Hotel Obsidian | Morning

[knife_bender]

You know what? At first Diego thought this room was ugly, but after spending the night in it (and having sex in there), it was beginning to grow on him. He heard someone walking around and assumed it was Annie but--no, no Annie was still beside him.

Diego lifted his head, blearily looking around for whoever decided to come in here while he and Annie were clearly naked.

"What--"

Annie	"Is there someone in here?" Annie wondered sleepily, blinking awake along with Diego and just as naked and sprawled all over this bed as he. She had kind of hoped to use this morning to her advantage, what with the whole privacy thing and how they'd fallen asleep before they could talk, last night. (Stupid Annie. This was why you prioritized things like your pregnancy announcement before everyone got naked and lost track of time!)
Lila	"Oi, wake up!" Lila shouted at them, clearly annoyed -- probably for several reasons -- as she stomped through their room and lifted a cushion off a window seat to see if there was a wayward child in there. "I can't find Stan." Which was more than a little worrisome.
Diego	"Why are you yelling?" Diego asked, attempting to grab his pants without showing Lila everything.
Annie	"Also, knocking?" Annie replied, yanking the sheet around herself -- sorry, Diego, this was her sheet at the moment -- as she fumbled around for her clothes. (They weren't exactly tidily piled up, so....) "Knocking is what people do, usually. Fuck's sake." Was this going to be a thing that happened to them every time they went off on an adventure in their home universes, now? Just showing everyone in the world their naked bodies now?
Lila	"I'm yelling because I'm worried," Lila snapped, as though that wasn't incredibly apparent. "Imbeciles." She'd barely even looked at them, honestly. Barely at all.
Diego	"I'm sure he's around here somewhere," Diego said, starting to sound a little worried himself. "It's a big hotel."
Annie	"Give us a sec," Annie replied, gentling some as she turned her back to Lila to pull on a shirt. (Again, this was giving her flashbacks.) "He can't have gone too far." Right?
Lila	"Okay." Lila blew out an exasperated breath as she fell back into a chair, before reluctantly giving voice to what she suspected. "I mean, he wouldn't have got kugelblitzed with everyone else, would he?" Right? That was preposterous. Tell her it was, please.
Diego	"Shit." He hadn't thought about that, and was not putting his shirt on faster so he could start trying to find Stan. It didn't take him long to find a clue. "I found something." He lifted up some Slim Jim wrappers that were lying on the floor. God, this kid was a mess.
Lila	Nearby -- perhaps related, actually -- Lila took an opportunity to step on a cockroach. "Ugh, rank." But Diego had, indeed, found what looked like a clue, and she was walking over in interest after making sure there was no roach on her boot.
Annie	"Almost looks like a trail?" Annie said softly, pacing along where Diego had found those wrappers. Though that didn't make sense. It was a trail leading to a wall of framed pictures, so...either he'd disappeared into thin air right here, which was the worst case scenario, or this was less of a lead than she was hoping.
Diego	"Wait a second..." It was slight, but the wall where the Slim Jim trail ended looked different. Diego wandered closer and grabbed the protruding edges of the wall art and pulled-- Exposing a hallway of mirrors. "Oh boy that is some spooky shit." He crouched down to pick up an object at the edge of the hall. "Stan's lighter."
Lila	Well that was not...ideal, no. "D'you think he went in there?" Lila heard herself. Of course he'd gone in there. She herself would have gone in there in a heartbeat at that age.
Annie	"I don't think we can assume he didn't," Annie replied, sliding her hand along the previously-hidden doorway and peering into the hallway. "And like...come on." Annie, at twelve, would not have gone in this hallway on her own -- but Annie wasn't supposedly Diego and Lila's child. Of course he'd gone in here.
Diego	"No warm-blooded 12-year-old can resist a mystery tunnel," Diego said. "Stan!" His voice echoed down the creepy tunnel with no response. He turned back to Lila and Annie. "We going?"
Annie	"Of course we're going," Annie replied, shining a hand down the hall and immediately regretting it as the light reflected off the mirrored walls into her eyes. "Stan?" Maybe that time, calling his name would work?
Lila	"After you," Lila agreed, looking more than a little wary about all of this -- but also like she realized, at this point, that they didn't have much of a choice. Ugh, if he wasn't in there, she was going to be in so much trouble.
Diego	"Fine." He'd go first. Did he want to go first? Not really. But he'd go. Ugh the mirror thing was so creepy. It was like being in a funhouse. "He better be down this fucking thing or I'm gonna be pissed."
Lila	"It was your idea to go in this murder hole," Lila pointed out, crossness an obvious cover for nerves as she trailed in after Diego and Annie. She hoped it had not also been Stan's idea to go in the murder hole. He'd probably found a dumbwaiter, or was riding an elevator. That was the sort of hijinks children got up to in creepy old hotels normally.
Annie	"Lila, can we not?" Annie asked, exhausted and cranky and defeated and suddenly feeling like she needed to pee, which was not good timing at all. ...unless it was, considering that the hall led to -- "Um." Was this the same exact room? What the hell?
Diego	"Did we just go in a circle?" Diego asked, turning around. They were back in the white buffalo room. Or a room that looked exactly the same. Unless you looked closely at the details.
Lila	"Was that always there?" Lila asked, honing right in on one of those details and nodding up to where the buffalo's head had been, before. It was now, distinctly, the other end of the buffalo.
Diego	"No," Diego said, looking up at the buffalo. "I never forget an ass." Might as well go for levity here. The more closely he looked, the more he could see that this definitely wasn't the same room. Small details, but enough. "What the hell is going on here?"
Annie	"It's just different enough," Annie noted, examining a picture that she was sure had changed. "Maybe we skipped universes again." They needed to find someone who could tell them what shape pizza came in here, maybe.
Lila	Lila, meanwhile, was giving her attention to some snacks that seemed to have changed from what was in here previously -- when the door they'd come through swung shut with a squeak, apparently of its own accord. "I don't normally say this, but I'm officially freaked out."
Diego	Diego was too, but of course he wasn't going to voice it out loud. "Let's go down to the lobby." The lobby, it turned out, was way nicer than the Hotel Obsidian's. And had a cool Eastern-inspired vibe. Could have used better lighting, however. It was dark as shit in here. "Stan!" Diego shouted. "Stanley! This place is jacked."
Annie	Annie illuminated both hands, the lights giving a pulse in response as she shone lights into corners as though Stan might just be hiding and not responding to their voices. "Yeah, it's...weird. Very, like, Japanese," Annie observed. "Stan!?" Or, you know. Maybe he couldn't say anything.
Lila	Lila made her way to the front desk, since it seemed like a logical place to find someone who might be able to help. "Hello?" Notably, she was not ringing the bell on the desk. Because she could read, and the sign said not to.
Diego	"Hotel Oblivion." Well that was a creepy ass name. He immediately went to ding the bell because that's what you were supposed to do, right?
Annie	"Babe." Annie reached out to stop him, pointing at the sign. Along with learning about pizza, Annie also knew that an important rule of universe hopping was to pay attention to the obvious warning signs. And it didn't get much more obvious than a literal sign.
Lila	"Yeah, can't you read?" Lila scoffed, trying and failing to stave off the despair she already felt at not seeing Stan anywhere, even now that they were through the murder hole. "'Do not ring bell.'"
Diego	"We need help finding Stan," Diego said. "Why put a bell if they don't want us to ring it?" His logic was sound here, guys.
Lila	Lila blew out a sigh, making her way over towards a conveyor belt of sushi. As one -- or, well, one who was not pregnant -- did. "Trudy's gonna kill me."
Diego	"Wait, who's Trudy?" Diego asked, following behind Lila. He would not be eating sus sushi, thank you.
Lila	"Stan's mum," Lila answered succinctly. Had to come out sometime, she supposed. And really, this was Diego's fault for thinking that Lila actually looked thirteen years older than she had the last time they'd seen each other.
Annie	Annie, who was already avoiding the sushi both because it seemed gross and because it was one of like four things she already knew about pregnancy, now felt nauseous for a brand-new reason. "Excuse me?" Oh, Lila. She was going to kill you.
Diego	"Wait--what she said," Diego said, pointing at Annie. "What the hell?"
Lila	"Stan, he's not our child. Fancy some sushi?" Lila offered. Also, calm down, it was just a prank.
Diego	"So...Stan's adopted?" Diego asked, because surely that was the case. That was the normal line of thinking to have. "That's fine. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I was adopted and I turned out okay." Kind of.
Lila	Oh, Diego. You were so cute, but so dumb sometimes. "No, not adopted. I borrowed him from my mate Trudy for a week." Did she need to literally spell this out? Perhaps in Morse Code, or semaphore?
Annie	"What is wrong with you?" Annie demanded, holding up a hand so she wouldn't have to see Lila eating that sushi, gross gross gross. "Are you -- what the fuck?"
Diego	Diego's brain was breaking just a little bit here. Annie seemed to have been picking up on what Lila was putting down quicker than him. Which was not surpriing. "Wait, you borro--Lila did you kidnap a kid?" And had done a good job convincing Stan that it'd be fun to be kidnapped because that kid had given away nothing.
Lila	"She went on holiday, and he needed some fun, and I wanted to see what kind of dad you'd make. You know, stress test. Kick the tires." Lila looked over at Annie, mouth full of sushi. "Y'ought to be thanking me, really." And she didn't even know how timely this experiment was!
Diego	"Are you insane?!" Diego shouted. He was so angry, he didn't even know how to express just how fucked up this was.
Lila	"We met in an asylum," Lila reminded him mildly. So. You know.
Diego	Goddamn it, Lila, you did have him there. He was still pissed though! "You know, Stan deserves better than this." Not that he thought Lila cared at this point.
Lila	"Stanley's in on it!" Lila exclaimed, rolling her eyes. It hadn't been his idea or anything, but he was hardly a victim here. Or, well. He hadn't been, until he'd gone missing.
Diego	That, that right there was what sent Diego over from being mad to being hurt and mad. He had actually bonded with that kid, and it turned out he was fucking with him the whole time? "You're--you're--" Diego couldn't even get out what he wanted to say he was so angry, and he could feel the words he could think of get jumbled in his mouth. So instead he did the next best thing and picked up a bar stool to throw it into the lobby.
Annie	Annie had seen Diego's stutter in action enough times to not only recognize the symptoms, but to also understand how incredibly hurt and upset he must be to have triggered it at all. She didn't blame him. Was she relieved, in some corner of her mind, that Diego did not have a twelve year-old child with an unstable time-traveling woman? Sure, selfishly, it was great to have that load off her mind, in theory -- but it was so far from being her primary concern right now. "You're the most manipulative person I've ever met, and we know some fucked-up people," Annie snapped at Lila, half-considering whether vomiting on the other woman was a bridge too far. She was mad enough that it took the focus away from the whole sushi-munching situation, but still. Thought occurred. "You roped a child into some kind of fucking mind game? What the fuck is wrong with you?"
Diego	"You know what?" Diego said, taking in a (mostly) calm breath. "We will do with this later. Right now we lost a kid. A human being that belongs to someone else." God, Stan's poor mother.
Lila	"Why do you think I'm stress eating fish, you bloody wankers?" Lila snapped, actually going so far as to throw a little roll of sushi in Diego's direction. "Look, I adore that little criminal, okay? More than you ever will. But Stanley can take care of himself. He's probably having a laugh. We just need to --"
Diego	Oh, Diego so didn't want to hear anything from you, Lila. "I'll take care of this myself." Since Stan wasn't in the lobby he'd just check outside. Maybe he was enjoying the AU Hotel sunshine or some shit.
Lila	"We should probably stay in one place," Lila suggested, watching him stalk off towards those doors as Annie shot her a dirty look and made her way over to try shining a hand under a table. "What if he wanders by?" Also, it was much less fun being yelled at and left out. Lila had liked the whole third wheel thing more than this, even.
Diego	La la la, he couldn't hear you, too busy trying to save the day. Saving the day hit a bump when he went through the revolving door...and entered back into the hotel. He did it a second time to make sure that this was a thing. "Get over here!" He hated this place so much.
Annie	"Did you find something?" Annie asked as she and Lila hurried over. (Varying values of 'hurried' being in play, of course; some of us had sushi to finish.) And of course that was a stupid question, since she did not see Stan there at all. But maybe he was still outside!
Diego	"I can't--I can't get out," Diego said, sounding defeated. "The doors won't let me."
Lila	"Yeah, I'm never eating here again," Lila declared, as though that was somehow the deciding factor. Again, it was possibly a cover for nerves, but she wouldn't admit that.
Diego	"You have the attention span of a fruit fly." Since the doors weren't an option, he was going to go back to his first idea. He headed back to the front desk to hit the forbidden bell.
Annie	"Diego, it says not to!" Annie warned, clocking where he was going and following at as brisk a clip as she could given that she still was still way too aware of her own stomach and bladder. And like, granted, Annie understood that most of the time, what she'd just said was basically incentive to do something, but -- now really didn't seem like the time.
Diego	"We need help finding Stan," Diego said impatiently as dinged the bell. Almost immediately he knew it was a mistake. For one thing, a loud gong sounded, echoing throughout the lobby. Then the lights went out, drowning the place in darkness except for a few spots of weird yellow light coming through the slats. Then the growling started.
Annie	"Diego," Annie whispered, suddenly very afraid. Her instincts in times like this always screamed to put herself between Diego -- and Lila, in this case, though Lila might well be mimicking Annie's invulnerability right now -- and danger. But with what she knew, she was much more hesitant to take that kind of a risk. Not that it seemed like there was going to be much choice, here, between that ominous gong and the growling and the way she couldn't catch onto enough power to illuminate more than one hand, which didn't help much at all with the darkness enveloping them.
Lila	"We need to get out of here," Lila hissed, angling herself so that she, Annie and Diego formed a little triangle. She might not have wanted to engage with all of this, but it wasn't like she couldn't handle whatever was coming in her sleep, most likely.
Diego	"Not without Stan," Diego said, pulling out a knife. He could hear the growling and the footsteps coming closer but still couldn't see a freaking thing. But then a whistling in the air told Diego that someone had thrown a blade, and he lifted up his hand to whip his knife in the same direction. Unfortunately he was too slow, and nobody was more surprised than he was when three of his fingers got hacked off his left hand in one swift swipe of a curved blade.
Annie	Annie had barely processed what was happening -- with that whistling sound, her brain had shifted over into fighting mode, and nearly everything (nearly) was forgotten in the effort to focus on the threat. But. Only nearly. "Oh my God!" she yelped, firing off a weak blast in the direction the knife had come from, trying not to think about what it was she had heard hit the floor. The fact that there'd been a metallic tinkling was -- bad.
Lila	Lila, for her part, grabbed onto Diego's elbow to give him a yank, her eyes as yellow as Annie's as she shot off a similarly useless, weak blast. "Come on!" Forget your stupid fingers or whatever, you could probably get more.
Diego	"Hold on!" The adrenaline was kicking it which meant the pain of the finger hacking hadn't quite hit him yet, and he could be focused on something a little more important. The light was low, but his fingers hadn't gone too far (ugh), and he could see where one was lying on the floor, wedding ring still on it. He wasn't going to keep the finger (he was not Five), but he was going to slip the ring off with his good hand before turning to go. "Elevator!"
Annie	Just a few months ago, Annie had been the seemingly-unstoppable entity stalking after a group of innocent, fleeing people. Weirdly, this fact did not, like, afford her an empathy with the enemy chasing them, whose footsteps she could hear even as the elevator door finally dinged. "Hurry, hurry, hurry!" Like any of them wasn't already hurrying as much as they could.
Diego	Hurrying, yes, hurrying was vital. They had managed to get to the elevator okay, going up to the floor where the white buffalo room was located. The scary thing was that the footsteps still could be heard when they reached their destination. Also was that chains rattling?
Lila	It was definitely chains rattling, which just spurred Lila on with getting the door open to the creepy mirror hallway and leading the way back down it and back into the room with the white buffalo. With the white buffalo's head, to be precise. She'd had a bad feeling about this from the start, let the record show!
Diego	Diego absolutely did not stop running until they were back in the right white buffalo room, and the door was firmly closed behind him. That's when Diego finally had the chance to look at the damage. "Oh--that's a lot of blood."
Annie	"You're okay," Annie told him breathlessly, trying to reassure both Diego and herself as she scrabbled around and shoved a throw pillow at him. "Here, keep pressure on it --" And Annie would have helped with that more, or maybe even started taking a look at whether she needed to cauterize the wound, had she not heard the footsteps coming down the hall. She locked eyes with Lila before both the women threw their backs against the door. Jesus Christ, how determined was this thing? You already got fingers!
Diego	"What the fuck," Diego hissed, scrambling to find some way to help. But, no, there was just bleeding out. "God, that's a lot of blood."
Lila	Lila dug her feet in against the carpet, squaring her shoulders back against the door as Annie did the same, and on the other side -- whoever was there started pounding on it to demand entry. And then, just as abruptly as it had started, the pounding stopped. Lila glanced over to Annie, giving it a moment before turning to look at the door, which had popped open just the slightest bit but otherwise was still. Whoever it was had given up on them, apparently. Unless, of course, their mystery assailant was the source of the distinct slurping sound that had come into the room with them. But, of course, it was something much better than that. "Stan?"
Diego	Sure enough, there Stan was, casually drinking a slushie. "Are you kidding me?" He lost his fingers looking for you, you little shit!
Lila	"Where the hell were you?" Lila demanded, worry etched all over her face no matter what she might try to claim. She'd genuinely been quite worried about him. And not just because Trudy was, in fact, going to have her bleached head if Lila had lost her son.
Stan	Stan really didn't understand what the freak out was about. "A kid can't get a slushee and a Slim Jim?" It was a good line to go out on, which was good because moments later a kugelblitz wave pulsed through the hotel again, taking Stan with it.
Diego	"Oh, shit." Worst day ever? Worst day ever.

[NFI, NFB but OOC is always fine by me. Taken from TUA 3x06 Marigold and preplayed with defenderofdesmoines]