SWNOVELS Chapter Miracles.
Music, This Chapter: Fragma: Toca’s Miracle – Original [Club Mix]; female vocals by Coco Star.
They were all just ordinary looking people in there. And it wasn’t even all that special the area itself. It looked like the old ‘Church’ ravers hall in NYC. The small one, the one they also called ‘Limelight.’ Fifty people certainly not any more than that... Plain old sleeveless printed linen dresses for the women and simple cotton t-shirts were what the males were mostly all wearing.
The floor was vibrating and she could feel the vibrations literally coming right up through her feet with the ground really shaking through and through each time the people jumped up and landed down down hard on it – which was a lot.
It was hot and the sweating all around was profuse. Every so often she could feel a stream of forced cool air from somewhere, but all in all it was pretty hot in there. This was nothing at all like the ethereal and beautifully calm peaceful environment she had initially found herself being in.
The tall girl was still there with her, standing right close up behind her. She shouted into Liz’s right ear: “I haven’t seen you here before. Are you newly with us?”
Liz tried to reply as loudly as she could. “YES! I’m not really supposed to come in here with you!”
She heard the girl answer: “Hah! If you’re here you’re meant to be here. Come with me, I’ll show you around. You’ll want to see...”
Liz felt a hand take hers and the tall girl led the way out of the main body of people there, off to one side where there was another of the sliding doors. Liz never could see how they were figuring out which sliding panel led to what, or which door went where. There were no signs on them or near them at all.
Through these particular doors there was a tiled large space with showers and towels and all kinds of features – shaved ice mounds in large metallic basins with laser LED’s playing on them, the shaved ice being dispensed from ice blowers coming out of the ceiling; various sizes of thick glass-like containers of water, translucent but quite chunky and robust plastic drinking and pouring vessels flashing and glittering whenever a laser LED played onto them.
“Have you tried pink water?” The tall girl asked Liz.
“No. What is that?”
“Here -.” She stretched a hand out and waved it under a heavy-looking steel faucet against the wall, a stream of glowing clear pink fluid pouring out of it then into a brushed steel basin beneath. The fluid itself wasn’t glowing really, there were lights at the nozzle end of the tap that came on when the fluid was coming out. “This is plant musk infused water – from the Olearia plant. Over there,” she pointed. “Is green water. That’s from Angelica root.”
Liz leaned forward to read something etched in the metal fitments around a set of overhead faucet controls – it read: ‘Hormone shower.’
“Really?” She murmured.
“Oh the guys’ ones in there, over there,” she pointed away to some other place evidently around a curvature where the whole area led further along somewhere. “Marshmallow root-sap infused. “...will freaking kill you. You’ll be coming for days.”
“N-o-o-o. Serious?”
“Oh yah.”
These people all had odd accents, she noted again. There was something there that they all had, in the voice, the inflexions, but she was not able to place a finger on it. Was certainly not American at all, definitely not Canadian, maybe slightly French -, and yes very well-spoken and literate like an educated British person’s voice but not British. More like someone Eastern European, maybe even ancient Latin-sourced... ...like a snob English diction voice-trained Romanian or Estonian or something ‘niche-y’ like those. It was an exotic niche accent.
“This one is here is nice.” She pointed out another shower head. “Citron and coriander. The London City girls all like that. Bit weird, but well, it is pretty sexy you have to admit.”
Liz McNeil’s mind: (...There’s London City girls here??)
“Any plain just hot water showers?”
The short-cropped head of hair shook. “Nup. Just kidding. Of course there are.”
The tall girl’s eyes landed on something she saw just around the curvature where Liz couldn’t see from her position - that seemed to make the girl’s eyes appear disappointed. “Aargh. Not the Xan again. Damn. Come back and see me again though, awright?”
*
Xan T-Five escorted Liz McNeil out of the area where all the people were, back to the relative quietude of the passageway outside.
“There’s no sex going on in there. There’s just people dancing.”
“Oh, is that what they pretended for you?” He arched his eyebrows and spoke with some sarcasm.
Half way down as they walked, Liz McNeil collapsed into a state of complete unconsciousness, since Xan Twenty-Five considered that taking any more chances with her up here was a problematic thing from now on, especially now that there were others who knew she was here, or at least had been here, and since he was about to send her back down to more or less where she had come from...