The Cold Storage ended up being surprisingly light work.
When I had found it for the first time, those thin tendrils had been able to hold my entire weight. That, for some reason, had given me the false assumption that it would be difficult to destroy it. But instead of getting the Luxury Suite experience, I just ended up getting the Third Floor staircase experience.
A little bit of imagination, one hand raised, and the mold on the door was gone before I knew it. The door snapped open with force, hitting a cart that had been stored right behind it. The resulting clang caused my bones to rattle. Moving despite that, and getting into the room, I was able to see the cause of the Cold Storage rot.
In the upper right corner of the room, looking like a wart upon the walls, was a blob of black mold. A blob that was beating as if it had a heart. Thump, thump, thump. It swelled up like a bagpipe, before receding into a smaller sphere and repeating the process. To add to the horror were more tendrils growing out of the blob in random spots, lashing out at the air at set intervals. The only thing really missing was a sound to go with it all.
As terrible as it looked, tough, its defenses were similarly terrible, too. With another quick attack using Unravel Magic, I was able to send the source of the mold in this room bursting away. This time, I paid attention to what happened to all of its tiny particles as they lost form.
I would have expected them to fall to the ground or even stay stuck on the walls. But there had been proof before that that was not the case. The mold never stained the walls or floors, after all. No matter how massive the wall or blob, the resulting shatter was always missing by the next time I came around. Until now, I had foolishly assumed that was Carol doing her job a bit too well.
Obviously, it wasn’t. The splatters of the mold that had fallen down on the wood or gotten caught in the walls started flying up. Through the ceiling, they seeped into the floor above and vanished. Little by little, all of it followed the same pattern and cleaned out the Cold Storage room, as if it had never been there in the first place.
Can’t imagine that could have been very good for the customer experience in this place. Somewhere above this room was that locked room on the First Floor, and then an empty space on the Second Floor. Then…the Luxury Suite on the Third Floor. Was that where it was going on?
The mold was not disappearing, then. It was just retreating back into its main base. It was biding its time until it could come back with a vengeance. If it was even capable of vengeance, that was. As far as I had understood based on the information shared by our extraterrestrial friends, this was just a mindless fungal parasite following its natural coding.
Unfortunately, it didn’t exactly make me feel any better about it all.
Anyway, meat.
I had promised the old man that I would make some rabbit for him, and he had readily agreed. That was for the better, too, since I did not want another moment of needing to explain to someone what a rabbit was. May Don bless the True World for having rabbits and their wholesome cuteness.
Alright, let’s not bring up the wholesome cuteness of an animal I am about to cook into a dish. I apologize for my insensitivity. Doesn’t make the living ones any less cute, though. May Don help the spirit of the one we were feasting on find some peace, I guess.
For now, I found the place where the rabbit meat was kept and headed back to the Kitchen. There, before I could start working, I saw Dom and Poltrick retiring back to their own rooms. The old man’s eyes lit up at the sight of the ingredients in my hands, and he asked me to bring them up to his room once I was done. Assuring him that I would, I finally started cooking.
Since I had the luxury of working with something that I knew, I was able to make a light rub quite easily. The True World did not seem to have any dearth of spices. In fact, it probably had more of those than Earth did. As such, it was a joy to discover interesting new flavors on the fly as I prepared the rabbit meat and kept it aside.
I had tried to keep the actual spiciness punchy, but let the stronger scents of the spices be a little subdued. At the same time, letting the sweetness assault the taste buds when you least expect it is something I personally like, so I let that happen, too. A pinch of sugar did the trick for that. Then, when all was said and done, I got to making some tortillas.
There was something like corn flour in the Pantry, so I used that to keep myself as close to traditional as possible. With the meat put in a container with a thick curry to slow-cook it, and the tortillas basically done, I then switched to the sides. Some onions quickly pickled with lemon juice, a slightly tangy yogurt-based sauce, and some dry vegetables julienned to top it off.
As much as I would have liked to name the platter that I had prepared, there was no reason to do so. It was rabbit tacos. As simple as that. None of it was assembled, since I did not know if the old man would like that. So, keeping all of the ingredients separated, I headed up to Room 102 to sit down and have a meal with him.
If he wasn’t down for it, he could stick to eating his rabbit. If he wanted to try, though, I could introduce him to the burst of flavors that came from putting the rabbit in a tortilla. Surely, he would not regret it.
Up the stairs and to his room, I knocked on the door and waited for about half a minute before he finally opened it. All the while, I did my best not to look to the left, where Bella’s room was. The last thing I needed was more reminders of earlier today. The old man and Poltrick had been able to drag me back, so there was no need to fall back down.
Once the door opened, thankfully, all of those negative thoughts vanished. The almost childish smile of Old Man Dom was enough to bring a smile to my face and melt my heart. Getting in, I set the tray of food down on one of the tables and took a seat on one of the chairs.
The first thing I noticed about the room, which had similar furniture and decoration to the Innkeeper’s Room, was something I didn’t even know existed here.
“Is that a…piano?” I asked, looking at the instrument taking up most of the area of the room.
“Yeah. That is what it is called, I believe. I was never into playing instruments, to be honest, so I do not know why it is here.” He answered as I taught him how to make a taco out of these ingredients. “It was just sitting here ever since I checked in. That’s a bit funny, isn’t it? Just one room with one piano?”
There had been a piano playing in the morning on the first day, but Carol had told me that it wasn’t a live instrument. There was apparently a gramophone-like device in her room that let her play pre-recorded disks. She had used one of those that morning because she was in a good mood.
More than anything else, it only made me confused about what the technological time period of the True World even was. They had no clue what space was, but had met aliens before. They had matchsticks and gramophones, but did not know what a toothpick was. Wood clearly existed in their world, given, well, the entire building. How did that even happen?
“Do you know how to play, young lady?”
“Eh?” I looked at the piano, and then back at him. “Well, I had a phase, yeah. I only know the basic stuff. Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle, Old McDonald. Stuff like that. I guess I can. Kind of.”
“What’s all that? Names of songs?” He took the first bite of his rabbit taco, and his eyes lit up. “Oh, my Don! This is fabulous! It is the most sublime rabbit dish I have had in a long time. Thank you, innkeeper.”
That was the first time he had called me innkeeper. Until now, I had only been ‘young lady’. But not anymore, apparently.
“Glad you like it. It’s a favorite of mine. And, uh, yeah. Those are names of songs. Want to hear some of them?”
“You will play for me?”
“Sure, I will. Here, give me a sec.”
“What’s a sec?”
I ignored the question, tied my hair into a bun, and sat down in front of the piano. When I said phase, I had meant phase. Once upon a time, I had gotten super deep into pianos and their lore before suddenly forgetting about all of it one morning. During the period that I had spent learning, I was confident that I had developed some muscle memory.
Once you put in the time and effort to learn the keys, it is difficult to get them out of your hands. Pressing down on the keys once to check their tune, I smiled at the result. There was no telling how old this instrument was, but it still worked perfectly. Maybe we could move it down to the Lobby, somehow…
“Thank you so much, my dear Carol,” I whispered as my fingers trailed the keys and landed on the first few notes of Old McDonald. I wasn’t trying to make fun of the man’s age or something. It just happened to be the one that first came to mind.
And I was going to play. My brain was ready to play. But that didn’t happen. Instead, my eyes landed on the part of the piano where the brand name would have been. The place where you would have expected to find a ‘Steinway & Sons’ back on Earth. Here, though, there was no text. Only a symbol. One that made me pause and stare.
A big cat’s head with wings jutting out of its sides. The exact same insignia that I had noticed in that burnt room earlier today. Not exactly a situation I wanted to remember, but still something that was clearly important. More so, because this was not the exact same illustration. This one had something about it that made me look twice.
The one on the ceiling of the burnt room had been simple. A silhouette with its edges highlighted to let the colors pop. But this one was different. Six wings on each side of the head, with gold outlines throughout. What was striking was that the wings were not the same beyond that. A few had a black filling in them, while others were left hollow.
Five of them, to be precise, had a black filling. Seven of them were as is. And on five of the twelve wings, at their very origin, was a small dot jutting outward.
“Are those…?”
“Oh, this is just wondrous. I added some of that sauce you gave me, and it is so much better than before. How much deeper can the flavors get!?”
I gave Dom a meaningful smile and then leaned in closer to the symbol. They were. Piano notations. It wasn’t immediately obvious what the exact flow of the keys was, but that was solved on closer inspection. The dots on the keys were not equally sized. Some were smaller, some were larger. Five different sizes.
My hands moved to the very first of the complete octaves, and I played what it asked. A simple, yet moving tune. There was warmth in it, but with warning. In the end, however, nothing happened. I moved to the next octave and played that. Nothing happened. The next one, and still…nothing happened.
“What is that you are playing? Happy Birthday?”
“Just warming up.” I reluctantly laughed before moving on to the next one.
One, two, three, four, five. The shrill cry of the final bit of the melody lingered in my head. Old Man Dom’s happy groans of taste filled the room, as if preparing me to move on to the next one. But that didn’t happen. Instead, a loud churning noise filled the entire First Floor, making me jump out of the chair and look around.
Something creaked and cried, and moved inside the walls. The voice grew louder and grew further. Then, after the minor riot finally came to an end, a loud thud rang out from the side of the burnt room. To confirm that I hadn’t hallucinated it, the dwarf also cried out about keeping the noise down.
“I’ll…be back.”
Out of the chair, out of the room, and down the corridor, I reached the room where the sound had come from. And even though I had been expecting to find nothing, or maybe something insignificant, none of that was true. Right in the middle of the room, below the insignia on the ceiling, was a book. A leather-bound book with a massive steel frame holding it shut.
I picked the book up and dusted off all the dirt from its top. Something had activated because of the notes, and this is what it had spat out. Playing the piano had revealed something in the burnt room, out of all places. And what’s more? It was something that I never would have expected to see.
On the leather cover of the book were two lines. The first one confirmed that this was a diary. The seventh diary, to be precise. Below that was the name of the person whose diary it was. A name I had gotten familiar with over the last two days.
Andrea Donatella.