probably thicker than Collin's, though he wasn't there to compare. Its grasping hands had four fingers and an oversized thumb, though, the last finger on the other side, along with the middle finger, were each thick to the point of resembling extra thumbs. Not to mention they more resembled clawed talons than finger, ending in thick pick-shaped spikes.

The moment she got back down she locked the door and waited. Keeping her ears perked every second of it. Till she heard Collin or anyone else, she contended to keep listening for the scrambling thunks of feet, content to try finding a snack to eat in the meanwhile, even if she wasn't so hungry anymore.

Walking over to the coffee-maker, the contraption itself was austere, and affixed to the wall bordering the shelf-desk-drawer-whatever it, the faux TV, and the freezer were all set inside. It had a simplistic clockwork time dial with a rotary control mechanism, and a little integrated drawer within which small bags of ground herbs could be found. Taking one at random and smelling it, the aroma was a dead ringer for coffee, with a bit of extra spice to it. She shrugged, unlatched a small hatch at the top of the contraption, stuffed it in, latched it shut again, pulled down on what she assumed was some sort of 'priming' lever, and set the time to two minutes and fifty seconds - her go-to input time whenever preparation directs were lacking for her latest snack of choice.

While that was boiling off, she wandered back over to the fridge, knelt down, and gave it a look-see. The glowing blue symbols were simple enough to read: an power button, a snowflake, a flame, a door-nob, and four letters stacked together in the left-hand corner...

"O...I...V....X... Roman Numerals?"

She shrugged and hit the luminescent door-nob shape. There wasn't any clicking feeling, but it went from cold to warm after a hot second of touching it, the light around it flickering white, then returning to the cool blue that matched the other symbols. The fridge door went slack, and she flung it open without hassle.

The inside was lit up by big glowing snowflake shaped lights, one plastered to the walls and roof of the frigid container. As far as food offerings went, there was some frozen fish slices, some mushrooms set in a thin metal tray, a few hand painted metal beverage cans and, of all things, popcorn. Or something that looked like popcorn, caramel glazed salted popcorn at that. All bunched in a thin, wide metal pot that took up the middle of the three shelfed areas of the fridge.

She took out the pot carefully. It wasn't cold though. Just... lukewarm. Which wasn't nearly the weirdest thing she'd come across these last few days.

Closing the door, she slunk back over to her bed and laid down in the warm, woolen sheets, popping the scrumptious snacks into her mouth one by one. While the outside was about what she expected, the inside had a neat to it, along with a texture like crisped meat that'd been packed with rich buttery juices.

Regardless of however long she'd need to wait for Collin to pop in, at least she had something to-

A sound like thunder almost gave her a heart attack, half of the popcorn flying from the pot and all across the room. The painting, which had been pitch black, had been segmented by webbed white lines of power, which rippled and churned the oily black texture set within the frame. the darkness retreated behind the paneling, and those luminescent cracks of light briefly turned into dazzling fractal rainbows as it invaded and overtook the space the darkness had fled from, before hazily blurring together into a portrait of... Collin.

One that moved, the heavy set oil colors of the picture screen moving in thick patches, like magnetic sand being manipulated by an unseen magnet. Though, the texture and clumping fluidity was that of paint through and through.

"Clarice? You're awake?"

The frame vibrated as he spoke, his words coming across loud and clear.

"Yeah... I'm going to need to know what's going on. Right now."

"I thought as much. Look, I'm still figuring things out myself, so I'll explain it all when I get back. Just stay in the guest room and don't cause a scene. I'll be down in a few hours tops."

His picture froze in place after that, no more words reverberating off of the pseudo-T.V.

Clarice would've scratched her head at this latest development.. but she was much too burnt out on inexplicable surprises by now, so she resolved to pick up the popcorn, grab her cup of coffee, and see if there was a remote or something she could use to channel surf.