After a little more discussion about furniture and the technicalities of finding Kairen for me, Lawson told me that he needed to go take care of some things, but that I was free to look around the building as I pleased.
Alone and left to my own devices only maybe an hour after waking up, I was in the mood to explore since I had been given permission. I didn’t venture too far from my room for fear of getting lost in the maze of hallways, but I did a bit of looking around. I managed to find what I assumed was an exit, and standing guard at the door was a large and intimidating man. He tensed when he noticed me coming around the corner of the hallway, and didn’t un-tense until I wandered back in the direction I had come from.
When I got back to my room, I was tempted to just stay there, but I was also bored and my curiosity got the best of me. I followed the opposite direction of the hallway this time, in the same direction as I was used to traveling to get to the stage, although I didn’t have any desire to revisit that place.
Instead, I took one of the other branches in the hallway. There was nothing to differentiate the different paths besides which direction they were facing, so it was confusing. During my exploration, I didn’t find much of interest, just oriented myself a bit.
By the time I made it back to my room again, I was mentally drained. It’s surprising how tiring it is keeping track of where you are in a mess of identical hallways. When I saw my room, I immediately noticed that plain white curtains were hung up on the inside of the bars in a way such that they didn’t cover the gate, but could be closed to, and did completely cover the rest of the hallway-facing wall. I entered slowly, marveling at how quickly the change had occurred. Inside my room, nothing about the furniture that was already there had changed, but it looked like one of the bean bags that we had sat in earlier in the day had been dragged in and slumped against the back wall. On top of it was a piece of paper.
I did my best to pick it up without ripping or crumpling it. It was printed this time, and while several of the words were still difficult to read, I at least understood the gist of this one: Lawson would stop by later to help pick out furniture for my room and whatever else I wanted, and he wanted to let me know about the curtains and bean bag. I flipped the paper over to place it face-down on the side table, and on the back there was another, shorter message, once again reassuring me that I didn’t have to do anything if I didn’t want to.
A part of my conscious was ingrained with distrust, and began to worry that his constant reassurance was to make me lower my guard so he could get what he wanted, but when I thought about it reasonably, things couldn’t be that much worse then when I was with Krim, even if he was lying. I had lived with it before, and I had a much better chance of escaping now than I had with him. There was no reason not to gamble on it. This train of thought didn’t assuage the nagging feeling wracking my brain, but I felt a little bit better at least.
With nothing else to do while waiting for Lawson to show up, I curled up in the bean bag and internally decreed it my new favorite spot, replacing the top of the perch, due to the sheer squishiness of it. I wrapped myself in my wings almost like a blanket, and closed my eyes to daydream.
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