OOCOpen to all. Bring your game faces. Seasonal event. This is not for you. - Danielewski. Timestamp: 23 Summer 515 AV Over a year and a half ago Caelum had spent the better portion of a day crawling on Alement’s floor with a stub of a chalk and a slow shaping vision. He had measured the length of the walls and the angle of the corners, marked off where he wanted to place tables, and sketched out a diagram for the bar and the kitchen and even the infirmary. On his hands and knees he had traveled over pale grey granite and climbed atop chairs to learn the height of the walls. He knew Kavala felt a unique sense of connection, even ownership, to the materials that made up Alements due to her incredible work with geomancy to frame up so much of it. Yet even without the magic, Caelum felt a similar but different bond. There was an intimacy in growing, in maintenance and long knowing. It was not merely a matter of time, all of the thousands of hours he put into this place, but also the result of effort. Elise was known to tease her employer about his eccentricities, most commonly those that had directly to do with his tavern, his infirmary, and his house hold as a whole. Everything had a home and most of the homes were neatly labeled in a tight, elegant script. Neither Caelum or Elise were much accustomed to having things, let alone so many places to put them. Their reasons were different, but the sheer sense of satisfaction coupled with a sort of slow burning anxiety was the same. Therefore when Caelum walked through the double doors leading from the patio of Alements and into the common room, the late afternoon light throwing his shadow ahead of him on the stone floors, he knew immediately that something was wrong. Alien. Out of place. All of his paranoid nerves were humming, prepared to be vindicated again. Brightly colored rugs were scattered against the far walls, situated beneath the tables rather than the aisle. A breeze carried in off the waters of Plunge Pool Bay and flirted with the fern fronds hanging from the patio roof. Caelum had stopped a few strides inside the door, hands filled with dirty glassware, smile falling off of his face as he stared at a patch on his floor that seemed to have sprung a door knob. Soft green moss grew rapidly out of cracks in the floor that had not been there when he stepped outside a few chimes ago. As he watched, pale flowers budded into the shapes of hinges and gleamed the same shade of pewter as the rough hewn knob. Frowning with confusion, Caelum lifted the glass he had drank from to his nose and gave a testing sniff. It did not smell like any of hallucinagens he had stored in shop and it was ludicrous that he would have made such a serious slip himself. That did not change the fact that there was a door in the middle of his common room floor. |