It started simply enough. Lynn had simply preemptively asked where the manor's bathroom was, and Strix had answered her.

"Second floor," was the answer. "Second room straight ahead if you need it, turn right if you don't," was the elaboration.

This had struck Lynn as somewhat odd. "How can it be in a different place depending on a factor like that?"

Strix had just shrugged and said, "The second floor is weird like that." And, for a few weeks, Lynn was willing to just brush it off.

Until one day, she stepped through the door straight ahead for no reason other than to see what it would do, and ended up in a mazelike space lined with books in a near-perfect imitation of the library, though this one was static instead of constantly shifting and only had one level.

After returning to the first floor, Lynn had confronted Strix. "How is there a library on the second floor? Why does it need one?"

Strix had shrugged again. "The second floor is weird like that." Then, as an afterthought, "And it doesn't. Need one, I mean." This was enough to satisfy Lynn for another week.

The next time she came to Aleshe Manor, Lynn skipped the library and made a beeline for the second floor. In the first, empty room, she went straight ahead and wound up in an imitation of the hallway, complete with the cup of tea Strix had been drinking when she'd walked in. She turned to the right, thinking, tea shop tea shop tea shop, and when she opened the door, she was in a room resembling an empty tea shop. She picked up a jar of tea from behind the counter and turned right again. The door opened straight onto the staircase leading back to the first floor. That... is one too few rights. Especially since this is the door I entered through.

"Strix." Lynn set the tea jar down on the table in front of Strix, who was sipping tea in a cup identical to the one that had been on the second floor. "Explain how there is an entire tea shop inside your house."

Strix simply glanced at the jar and said, "The second floor is weird like that" again. This was not the answer Lynn was looking for.

"Strix." Lynn looked the other girl in the eye. "Exactly how is the second floor weird?"

Strix sighed. "Just tell me one thing. When you were on the second floor today, did you open a door facing west?" Lynn thought for a moment, then nodded. "What was on the other side?"

"This hallway," Lynn replied. "Or a room with the same furniture, anyway. Your teacup was there and everything."

Strix sighed again. "Well, if the second floor thinks you need to be here, then it's probably because it thinks you need to know what it is."

"You're talking about it like it's alive."

"Eh. Might be." Strix shrugged. "At any rate, the second floor is... I know I just said this, but it's weird. The door to the east always opens onto the northeast staircase, and the door to the south always opens onto the southwest staircase. That's... kind of normal, I guess. Then there are the other two doors."

"The doors that change every time," Lynn guessed, and Strix nodded.

"The door to the north is pretty straightforward. It just shows you what you want. You can influence it by thinking really hard about something. But the door to the west... it shows you what you need. And sometimes, what you think you need is completely different from what you actually need. Also, it's cryptic sometimes. Like really cryptic. You probably got that just now, though, from the whole 'showing-you-the-hall-when-you-needed-to-talk-to-me' bit."

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

That... made sense. It was a strange sort of sense, but it did align with what Lynn had seen of the second floor. "What should I do with this?" she asked, gesturing to the tea jar.

"Just leave it, I'll put it away later. Food from the second floor is sometimes poisoned, but I'll find a use for it. Maybe I can host a tea party or something."

And that was enough for another week. Lynn spent the rest of her visit exploring the library and talking to a ghost who'd introduced themself as 'Number Four,' the mystery of the second floor set aside for the time being.

The week after that, however, was time to experiment.

Lynn had spent her time since the last visit writing down things to ask Strix about the second floor, along with things she could do to test the limits of its powers. Strix didn't say a word as she breezed up the staircase, notebook out and ready to mess with some magical doors.

The first test was simple: Open all the doors. This hit a snag almost immediately, as the door on her left in the first room refused to open until she shut the door she'd entered through.

Heading north or west produced a similar result- she couldn't go more than one room in either direction until she'd closed the door behind her. Oddly enough, the western and northern rooms were empty every time, identical to the first room. Was it because all she wanted- and, perhaps, needed- was to figure out how the doors worked? Another peculiar quirk of the doors- if she were in the northern room out of two, the door leading to the northeast stairs wouldn't open. The same went for the eastern room and the door to the southwest stairs. It was as if there was a limit to how far the chain of rooms could extend, but how that limit worked, Lynn had no idea.

Next. Just how far could the space behind the doors be stretched? Could it mimic an outside area? A space the size of a football stadium? Could it create living creatures, or things that couldn't exist?

Lynn fixed an image in her mind as she reached for the northern doorknob. A twisted triangle shape, each side wrapping around in a manner that rendered it impossible to construct in three dimensions. She pulled the door open...

...and found a nearly empty room, one wall taken up by a painting of the shape she had pictured. That's a 'no' on impossible objects, then, she thought as she marked it down in her notebook. Kind of disappointing, really. It'd be cool to see what such a shape really looked like.

Another disappointment came with testing the size limit of the rooms. Sure, it was big, but nothing like Lynn had hoped. My elementary school gym was bigger than this.

Oddly enough, the rooms could mimic the outside world. Sure, there were still four walls and a ceiling, but there was a painted sun just as bright as the real one, and the blades of grass growing out of the floor certainly seemed real enough. They didn't seem able to create living animals, though- when Lynn tried asking the north door for a bird, all she found was a realistic plushie.

Lynn checked her notebook after pocketing the stuffed cardinal. Everything on her list was crossed off, now. There was only one thing left to do.

"Hey, Strix!" Strix looked up as Lynn came barging down the stairs and into the hall. "Got some questions for you."

"All right, go ahead." Strix set her tea down. "Whaddya got?"

"First-" Lynn checked her notes- "How many rooms are there? Is it just one? Two? Three? An infinite number?"

"Hmm." Strix thought for a moment. "I'm not entirely sure, but when I looked at the floor plan, it said there were four, in two rows of two." Ah. That would explain why the doors refused to open.

"How does it know what you need?" Lynn asked as she marked down Strix's answer. "Is it alive? Is there a ghost running the second floor and controlling the rooms, like the library's fourth ghost?"

Strix shrugged. "Dunno. If there's a ghost I've never seen it, if the house is alive I'm not sure how to test for that. I'd ask that to ghost number five if I were you. Er, if I caught him in a good mood, that is."

Lynn nodded and made a note to ask the next time she ran into the ghost in charge of keeping track of the library's vast number of books. "One more question. Do the rooms actually create new spaces whenever you walk through a door, or do they just access one of an infinite number of different preexisting rooms?"

Strix opened her mouth to answer. Then she shut it. Then she opened it again, but the only thing that came out was a laugh. "Wow. That is... that is a very good question. I don't know what to say about that. Ask number five, maybe? And, um, if he tells you, mind passing it on?" Lynn agreed, and made the trek down the mountain again, promising to find her answers when she returned the next week.

(She did, in fact, ask the fifth library ghost the next time she saw him. His only response was to hand her a list of book titles and leave as quickly as possible. The other ghosts swear he was laughing afterwards, but he denies it whenever it's brought up.)