Isabel returned to find them quietly discussing who should be doing housework and who should be doing laundry.

“Very good,” she told them approvingly. “Who's helping in the kitchen?”

“I am,” Erica said meekly, and Des echoed it.

“Then gather up those dishes. Go out the door and follow the path straight ahead, you'll reach the kitchen door. You can start on the dishes until the cook comes in. At that point, you will do whatever he tells you. Understand?”

Biting her lip, Erica nodded silently; she and Des obeyed.

“Housework?”

JC had of course nominated himself for that, since he'd worked for a couple of years doing housekeeping at a motel, along with various janitorial-type jobs. That left Suzi and Theo, one to be with JC, one to start on laundry.

“Us,” Suzi said, gesturing at JC.

“Go wait inside. There's a broom closet just inside the kitchen door, you can start sweeping everywhere you can reach. I'll be along in a few minutes with more instructions.”

Eyes low, JC did as directed, Suzi only half a stride behind.

The brighter light outside made both blink in discomfort.

“I...” Suzi began, and whimpered softly; JC grabbed her hand, and felt her squeeze it tightly as tears gathered in those rosy eyes highighted with shades of pink and aquamarine and gold. After a few heartbeats, she relaxed, but didn't resist the quick hug of reassurance he gave her. Isabel could have warned them!

Technically, there was blue sky above, unmarred by clouds, and a glowing light source a short distance above the horizon cast long shadows, but it didn't look quite like the sun. The pale golden hue seemed almost right for morning, and the size appeared to be approximately right, but something in the back of JC's mind refused to believe that that was the same sun under which he'd spent his entire life.

Of course, if they weren't part of the normal universe anymore, all bets were off as far as basic physics, probably. One would want gravity and some sort of day-night cycle, something to keep the considerable greenery visible not far away healthy, but an awful lot they took for granted would be optional.

From here, in any given direction other than directly towards the house, they were surrounded by fairly flat grassy ground with smallish trees in clusters or standing alone, and what might be beds of plants scattered between them. What lay beyond that, if anything, was lost to distance—but that certainly suggested that this was not a small space.

The house itself was large, three full storeys, and clad in vertical siding of some kind in a dull desaturated brown that really failed to be anything at all. Where there was nothing specific JC could point to, the proportions and roof angles and placement of the windows just looked somehow awkward and unappealing, as though thrown together by an amateur architect.

Outside the door, JC pointed out a wooden stand up to two parallel clotheslines.

They caught up with Erica and Des in the kitchen, and found them attempting to organize a virtual mountain of dirty dishes. Suzi laid a hand on Erica's arm to get her attention, touched her collar and then her lips with the other hand, and then shook her head warningly. Erica gave her a rueful look along with a nod, and Des winced.

Sadistic bitch. Doesn't like causing pain, my ass.

The broom closet was a substantial one; JC handed Suzi a broom and dustpan, took one of each himself, and tore two flimsy plastic bags off the roll, giving each a cursory check that the bottom was sealed properly—he'd had a day badly ruined by a bag with a small defect in the seam, and they didn't need that right now.

Working around these nails was definitely going to take some getting used to; they kept wanting to snag on things. From what he could tell, the trio born female weren't having a much easier time with them, all normally tending to keep theirs short.

Not far from the broom closet was an open doorway that led to what he thought was a laundry room, but it was a strange one—no familiar appliances, just stone sinks, two of them round with washer-like agitators in the centre. There were piles of laundry on the faded linoleum floor.

There was one other exit from the kitchen, a fairly wide one with double swinging louvred doors across it. JC glanced at Suzi, made a back and forth sweeping gesture at the linoleum kitchen floor and waited for her nod, and ventured past the swinging doors. Since they moved aside easily at his touch, what was beyond was somewhere they could reach, and therefore it needed to be swept in order to keep Isabel happy.

A broad bare hallway offered access to rooms, mostly to the right, with a single doorway and a closet to the left before a shallow wide flight of stairs upwards doubled back towards them. The floors were all bare parquet wood, in tolerable condition without cracking or splitting that JC could readily see, but lacking any real lustre. There wasn't a carpet or rug or runner in sight, but then, the blandly-painted walls lacked anything decorative on them either, not so much as a cheap poster or a photograph.

The door on the left was a half-bath tucked under the stairs, and the closet held, strangely, outerwear like jackets and boots, along with a variety of other household odds and ends not quickly identifiable, much of it in cardboard boxes.

The first door on the right led to a dining room with a long formal table of what JC thought was solid wood, maybe maple, warm and light with subtle ring markings. Three of the matching chairs were more elaborate than the rest, with arms and higher backs: the ones at either end and one immediately to the right of one of those. JC counted five simpler chairs along the sides, making eight in all. Under other circumstances, wonderful for tabletop gaming.

The second was a formal sitting room with elaborate, antique-looking furnishings, although devoid of knicknacks or anything that wasn't strictly utilitarian.

The third and last door on the right went to a room full of bookshelves, that was obvious even from the doorway, along with a glimpse of a heavy-looking long table with chairs around it.

At the end of the hall was a wooden outer door with a painted-glass window in it, and two tall painted-glass windows flanking it from floor to ceiling. Peeking through a clear panel, JC saw more outdoor greenery on the other side, suggesting that this was a front door.

Between them, he and Suzi swept all of the rooms, and paused to consider the stairs. They traded glances, and Suzi spread her hands and started up them. They could reach it, so it must count as an area to clean. At the top, she started working her way back down, sweeping each.

JC went past her to investigate the hall beyond.

Near the stairs was a closet full of cleaning supplies on a lower shelf and, above that, considerable empty space that held a few forlorn towels and sheets; next to that was another flight of stairs upwards. Six closed doors, three on each side, and at the far end a casual kind of living room. There was an old-school but large TV sharing a metal stand with a DVD player, three large comfortable chairs and two couches and a loveseat, a coffee table, a set of shelves on which he saw, at a glance, a couple of decks of cards, a chess board, a Risk game, and a Jenga game. A bulletin board had sheets of paper tacked all over it.

It had the same kind of feel to it as every staff lounge he'd ever been in.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Did that mean the doors along this hall were living quarters for whoever used this lounge? Because he certainly couldn't imagine whoever was in charge using this room. Who else was inside this little reality bubble? Isabel had mentioned one in the kitchen and one on the grounds, but unless most of these were empty, there were parties unaccounted for.

He swept up in this room, then met Suzi in the hall, and gestured for her to go to the far end and look.

Nervously, he tried one of the doors.

It opened, admitting him to what looked a lot like a dorm room: a twin bed, a wardrobe built into the wall with storage space above it, a locked roll-top desk with a new-looking ergonomic chair in front of it, a filing cabinet set into the lower part of a well-filled bookcase. There were bathroom fixtures, including a shower stall, separated from the rest of the room by an open archway.

Instinctively, he gravitated towards the books.

They were an odd mix of unexplained phenomena, folklore, history, and sciences like geology and biology.

He went back to the hall, beckoned to Suzi, and showed her the room he was in; she nodded understanding, and opened the door to the next.

In the bathroom of the second he found a large basket half-full of dirty clothes—those of a man of some size, jeans and muscle-shirts and flannel shirts mostly, streaked with what looked like soil and grass-stains. There was no filing cabinet, and the books were all on plants and soil and irrigation and similar subjects.

Was that the large man who'd held him on one side while the restraints were put on him, just after he arrived?

Isabel found them there, still on the first pair of rooms.

“Very good,” she told them. “These are the personal rooms of the staff. They've been forced to look after them themselves lately, and they haven't had much time for in-depth cleaning. Strip the beds and take the bedding and the laundry in the baskets to the laundry room off the kitchen. One of your friends is already making a start on what's down there now. The bedding is all the same so you don't need to worry about mixing it up.”

Small mercies, JC thought.

“The clothes you wash and fold and pile in the lounge at the end, they can each take their own from that. Give the bathrooms a good cleaning, make the beds, do whatever dusting is relevant in each room. Got all that?”

JC and Suzi both nodded.

“The ground floor needs dusting and the bathroom needs to be properly cleaned. The floor above this is my suite and Nestor's and Phrixos'. There are doors that won't open for you, those rooms are out of bounds for you at all times. Otherwise do the same up there as on this floor, but get the clothes back to the right rooms. The bedding for our floor is a different size from down here but within the floor it's identical. Clear?”

Again, both nodded.

“Good,” she said briskly. “In-depth housework hasn't been done in some time, so you won't get through it all in one day, but that doesn't mean that wasting time is acceptable.” She left without another word or a backward glance.

Being able to talk would make this a lot simpler to coordinate, JC sighed to himself.

Suzi tapped his arm to get his attention, pointed to him and gestured upwards, pointed to herself and gestured around them.

There was some sense in that—make sure the bosses got priority and were happy. When he nodded, she gave him a quick kiss on one cheek and vanished back into the nearest room. JC went, instead, back to the stairs and up another floor.

The upstairs suites were larger: there was an outer room, basically a sitting room with couch and bookshelves and desk and other things that varied from suite to suite, though two of them were far more carelessly arranged and less decorated than the third; the beds were queens, and the bathrooms had actual antique claw-footed bathtubs instead of just shower stalls. Within each was a door that refused to open.

The view out the window was, overwhelmingly, green, but it varied—and it went on a long way. There seemed to be an intermittent red brick wall of sorts that curved, possibly surrounding the house and a substantial area of ground, though he couldn't see all of it from here to confirm that. But beyond that, the landscape stretched off for a considerable distance, a patchwork of different kind of vegetation, and he was sure he could see light glinting off water.

Much closer, though off to one side, he could see an enormous fountain. From here, he couldn't even begin to estimate the size of the footprint of the bottom basin, which was circular with a red brick wall surrounding it that must be more than wide enough to walk on; the central spire extended upwards at least to the level of the third-floor window JC was at, a spiralled series of graduated shallower basins through which the water spilled.

Just how big was this little private reality?

It probably didn't matter at the moment, since they weren't going to get far from the house.

JC started with the suite nearest the stairs, the one that looked the most comfortable, trying to ignore his reflection in mirrors and any other shiny surface, since they invariably gave him a rather queasy feeling of dissonance. He pulled the basket out from the bathroom, stripped the bed to add the bedding to the basket, and then gathered cleaning supplies from the closet in the hallway so he could tackle the bathroom. Since the clothes in the basket were women's, he figured this was Isabel's suite.

Gloves would have been a nice touch. Isabel hadn't been kidding about the cleaning being a bit touch-and-go for a while. Maybe being not-human meant being not able to catch anything from humans. He rather hoped so. As clumsy and limited as gloves and other protective wear were, they were a whole lot better than nothing at all, when dealing with something like this.

Well, he'd done unpleasant jobs before, and given how much of her life revolved around dogs, he figured Suzi must have a reasonably strong stomach. He liked dogs, but they tended to be messy.

With each trip down bearing a basket of laundry, he was more impressed with the impact Theo was making on the pile that already existed. The kitchen was now under the supervision of a man who was barely tall enough to reach the back of the counters and perceptibly, though not grossly, overweight, in a white short-sleeved shirt and pants; the impression JC had was of impatience and general irritability, though how he could complain about the volume of vegetables Erica was neatly chopping on the large table and how much headway Des was making on the mountains of dirty dishes, JC wasn't sure. But then, he'd had bosses like that, who apparently lived to find fault with others.

JC was quite sure that had been the man on his other side, just after he'd arrived.

Apparently they didn't get a lunch break.

Then again, JC thought he could have eaten but felt no particular need to. Maybe lunch was a human thing.

Strangely, when Isabel came to collect them all and send them back to their own small building under a darkening sky, JC found he didn't feel nearly as tired as he probably should have. No aches from the exertion... not even, he realized abruptly, the little things that accumulated over decades of life and that he was so accustomed to he never thought about them anymore: joints that were a bit stiff these days, muscles that complained of overuse easily, itchy eyes from stirring up dust, a tooth that he'd been procrastinating seeing a dentist about for an increasingly frequent twinge. He didn't even seem to have been sweating much, and despite seven people exerting themselves without showers or deodorant, now gathered in an enclosed space, even JC's heightened sense of smell detected minimal body odour. The precise scent did seem to vary between individuals, which was interesting. And, of course, vision more clear than he'd ever experienced with glasses, with no worries about streaks or fogging.

What had they been turned into?

And, a little voice whispered underneath, was that part of this really so bad? Today would have been exhausting with his own imperfect and very human, if male, body...

Erica and Des had another basket of that bread, along with another kettle of tea; there was a basket of scrubbed carrots and small red tomatoes, and a shallow bowl with cold sliced roast of some kind in it, enough for each to have maybe a couple of slices.

“When you hear the bell, it's time for bed,” Isabel said. “No staying up late. You need sleep to stay healthy, and I want you healthy. And, like this morning, no leftovers.”

Erica held up a hand for patience for a moment, after Isabel left, listening intently.

Once she was sure, she and Des traded glances; Theo looked from one to the other, and began to repeat his trick with the mugs and the tea, while Erica took the dish of meat to the bathroom. Des only shook his head at the perplexed looks from the rest of them.

Obviously something had Erica and Des worried. Well, specifically worried, within the overall bottomless cornucopia of worrisome things.

Zach picked up a loaf of bread, gave Des a questioning look, and got a shrug, so he tore it open and took a bite. The vegetables apparently were also safe, but the tea went down the toilet.

Bread and vegetables finished, meat and tea disposed of, dishes stacked to go back to the kitchen in the morning, they were at a loss for what to do. It was possible, JC thought, that she might have left them able to speak—but he cringed from the idea of inviting an encounter with that pain, and couldn't blame anyone else for being similarly reluctant.

The dimly-lit room with the padded floor no longer had doors lining it. Nor was there bedding of any sort anywhere in their prison. They cleaned up as best they could in the bathroom, none of them comfortable with their own altered bodies or prepared to spend long at it, trying their best to grant each other whatever privacy and modesty the situation allowed. Before the bell sounded, they were already curled up in a chaotic puppy-pile on the floor, taking what comfort they could from the company and the contact.