The First Morning

Lei wakes up in the morning to talk about what happened to him last night. What is he going to do for his second day?

Luckily, Morrok's sudden appearance last night didn't break anything. With the sun up and the sky blue once again, Lei rummaged through his blue suitcase. In his hand was an old, browned piece of paper. The sloppy and distinguished water painting had begun fading almost a decade ago. At the painting's center were thin, red brush strokes taking the form of a messy but noticeably distinctive figure. It was floating atop a mass of blue, what the young man remembered as being water. A mangled purple stood in between where red and blue met.

 

The memory was vivid for a good reason. It was almost winter vacation. A week before then, a much younger Revya had seen it during recess at his elementary school. It disappeared quickly realizing that a child glanced at it and pointed his finger. The child did not want to forget about what he had seen, so when it was painting time before returning home, he painted a red and blue blob. This was over fifteen years ago, however. Revya no longer remembered what explicit detail he had saw of the creature on that day. It didn't have a mouth, a nose, nor eyes. Maybe he just didn't see them.

 

Lei left his bedroom exhausted. The brief and terrorizing encounter with a familiar face last night made sure of it. He walked down the hall into the second floor lobby, spotting Adenine sitting down at her desk. Wide awake, the brunette haired, fair skinned woman's eyes peeked momentarily before returning to the lit monitor. Her hands effortlessly punched in keys at hundreds of words per minute. "Something coming from your room caused an awful amount of ruckus, last night," she said with no direct attention to the black haired youth.

 

"I got attacked." The young man took a second look at the lobby. Amongst the sofa was a someone Lei had not seen, yet. She and her brown hair wrapped up in a bob sat on one of five ivory sofas positioned in a circle; the sofa on the middle right closer to the stairs leading to the first floor. She did not notice Lei, being preoccupied reading a book whose title could not be read. She was just about his height, maybe a bit shorter.  Laying in the center of the round pattern was a resting black furred werebeast. "Well, he certainly didn't go very far."

 

Adenine's hands flipped its breaks. "Really?" she almost snorted. Her arms crossed each other, laying on the dark, wooden finish applied to the table in front of her. She took a noticeable breath and relaxed her posture. She was now staring at the young man with a skeptic expression. "How so?"

 

"He attacked me last night." It came out blunt.

 

"Not possible." And so did hers. After clearing her throat she asked Lei, "Do you know what that collar around his neck is for? Sounds like a dumb question, doesn't it? But it's not." The two observed the collar made of brown leather wrung around the werebeast's neck. "Let me ask you another question. What's the difference between werebeasts and werepeople?" There was no opportunity to answer. "Werepeople are like the domesticated version of werebeasts. Think about it like dogs and wolves. Their intelligence level is about the same and there are very dumb and very smart ones among the bunch. Werebeasts do things mostly out of instinct, so it's hard to get them to behave. That collar on his neck? There's a curse on it for disciplinary purposes. If Morrok doesn't behave, it hurts him. It can also kill him."

 

"That's pretty vague." Lei replied, disappointed but well informed. That didn't explain how the thing got to almost wanting to kill young Revya last night with no repercussions. He wanted to think Adenine was fooling him, but honestly bled through her voice. It reminded Lei of last night, when the woman stopped Morrok from doing whatever it was that the black furred creature was going to do. It was the same type of sincerity even if slightly obnoxious.

 

The secretary shook her head. "I expected to you know this. Since, you know, the Revyas made the curse and the collar a long time ago. I'm somewhat surprised that you don't know. Didn't you have these kinds of pets in your family?"

 

Lei remembered a dog and a cat, but a family with pets like werebeasts? How does that even work? His mind could not fathom the amount of maintained needed to care for something that could speak in a language he could understand. "Not that I know of." To Lei, it was a silly question. For everything the man had experience in his life so far, everything up to when he was brought to live with his Uncle in this crazed mansion somewhere in North America, he knew himself growing up like every other kid with parents and a decent home.

 

"It's impossible for Morrok to have been in your room." Adenine said again. "Because he sleeps in my room at night. Even then, we were up late. What we were doing has nothing to do with you, so don't ask."

 

The young man was clearly beat. Okay, fine. So maybe the creature last night was not Morrok. Lei had forgotten something else as well. Perhaps he was too afraid to think about it at the time of being ambushed in bed. He could not understand why he had skipped the potential fact that the black furred creature was not the only werebeast in the mansion. Considering how many people Lei had yet to meet, maybe judging the werebeast was still too early... but Morrok was still intimidating. He need a new topic before the secretary would get sick of him distracting her from her computer work. "By the way," the black haired youth asked, "Who is that?" Lei pointed at the lone woman sitting on the sofa reading the book in her left hand.

 

"Don't bother Katiya when she's reading. She gets absorbed into literature." The brunette sighed and turned back to her monitor. "Can you go bother someone else now? If you want to know more about her, then go bother her." Didn't she just tell Lei to not bother the book lady? His impression of what she said translated as 'leave me alone I have work to do'.

 

"One more favor before I wander off for the day," Lei told the secretary and she shared with him her annoyed groans. "Please." Adenine showed a twisted frown. "Do you have a map of the mansion? The place is... huge."

 

The woman's eyes bulged for a moment. "You know, Fienne came to me earlier and thought you might ask that question, so she insisted that I print one out for you." From below her computer desk, the secretary grabbed several sheets of paper detailing the mansion's floor plan. "Look, I'm really busy, so I didn't have time to jot down every single person's name that lives here. I did mark which rooms are occupied, though. And just so you know, we're right here." She tapped the eraser end of the wooden pencil she held in her left hand onto one sheet.

 

Young Revya was happy that to hear that this was already planned. He counted the each sheet of paper, looking at the each humongous floor from a bird's eye view, each floor of the mansion clear cut to see its infrastructure. He checked the papers one more time, wondering if he has miscounted. There was a sheet missing. Suddenly Lei wanted to know, "I thought there was four floors to the mansion?" That did not include the rooftop. Or the basement.

 

Adenine had already resumed typing at mechanical speed, then stopped again after hearing the young man's question. Her robin egg colored eyes paused and slowly faced right. "Yeah- see the entire fourth floor belongs to Master Revya."