When he opened his eyes once more, Kāifēng found himself……well, definitely not in Kansas anymore, he could tell that pretty easily. Not that he’d ever been to Kansas, but Kāifēng assumed that it looked nothing like the vast expanse before him. Based on what Hayden had told Liánlí before—in turn based on his visits to certain extended family who lived out in Dorothy Gale Country—Kansas and this place only had large swathes of wide, open flatlands in common.
One look up at the sky, however, answered any nagging questions pretty conclusively: whorls of deep, sunset violet spun and spiraled across an endless celestial canvas while darker, shadowy shades and blacks seeped in around one set of edges and lighter pinks and reds fled to the other side, seeming to diminish but never fully disappearing. Twilight on Earth could never equal this. Kāifēng had seen plenty of Terran sunsets in his twenty-eight years alive, so he felt perfectly qualified to say that all the Earthling poets who ever invoked twilight as an image in any of their work? Had simply had no idea what they’d meant to talk about.
Nothing on Earth could have equaled this sky above him, no matter how hard it were to try. Liánlí had never felt particularly drawn to space or science-fiction—Earth itself had had plenty of unsolved mysteries for his fancies, and anyway, Zhìháo had had more than enough trouble on his hands. Simply trying to hide his CD copies of Salt-N-Pepa’s Hot, Cool, & Vicious and Very Necessary from his parents, never mind his collection of Stephen King paperbacks? Had kept him too busy to think too much about all of said mysteries down on Earth, beyond noting that they existed and held some measure of interest for him. How could anyone have expected him to think too intensely about what laid out there in the wild, technicolor yonder of outer space, much less to get it in his head that space might prove itself so beautiful as this?
Something on Earth probably rivaled the black tower that loomed in the center of everything. Plenty of somethings got tall enough for that, actually. In all likelihood, there also existed plenty of somethings back on Earth that had such an ornate, cathedral-looking base. At opposite sides of the main tower, two smaller ones grew out of the stone so easily, the building almost looked natural, as if one of the mangled-looking trees had determined that it would make itself larger and more impressive than anything else among these fields of Kāifēng—or possibly anything else for miles around (********, what did Kāifēng know? it sounded like something that potentially could have happened). If not for how the perpetual low light glistened on the stone, the tower’s surface could have passed for tree bark.
Craning his neck, Kāifēng peered up at the tower’s central spire. It rose into the sky in a jagged spiral, with more of these smaller towers jutting out from it at odd angles. Up and up and up it went, reaching ever toward a spot of sky torn about evenly between heliotrope purple and bruise-colored violet that seemed like it wanted to give way to the black dogging at its heels. Or maybe to the black stone that made up the tower itself.
“Wonder what they kept up there,” Kāifēng said to nobody in particular, because nobody else stood nearby to hear him. Only the trees, utterly indistinct and indeterminable in terms of their relative alive-or-dead-ness, and the river, which seemed to care very little for such questions, and the tower itself. Surely, such a magnificent structure wouldn’t give away all its secrets so easily.
Whatever had gotten housed in the tower, he’d likely need to work to get it out. Seemed like a good project to work on, though. Perhaps he’d find some “how to” manual about what it really meant to be Kāifēng of Saturn and what he could do to fulfill that role to the best of his ability.… Though, now that he thought of it, if he did find such a thing, how would Kāifēng guarantee that he could even read it?
Probably not, he figured.
Kāifēng didn’t know how old this place was or how long it had been since anybody living had stomped these grounds. Plus, he didn’t know if any of the languages with which he had any degree of fluency had been spoken here. Since he stood on Saturn, now, the safe guess seemed like “probably not.”
Depending on how old this place was, the languages Kāifēng could read and speak reasonably well may not have even existed at the time when somebody might have written a book like Alright, So You’re The New Kāifēng of Saturn. Now What?!
Judging by the state of the field, he couldn’t rightly tell how long this place had stood without anyone checking in on it. Aside from the trees, it seemed that hardly anything sprouted from this ground. Between the lack of living things, even plant life, and the indeterminate, living or dead Limbo status of the trees, Kāifēng couldn’t help the skin-crawl sensation creeping up the back of his neck. What, had somebody salted the place like Carthage?
Slouching against one of the trees, he flipped open his fan and frowned down at the landscape painted on it. Sure, everything there had the same creepy-kooky, mysteriously spooky, altogether ooky vibes and general ~*aesthetic*~ that now surrounded him……but nevertheless, something didn’t feel quite right about it. The place in the painting on his fan, Kāifēng would’ve expected to brim with its own kind of life. Maybe not the sort of life that seemed alive to people who couldn’t appreciate certain dark things or how they were meant to be loved, but nevertheless, a kind of life.
Everything around Kāifēng right now, though? It just felt dead.
An appearance not at all helped by every tree he came across that had some sort of knife, or axe, or something stuck in the bark, as if someone had come here in search of violence and, prevented from finding a human target for it, they’d decided to take their problems out on a poor, hapless tree that had probably never done anything wrong to anybody.
What sort of nonsense could’ve inspired someone to stab a tree? Like, honestly??
All the more reason to stick his nose into things like a meddling kid and see if he couldn’t figure out what the happ was ******** here this day.
Taking a deep breath, Kāifēng set out walking with more purpose than before. Saying that vow his heart had given him—all too likely, it had brought him here for a reason. Made sense, then, that he should make his way around and see what had fallen to him to find, or otherwise figure out what that reason was.
A single critique came to mind, as he surveyed the fields sprawling at his feet, complete with twisting, gnarled black trees up close to him, a village with likewise twisted architecture off in the distance, and a and a river that seemed like it had probable been lovely, once upon a time.
Only this one point of contention—namely: the place in which he’d found himself came up lacking in the way of breeze. Stifling for your nerve. Choking, even. The sheer stagnancy of it all, far too much. Despite the chill that danced along his bones, Kāifēng felt certain that the air itself could have suffocated a grown human, had it put its mind to doing so (and many thanks to whichever cosmic power meant that the air did not have a mind to asphyxiate Liánlí like that).
Nevertheless, something about being here felt so………right.
Well, something about the river felt pretty undeniably wrong, the more that Kaifeng looked at it.
Not that whatever had gone wrong with the river seemed beyond fixing or anything? Kaifeng certainly wouldn’t have called the river hideous, or unsightly, or any such things.…… It really could have used some work, though. Walking alongside the bank, Kaifeng kept catching whiffs of something like death or rot. Not being terribly well-versed in what either of those things smelled like, he couldn’t exactly say? But whatever scent kept cudgeling his senses, it distinctly lacked the sort of clear, pleasant smell that he would have expected from a healthy river.
On top of that, the river……was not moving in the slightest. From the look of the green and violet algae teeming on the surface, this river hadn’t flowed like a normal river in far too long. Possibly an unfathomable amount of time. Maybe Kāifēng didn’t remember much from AP Biology in high school—he’d been younger than everyone else in the class and had kept himself working into a nigh-on constant state of stress so he wouldn’t have time to let himself get bogged down in any individual pieces of it; there was plenty about high school that he simply did not remember—but he could guess pretty easily that an algal bloom like this didn’t belong in a river like the one running through this field. All over, it painted the very picture not of life and vitality, but of decay.
Something about traipsing around this field felt, inexplicably, like the sense of home that Liánlí had never truly known when he’d still been Zhìháo, still lived at his family’s home up in South Boston. Even with the oppressive feel of the air—even with the raised mounds of earth, all modestly sized, littered here and there around the landscape, threatening to trip any travelers who didn’t pay sufficient attention to where their feet fell—a peace slipped comfortably into Kāifēng’s spirit.
As he meandered around the base of the largest tree he could find, peering up into its branches and wondering how they might have looked while full of crows and ravens, his breaths came to him more easily than they tended to do on Earth. Everything felt freer about drawing them in and letting them go. That he’d learned breath control for the sake of his music and honed it through years of practice at both flute and vocals—purely irrelevant. Something about this place gave Kāifēng the sense that he might have had the easiest time of his life, trying to keep them measured.
“When I die,” he sang, fluttering his fan and feeling ever-so-delicate beneath this tree, “I don’t wanna rest in peace. I want to dance in joy. I want to dance in the graveyards, the graveyards. And while I’m alive, I don’t wanna be alone, mourning the ones who came before; I wanna dance with them some more……”
Hmmm, no. Didn’t feel any different in his chest or lungs from how it normally felt. Delta Rae have Kāifēng a good arrangement to test with, thanks to all the longer lines in that song. He’d sung it too many times to run out of air or let himself get tripped up, so that posed no problem. But nothing felt any better or worse than how he felt down on Earth, judiciously managing his volume and intensity, making those breaths count for everything they had in them. The increased ease of breathing seemed to be in his head, more than anything.
As Kāifēng skulked away from the trees and over toward the tower, his thoughts settled in all cozy-like……or at least they got as close to “settled” as they ever managed.
Reminded him of a certain party he’d attended with Hayden, back at Harvard, where somebody had passed around Adderall for recreational use. Wanting to try something new, Liánlí—who’d started going by that name but hadn’t yet changed any of his papers legally or broken away from being Zhìháo in certain contexts—had taken one of the little orange-and-white capsules. After giving it some time to kick in, he noticed that, for once in his then-seventeen years of life, his mind felt quiet and the world didn’t seem overrun with endless static that strained the limits of every technique he’d tried to help himself learn to focus.
Not exactly the same as what was happening for him now, no. But being out here as Kāifēng, meandering around the fields that, per Fang, needed him to protect them? Brought with it a sense of clarity that, in his day-to-day as Liánlí, he hadn’t realized was missing in his life, not until he’d stumbled into how it felt, existing without whatever aimlessness typically jumbled up his mind.
Even though he wasn’t really doing anything, even though all he’d done was wander and take in the scenery, it didn’t feel empty. It didn’t feel devoid of purpose. No, he hadn’t yet figured out any particular truths about himself, nor about this position that came with the title Kāifēng of Saturn, nor about how he ought to go about serving in that capacity. But for the time being, maybe it was enough to simply explore this place that had become his to protect, to get more familiar with the environs, to settle into feeling himself as Kāifēng of Saturn and figuring things out more concretely could happen later.
Everything in this life needed time to develop without making that much apparent progress.
As he closed in on the cathedral-base of his tower, Kāifēng’s spirit eased itself into a low recline, like lounging on a plush chintz. Tilting his head at the large windows that loomed over him, Kāifēng felt only awe for their beauty and the size of them. Compared to the lifelessness around him and the implements of destruction stuck into some of the trees, the stained-glass tableaux remained pristine, apparently unweathered by……well, anything, Kāifēng supposed. Timeless, even though they’d once been created by someone’s hands. From far enough back, they all depicted scenes many people might have found gruesome. Grotesque, even.
To Kāifēng, they only reminded him of the charm necklace he liked wearing as Liánlí, the one Hayden had gotten him with the Rider-Waite version of the Death tarot card. One of the windows’ pictures even looked a great deal like that scene.
Besides, up close, you could tell that the glass hadn’t come from the classiest sources. Plenty pieces looked like they had once been broken before getting reassembled into these works of art. Many pieces had curves or mottled bits that struck Liánlí as reminiscent of wine bottles, beer bottles, any alcohol you might’ve liked bottles. Rather than being crafted specifically for these pieces, the glass had gotten gathered up and repurposed, turned from refuse into something beautiful.
Kāifēng liked it here. No, he hadn’t been here long, but any place that would valorise such found-but-transformed-trash-object art—a place that would look at literal garbage and insist that it, too, could be beautiful—seemed more than alright to Kāifēng.
All he needed to do was go inside and figure out more of what was really going on, here.
Strangely, he found the door neither closed nor locked, but already cracked open for him.
Was that strange?
Mn, no matter, really. Someone else’s problem.
With a deep breath, Kāifēng let himself in……and found himself standing beneath a vaulted ceiling high enough that two……not-entirely-floors jutted out front its walls. Kāifēng hesitated to call them floors when they didn’t entirely seem independent? But they were raised platforms sticking out of the walls, and at some places, they seemed to lead to doors.
Whatever they deserved to be called, Kāifēng trembled at the beauty all around him. The twilight from outside filtered through the stained glass windows ever so perfectly, catching all the odd curves and jagged edges of the assorted pieces, throwing purple-tinted shadows all across the floor. Oh, he could have gladly spent hours in here, dissecting each image to map out exactly what the artist had created.
Except that fate had other plans.
Except that the floor shuddered underneath his feet……and for a brief moment, Kāifēng stood on nothing at all. His entire body lurched as he plummeted. Flailing almost came to naught. But when his hand caught something protruding far enough from a wall before him, he gasped. Nearly yanked his hand back and resumed the fall.
A skull peered down at him, three silver coins glittering from its lifeless eye-sockets.
Part of Kāifēng wanted to reach out and take those coins. If nothing else, they might have had more clues about what was happening (assuming he could read any of them, which still seemed like a long-shot). But the vast majority of Kāifēng remembered too well: nothing good ever happened to those who disturbed the dead.
Smeared stains smudged all over the skull—he couldn’t tell what color they might have been—looked like someone had bloodied up their fingers trying to climb back out of here. Eugh. Well, Kāifēng certainly didn’t want to get involved with that.
One good thing came for him, though: one of his feet knocked something loose, and he heard it hit solid ground soon thereafter. So, with another deep breath, Kāifēng closed his eyes and just let go. Maybe it wouldn’t be the most pleasant experience in his entire life, but at least he wouldn’t have that far to fall. At least he probably wouldn’t get hurt too badly, and then, he could regroup, and clear his head, and figure out what to do about whatever mess he’d gotten himself into.
He was a Knight of Saturn, now. This place was his to protect and no one else’s. Didn’t he need to trust it?
wc: 2,915.
Posted: Wed May 24, 2023 1:17 pm
mind the map now & watch your step
The fall barely took long enough for Kāifēng to register that it was happening.
Unceremoniously, he landed on his a** and thumped into a floor that left much to be desired in the forgiveness department. With a heavy sigh, he let himself topple over in a heap. Rocked onto his back. Stared up at the vaulted ceiling, still visible through the trap door through which he’d fallen but now much, much further away. Wrinkling his nose, Kāifēng squinted at something else that swayed there now—a rope.
Too high up for him to reach at the moment, but if he maybe climbed back up the wall.……
That idea made him shudder, though, recalling what his hand had landed on when he’d caught himself: a skull. Possibly not a human one, judging by its trio of eye sockets. If more things like that lurked in the walls here, then climbing probably wouldn’t help as much as Kāifēng wanted to hope. Too likely, he’d only succeed in disturbing these remains and calling down something wretched on his own head.
Inhaling deeply, he hauled himself into sitting up. Right this moment, he didn’t remember what sort of whim had possessed Liánlí to not only buy a sizable, very bright flashlight/lantern-thing, the sort meant for people who rode their bikes everywhere, but to also stash it in his subspace pocket just in case. Regardless, he had done those things and good that he had, too. Attached to the lantern, a long, black elastic strap was meant to keep it fixed to someone’s head. A black plastic belt allowed an owner to adjust the length, though it always remained long enough to safely fit a bike helmet.
Before tossing it in his subspace, Liánlí had finagled the weird little thing to extend the strap as far as it would go. Good thing for that, as it meant Kāifēng could wear the lantern like a necklace now and keep his hands free. In a place like this, he didn’t want to get caught with no free hands.
First thing his beam of light fell on looked like a perfect little torch-hold, tarnished silver and jutting out from the wall (stuck in there between a bunch of bones, Kāifēng couldn’t help but note). Except no torch sat in there and Kāifēng didn’t have any on him. Maybe he’d find a magical means of illuminating his situation among one of the skulls or femurs or ribcages that he spotted as he dragged his light across the walls.
But on the other hand, two obvious problems presented themselves. For one thing, everything of which Kāifēng had already reminded himself about why disturbing the dead never ended well for anybody. And for another thing, his flashlight danced across a black brick wall—the only one with no bones protruding from it whatsoever—and lit up some script engraved on them, and that answered all his questions about whether or not he’d be able to read any written materials he found around here.
Pushing himself up to his feet again, Kāifēng noticed odd little divots all across the floor. Each one seemed about wide enough for a shovel, but none of them seemed to contain anybody’s bones. Kāifēng frowned, scrunching his face up like an irritated bunny. Why had anybody seen fit to dig down here if not because they had more bodies that needed helpful hands to lay them in the cold, dark ground for their eternal rest?
Tilting his head and peering at the hollows provided no answers. Wore on Kāifēng’s patience and nerves, more than anything else.
Slipping his fan into his sash, Kāifēng pursed his lips at the lines of text on the wall. They sat between a pair of archways, leading down two different corridors that, based on what he could see of the shadows from here and the general vibes the ambiance gave him, he had to guess contained more skeletons along the walls. The way their carver had arranged the characters, Kāifēng wanted to say they looked like a poem? Maybe they could have been one? Maybe whoever had put them there wanted to enhance the spooky but homespun sort of milieu with their lovely, lovely words? Maybe they’d woven together a true poetic masterpiece.
Which probably meant something very cool—likely more than a little bit ominous as well—to someone who could actually read it, but………well.
Kāifēng could not.
He huffed, allowing his shoulders to droop while he pouted. Shame that he couldn’t appreciate the words left behind here. They’d been important enough to someone—presumably the last Kāifēng Knight?—that they’d taken the time to carve the words into stone. Whatever poet or scribe or whoever had done this, they’d wanted for people to read these words. If only Kāifēng could have done so and honored their wishes………but, alas.
Nothing else around here stood out as potentially helpful to him at the moment, though. Best, then, to get a move on.
Seemed a bit unfair to judge the right-hand corridor by the lyrics of a song inspired by a nearly forty-year-old Jim Henson movie, from an album memorializing David Bowie and his performance as Jareth, the Goblin King. Wouldn’t hurt anybody if Kāifēng checked that path out a little, would it? Probably not. By someone-or-other’s definition, setting off down that hallway only counted as Kāifēng doing his due diligence as this place’s sworn protector and guardian.
“Knock on the doors,” he kept singing, “that’s what the knocker’s for. Heed my sage advice: better mind the floor…”
At least Kāifēng didn’t need to worry about that, he thought. A solid ground floor like this didn’t have any ways for strange little Muppet-cousins to poke their heads up and turn the tiles around. He’d definitely be safe.
Considering this place was probably very old, Kāifēng doubted there’d be any more traps like the one that had landed him down here in the first place. Surely, someone else would have intrepidly tripped into them by now. Even if they did exist, Kāifēng would see them coming and know to avoid them.
All up, this misadventure felt like a good omen about his future as a Knight of Saturn.
Nothing odd stood out to him after a few paces. Fine, yet more skeletons lined the walls and ceiling, but as the shock from spotting the first skull beneath his hand wore off, Kāifēng found the weird little guys more pleasant than not.
“Freedom is around the bend, if you could only see it. How will you make it to the eeeeennnnd?”
Here, he’d look and notice one with deedly-bobber-looking antlers that would’ve made so many Star Trek makeup and prosthetic artists feel terribly vindicated for how many of their aliens were just blue or green or purple humans with thingamajigs sticking out of their foreheads.
“Mind the map now and watch your step, or you’ll end up in an oubliette. One wrong move and it’s down, down, doooown.…”
There, Kāifēng would look and spot a pair of hands with their fingers intertwined, forever clinging to each other now, thanks to the respect paid by whoever had deposited their remains inside this ossuary.
“Pray the map isn’t upside down, or you’ll be stuck in the underground, in a cave from which there’s no way oooooout.…”
Kāifēng smiled, briefly pausing his song. Aiming the lantern around his neck toward the ceiling, he gazed up at a skull with fangs that almost looked like they were smiling back at him. Intellectually, he realized that couldn’t be the case. Smiles happened with the lips, when you looked at the real action of them. Teeth got involved in their turn, but only because the lips revealed them. If this alien’s people had had lips that functioned anything like human lips, then they would’ve decomposed some untold number of centuries ago. Even so, the fangs on the skull above him looked really pretty cute.
Had he paid better attention to his surroundings, Kāifēng might have noticed that the dirt beneath his boots was thicker here, rising up to meet him as if someone had deliberately placed it over top of something. Had he kept his mind on the ground, he might have felt the nominally solid ground wobble beneath his feet and darted away before it collapsed. Had he not resumed humming his happy little song—“Mind the map now and watch your step, or you’ll end up in an oubliette……”—he might have heard the creaking sounds beneath him as he rocked back and forth on his feet, bobbing his head in time with the tune.
Oh, well.
CRRRRRAAACK!!!
No sense wasting time on a game of “Coulda, woulda, shoulda.”
The sickening crack walloped Kāifēng’s eardrums. His heart and stomach lurched all over again. But this time—this time, Kāifēng caught himself more quickly. A broken wooden plank stuck out just far enough for him to grab onto and stop his fall. Lucky for him, too, because based on what little he could see beneath him? He felt confident that the floor had spikes on it. Or polearms. Or some other sharp, pointy, impaling object that he very much did not want to meet the business end of, please and thank you.
Glancing up at how his hands had landed and how his arms had posed themselves, Kāifēng chuckled breathlessly. If he hadn’t known better, looking at their vaguely oblong position, he might have thought himself a ballerina doing a pirouette.
“We’ll be fiiiiiine,” Kāifēng told himself, voice barely above a whisper. Closing his eyes, he did a few rounds of the deep breathing he did while meditating every morning. His arms whined in protest, but he didn’t let himself give up. Swaying idly back and forth, he muttered, “I just……need to pull myself back up.…… Just like picking yourself up after some bad times.…… Knight of Saturn, knight of Saturn……that probably means I can do this fine, right?”
Another deep breath, and Kāifēng tried to tug himself out of this predicament.
He got his eyes up far enough to see the floor. But when he tried to scramble the rest of the way out, he couldn’t make it. Finding nothing to grab hold of up top, his hands slipped. As he dropped, his legs flailed. Even when he caught himself again—hands beside each other and arms hanging straight up and down like an elementary school poster of a cat hanging off a tree branch, exhorting the children to Hang In There!—Kāifēng kicked at the empty air.
He had to get himself out of this.
Somehow, some way, he had to get himself out of this. He still had so much at this place left to explore.
ooc note: The mentions of alcohol from Kerberos, Fang, Bélénos, and Ilse have been discussed with and approved by Song and Prince!
abattoir blues / alcohol, your songs resolve
Getting himself out of the hanging around predicament took Kāifēng a few tries and some risks that, in all likelihood, Hayden wouldn’t have appreciated him taking.
Which was all well and fine (fair enough from a certain perspective) because frankly, Kāifēng didn’t appreciate the fact that he’d be in for a very deserved “I told you so” when he told Hayden about all of this. Not about any of the magic parts—that much, Kāifēng sort of felt could be chalked up to “Hayden accepted a certain amount of weirdness in his life when he decided to befriend Líanlí”—but about how difficult Kāifēng had found it to pull himself up, even with the enhanced strength of being a magical knight. About how he’d almost considered letting himself drop and simply trying to fall with enough style to dodge the pointy objects down below.
“I’m not saying that cardio and meditation aren’t good for you, Li-Li,” Hayden had been telling him for years—back since they were at Harvard together, even. “I’m saying that they aren’t good enough and that you’d do well to supplement them with some strength-resistance training. Really, it could help you out a lot. You can thank me later.”
Locking gazes with the eyeless sockets of some mostly human-looking skull that protruded from the wall, Kāifēng sarcastically echoed, “Myeeehhh, you can thank me laaaater~”
Of course he realized Hayden had been right. Hard not to, after having his face rather unavoidably rubber in that fact. That didn’t mean he felt like being mature about it, though. Only the skeletons lurked around to judge him about it, or so it seemed, and they honestly didn’t feel particularly cruel or anything.
Liberated from that trouble, though, Kāifēng looped back to the place where he’d originally fallen. Nothing about the little nexus had changed—but now that he’d pointed himself in the right direction, Kāifēng’s lantern-beam fell on yet more tunnels. A total of six, including the two he’d initially noted.
Since he didn’t feel especially judged by all the skeletons in the walls, Kāifēng crossed his arms and pouted. This whole setup was really quite rude (from his perspective as someone who couldn’t read the poem-thing carved on the wall). The frustration of not knowing what each corridor would get him into was almost enough to send Kāifēng running back down the path he’d already taken. Maybe he could take a running jump and leap over the pit of very sharp objects.……
But as he turned to consider that option, Kāifēng spotted something else that he must have missed before: another carving in the brick, this one distinctly less literary in nature. Three cut gemstones, arranged in a triangle formation.…… Huh. So somebody wanted someone else to think that pathway went to treasure, did they? Made sense enough with the juxtaposition of the sigil and the pit waiting to impale people. Maybe the other paths would also have these little signposts?
Idly singing to prevent any silence from eating at his nerves—“So many romantic dreams are merely bedroom schemes. It’s such a nice ideal. Too bad it’s rarely real”—Kāifēng perused the bricks around the entrances to the other hallways. All of them, he found, had little pictograms that functioned as labels. One of them looked like a crown and scepter. Another looked like some kind of pendant. The path slightly off-left of the middle had pictographs that looked like musical notes.
“We’re animals at the core,” Kāifēng sang, tracing his fingertips over those curves and lines, “instincts we can’t ignore. You think you’re civilized? You just might be surpriiiiiiiised.…”
Pivoting on his heel, Kāifēng traipsed over to the first path he’d rejected. “People talk about love, love, love, love, love and it sounds like ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah’ ‘cause they really mean sex! Sex, sex, seeeeex—people just want to conneeeeect.…”
The little pictograph label that greeted him here looked rather like a dragon, and Kāifēng supposed that he could understand the logic. Mark the paths with potentially deadly traps lying in wait as the ones that contain treasures, and mark the ones that actually lead anywhere important as containing serious dangers. Simple reverse psychology, sure, but if someone wanted to steal from a Knight of Saturn, then they probably didn’t have much in the way of brains to begin with, did they?
“Love, love, love, love, love, so typical,” Kāifēng sang, then tapped the little dragon in time with the eight “blah”s that took up the next couple bars. “We don’t feel like we think we should.…” He turned again, throwing himself into a sort of lopsided pirouette, mostly by virtue of being too enthusiastic rather than because he’d intended to do so. “Not like we were taught we would. We’ve been fed too much bull about love.…”
On the other side of the room—and seven more repetitions of the word “love”—Kāifēng rocked up to the last pictograph.
“I believe in love that’s true. I’m a sucker just like you.…” As he leaned in closer to it, he vaguely wished that he’d worn his glasses instead of his contact lenses. Something about the situation just felt like he ought to be pushing glasses up his nose right about now. “But real love don’t stand a chance in absurd pop song romance. Grow up with my point of view.…” At least the last picture-label seemed fairly straightforward. “It’s easy to see right through.”
Kāifēng may not have known what lurked on the other end of the reverse psychology here, but he couldn’t mistake how the carving was shaped like a burning flame.
“You start to feel deceived.…” He spun back and forth a few times, looking from the Flame Hallway to the Dragon Hallway. “Throw out what you belieeeeeve. People sing about love, love, love, love, love.…”
Would’ve been nice if the corridors could have explained themselves for him. Like, if he’d maybe had some trinket—something more overtly magical than his pretty silk folding fan—that could perhaps have indicated for them who he was and made them explain all their mysteries for him. Then again, Kāifēng supposed that this would’ve meant fewer fun things for him to discover about this place. Plus, maybe there wasn’t a way to key up the magic so that it let the Knight of Kāifēng in but not anybody else.
Continuing to hum the Pansy Division song on his lips as it devolved into an endless repetition of the chorus, Kāifēng tapped a finger against his cheek and considered his options.… He couldn’t predict what would lay down either of the paths from their picture-labels. That much was certain, given how the pit full of spiky objects had been labeled with three gemstones. But did the dragon feel luckier or did the fire?
Probably the dragon, all things considered. Dragons could generally be reasoned with in a way that fire could not. Which probably meant that, following the twisty reverse psychology of this whole business, the dragon pathway would not be quite as safe.
So, with another abrupt pivot, Kāifēng set off down the corridor with the picture of the flame beside its entrance. As he ambled along, taking in the view of the skeletons that also lined these walls, he moved on to a different tune: “If you’re havin’ girl problems, I feel bad for you, son. I got ninety-nine problems and a b***h ain’t one~.…”
Alternately humming and singing along with Hugo’s cover of Jay-Z, Kaifeng followed a path that seemed rather windy and twisting, relative to the other corridor he’d gone down. On the positive, however, the raw dirt floor stayed perfectly beneath his feet where it belonged. No trap-doors opened up to threaten him with falling into a pit of sharp, pointy things. All along the walls, the friendly skeletons kept him company the whole way down, while Kaifeng pleasantly kicked up dust in time with his song: “At the crossroads a second time~ Make the Devil change his mind~ It’s a pound of flesh, but it’s really a ton. Ninety-nine problems and a b***h ain’t one~…”
He’d cycled through a few repetitions of the tune by the time he came to what seemed like the end of the road.… Or at least, a diversion into somewhere else: a door, this one in the wall, where one would expect a door, and not beneath Kaifeng’s feet, where doors honestly had no place being. It didn’t open when Kaifeng tried the handle, but at least that problem easily righted itself. Hayden, he thought sullenly, probably would’ve tried to kick in the door because such old wood would probably give out easily. Kaifeng, on the other hand, spotted something silver glittering there before him: a key, dangling off a chain necklace that someone had looped around one of the skulls. It protruded from the wall at just the right angle to keep the necklace in place, forbidding it to fall off.
“Well, don’t mind if I do,” Kaifeng said to no one, reaching out to take the key.
After fumbling through the lock and pushing the door open, Kaifeng hesitated. That experience with the door into the tower had taught him to expect anything around here. Falling down into this chamber would do that to anybody, he felt. But no unexpected weirdness jumped out to ensnare him, so he strode across the threshold and into……
…………a wine cellar?
Wrinkling his nose, Kaifeng frowned. Metal racks from floor to ceiling with bottles held on their sides. A fancy-looking standing cabinet, carved from black wood, with variously shaped glasses collecting dust inside. Most of them certainly looked like wine glasses, and among their number sat a corkscrew. Over by a different door, kitty-corner from where Kaifeng had entered this cellar, someone had left a different bottle shattered on the floor, with its cork apparently nestled so far down in the neck that it wouldn’t come unstuck. As he knelt to inspect it, Kaifeng could imagine the massive red stain seeping across the floor. Might have happened that way. But this place had been abandoned so long, the wine—or whatever had been in the broken bottle—had long since disappeared.
Half-singing and half-humming, Kaifeng let yet another new song slip out from under his breath—“‘Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick, the one that makes me scream,’ she said. ‘The one that makes me laugh,’ she said, threw her arms around my neck”—as he inspected some of the intact bottles along the wall. For all he couldn’t read any of the words, he sure could look at pictures.
One of them had a design with some sort of dragon curling up like an ouroboros, save that he failed to catch his tail in his mouth. Alongside that, a trellis with black roses provided the label with a border, and on either side of the not-quite-ouroboros sat an illustration. On the little guy’s right-hand side, the illustration depicted another bowl, this one full of round little things that looked an awful lot like chestnuts. Then, to his left, the picture showed off stalks of some plant that looked an awful lot like bamboo, though significantly shorter and squatter. The leaves on the top looked different from how he recognized bamboo leaves looking as well, but Kaifeng supposed that he could chalk that up to the plant possibly being from outer space. (After all, he presently stood in a cellar on Saturn. Anything could’ve proven possible!)
For all he squinted at it and considered the drawing from different angles, Kaifeng couldn’t tell if the discrepancy was simply a limitation imposed by the size of the label, or if it meant that he wasn’t looking at a drawing of bamboo. Though, he supposed that it being bamboo wouldn’t have explained the foregrounded presence of a little bowl full of some dark liquid and a spoon letting the liquid ooze off of it, showing off how viscous it was meant to be. That did not, however, explain for him what he was actually looking at.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Kaifeng muttered, his song temporarily forgotten and his words directed at……well, nobody, really. But if someone had been here with him, he felt like it probably would’ve been Hayden. “Do they even make liquor out of chestnuts…? Or bamboo for that matter? I mean, the sugar content in it tells me ‘Maybe yes,’ but……”
Meh, he’d look it up when he got home, maybe. If he still felt like it. For the moment, though, he set the bottle back where he’d gotten it and picked up another off the rack.
Grabbing at random found him a bottle with a wide, bulbous bottom, a middle section shaped almost like an almond, and an intricate, spiral neck. Kaifeng tilted his head, struggling to fathom the shape of it. This thing looked more meant for fancy perfume than for alcohol. Granted, a perfume bottle would’ve been smaller; the bottle in his hand seemed at least the same size as the more conventional bottles around it, if not larger than some. Thanks to the light from his necklace-lantern, Kaifeng could also see that the glass had an almost lilac hue to it.
The bottom left corner of the label, as well as this bottle’s cork, both bore a stamp shaped like a bubbling cauldron. Most of the label, however, was taken up by an elaborate drawing of berries. Three different kinds of them, at that. Some had the same round, firm look of blueberries, save that they’d been colored in a faint, softish pink hue. Similarly, the second kind resembled raspberries to a tee, except that they were a vivid gold. The third kind had the hue that Kāifēng would’ve expected from a blueberry, but the shape was wrong: instead of small and round, they looked quite big, with an oblong shape like a long grape and an almond had tried to meet each other in the middle. Regardless of their type, however, all the berries bore the same layer of frost, with a dusting of snow atop their little heads.
Could berries even be said to have heads?
Well, no matter, either way. Another thing for Kāifēng to ask the Internet about later, if he felt like it.
Humming rather than singing the same tune he’d been on most recently, Kāifēng put the strange purple bottle back and grabbed up another. This one looked more like a normal wine bottle, and its label featured an illustration of some kind of tree? Maybe a bush? Whatever it was, the plant’s stalks reached from one bottom corner of the label to the upper corner on the opposite side, and all along the limbs, little white flowers bloomed, each with six long petals.… So far, nothing entirely disproved Kaifeng’s idea that he’d wandered into someone’s wine cellar, but he wanted to be completely certain.
“Yoooou, soft and only,” Kaifeng softly picked his song back up again, only to immediately pause and tilt his head at the stamp on top of the cork. Three of the same flowers from the illustration, arranged in a little curve, with a hole in the middle where someone had presumably stuck the corkscrew at least once before. Very nice. Twisting the device down into the bottle’s neck, he continued, “Yooooou, lost and lonely. Yoooooou, strange as angels, dancing in the deepest oceans.…”
The cork came out of the bottle with a pop!
Kaifeng lifted the neck and took a deep whiff.
Immediately, he whipped the bottle away. He hacked like a sick cat, nausea sweeping over him and here he stood, trying desperately to bite it ********>—” Kaifeng trailed off into disorganized, half-grumbled cursing, some in English, some in Mandarin, and some just disconnected noises that meant nothing in anybody’s language. Yep, definitely alcohol.
Definitely old enough to have gone rancid.
Definitely kinda smelled like turpentine, after however long it had been pent up down here.
Reflexively, Kaifeng rushed to turn the bottle upside-down. As the contents glupped and slopped, sloshing their way onto the floor, he noted that the liquid came out silvery and ever so faintly glowing. Which would’ve been quite nice, actually, if not for the putrescent ******** smell that dogged his nostrils.
Ugh, kinda high-key <********> this wine cellar. Covering his nose and mouth with both hands, even though doing so accomplished nothing, Kaifeng scampered up a rickety flight of stairs. Thankfully, the key also unlocked the door at their top. Good, good, good. The more distance he could put between himself and that nasty-a**, trash-garbage liquor? Or wine? Whatever it had been? So much the better.
Slamming the door closed behind him, Kaifeng sighed. Slouching against it, he cast his gaze around……wherever he’d come up.
Some kind of cottage, maybe?
Yeah, Kaifeng thought as he undid the necklace’s clasp and fixed the key around his neck. Yeah, this whole place had a very cottage-feeling sort of vibe to it.
Off to his left-hand side sat what looked like a kitchen: a little stove with a chamber for burning wood or coal or whatever the previous occupants had burned; a table that looked like it wouldn’t seat too many people but would provide a cozy atmosphere for anybody welcomed to it; assorted bowls and pots strewn around the counters……and, for whatever reason, the floor. As well, a couple of the cabinets had their doors flung open, as if whoever had once lived here had been in the middle of something and called away very suddenly—too suddenly to properly clean up whatever they’d been doing.
Nobody needed to be impressed by this little living space, Kāifēng supposed. Didn’t seem like anybody was coming up here too often, and if it was meant to be Kāifēng’s place, then he didn’t see himself inviting anybody up here just yet. But still, it didn’t hurt to tidy the place up. Put things back in some semblance of order.
Once he had, Kaifeng turned back to the room that the cellar door had spat him out into.… Some kind of living room, from the overall look of it, with a mix of sitting pillows on the floor—some of which looked very finely made indeed, if dusty and a bit worn by time—and sofas that seemed almost more decorative than functional. Inspecting them more closely, Kaifeng wondered if they hadn’t been designed more for a wealthy Victorian white lady to faint upon them when she felt like emotionally manipulating her children by exaggerating her own frailty.
Either way, there wasn’t much use for them, at present. Not until Kaifeng came back with some trash bags and a couple easy-empty, battery powered hand-vacuums. All the dust in here desperately needed cleaning before Kaifeng could even think of putting the cottage—or whatever this place was—to use as anything but a fun curiosity to tell Hayden about when he got home.
Not that the dust stopped him from exploring further. There wasn’t much to explore, really, and he yearned to know more about what this place kept in it, and how it tied into whatever all was happening at this place called Kaifeng.
Across from the stairs, he found a walk-in cupboard full of linens and assorted tools that he’d need to mess around with later. None of them looked like anything out of the ordinary for a rustic little cottage: pruning shears or something loosely scissor-shaped that very much resembled pruning shears; a broom, a sweeping pan, and various implements of dust-ruction that seemed desperately in need of cleaning off themselves; a box containing some assorted hammers and the like………and jugs. Or jars. Or……something, Kaifeng guessed.
Several large containers, each with at least one handle and some with ropes attached, arranged in two rows filled the cupboard’s bottom shelves, front to back. Several more of them sat all lined up in the back, some stacked atop their fellows, making it impossible for Kaifeng to fully access the back of the cupboard without biiiiiiiiig stretching like Táotáo after a nap and extending one leg back behind him like a ballerina.
Before he could allow the silence to set in again, Kāifēng once more started singing, moving on from his bullshit about The Cure to some Taylor Swift bullshit instead: “You booked the night train for a reason, so you could sit there in this hurt. Bustling crowds or silent sleepers, you’re not sure which is worse.…”
Kāifēng, strictly speaking, didn’t feel entirely sure himself—specifically, he couldn’t say why the part of him that always needed something to fill the silence had gone straight to this song in particular. “Champagne Problems” was hardly his favorite tune out of TaySwift’s catalog and while he liked Evermore just fine, it wasn’t his favorite of her myriad eras. This song wasn’t even his favorite of Taylor’s ballads specifically—that top-dog honor went to “Mine,” though mostly thanks to Naya Rivera and her performance of the song in character as Santana Lopez, rather than for any reasons related to Taylor Swift herself (which didn’t invalidate his reasons in the slightest, thanks!! Why couldn’t more people listen to Tyler the Creator about personal reasons being valid ways of responding to any given song or album!!)
—but somehow, as Kāifēng pawed around in the cupboard, something felt so inescapably, undeniably Right about continuing to sing, “Because I dropped your hand while dancing, left you out there standing crestfallen on the landing—champagne problems.…”
Around the corner from the cupboard, he found a room with an old style bathtub, the sort that required people to fill it up by bucket—and, indeed, the bucket had been left hanging on the wall.… “Your mom’s ring in your pocket, my picture in your wallet.…”
Not that the presence of a bathroom was, in and of itself, something wrong.… “Your heart was glass, I dropped it. Champagne problems…”
But finding the bathroom did raise plenty of questions for Kaifeng. As he traipsed inside and examined what had all been left behind—humming the melody of his current song, or more specifically humming the little lyric-less lull between the first chorus and the second verse—he wondered where the cabin’s previous occupant had gotten the water for bathing with, considering the state of the river. Speaking personally, Kaifeng wouldn’t have taken a bath in water like that. Even after boiling to get rid of as much nastiness as possible, he wouldn’t have trusted it. For the life of him, Kāifēng simply couldn’t imagine being that level of desperate……and yet, the bathtub existed, very clearly, sitting right out in front of him.
“You told your family for a reason,” Kaifeng went on, tracing his eyes over a scrub brush hanging beside the bucket. “You couldn’t keep it in. Your sister splashed out on the bottle. Now no one’s celebrating……”
Was there some kind of filter somewhere on the grounds of this place? Had the river been somehow different in the past? This place, special though it was, seemed to have been alone for ages. Stood to reason, then, that the river could have been different before the last caretaker had abandoned these fields with creepy trees and adjacent river, this nice little cottage in which Kāifēng currently found himself, the evil wizard tower in the center of it all with what sure seemed to be a good deal of tricks up its sleeves.…… Perhaps there was a spring around here somewhere and it provided the fresh water?
Hmmm. Something to investigate later, Kāifēng thought.
“Dom Pérignon, you brought it. No crowd of friends applauded.…” Moving on, Kaifeng faced a choice: two more rooms to look into, one to his left and at the end of the corridor, while the other sat to his right, its position a mirror for the left-ish room. “Your hometown skeptics called champagne problems.…”
Well, Kaifeng was left-handed. As good a reason as any to head to the left. “You had a speech; you’re speechless.…”
Kaifeng curled his fingers around the doorknob, cold iron with ornate carvings that he didn’t stop to look at. “Love slipped beyond your reaches.…”
The door didn’t open.
Abruptly falling silent, Kaifeng scrunched up his nose and pouted. Trying again netted him the same result: pointless frustration as the door, mocking him with its current locked state, refused to open. For a moment, he rattled the door, jostling it by the knob, just to see if that might help him somehow with the predicament of how to get in this room. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t.
This, he felt, was probably what people meant by the phrase “sticky wicket.”
At a loss for other ideas, he unfastened the necklace so he could try the key.
His shoulders slumped when that <******** worked. How utterly anticlimactic, a simple, logical solution presenting itself like this instead of giving Kaifeng something more magical when he stood here, in a cottage on Saturn—which was apparently far more hospitable to human life than he ever remembered learning in his childhood science classes—all dolled up in his garb as a magical knight. Talk about rude.
Oh, well, at least the door had behaved itself and let him……out. Or so it seemed.
Crossing the threshold, Kaifeng picked the song back up where the last chorus had started—“Dom Pérignon, you brought it. No crowd of friends applauded.…”—and yeah, the door had let him out. He definitely exited the building, boots crunching down on dirt and grass instead of the hardwood floor.
Before him lay a path of simple bricks—“Your hometown skeptics called it champagne problems”—with assorted grasses, mosses, and thorny, plant-things sticking up through several of the cracks. Down at the other end of the brick path—“You had a speech; you’re speechless. Love slipped beyond your reaches”—sat another little building. And, well, Kaifeng had to move in closer, didn’t he?—“And I couldn’t give a reason: champagne problems”—At least, it felt like he needed to do that in order to learn more about this place.
(After taking a few paces, Kaifeng turned around to look at the place he’d left. Yes, he decided as he looked it over. Yes, “cottage” felt like a pretty accurate description. Very nice place. The sharp angles of the corners and the roof made Kaifeng think of old German Expressionist films, very The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but nevertheless, it had a homey feeling—at least, it did to Kaifeng. He supposed that he could see why someone else might’ve found it intimidating.)
“Your Midas touch on the Chevy door, November flush and your flannel cure. ‘This dorm was once a madhouse.’ I made a joke, ‘Well, it’s made for me.’” Kaifeng twirled down the path, not really dancing around the bricks and the overgrowth breaking them apart. That he didn’t trip over something definitely counted as a miracle, because he kept his eyes on the sky (still in the rich twilight violets and pinks as before), on the buildings’ roofs, on pretty much everything else but the path beneath his feet.
“How evergreen our group of friends; don’t think we’ll say that word again. And soon they’ll have the nerve to deck the halls that we once walked through.” On the other side of the path, he found the out-building locked. He gave himself a moment to pout about it, letting the door feel his sulking kitten energy.
“One for the money—” Wrinkling his nose, Kaifeng tried jiggling the door on its own, just in case that might work for him this time.
“Two for the show—” It didn’t work.
“I never was ready—” At least the key on the silver chain fit neatly inside the lock. A downright nightmare for twenty-first-century security experts, said the part of Kaifeng’s mind that made him eagerly take any YouTube sponsorships he could get from any apps or tools meant for remembering your passwords with XYZ special new encryption thing that swore up and down they wouldn’t let anybody else but you get your information. None of them had worked exactly how he wanted yet, but he kept hoping.
“So I watched you go—” Still, he couldn’t fault a probably thousand-year-old place for using thousand-year-old security protocols. The lock easily gave way to the key.
“Sometimes you just don’t know the answer ‘til someone’s on their knees and asks you.” Kaifeng closed his eyes as he pushed the door open, as he crossed the threshold. “‘She would’ve made such a lovely bride, what a shame she’s ******** at the room around him, he only finished the line because not doing so would have bothered him: “‘……in the head,’” fell from his lips with no song behind it.
Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2023 1:57 am
Even given his aversion to silence (especially prolonged silence), for a long moment, the building’s single room yawned around Kaifeng and he didn’t have anything to say.
Had he walked into a one-man abattoir?
Oh, catacombs beneath the evil wizard tower—that was one thing, but all of this? With the suspiciously stained worktable sprawled out in the middle of the room, right beneath a skylight, and the unhoused skeleton still lying there? Similar stains stood out on the tools resting by the body: a scalpel and a similarly fine knife, both caked in a brown that had clearly once been red. All over the floor, he spotted more and more of them: spots, some of them not inconsiderably sized, where the wood had blackened like necrotic flesh, with little ghostly hints that these splotches had, once upon a time, been red.
Along one wall, a rack of different knives, cleavers, and other assorted implements hung above a row of disconnected splotches, the same once-red blackish shade as the other stains that certainly seemed to have come from someone’s blood. Every window in the room had its own line of disconcerting objects, too. Namely, the recessed sills held glass jars of assorted sizes, each held an organ preserved in some manner of fluid. Most of them looked like hearts, Kāifēng felt pretty sure, but he also spotted at least three brains, something that was probably a kidney, and several tiny jars containing unmistakable eyeballs and optic nerves.
Ugh, Kāifēng was glad he didn’t eat before coming up here.
Although another song came so easily to his mind as he looked around—And the mercy seat is waiting, and I think my head is burning, and in a way I’m yearning to be done with all this measuring of truth—Kaifeng didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything. His lips trembled, and his throat closed in around itself, and the more he saw of the sharpened implements, the more he felt as if his voice had entirely dried up.
……Had the last Knight of Kāifēng been some kind of serial killer? A master torturer, perhaps? Or was there (please, please, please, please, please, please, please) some kind of perfectly normal and non-homicidal explanation for this specific collection of implements and also bodily organs?
A desk sat in one of the room’s far back corners, with a row of thick books held in place by a large, heavy-looking bottle, almost more of a jug. That choice of bookend made Kaifeng wrinkle his nose, recalling all over again the turpentine-smelling ******** he’d found leftover in that bottle in the basement. At least he found this bottle quite empty, despite the cork still firmly placed in its neck.… Quite heavy, as well, and without it in place, the books lazily slumped over onto the desk, kicking up a cloud of dust. Tsk, Kāifēng would have to pick them up before he left, and tend to this place with clean-up tools when he brought them next time. No good sense in leaving things a mess, regardless of what the previous Knight might or might not have done with his time.
He frowned down at the bottle, though, his whole stomach reeling with a mix of confusion and dismay. If the last Kāifēng Knight had not been a serial killer—if they’d wanted, as Liánlí-Kāifēng assumed most people did, to not give off Serial Killer Vibes—then this particular choice of alcohol seemed marvelously counterintuitive. Not that any of the words on the label made a single bit of sense to him, but the illustration of what looked like bleeding apples and bees that bled honey instead of making it like normal bees? Definitely seemed like the sort of edgy bullshit thing that Zhìháo would’ve liked, and that thought made Liánlí cringe. Worse yet, the label bore a drawing of some fanged, monster-looking guy with his head tilted back, apparently bellowing his problems at the sky.
As if he could banish all secondhand embarrassment from his presence, he fumbled the books back into a standing position, then put the bottle back where he’d found it.
Ugh, the serial killer idea still had room to be wrong, but the last Kāifēng Knight being a cringey edgelord, though? ……Technically also still had room for Liánlí-Kāifēng to be wrong about it, and ********, he hoped that he was. Like, maybe there could be some kind of understandable explanation for killing a lot of people—Knights, as far as he knew, accepted as a job risk that they might need to do that someday in the pursuit of justice—but how the ******** could you justify being super-cringe about it?
“Please, please, please,” he muttered, crossing his arms as he turned his gaze down. “Please let me find something that makes my predecessor less of a cringe-fail edgelord.…”
Glancing around the desk provided Kaifeng some relief until he remembered he couldn’t read any of the writing. The parchments strewn across the desk only meant anything to him insofar as: 1. he could tell that he and the last Kaifeng Knight had the same organizational habits (namely, messy ones); 2. not that he could evaluate for certain, not knowing what the characters were supposed to look like, but Liánlí-Kaifeng felt fairly certain that the handwriting here left a lot to be desired (meaning, much like his own, which was also very messy); and 3. several pieces of the parchment had little doodles on them, all featuring what seemed to be a person? Albeit only their face or bust? But the decorative antlers, pair of thick braids, light facial markings, and tiara with the knotwork flower all suggested that they were meant to be the same person.
Briefly, Kaifeng checked over his shoulder to verify: the skeleton on the table did not have any antlers. Between that and the objective cuteness of the doodles, he found himself breathing more easily……found his stomach settling and his nerves easing off on their lively tap-dance of What The ******** Even……and then, Kaifeng decided to open one of the books.
No, he couldn’t read these words any more than he could the ones on the parchment notes……but pages upon pages of detailed anatomy charts sure felt like an extra point in favor of the last Kāifēng Knight being a serial killer (and possibly also a cringe-fail edgelord about it). Leafing through the illustrations, Liánlí-Kaifeng wondered if he’d be able to eat anything when he got back home to Táotáo, either. Hayden would probably get on his case if he didn’t, but also, like……ew? Liánlí had had several reasons for ******** off from Boston before Zhìháo’s parents could try to force him into medical school, but a distinct aversion to s**t Like This had definitely been on the list.
Shaking his head, he nudged the book back into place. Whatever the story on this room was, Liánlí-Kaifeng felt perfectly ready to ******** off outta here. The only thing standing in his way, it seemed, was his own attention span, and how readily he noticed the spot in one corner with metal hinges.
Not that anyone had done anything to conceal them—nor had anybody tried to hide the handle—but other aspects of the space had stood out to Kaifeng first.
He hesitated a moment. What sorts of things would he find in the cellar of an out-building like this? Maybe he didn’t want to find out.
Except no, Kaifeng decided and he clicked his lantern back on. Better to know than not. Steeling himself with a deep breath, he yanked up the handle and stomped down the stairway.……
……Into another ******** wine cellar.
His entire body fell into a slouch. “Seriously?!”
All three of the walls without an attached staircase had the same metal racks that Kaifeng had found in the cabin’s cellar. Only the one directly opposite the staircase was not entirely blocked off for wine-racks, and only because the last Kaifeng Knight had apparently needed space for another cabinet full of glassware. Frowning, Liánlí tromped around closer to one of the racks, then noticed the skeletons in both the fourth wall and the staircase. One skull, which had antlers not entirely unlike the ones in the little doodles, faced out at him directly, so he sulked right back at it and gestured at the rest of the room.
“What the ******** kinda lush did you have to deal with down here, babes?” He shook his head and rolled his eyes, swishing his braid with Maximum Agitation. “I mean, honestly.…”
Not that his exasperation made him any less curious about what the last Kaifeng Knight had kept in here. Humming because he didn’t wish to dignify this utterly excessive bullshit by full-on singing—Gonna sing those songs that offend the censors, singin’ those songs that offend the censors, poppin’ my pills from a Pez dispenser, rockstars don’t do mornings~!—Kaifeng pawed through the bottles, looking for any signs that he recognized on the labels. If not that, then anything mildly interesting would do.
First, a label with an intricate drawing of a peach tree, on which Kaifeng didn’t find an identifying seal until he looked at the top of the cork. There, they’d put in a stamp shaped like a daffodil crowned in sunbeams. So, was this like a wine? Or more like a schnapps? Kaifeng couldn’t tell, but he also didn’t care enough to put any in his mouth for a taste-test—not after how godawful the stench had been from the one bottle he’d dared to open.
The next bottle to catch his eye didn’t have a cork, but a top with a complex latch, bearing a single blue rose shaped like a heart. Down on the label sat an illustration of a thicket full of blue roses. Above the bush, some unseen breeze blew whirls of likewise blue petals through the picture. Even the corners of the borders, with their complicated whorled designs, were single blue roses, each one shaped like a heart, the same as on the top. Graciously, the clear bottle showed off how the wine itself was also a vivid shade of blue, with clear signs of built-up bubbly stretching up into the neck—sparkling, then. Part of Kaifeng wanted to crack the bottle open and taste it, simply because he’d never had rose-wine before. But without someone to verify that he wouldn’t poison himself, drinking thousand-year-old rose-wine sounded like a categorically Bad Idea, so Kaifeng placed the bottle back in its slot.
The next pull gave him another clear bottle, this one full of a pinkish-red liquid, itself largely translucent. More interestingly, the first repeat of a symbol: the little perpetually unsatisfied ouroboros guy from the one bottle appeared here, as well. One of him hovered in the upper left-hand corner of the label, above a lovingly illustrated strawberry field, and another had been stamped into the cork. He also showed up on the bottle after that, clear and filled with a black liquid that seemed so opaque, his mind didn’t want to believe it wasn’t solid. This label had more roses, a thorny vine snaking down from the upper-left corner to the lower right, curling in a heart around the ouroboros guy, dead-center.
These roses, though, were also black. Moreover, bunches of little black berries also dangled off the vines.
Must it take a life for hateful eyes to glisten once again, Kaifeng hummed, reaching for another bottle with a symbol that he already recognized. The bubbling cauldron from the ridiculous bottle with the illustration of the three berries—but this time, it showed up in the corners of the borders, around a drawing of one plant that Kaifeng recognized and one that he couldn’t name for the life of him. Granted, he didn’t actually clock the long stem with the bunched tentacles bearing little white flowers—but he did recognize aniseed when he saw it. The other plant looked almost but not entirely like a fern? Maybe? Kaifeng didn’t remember what ferns looked like, but that’s what his brain managed to come up with for the odd, tendril-looking shape of the leaves. Probably, the plant was not actually a fern, though……or at least Kaifeng had never seen a fern with little yellow fruits covered in bulbous little bumps.
Offhand, though, he could only think of one alcohol that involved anise, and that certainly made sense out of the green liquid inside this bottle. Kaifeng had always understood that absinthe had more of a pale yellow tint to its specific shade of green, but he supposed that the seafoam-y color looked nice enough. Matched with the bubbles in the cauldron symbol, at least.
Yet another symbol he’d already seen followed on the next bottle as well: the trio of little white flowers, six-petaled as before. This illustration, as well, seemed largely similar to the one Kaifeng had seen on the bottle he’d cracked open so stupidly—with the major exception that these pictures of the plants included the seeds, stacked up in a rounded pyramid above the blossoms. Maybe this bottle’s contents wouldn’t have the same revolting turpentine stench as the bottle from the other wine cellar, but Kaifeng didn’t wish to risk subjecting himself to that in the name of checking whether or not this beverage was likewise silvery with a faint glow.
What will we do with a drunken sailor, what will we do with a drunken sailor, what will we do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning……—Moving on to a new song and growing quite bored with the Flogging Molly, Kaifeng finally found a symbol that he hadn’t seen yet. Surrounded by different drawings of peaches and bunches of three cherries, there sat a symbol of a heart-shaped padlock, with a little key attached to it on a chain. That raised so many questions that Kaifeng knew he lacked the context to remotely begin answering, but still: peach and cherry sounded like an interesting combination of flavors. A thousand years ago, give or take, this was probably some primo, top-shelf stuff.
After that, came a label unlike any of the others that Kaifeng had seen as yet. Sure, it displayed another plant, but the way the artist had stylized the drawing, though, with all its dramatic, swooshing curves? Amazing. Fantastic. Ugh, he loved it, and the fact that the plant seemed to be a pear tree made everything that much nicer. Thanks to the golden bottle being largely opaque, he couldn’t tell how much was left in here—but he liked the symbol on the cork, the trio of golden pears all sat together. Very nice. Pity it had probably gone rancid like the other bottle Kaifeng had dared to open.
The next several bottles all had symbols that Kaifeng recognized from this excursion into the old Kaifeng Knight’s wine cellars: two with the heart-shaped padlock symbol and yet more drawings of cherries (the first seemed to color the cherries more brightly, as opposed to the darker fruits on the second bottle, but otherwise, Kaifeng struggled to really discern the difference between the labels).……
Two with the monster-guy yelling at the sky from the bottle up on the old Kaifeng’s desk (one of the labels was no help whatsoever, since Liánlí-Kaifeng couldn’t read any of the writing and he had no idea what the illustrated field was meant to contain, but the other helped quite a bit; honey and bees and nothing else indicated, to Kaifeng at least, that this bottle probably contained mead, of all the gods-forsaken things to drink).……
One with the bubbling cauldron (and Kaifeng couldn’t be certain, but he recognized the crystals that looked like rock candy—that pure sugar on a stick—and he sure felt like the red-brown, vaguely football-shaped fruit-pods opened up to reveal cacao beans, which might have meant that chocolate had been involved in making this beverage? Interesting choice).……
And one with the perpetually unsatisfied ouroboros guy (and an illustration of someone gathering grassy stalks amidst water that rose to about mid-calf.…… Was this supposed to be rice or something? The ******** did Liánlí-Kaifeng know about what rice looked like before he could buy it at a store and cook it in something? Absolutely nothing, that was what he knew about what rice looked like).……
At long last, though, Kaifeng came to a symbol he recognized from somewhere else: the pawprint deadcenter on the label……it looked so much like the symbol that had been on Fang’s brooches, back in the park, with the spider-youma. Kaifeng couldn’t recognize what the light brown, grassy grains were meant to be, nor did he recognize the bowl of tiny, beady-looking grain or……something? But the pawprint was there, and the orange hue looked a lot like his shade of orange.…… Maybe Kaifeng was misremembering and the pawprints would actually prove to be quite different from Fang’s?
He might not know for a while, at that. Moving from his apartment to the new place had a lot of moving parts involved. Necessary, though, to give Táotáo the backyard that she deserved to play in. All the same, Kaifeng stashed the bottle in his subspace. Sometime soon, after the move finished, he’d need to hit Fang up and give it to him. Even if it wasn’t actually from his home-world, maybe it could be a nice gift.
The bottle didn’t seem to have been opened, ever. Maybe it wouldn’t be completely horrible to drink.
wc: 7,655.
Quote:
The different alcohols found in this installment are meant to be, in order:
Murikabushian liquor distilled from chestnuts and sugarcane molasses (think like a shōchū)
Letean three-berry ice wine (uses Letean equivalents of honeyberries, golden raspberries, and pink lemonade blueberries, frozen before they were picked)
Kerberan asphodel wine (made with the fruits and stem, silvery with a faint glow)
Farbautian bloodwine (uses a sweet-tangy apple for its base; fruit has golden outsides, red insides, and viscous juice. The recipe also uses honey and spices. Does not taste like blood at all, but kinda looks like it)
Rhiannian/Rhiannon-made sparkling peach wine
Ilsean sparkling rose petal wine (hence it being vividly blue!)
Murikabushi double-distilled strawberry spirits (sweet and tangy, alcoholically hits like a ******** TRUCK)
Murikabushi rose-wine (made with the petals and the hips, basically vantablack-looking)
Letean wormwood and aniseed spirits (translation: absinthe! except Letean absinthe actually IS hallucinogenic, whereas normal Terran absinthe usually doesn’t deserve that reputation. Also, wormwood looks basically nothing like a fern, not even on Lete, a magical girl exoplanet)
Kerberan asphodel spirits (made with the seeds and tubers, also silvery with a faint glow)
Ilmarian peach-and-cherry sparkling wine (more alcoholic than you’d expect from a sparkling wine; combines the sweet peach taste with a rich, tangy cherry, similar to a Montmorency cherry)
Bélénian twice-distilled pear brandy (exceptionally sweet; golden bottle makes it hard to tell how much alcohol is in there)
Ilmarian twice-distilled sweet cherry brandy (uses a very sweet, tangy, full-bodied cherry as the base to make something like a geist, macerating the cherries and infusing them with neutral spirits and a blend of spices. An IRL equivalent for the base would be Cherry Heering, and an IRL equivalent for the double-distilled version would be Kirschwasser)
Ilmarian wild cherry liqueur (uses a more sour-leaning cherry for the base and keeps the base in during the fermentation process, which lends it slightly bitter and almond-y taste. A solid IRL equivalent would be Maraschino)
Farbautian rye whiskey (has some pleasant vanilla undertones, but the overall taste experience is very smoky, peppery, oaky, and spicy. Low-key, Farbautian whiskey is determined to make you cry and if you drink it without doing so, that’s seen as a sign of strength, nerve, and exceptional mettle)
Farbautian mead (……it’s basically like Terran mead, but it’s made from space-honey that got cultivated off of space-bees. Farbauti’s culture was functionally space-Vikings; mead had to show up somewhere)
Letean spiced dark chocolate liqueur (which, as with most things from Lete, will get you utterly REKT, and has a high enough alcohol content that unopened bottles of it could theoretically still be okay to drink)
Murikabushian rice wine (it’s basically space sake, but with a high enough alcohol content that an unopened bottle kept in ideal conditions might theoretically still be okay to drink)
and Fangan whiskey (made using Fangan fonio as a base, has a rich, nutty flavor)
