The Mystery of the Haunted Hotel Part Two
Noelle batted at her phone as the alarm went off. “Oh fucking hell” she muttered. “It’s time to get up for breakfast.” She slithered out of the bed and headed for the bathroom to change out of her pjs, then decided the hell with it. “I’m going to breakfast in my pajamas” she announced to Carneggy as he pulled himself out of bed. “But I’m wearing my coat.”
Making sure that her Slytherin prefect’s pin was straight and secure on her pajama top, Noelle slipped out of the hotel room and into the frigid hallway. She was looking forward to breakfast, which at WEEHU the previous October had been quite social and full of friends to talk with every morning.
The first thing Noelle and Carneggy noticed upon entering the breakfast space was that this definitely was not going to be a social experience. The three or so people already there looked groggy and out of sorts and all shuffled listlessly around the area as they foraged through the meager offerings for something tasty and nutritious.
“I didn’t think it would be possible for it to be more cold down here, and yet somehow it is.” Noelle observed. Her attention was immediately drawn to a waffle maker set up on the breakfast counter. “Well you know I”m going to have to play with this.” she told Carneggy, and proceeded to make herself a waffle using pre-mixed waffle batter from a nearby dispenser. Next to the waffle area she noticed a set of shelves containing tiny boxes of cereal as well as two full shelves of apples and oranges. “I think I’ll take some fruit up to Kat” she started to say, leaning down to pick up on apple. Her voice trailed off as she noticed just how not wholesome the apples looked up close. “These apples look like they’ve been here for awhile” she observed to Carneggy. “It’s almost like we’re wandered into a ghost town kitchen or something.”
“You should check this out too” Carneggy said, pointing to an adjoining area. “Stick your head through that door and see what you think.”
Noelle nervously approached the glass door, which seemed to lead into an office of some sort. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed as she felt the air beyond the door. “It’s got to 20 degrees in there! They expect someone to work in that?”
“It’s even better” said Carneggy. “That’s the business center that anyone can use.”
“Jesus, who’d want to?”
They chatted with the few others who’d come down for breakfast, then returned to the room and went back to bed.
I really was a little disappointed that more people didn’t come to breakfast at Charmed! - but the quality of the stuff offered was so inferior that I don’t blame people at all for choosing to sleep in and go to Cracker Barrel instead. It was pretty bleak. I ended up eating yogurt in my room to augment my daily bowl of tiny box cereal and muffin half.
Friday was of course the first day of classes, and I was all fired up to get up and go to all of them…but somehow managed to go back to sleep and not wake up again until nearly 1. (Classes started at 130.) I obviously needed it, but I hate to be rushed in my getting up and ready for things, and ended up passing on the 130 classes entirely. Instead, I managed to find @hypnokittencalico and took her back to my room for the last of the sekrit projekt reveals. Then we showed up wide eyed and attentive at 3 o’clock for @theleeallure‘s Hypnosis for Service class. One of the things I’ve always found interesting about Lee is the ease with which she seems to find people eager to be her hypnotized slave of one sort or another; for this class she had @hypnosubdude (aka the hypnotized yard slave) helping her demo. My biggest take away from this class was that everyone spends far more time in a waking trance than they might know, and that it wouldn’t be half-fun to get to experience something like that at someone else’s direction.*
I have no idea what I did from 4 to 5. ** Maybe we had dinner? Or just loitered in the hallway? I know that sometime in this hour I was introduced to Hypno-sandwich’s friend Heel_Edge, a hypno newcomer who, I’m happy to say, is an amazing person and fit right in. At 5 o’clock, I joined @tennfan2, @hypno-sandwich, @zanythoughts, and @h-sleepingirl for Tennfan’s Telling Your Story class. I will readily admit that most of my fun in these types of discussions involves making my fellow writers squirm while being praised; Tennfan did a good job of leading the talk through a variety of topics including why we write, where we write, who we write for, and what we get out of it. I’ve heard that several people who attended have reached out to him about writing, so mission successful!
I’m almost positive that afterwards we had dinner. Or messed around in our room for awhile. All I know is, we made it back into the classrooms and caught the tail end of hypno-sandwich’s part of orientation, then watched as Lee yo-yoed him with various induction crammed into a short period of time.***
At some point we all went upstairs and officially opened up the Cookie Room. For Friday night, the rules of entering the cookie room were simple: in order to get a cookie, one had to perform a forfeit of some sort. (For example, neck rubs for any of the three owners of the room, or “dance monkey dance.”) We weren’t picky about what people did: one fellow jumped up and down on one foot for awhile, which was more than good enough for me. **** We did see some marvelous tricks however: Lily (the artist formerly known as W) sang “Under the Sea” from The Little Mermaid to me - IN ITALIAN. Mephki informed me of an important piece of scientific trivia, namely that the average ph of a vagina is 4.5. (Remember that, I’m sure you’ll need to know it someday.) I received several excellent neck rubs of varying degrees of strength, skill, and intensity, as well as as an A+ foot rub. Someone recited the beginning of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales - in OLD ENGLISH, and the lovely Alianne belly danced for us while @everydayis-girlfriday played and sang. It was a marvelous evening of fun and cookies, and I’m happy to say that we didn’t have to punish a single person for thievery!
* See Saturday night’s recap for more on how fucking fun this can be
** Let’s be real here - there’s a lot of empty space in my memory at these events. I’m sure we ate, and loitered in the hallway, and so forth.
*** (I’m not going to lie - I am teeth-grittingly envious of him for getting to have this experience - there are some types of “dance monkey dance” that are a real turn-on for me, and this one is waaaay near the top of the list.)
**** I didn’t care what people did, as long as they came up with it themselves. This business where people want me to do their thinking for them? It’s annoying as hell. I like people who have working thinking mechanisms of their own.
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