The doorway had fangs. That was the first thing to be noticed when the section of the building’s smooth, greenish wall framed by yellow paint slid up into itself, revealing the entrance hall.
While the six people moved through the doorway, a hole in the side of the ‘ROOMS FOR RENT’ sign next to the doorway dilated and a sniffing noise could be heard issuing from it. Mark kept his distance from both the hole in the sign and the door’s teeth, discomfort plastered on his face. Quet, on the other hand, stared at the features in fascination while the two pulled a half-conscious Omet inside.
At the front of the room, a monster which the group initially mistook for a bundle of straw sat behind a reception desk. Behind them, two brown sofas made from… something smooth stood ten feet apart. And in the far wall, a fireplace crackled with calming purple flame. Two staircases on the left and right walls crept up to a surrounding balcony with numbered doors leading to a dozen or so different rooms.
The receptionist’s dozens of spindly, segmented legs unfolded and they perked up when they saw Salamin come in with the other five. “Ah, you’re back…” They studied the Primoi. “...Er, are those the Primoi I heard were causing a fuss a few blocks down?”
Quet waved. “The very same.”
“I just brought them here,” said Salamin, “since we’re familiar. They’re paying for rooms.”
“Mm-hmm… And I assume you’ve chosen my establishment in particular since you wish to avoid further trouble with the new person in charge?”
Mark nodded. “Just for the night. We don’t plan on staying here long.”
“Alright then. Ninety slivers for all five of you, if it’s just one night, and if you double up. One hundred fifty if you want the additional services this building provides.”
Waia dumped Horan on the couch and removed her backpack from his shoulders. “Hundred fifty, thanks. Also, do you accept solid gold as payment?”
The receptionist paused for a moment. “I assume you’re referring to unminted gold? Not just the gold in slivers?”
“Twenty-four carat.”
The receptionist tapped twice on a corner of their desk using one of their thin, spider-like arms. “Just one, thank you.” A hole opened up where they had tapped, and with a groaning “Blehh…”, what looked disturbingly similar to a human tongue reached out, with a single thin, ridged coin perched atop the appendage.
The receptionist unfolded two more spindly limbs, grabbed the coin, weighed it for a moment, and dropped it back in the hole, which promptly closed up. They turned back to Waia. “Fifty grams should do it.”
Waia nodded. “Got a cup or something?”
“What?”
-
Three rooms had been doled out once Waia had provided payment, in the same fashion as back in Hawaii. Salamin had retreated to one of the rooms rented out by her and her crew, and the other five followed suit.
Mark cleaned the scratches and cuts he had endured during the fight with Salazar in the en suite bathroom, while trying not to think about how the plumbing worked if the building was alive. He heard Horan groan as he slowly became lucid on the bed he had been laid on.
Mark emerged from the bathroom to see Horan sitting up on the bed, taking his shoes off and setting them down on the floor. “Really? You didn’t even take my shoes off? That’s just unsanitary.”
Mark sat down on the bed opposite Horan’s. “Good, you’re thinking clearly.”
Horan removed his jacket, placed it on the bedside table and buried his face in the pillow. “Clear enough.”
“Great, then you can answer my question: What was that?”
Horan sighed and lifted his face from the pillow. “What, me taking off my jacket? It can crease if I wear it 24/7.”
“No, I’m talking about how you passed out during the fight even though nobody even touched you. You may find it hard to believe, but that worries me.”
Horan shrugged. “Yup. Amped a little too much for too long. Turns out, I couldn’t handle it. We’ve established that I can barely do anything since Thel, don’t act like this is news.”
“Yeah, we do know that you can’t even come close to what you managed while Thel was around. So why did you try?”
“...Because we were in a life-or-death situation? I was pushing myself because if I didn’t, we’d be at a disadvantage. You’re the pragmatic one, you should know how this-”
Mark raised a finger. “Don’t talk to me like that. You know you could’ve just paced yourself a little, you’ve had plenty of time to get comfortable over the last few months, and you were fine with the monsters back in Hawaii. What made today any different? You’re smarter than this.”
Horan was getting unnerved by Mark’s refusal to raise his voice. “I don’t see why this is a problem, dude. We won, didn’t we? We’re all alive and well.”
“Oh, sure, act like it’s all fine now!” Mark dragged his hand down his face. “You survived this time, so you’ll obviously be fine when you burst an artery trying to get off the ground when we deal with Yang! Things go wrong, Horan! We try to play things safe because we don’t get to pick our bad days, and you can’t just pretend like you’ll never get unlucky!”
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Horan threw his hands up. “Okay, okay, I get it! Play it safe!”
“And why do we play it safe?”
“Because being alive is pretty fun.”
“...Close enough.” Mark got back up. “I’m gonna go see if we can go now, not doing anything is making me anxious.”
Horan took his eyepatch off and put it on his bedside table. “Dude, seriously? We all almost died, you can’t just move on after five minutes! You were just talking about pacing yourself.”
“When I talked about pacing, I was not referring to twiddling your thumbs and wasting what little time we have.” Mark turned to see Horan’s eyepatch on the table. “Oh, you are not taking a nap.”
Horan folded his arms across his chest. “Ask the others. They’ll back me up, we can’t just jump from place to place after going through something like that. Omet’s barely conscious, Quet looks like death warmed up, and Waia… Actually, Waia’s pretty much fine. But that’s two out of three, dude.”
Mark groaned. “Fine. I’ll let you have a break. But just for an hour, that’s already too much. But remember what I told you. We crossed a line to beat Thel, and we’re lucky to have both come back across. If you keep crossing it just because you feel like it, you’ll regret it someday.”
Mark closed the door behind him. Horan watched the door for a few seconds. His hand came up to touch his eye socket, and he leaned back into the pillow. “Because I feel like it…”
-
The steadily increasing sensory clarity that came with Omet’s consciousness returning was actually quite pleasant. They could get introduced to the room they were in one thing at a time, and they had plenty of time to appreciate the splitting headache that seemed to be the one thing that hadn’t been dulled by them being knocked out cold. Thankfully, the more the world around them came back, the more there was to focus on besides the pain. Of course, then Mark showed up.
The squeaking of the door handle startled Quet, who fell out of her bed with a loud whump. Both noises served only to heighten Omet’s headache.
Mark looked at Quet, who was trying to untangle herself from the blanket she had gotten twisted up in, then at Omet, who was pulling their face deeper into their pillow. “Uh, sorry if I walked in on something. Horan’s being whiny about it, so we’re only leaving for the under-place in an hour. Which is already too long of a wait, so you should all be grateful that I’m conceding this.”
Quet stopped trying to pull the blanket off. Partially because her efforts only made the situation worse, partly because she had a thought. “We know we can pay for stuff with blood, though. Why do we need to hitch a ride with Salamin specifically? We could just hire somebody.”
Mark froze in place. Quet could see the stupid, stupid, stupid running through his head, and she sucked at reading expressions. After a moment, he regained what little composure he had. “Okay, two hours. Or less.” He immediately closed the door.
Quet finally slid from the blanket and placed it back on the bed. “Two hours is too much. Hey, Omet, you good enough to be on your feet and doing stuff in two hours?”
Omet’s “Hope so” was barely audible through the pillow.
“Oh, hey, you’re actually up. I thought I was just gonna end up talking to myself as part of my constant spiral into sleep-deprived madness.”
“Normal things.”
“Normal things indeed.” Quet reached over and put a glyph on Omet’s back. “The lattice thing doesn’t extend to this building, but maybe I can just placebo effect you into being less grievously injured.”
Omet waited for a moment. “Nope. Head still feels like it’ll crack down the middle if I cough too hard.”
Quet sighed. “The benefits of conventional first aid, I guess.”
“Hey, I just realized something.” Omet raised their head from the pillow, then immediately set it back down. “No, no, way too bright. Mark said two hours until something. I don’t think I was awake for a whole bunch of stuff, bring me up to speed.”
“Oh, right, yeah. Man, you seriously took a beating back there. You were out for, what? Half an hour?”
Omet groaned. “That’s what getting your face slammed into concrete does. Feel what I’m feeling and you’ll know how much of an understatement that is.”
“Well, first of all, the bad news is that the only thing close to a lead we have is that we might be able to find something useful in the underground criminal black market of this magic monster city.”
“That sounds like the opposite of bad news.”
“Yeah, you would say that.”
“So what’s the good news?”
“There is no good news,” said Quet. “I didn’t say there was. Consider the monster market thing a good-slash-bad twofer, if you want.”
Omet should have seen that coming. “So it’s just that?”
“Yup.”
“And we’re leaving in two hours?”
“Less.”
All this back-and-forth did little to abate Omet’s headache. “Yeah, I know time’s passed since Mark told us, I meant-”
“I know what you meant. What I meant is that even if Salamin isn’t putting any time pressure on us, we’re still on the clock. I know you’re still hurt from our last fight, so maybe we can go outside and find the lattice. Apply a regenerative matrix. But then we’re moving.”
Quet didn’t raise her voice, but Omet still clearly heard the stress behind her words. “Hey, uh… Are you doing okay? You’ve been kinda all over the place all day, I think your lack of sleep is starting to get to you.”
“What do you mean? I slept last night? Okay, I was in Low Battery Mode, but it produces the same result!”
“You can’t just yell ‘hiyah’ in the middle of the night and not expect to wake anybody up.”
Quet cringed. “...Oh. Right, yeah. Hm. Well, uh, in my defense, Mang wanted to learn some stuff about magic, and I didn’t want to be rude, so… y’know…” She sat back down, tapping the side of her head. “...I’ve been subsisting off of two hours of sleep and inordinate quantities of caffeine for the past fifty-five hours.”
Omet sat up and attempted to look her in the eye. She just looked down at her lap in response. Omet sighed. “Okay, sure, I agree with you that we should get going soon. Honestly, I’m pretty much fine now, except for a headache. But this is starting to get to you. I’m worried about the others too, but we can’t do anything if you’re too much of a mess to think straight.”
Quet didn’t look up. “...Hurat would’ve been fine in my shoes.”
Omet’s face fell. “Yeah. Yeah, he’d probably know what to do right now.”
Quet chuckled. “How much do you want to bet that by the time we get here, he’s just got the Green Veil lady just tied up in a corner? Like, he just sees us and goes, ‘Oh, hey guys! Sorry about getting interrupted, back to the party!’”
Omet burst out laughing. “And the Lady’s just got one of those party paper rolly things in their mouth, and it pokes through their veil when they use it!”
“And a little cone hat..!” Quet put her fist in her mouth to stifle any more laughter.
“Yeah, you know what?” Omet got up. “I’m feeling pretty okay now. Wanna head down and see me lose my mind from the vibes?”
Quet grabbed the glyph which has slid off of Omet’s back. “When would I ever not want to? Let’s go get the others, I’m ready.”