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- The Velvet Room Staff
A PLACE BETWEEN DREAMS AND REALITY, MIND AND MATTER
Deep within the furthest reaches of the unconscious mind, a faint blue light glimmers like crystal before a candle. To gaze at this point is an instinctive reflex, a yearning to drive away the cold embrace of nothingness. Reaching for this twinkle in the void, however, produces a sensation comparable to falling through the air without a working parachute. It takes less than an instant for the azure speck to transmogrify into a whirling tunnel of blue and white, the 'falling' now closer to 'dragging', until every possible sense that could be imagined falls awash with numbing warmth.
The soft melody of a piano creeps its way into earshot. Following this is a return of vision, which is greeted by an abundance of stunning blues in varying shades and hues. Smell is the next to return, and it is greeted by the distinctive odor of poppy flowers. The exquisite choice in decorum suggested this place to be a smoking lounge, perhaps even a private drawing room, and the presence of a minibar stocked to its brim with a collection of reserves seemed to betray its inescapably surreal atmosphere.
Of course, this was not the true elephant in the room. Rather fittingly, and not without a hint of irony, that privilege belonged to the mysterious fellow with the long and pointy nose, who just so happened to be sitting squarely across the person that now existed as an occupant of this strange blue space. Sitting next to the bug-eyed gentleman in the black suit was a tall and handsome man with dull cobalt hair and pale xanthous eyes, wearing what appeared to be a stylish Inverness cape, whose stoic porcelain features painted a sharp contrast to the other person's seemingly crazed smirk and fixed stare.
"Welcome—" Speaks the old man at last, addressing his new visitor in a prolonged manner, "—to the Velvet Room."
And everything came at her in a rush, the velvet blue room came into focus from the black nothingness, accompanied by the haunting music of a piano that came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, no piano was in sight from where she was standing from. Wherever she was standing from, she gazed around using glances, not really turning her head to look around, but just to catch small glimpses of details of the room that she might had missed, but aside from the velvet goodness of the room, nothing screamed amiss.
Aside of course, from the whole unfamiliarity of it all, and how she even got here in the first place.
Was this a dream? That would have been the only explanation, but this was too hyper-realistic. Was she having an episode? It didn't seem likely, she didn't exactly dream when she had her seizures? What was going on?
Then she realised that she wasn't actually completely alone, and two other people were there in the room with her, for some reason completely missing her attention until now. The dark blue haired man that stood to the side seemed normal enough, at least in comparison to this odd room, but the man in front of her in the seat... his nose seemed to long for his body, it was out of the ordinary. She didn't mean to be rude or judgmental, but it was just so weird.
As she was thinking that, the long nosed man welcomed him to... the Velvet Room? She eyed him with suspicion, which was only natural for anyone, of course, "What is this place?" then giving a short side glance to the man standing before returning her attention to the long nosed man again, "Who are you two? What do you want with me?"
A PLACE BETWEEN DREAMS AND REALITY, MIND AND MATTER
The first questions are always the easiest ones to answer.
"This is a place between dreams and reality, mind and matter." The old man's reply is both frank and cryptic at once; he was implying that his new guest currently occupied a space somewhere that was neither the waking world from where she originates, nor the abstract dimensions of her own subconsciousness. Attempting to process any of it was a natural response for her kind, but a feeble one all the same.
"Rest assured, my dear, you are in no danger inside this place," the balding stranger evades her questions with a toothy grin, his pinholes for pupils seemingly boring their way into the young woman's eyes as if attempting to cast a spell of suggestion on her. "You are safely asleep in your bed, drifting aimlessly in the Sea of Unconsciousness." Even his words implied a kind of hypnotic affect with how he spoke them.
"My name is Igor, and I am delighted to make your acquaintance," he reveals his identity to the young woman with nothing short of protracted enthusiasm, gesturing to his companion with slender gloved fingers. "This here is my Assistant, Virgil. You have been summoned here because destiny has conspired to make it so."
Avoiding his guest's final question entirely, Igor slowly drags his hand through the air above the surface of a circular coffee table poised right before his seated form, manifesting a blue silk cloth from nothingness as if the embroidered tapestry had poured into reality from a nonexistent hole. Another wave of his hand causes a deck of gilded cards to appear in the same spontaneous fashion; once completely unaccounted for, now suddenly there.
"Do you believe in fortune telling?" Igor still hasn't blinked.
Post by Meiyi Huang on Oct 2, 2018 16:35:44 GMT -6
[attr=class,topreading]She gave the long-nosed man a sidelong look, squinting her eyes in suspicion and irritation, "Is this a prank show or something?" she asked, with venom lacing her tone. Americans love those prank shows, especially those who were YouTube celebrities, she found when she landed in the US for the first time. It was stupid, but there were so many of them, and she couldn't help but feel as if she was in one of them right now.
"I'm in my bed? So you're saying this is all a dream." she said flatly, clearly disbelieving everything he was telling her, "Can you prove it? This just seems as if I've been kidnapped, and I can tell the cops once I get out about you guys." especially if they target fragile eighteen year old girls like her, they need to be taken off the streets so that they can't harm anyone else.
Summoned? Destiny? She squinted even harder, though this time trying to pick out details from the two that were in front of her. The standing one was unmoving as always, but she couldn't tell if the long-nosed man was on drugs. well, he was very much bug-eyed and had an unusually long nose, but she can't tell if that was the cause of drugs. He was definitely speaking coherently enough in terms of his language, aside from his ridiculous ideas, but definitely not slurring or slow-like. Was she on drugs? She checked herself mentally, going through her memory and sense of consciousness. Nope, thinking clearly, nothing wrong with her memory aside from not knowing how she got here. At least she wasn't drugged, that was a good thing.
But what the long-nosed man did after that made her own eyes bulge out and her jaw drop. The man who called himself Igor materialised a silk cloth and a deck of cards out of nowhere, and for a second, Meiyi felt herself almost taken in by the show. However she managed to snap herself quickly out of it, surely it must be some kind of parlour trick, you know, where there were hidden compartments all throughout this room. The Virgil guy must have helped out too. She felt her suspicion return, yet not at the same intensity as it was before.
Though she blinked at the sudden question, "Uh, fortune telling?" she repeated, "I mean, does Feng Shui count? My mum always likes those fortune telling that involves the i-ching..."
No, what was she doing? Why was she telling him this? She stopped herself short, "No, tell me who you really are and what you are doing with me," she asked, her rage and frustration beginning to build up now instead of distrust, "I'm not going to allow you to just avoid my questions like that!"
A PLACE BETWEEN DREAMS AND REALITY, MIND AND MATTER
Like a praying mantis backed into a corner, the visitor allows her temper to flare out from beneath the delicate and fragile mask she calls a face. Such annoyance stems from an inherent lack of control over one's immediate surroundings, a desire to master an aspect of the self that one perceives to be incompatible to the whole of the community. A tragedy, for certain, but one that must be overcome if completion is to be reached.
These barriers, these obstacles, all of them were greatly fascinating to Igor, who merely grinned like a child full of wonder and merriment as he peered unblinkingly at his feisty guest. Virgil, on the other hand, seemed less tolerant of the young woman's irritation, yet continued to maintain his eerie silence while his master continued entertaining his own penchant for intrigue.
A single snap of his fingers is all it takes for Igor to force the deck of cards into springing to life, each of the decorative pieces of stock swirling treacherously around the old man as if he had conjured a gust of wind. No wires, no strings, no smoke and mirrors; it was a display that truly contradicted all human reason. To Igor, however, this was a mere 'parlor trick'.
Another snap, and the cards suddenly fly back into a single rectangular shape, neat and perfect, as if they had never left the table whatsoever. Next, Igor twists his right hand in a subtle fashion, causing the top gold-leafed card to suddenly turn over for the young woman to see for herself: a juxtaposition between a sword and the scales, the motifs of truth and balance.
"The Justice card certainly illustrates your desire to stay the course..." Igor announces in delight, then chuckles rather coyly. His toothy grin lessens, as if to demonstrate sincerity rather than impishness. "Your vigilance comes from a place of unfairness; your fierce reactions are an attempt to protect yourself from a perceived threat, one you feel has stacked the odds against you, and in such a way that causes you to question your sense of control."
"The absence of restraints aside, you are not a prisoner here, miss," the man named Virgil finally speaks at last, revealing a distinctively English-sounding accent. "Your presence in the Velvet Room is a privilege that is not granted to just anyone. Only those with special potential are given access, and only because my master personally allows it." The corners of Virgil's mouth form a faint, barely visible smile reminiscent of a certain famous painting. "We are here to help you."
Post by Meiyi Huang on Oct 3, 2018 17:18:10 GMT -6
[attr=class,topreading]Meiyi cringed when the long-nosed man only smiled at her widely when she became flustered, which was even more unsettling and creepy than what she originally gave him credit for. This was too much for her, and she didn't make her discomfort unknown.
A snap of his fingers brought the cards to life, dancing in mid-air in front of Meiyi, and she could only stare at it in wonder and confusion, "This can't be real..." she muttered to herself. Well, of course it can't, this is only a dream right? But if she believed that, then that means that she had to believe what Igor had been telling her too, and she wasn't sure if she was ready to do that yet.
Then, almost like a dancer's grace, the cards swooped back on to the table in a perfect, rectangular shape. She wasn't sure what was going on, but she could get a hint that it was something to do with the fortune telling business that Igor was mentioning about earlier. Was this those tarot cards that Americans liked so much? She's never had one done for herself, and she's never seen a deck before in real life, but she's seen pictures online, and they seemed to be similar to this...
Igor flicked his hand, and the top card revealed itself to Meiyi, what looked like a scale and a sword, and the word inscribed on the bottom saying "JUSTICE". Meiyi raised an eyebrow and frowned, unsure of what to make of it, until Igor deciphered the message behind the card for her. Reading into her, perfectly capturing the essence of her, the guilt, her very life.
She blinked and took a step back, taken by surprise and trembling, "How can you..." she shook her head, took a deep breath, and straightened herself, "No, this is all bullshit. You're just playing with me, saying whatever you want me to hear, like any other fortune teller." though she was beginning to become more and more unsure of herself, deep in her heart.
The stone-faced man called Virgil finally spoke, bringing Meiyi out of her unfocused thoughts, however only filling her with even more questions, "Special? In what?" she whirled around to face the long-nosed man again, "Helping me with what? You're making this sound like as if some disaster is going to happen or something."
A PLACE BETWEEN DREAMS AND REALITY, MIND AND MATTER
Without even realizing it, her expressions of discomfort reveal all to the man holding the cards (for want of a better way to illustrate this point, as he was not actually holding anything in the true sense of the term). She operates herself like clockwork in a timepiece, meticulously planning every element of her waking moment in preparation for some, unforeseen disaster.
Whether she knew it or not, this was precisely why Igor had summoned her to the Velvet Room. He merely grins that Cheshire smile, fully confident that his decision was well-founded. Virgil breathes calmly through pinpoint nostrils, sensing his master's delight.
Igor twists his left hand over now, causing a second card to flip over from atop the neatly-stacked pile, face-up for his guest to purview at her discretion and directly parallel from the Justice card. Before her sits a mighty pillar of stone, a Tower that stretches high into Heaven, being delivered a destructive thunderbolt, as if to confirm the visitor's suggestions of impending disaster.
"Ah, The Tower..." Igor sighs, almost as if caught in a reverie. "It seems you are, indeed, correct! An impending catastrophe is on the horizon, one you cannot avoid, no matter how much you try to shelter yourself away from the howling winds or the thunderbolt's impact." While he may not have been specific with his words, or even descriptive, it could at least be verified with utmost certitude that Igor was telling the truth. A crisis was about to unfold.
But Igor, seemingly a prisoner of his own weird cadence, merely continues on without hesitation, avoiding the questions that his visitor deemed important rather than humoring her egoistic need to reach for answers truly well beyond her current level of understanding, "It is as my Assistant has mentioned: your presence in the Velvet Room is no accident. Only those who have formed a 'contract' may enter here, a binding agreement that links them inexorably to this very place." He glances around at the lounge bathed in blue, then returns his fixed stare back to the young woman. "You, my dear, are about to embark on a journey of utmost importance in the coming days, one that will entwine your fate with the lives of everyone you come to meet along the way."
Post by Meiyi Huang on Oct 4, 2018 21:38:11 GMT -6
[attr=class,topreading]The smile that crept on Igor's person was unsettling, as if he took pleasure from seeing her so out of her depth, so out of her comfort zone. Though, this would be out of anyone's comfort zone. She shut her eyes for a second, hoping that this was truly all just a hyper-realistic dream gone too far and that she could wake up.
Then opened her eyes back to the velvet room. No such luck, she sighed.
She looked just in time for Igor to reveal a new card, one that he called the Tower. For some reason, she was sure that she was just pulling these cards out of his ass, but she wasn't sure how he was doing it or if she was sure that it was truly just a magician's trick and not true fortune telling. Indecisive, she kept quiet instead and listened to his explanations.
Regardless, she was starting to lose her patience, and tapped her shoe on the floor aggressively, "Look, all you've been saying so far is that something is going to happen, whatever it is," she said, volume increasing as she began to lose her temper, "But how can you even know that? What even is going to happen? Stop being so cryptic!"
"What contract?" she sighed exasperatedly, "I don't remember signing everything, definitely not a deal for a tv show, whatever this is."
"How can you even help me anyways?" her fists clenched tightly as she began to lose control of her words because of her anger, "Neither of you look battle-ready, and neither am I, considering my own condition. Whatever it is that you say is going to happen, how can I even fight back or defend myself?"
A PLACE BETWEEN DREAMS AND REALITY, MIND AND MATTER
Igor's guest merely continues displaying her belligerence with aplomb, yet this fails to perturb the long-nosed man or his unflinchingly serious secretary figure. In fact, their utter lack of variation to their current expressions seemed to imply that they had expected this kind of response from her, maybe even predicted it.
"Please, do not worry yourself, my dear." Igor's tone of voice takes on a more compassionate note, yet his disturbingly effervescent smile betrays his otherwise sincere attempt at gentle reassurance. "The answers to your questions will all reveal themselves to you, in due time." He chuckles one last time, for good measure. Just as it would have been in an actual Tarot reading (this one didn't quite count; it was closer to a demonstration than a true examination of the soul), he could not reveal the full measure of her future just yet.
After all, she hasn't manifested it.
Igor brushes a finger behind one of his ears as if to scratch it, unknowingly bringing attention to the fact that they were pointed like an elf's at the same time, then folds his hands into one another while the rest of his hunched body shifts forward against the crushed blue velvet sofa. Virgil remains stiff as a board. Was his spine made entirely of metal, or was he just really good at hiding the fact that he was feeling pretty uncomfortable with having to sit up so straight for such a lengthy period of time? That was an answer he left his guest to decide for herself.
"Until we meet again..."
Darkness creeps into view once more, bleeding in from all sides of the periphery until Igor and Virgil slowly fade away from existence entirely; the deep rich textures and blue hues of the Velvet Room washed away by the dark void of nothingness. The soft piano that once filled the ears gradually becomes softer, quieter, until the only thing that remains is the sound of utter silence.
To wake up now is to accept the inevitability of being unable to recall any memory of this encounter, like oiled hands slipping against smooth stone. All that remains of it is an ephemeral fragment of subconscious awareness, a splinter buried deep inside the mind, wandering aimlessly adrift in the sea of unconsciousness.
Transient, as a blue butterfly sitting in a beam of moonlight.
[attr=class,topreading]The chuckles make her cringe, she wasn't sure if the long-nosed man was trying to comfort her or terrify her, but either way, each time he chuckled, Meiyi visibly cringed. Not out of disgust, just out of... pure discomfort.
Because of that, she wasn't entirely sure if she should believe his words when he said that she shouldn't be worried about the impending doom that she had recently been foretold about. Still, she kept quiet, suddenly exhausted by her constant protests and it felt as if a sudden tonne had been dropped on her shoulders, making her slump down a bit. Her vision began to lose its focus, as if she had been wearing glasses and someone had been slowly fogging it up.
As if on cue, Igor said his goodbyes, whilst his stoic assistant only stared at her and said nothing. Meiyi wanted to call out and say "wait", however, she couldn't manage to get her voice out. As if she had lost any ability to speak in the first place.
Her vision began to become darker and darker, the bright velvet blue dissipating into black. The haunting piano began to slip away from her, as if running away from her grasp.
Meiyi opened her eyes, covered in cold sweat and her hair drenched similarly in sweat. She forced herself to sit up on the bed and placed a hand on her forehead, "What..." she whispered to herself, "Did I dream?"
She felt the sinking feeling that she might have, yet didn't feel as if she could remember whatever it was that she had dreamt about, as if it had slipped through the gaps of her fingers. Though she hated the feeling of forgetting, she shook her head, "Oh well, musn't have been anything important."
She bounced off the bed, peeling off her sticky pajamas and changing into her casual clothes, tying up her hair in her signature ponytails, and smiled, ready to face whatever the day had in store for her.
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