I lost track of the twists and turns, it seemed like I’d wandered into a more remote corner of the estate, but what did I know? Why the hell was it so much larger on the inside? I instantly decided that I did not like architectural tricks.

We moved past a door that started rattling and shaking, emitting from the other side was the sound of wood being chipped and shattered.

I moved away from it, “What the fuck is that?”

“That’s… uhh, ‘Pookie’.”

My eyes widened, no metaphor was necessary, it literally sounded like an angry hippo was on the other side.

“Hey Pookie, relax dude.”

I inched closer to the door, “Not a fucking chance, bro.”

Something, made of metal and wood, cracked on the other side.

I backed away from the door and pulled Vivi away while doing so. She clutched onto my arm in response, a bit too friendly-like. The sounds faded as we made another turn.

“What did he say?”

“Uh, don’t worry about it, but also definitely don’t go in there.”

“I do feel bad about Pookie sometimes, but no one wants to risk going in there.”

“You're just going to starve him out?”

She nodded, a bit sad about it, “Nothing else to be done.”

I thought for a second then shrugged, sucks to suck. We took another turn.

“This place is way bigger than it looks on the outside.”

She laughed, “Weird, isn’t it? Apparently it’s some ancient architectural technique.”

I legitimately wasn’t making a joke about it, it was extremely strange and deeply unsettling. Her explanation didn’t do much to convince me either. What architectural technique warped space? Though, thinking about it, maybe it was some da vinci-type of thing. That guy was crazy. Good crazy. Probably. Was he in heaven? Or was he wandering the streets of some Italian city as a crazy-zombie-inventor? If zombies were smart… did they retain specific memories?

Damn, more importantly, Europe probably had all the good armor and swords. I was dealing with scraps here.

“Are yo- is that Ron down there?” A figure quickly crossed a hallway intersection far in front of us.

She shook her head, “I think it was Jon.”

A few more turns and we arrived, she unlocked the door then gave me the key.

“Are you rea-”

“Where’s the second key?”

She smoothly transitioned, “Guilty! I was thinking of sneaking in later.” She seemed… different. Less shy than the daytime. It was incredibly jarring and uncomfortable.

My patience and a heavy flat stare got her to hand over the second key. After you get the assigned mystery, it’s not supposed to be the first person who does something sketchy, is it? Or was it supposed to be the first person who does something like that, in some sort of basic foreshadowing? Ugh, I always liked the idea of mystery novels, but honestly, I just sat while Duck watched them while playing some crappy game on my phone.

That neglect was really paying off now. Maybe I picked up some of it through osmosis. What were we talking about again? Better go with the safe response.

“No thanks-”

“Let me show you the room.”

I started to protest, but she was already inside. With a sigh, I followed.

She talked about some crap about each part of the room, I ignored it as long as possible.

“Any, uh, chance you can speed this along?”

She was giving exhaustive detail and giving me some looks that made me feel like a piece of meat. Wasn’t she supposed to be the shy and quiet one? Her hungry look made my skin crawl.

“What’s your Class?”

“It’s embarrassing.”

I shrugged. Plenty of time to ask questions late-

“Here’s the bath…”

Holy. Shit.

Amazing. It’s not that I never been in a bath like this, I’d never even known that bathrooms like this even existed. It was… beautiful. My eyes went to the hot-tub sized bathtub in the center, obviously that drew the eye. Huge water spouts fed into it and I thought I spied jets as well. The shower was its own room… “Where’s the showerhead?”

“The entire ceiling.”

“Sweet fuck.”

She giggled, a more alluring sound than her daytime giggle, I felt a response even. You know, a response, just from the giggle.

“Want me to turn it on for you?”

I almost nodded before the potential meaning sunk in and I shook my head negatively as I looked at the dry and wet saunas. Maybe I should drag this investigation out. I dropped my bag in the middle of the bathroom as I started to strip my shirt and fiddle with the shower faucet. It turned on and water started to come out.

Free wine, a protection shield guarding the estate, knightley gear, a murder mystery, and top it off with a full personal spa in my bathroom? Could this day get any better? I mean, besides the murdering animals, though that was kind of a plus, the llama murder, and the general weird vibe of this place. Besides that it was almost… heaven? I giggled at the disapproving feeling that swept over me from on high. Don’t read my thoughts if you don’t want to be disappointed, Gab.

I took off the leather jacket and then my shirt before I knew what I was doing.

“Nice tats.”

Oh. She was still here? I blinked and turned around to face her. She was giving me a seductive look that seemed… enticing. She did look pretty sexy, if I was being honest. I mean… I guess Duck was in heaven. That really sent my head for a loop. Guilt, attraction, stress-relief…

“Wait, what did you say?”

“I like your tattoos.”

“I don’t-”

I caught myself in the mirror, it wasn’t hard to do, the thing was massive and spanned from the floor to the ceiling over the opposite wall. I wasn’t really able to take in the impressive stature of the mirror, it was far from the thing I was focusing on.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Back From the Brink.” It was emblazoned in a clean half-print half-cursive font following the line of my collarbone, just underneath it. I rubbed it, then rubbed it harder and again. No.

Then, I saw another. I pulled up my forearms, on the back of my right forearm was ‘Right Lady’. I checked the other, ‘Wrong Time’.

“You have more on your back, were you drunk or something when you got those? I have some party favors if you’re not quite ready to sleep. Helps take the edge off, you know, the apocalypse.” She waved her hands around.

I blinked a few times as I heard her words but, for the life of me, couldn’t understand a single one of them. I ignored her protests as I pushed her from the bathroom and out of the entire suite as I locked the door behind her. I was having a bit of a mental health crisis to deal with and didn’t have time for edging, sexually-charged flirting. I returned and locked the bathroom door too because I needed some physical security if I wasn’t going to have any mental security.

I spun to look at my back… Oh… Oh no. It was… Oh God no. Huge. It was huge.

“What the fuck Gabby!”

I didn’t have anything against people who had tattoos, I just didn’t like them and didn’t have them. Neither had Duck. Now, I was covered with the damned things!

In big, bold, capital letters across my upper back, ‘FORTUNATE SON’. The center of the ‘O’ in ‘Son’ framed the branch wound which had pretty much healed by this point, though it looked like it would leave a fairly noticeable scar. Well, good thing I had non-consensual ink to help accent that!

The spinning led me to ‘Contact!’ which ran lengthwise down my right tricep.

I was stunned and couldn’t help but keep staring at them, twisting myself around to get new angles. There… was another. It was worse.

‘Friends in Low Places’, it was on my lower back, like WAY lower back. I breathed in and out. Don’t give him the satisfaction. Don’t give that angelic prick the satisfaction. Don’t do it. Just breathe. Just breathe and don’t think about “how that angelic archprick dickless-wonder just fucking tatted me!”

Shit. I heard the barest tinkle of angelic, ethereal laughter. I narrowed my eyes, it was like he was too busy to even properly mock me. That motherfucker. There was no fucking way I would die until I got to punch him in the face. Non-fucking-negotiable. I’d flay and salt him!

A burning hit me above my eyebrow. Oh no. Above my right eyebrow was… ‘Threat’. Oh God. Face tats weren’t out of the question. Nightmare, this was a nightmare. Duck was going to think I joined some gang.

“Displ-”

No. No no no. I didn’t care. I just wanted one-fucking-day.

The steam was starting to fill the room so I stripped the rest of the way in a daze and marched over to the shower. It’s earthly divinity was only slightly spoiled by the fact that I had a scalding rainforest dropping down on me. That lasted all of 3 seconds before I turned it back to ‘kinda hot’. Duck liked the skin-melting, 5th circle of hell, heat.

I grinned as an often repeated joke and memory popped through the semi-fugue state and played in my head, “You like it that hot because you miss home?” The dichotomy of it, considering that she was in heaven, made me laugh, then laugh some more.

I turned up the heat and refused to take in the tattoos more than my immediate shock demanded of me. To my credit, I was fighting off this mental-health-crisis admirably through my sheer, stubborn refusal to process it in the slightest.

I moved to fill the tub with cold water and dove in. After a bit I turned up the heat and settled into a nice, body-temperature-matching, bubble bath. There was absolutely no way I would be solving the mystery in a single day. Even if I caught the Usurper right… now!

Damn. Well it was worth a shot. I was definitely going to keep this thing going on as long as possible. I had a personal spa and that was what I was going to focus on. Something in my head niggled at that but I was valiantly ignoring my mental state.

I was… just not going to think about it. Any of it. There is only the bath. Only the bath exists. There is nothing, but the bath. Bath is All. I am One with the Bath.

Okay, maybe just a bit to head off what the fuck was going on, “Disable Automatic Bonus Feat… Application?” Decent start, but I also wasn’t properly warmed up with the guessing game.

“Disable Bonus Feat Automatic Granting… system.” That one was just plain bad.

“Disable Automatically Granted Bonus Feats.” Oh, hell yeah, that was a good one.

Toggle for Automatically Granted Bonus Feats can not be disabled once Bonus Feats have been ‘automatically fucking enabled’ except by Administrator Intervention.

Bonus Feat Granted: My Body was a Temple.

I felt the pain stretch across my underboob. I don’t know if that was a spot that guys technically had… but, just like that, my underboob had a new one. Sighing, I inquired without first opening up my Status.

My Body was a Temple: good thing you left your skin nice and clean for all these Bonus Feats, eh? You don’t need to thank me.

My rage condensed and continued to do so until it threatened to collapse in on itself. A series of mind-twisting thoughts beyond words become a singular sense of rage, while it tittered on the brink of supernova and forming a black hole fueled by hate, I shoved its crystallized, gravity-bending form somewhere down, into a deep and dark place inside me before the relaxing water could leech the anger out of me with its perfect temperature luxuriousness.

I sat there for a while, I couldn’t tell you how long. My mind was raw and blank and I didn’t want to start thinking and upset the balance. Any sort of positive afterglow of the Penitent System was well washed away and the reality of life being irreparably changed hit me and hit me hard.

Duck was gone, safe hopefully, and I was here. Alone. I splashed some water in my face. I really just needed… some time. To process the crushing weight of what the fuck I am supposed to do? Should I go back to Ontiveros? Staying here as long as possible was nice and all… but it also had a ton of negatives. The freakshow that this place is, the fact that my parents were out there.

Ugh. I kind of already knew that my parents were… Well, ‘not here’ and I wasn’t talking about Rapture either. They weren’t believers, though technically my Mom had me Baptized but it hadn’t gone any further than that.

It’d be incredibly shitty to go back to Ontiveros now, especially after how soon I had just been there. Just the thought of that shame was enough for the pre-guilt to settle in at the thought of abandoning my search for my parents so soon after kinda-sorta-committing to it. The shame made it a potent cocktail aimed directly at my pride. Well that’d be fine, I’d let pride itself kill me rather than go back to Ontiveros a day after departing. I’d never be able to live it down or, more importantly, live with myself.

I really just want to spend a few days not thinking about it all.

You know what? That’s what I needed. A mental health day was what I really REALLY needed. Ignore the fact that my skin was… modified and I was stuck in this shit, alone. Maybe I’d relax for a couple of days and drink some wine while I casually solved a murder mystery.

That sounded pretty alright. I was still goal oriented, I wasn’t just distracting myself, I had a plan and something to do. I mean, I wasn’t procrastinating, definitely wasn’t. This winery was right down the road from Ontiveros and if there was suspicious stuff happening this close to my apocalypse fallback town, it’d probably be smart to solve it now before it got out of control.

The fact that there was a 5-star bath was just… an extraneous perk. A perk of the job. This all was making perfect sense.

Really though, I need a mental health day… a mental health week. A ‘Mental Health Week’. A week where’d I be able to ignore all of this Penitent bullshit and solve a murder mystery while luxuriating on a super swank winery. Yeah, that sounds pretty damn good.

New Order of Operations: Mental Health Week, Solve the murder, make sure there’s no problems that’d get back to Ontiveros… then I’d get right back into it… later. Like soon later, not, ya know, like too later. Maybe that’d work better, since having a dedicated Mental Health Day was already seeming impossible, then I’d spread the mental health period to an entire week in bursts. Fuck yeah, I’m solving the world here.

Now with an Order of Ops in place, I waved it all away and sunk beneath the water and sat there for a long time, still seething mildly despite the mood lift my Order of Ops had just given me. I took a breath and bubbled it out through my nose, then rose to take a new one.

The water rose with my mouth and was covering it? I tried to wipe it away from my face and then my nose but it wouldn’t leave. Apparently opening my mouth was my next best idea and, still, no air came in. Water did though.

I choked, splashed back in then twisted myself out of the tub. I slipped then tripped and hit the linoleum hard before getting to my knees to study the room. I had left the shower running and a haze of hot mist was still choking the air. Seeing was becoming steadily more difficult with the incredible feeling of drowning on dry land, but I managed to whirl around and desperately whirl in a circle looking for something. Anything.

My throat seized and lungs burned as more water filled them. This wasn’t normal. There was someone… here. But not. Another reflexive cough sent even more water to rush in deep. More muffled coughs racked me as I spun to try and see who was doing this. Nothing.

Nothing, I couldn’t see shit and the black circle on the edge of my vision was closing in. The only thing that didn’t look hazy and gray was a jarring red dot that stuck out on my minimap right as my eyes passed by the bathroom door.

I moved and slipped toward it as the water continued to pour down my throat. I grasped my hand around the hilt of my Will Sword and stabbed it through the wood of the door. Desperate, I pushed too much Will through it and on impact it burst apart a huge chunk in the center of it as the wood-shrapnel explosion filled the other side of the door.

I heard a yelp and followed it up with a force wave that slammed outward and blew the rest of the broken door off its hinges. I felt my Fortitude drop precipitously, but that was balanced by the fact that whatever had been happening with the water had been disrupted.

My lungs immediately started clearing itself up with puking and hacking. All I could make out were footsteps clacking away from my room as I continued puking up water before dragging myself back up to my knees and through the front door of my room. Damn, drained too much Fortitude, not actively drowning was about the most effort I could manage.

I’d catch the bastard. But by the time I pulled myself through the door and around it, all I could hear was a click click click of retreating steps. I coughed out more water and sucked a thin breath before retching again.

What the fuck! Can’t I catch a fucking break here?

Maybe I would try and solve this one quickly but I was NOT going to cancel my Mental Health Week. That is still a thing and it is still first on the Order of Operations.