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Chapter 35 - Chapter 19- Second Floor

The soft feeling of linen assaults your newly formed flesh, the pixels that had faded slowly reforming in this new location that is the second floor. Your whole body feels strangely light and refreshed, mind blank and fixed, muscles unaching as if the first floor had never occurred. The softness of the bed bellow you is superior to the hospital cots of the first floor, the mattress bellow you is springy and comfortable in the way all expensive mattresses are. Your eyes start to drift around the room, once again taking in the unfamiliar surrounding of a new environment.

The room around you resembles that of a high ranking elite of society. The air even smells and tastes expensive. Your lying on a four-poster bed, the kind that makes your own furniture back at the dorms look like cheap, uncomfortable hunks of wood and spring. Above you rises the soft brown canopy of silk velvet, so heavy it barely stirs even when the air conditioning, that you've only just noticed, blows directly onto the fabric. The orange-gold embroidery is clearly done by hand, the painstaking perfection of the fabric cannot be compared to the easy, mechanical perfection of the mass produced stuff. It looked like whoever was commissioned top create this masterpiece of fabric was paid handsomely for their work.

Your neck moves your skull, tilting it to the left only to see the extravagant black lacquered bedside table that is the size of your bed back in your dorm, a mix of gold and silver candelabra adorn the table, a large jewel encrusted mirror sits at it's center. The light refracting off of some of the clearer diamonds to cast rainbow light across the room in an enchanting beam of pure colour. Your neck tilts right to view the other side. 

A large white orchid blooms in an almost artificial manner, the strong scent of pollen filling your nose is the only way you can tell it was grown and not made by some CNC machine like some of the flowers you see at the dorms and cheap shops. The perfect spread of the orchid's lily-white petals feels too perfect to be true, the soft leaves are held at just the right height and angle. The soft healthy colour of its stem stands out just as much as the overly perfect flower at the top of the plant. 

Your eyes swivel lazily, scanning over the tall ceiling high bookshelf that filled the brim with gold adorned volumes that are more expensive than most affordable cars (and maybe a few more high end models you see the rich drive when they want to blend in slightly). The thick tomes tower over the four-post bed in an almost intimidating show of wealth and power. The first though that assaults your awe addled mind is: I hope that the guardian doesn't use that to crush me to death. 

Tour attention turns to the headboard behind you, and you use the word headboard lightly, the thing might as well be a hulking wall of soft fabric, the structure rises too high to weigh less than 90kg (around 195-201 pounds). The mass of fabric frames the top of the bed like the back of a throne, no! The back of a throne would be less extravagant looking. The bed itself must cost more than the rent for a small bungalow, The thick hardwood spirals up and around framing the equally expensive mattress and making your surroundings feel less at home than the decrepit hospital of the first floor.

You look down at your feet, the room is vast and expansive, stretching long as if your looking at your own stretch of land or your own kingdom.

The floor is wide-plank (perhaps European?!) oak finished so dark it's almost black, it's a strange type of dark, warm and expensive rather than cold and poor. Thick ankle deep rugs (Possibly from Arabia) adorn the floor in colourful harmony, a mix of crimson and gold that compliments the dark elements of the room, giving it an almost exotic look, too warm and sunny looking. The rugs overlap beautifully surrounding the bed so no wood can be seen for about two feet around the large bed that is still cradling your form in its soft folds. 

At the end of the room, maybe thirty feet away is a ridiculously lavish sitting area. Three low-slung club chairs upholstered in smoke-gray crocodile leather (or at very least a highly convincing substitute for crocodile leather), a drinks table holding a heavy mahogany cabinet filled with expensive looking wine that no doubt came from hundreds of years ago, you think you may have seen the date 1865. 

Floor to roof windows adorn the right wall, spanning the full length of the room (maybe forty feet), the glass spotless and well kept, paired with even longer curtains that drag along the floor. The curtains themselves are a work of art, deep black velvet with with a golden tree stitched into it in such a way that even folded and pulled back to leave the windows bare, the pattern so carefully made (most likely by hand again), the image stitched into the fabric can be made out and identified. 

You shift in the soft bed, looking more carefully at the sheets you realise that they are 1200-thread-count Egyptian-cotton, not the expensive linen that you had originally believed it to be. The rustling of your sheets makes you see that this floor must be set with a rich girl guardian...right?

You look around, your time on the first floor had been unpleasant and looking back you missed details such as the unnatural amount of dog bowls and dog posters all over the place. Those metal spikes had been stakes that some people attach dog leads to to keep the dog in the garden. So this time you don't want to make the same mistakes, you don't want to miss something obvious and spend days and days dying and listening to that insufferable AI voice read how long you have left until you lose. 

Despite the amount of effort you put in, you can't find anything that you would say is out of the ordinary, no unnatural number of specific objects, no posters or anything adorning the walls other than the paintings of what you can only believe is the ancestors that used to live and own this place. You must have looked around for around twenty minutes until the soft slapping of feet disturbs the still soundless and expensive air.

The guardian is approaching at pace and you can tell in some part of your brain that this guardian isn't going to stop to put their shoes on before coming for you.

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