An Afternoon at the Museum

They stepped through the heavy glass doors and into the Rotunda of the Museum of Pleasures Past. Laura dropped his hand, turned to face him, and spread both sets of arms wide. “ The Museum of Pleasures Past,” she announced, with the energy of someone reading a verdict. “Which I suggested. Which I have been suggesting.” She pointed at him. “Date two.”

“You did say it,” Andy confirmed.

“Date two.” She held up two fingers on one hand. Both sets of her eyes were bright.

The hush in here was total: the kind of silence that felt engineered, a deliberate absence, like every sound had been exhaled and forgotten a second before they arrived. The room itself was an afterimage of a cathedral—three stories high, perfectly round, a ring of tall, frosted windows bleeding pale daylight into a space that was somehow both clinical and luminous. There was a tang to the air, not bleach or polish, but the kind of warm, spiced note that lingered in a kitchen after a night with too much wine.

“Does that mean date three is karaoke?” Andy asked.

Laura turned away from him without answering and tipped her head back, blue eyes tracking up and up, and did a slow turn, both bodies moving in perfect sync. The expression she wore was not awe—Laura didn’t do awe—but something adjacent: the slack-mouthed, frowning surprise of someone caught off guard by their own delight.

Andy had been here before, if only via the magic Arabella had conjured. He’d been here when Chloe took a pellet to the shoulder and kept running. When Sam broke a pillar and didn’t look back. When the Mildreds came around the corner in full riot gear and the whole thing stopped being a game for about thirty seconds. He’d watched when they retrieved the tablet—some old, dense artifact none of them had thought to question—and handed it over to Arabella like it was just another prize. He hadn’t known then what it was for. He knew now. He looked at Laura, still slowly turning, still discovering the dome above her, and said nothing.

She said, “Okay, this is bigger than I pictured it. A lot bigger.” She completed the circuit, eyes coming back to him, and added, “Are you sure we’re not in the Field Museum? I feel like I’m waiting for Sue the T-Rex to jump out of a side room.”

Andy followed her gaze up, taking in the vast dome, the inlaid rings of bronze and blue glass, the subtle gleam of a mural that ran the circumference like a second horizon. “It was always this big,” he said, softly. “But last time, there were two dozen more people yelling over each other.” He squeezed her hand, then pointed at the side door. “That’s were Riley made her stand. A platoon of Mildreds came for the others, and she charged them, scattered them, and locked the doors before they could charge in. She was knocked out of the challenge, but she saved everyone.”

Laura smiled. “That sounds like Riley.”

“Up there,” Andy said, releasing Laura’s hand only to point. “That’s where Erin was knocked out. She could’ve made it up the stairs, but she covered Claire instead. Drew all the fire to herself so the rest of them could escape.”

Laura tipped both faces up, one to follow his finger, the other trailing the wall art at eye level. “Classic Erin,” she said. “Nothing to prove, but she still throws herself on the grenade every time.”

“Claire was close to being knocked out. Erin protected her,” Andy added. “The guards didn’t have a chance.”

Laura’s faces went thoughtful. “You remember the whole thing, don’t you? Every detail. Like you were actually there.”

He shrugged, which was as close as Andy ever got to bragging. “It felt like it, yeah.”

They stood at the base of the rotunda, not moving, letting the space settle around them. It was quiet enough that Andy could hear the faint whine of the building’s air system, the subtle click of the lights that rimmed the dome. He looked at Laura, and she looked at him, and the double line of her gaze was so intense that for a second he thought maybe she could see both his thoughts at once, just as he could see both of hers.

“Do you want the tour?” Andy asked.

She grinned. “Is there an audio guide?”

He gestured toward the far side of the rotunda, where a pair of double doors stood closed, their surface covered floor to arch with a mural so grand it almost felt like a parody of old-world pageantry. “Over there. The Hosts’ mural. It’s different from last time, probably repainted.”

Laura took a few steps forward, and Andy fell in beside her, keeping pace as she approached the doors. Both of her stopped at the same moment, heads tipping back to take in the full sweep of the art.

It was a Roman triumph, reimagined for the world’s least subtle sex cult: dozens of figures paraded down marble steps, draped in colored togas, laurels, and nothing at all. Some were rendered as gods, some as monsters, some as the kind of women you wouldn’t dare meet the gaze of in a nightclub after midnight. Arabella was near the center—draped in emerald, one hand raised in benediction, eyes painted with the same sardonic warmth she always brought to The HH.

Andy traced his finger left, picking out the next few figures. One was a young woman with blonde hair, a mischievous and somewhat deranged expression, an incongruous little top hat on her head. “That’s Sylvia. She ran the season with Nick and Dakota.” He moved on, pointing to a small woman with golden hair, wrapped in a Dutch braid over her head: “That’s Cassandra. She’s an old Host, although you wouldn’t think it, if you saw her. I met her at my birthday. She’ll probably be at the wedding. You’ll like her.”

Laura squinted, then smiled. “She looks tiny.”

“She’s an odd one. But she did give me Samson Drei,” Andy agreed. “Next to her, that’s Genet. Brown hair, noticeable nose, impossible curves. She’s running a season to legalize polyamorous marriages, believe it or not.”

One of Laura’s faces cocked an eyebrow. “Of course she is,” she said, and Andy couldn’t tell if it was pride or a joke.

He kept going, enjoying the excuse to narrate. He pointed to a small redhead with an aquiline nose. “That’s Scarlet, red toga, gold eyes. She's hosting a season about stories. She’s been doing this for a long time.”

Laura looked at the mural, then at Andy, then back at the mural. “That’s a lot of redheads,” she observed. “Is that a type, or is it just tradition?”

He followed her gaze. “It’s not all redheads. See, there’s Leah.” He pointed to a beautiful woman with long, slender legs, dark hair reaching her butt, and large breasts. “She’s the Host who took my cousin Jake and who Hosted Emily’s first season.”

He pointed to a blue-skinned woman with a martial posture, a hand on the pommel of a silvery sword. “There she is. Harper.” He smiled. “I was wondering if she would be here.”

He found the next: “Vanessa. Ah, she’s a redhead. She’s the one who ran a gender-bender season. A whole arc where a bunch of men got turned into women, and she just rolled with it. The ratings are insane.”

Laura’s eyes crinkled. “Did you watch that one?”

Andy shook his head. He pointed to another, a redhead with a knowing smirk and a face like she knew every secret anyone had ever tried to hide. “That’s Azure. The name’s a little misleading, I guess. She’s the Host of a payback season that’s running quickly to its ending.”

Laura stared for a second, then said, “Azure is blue. She’s not blue. Nothing about her is blue.”

Andy grinned. “I know. You want to guess how many people corrected her on it?”

“One?” Laura said.

“More like thirty thousand,” Andy answered. “Not sure what happened to any of them.”

He pointed to a different region of the mural: near the bottom, almost hidden in the crowd, was a sullen-looking young man with black hair and gold eyes, leaning on a silver-tipped cane. “That’s Lucian. A rarity of a male Host who is also a demon.”

Laura snorted, both faces. “Poor guy.” She played the world’s smallest violin, and Andy laughed.

Next to him, a dark-haired woman with feathered wings folded behind her, gaze flat and endless. “Lilith,” Andy said. “She’s old, and she’s a Host now, but she wasn’t originally one. She runs a fantasy season, and attended my birthday party. I think she has some connection with Arabella.”

He pointed to a pale Japanese woman in a sharp kimono-like toga, her lips curled up slightly in a smirk. “Yuki. The dark side Host by definition, sadistic and capable of a lot of hurt.”

He followed the arc of the mural upward, where a cluster of strange figures loomed in the back. A strikingly tall, pale redhead with black eyes, rendered in stark contrast to the crowd, stood near the apex. “That’s Shar,” Andy said. “I don’t think I need to say anything else about her.”

“Another redhead.” Laura said, with the satisfactory tone of someone whose theory has been vindicated. Andy, prudently, did not respond. Beside Shar, a tall, willowy woman with blue skin and woad swirls on her skin stood tenderly. “Nimue. She’s almost as old as Arabella. She was at the Fifth Challenge, if you remember.“

Beside Nimue, a woman with bubblegum-pink hair and a smile that was either innocent or insane, depending on the angle. “Sally,” Andy explained. “She’s running a video game-based season. She’s also a hell of a baker, although her cakes tend to have… effects.”

Laura stared, both faces completely absorbed by the mural. They kept moving, tracing the line of Hosts along the wall, Andy offering tidbits and Laura soaking it up, each fact met with a different shade of amusement or skepticism. They didn’t notice the time passing; the only motion was Laura’s hand, still on the velvet rope, and Andy’s finger as he pointed out the next in the line.

Eventually, Laura stopped, both faces turning to him in perfect sync. “You know all of them,” she said, voice almost accusing.

Andy opened his mouth to deflect—and then didn’t. He looked back at the mural. At Scarlet, at Azure, at Lilith. At the pale, bespectacled severe figure near the side he hadn’t pointed out yet: Verena, poised and professional, dark-robed, one hand pressed flat against a stone tablet. And behind her, the tall, nude demonic form that was Vizkoroth, rendered in scarlet oils that seemed to shift if you didn’t look directly at them. The metal drone known as C2 stood out near them. And a purple-haired kitsune he knew was called Nymeera.

There was Ishtar, and the bimbo called Chrissi, the dragon-woman named Wrynn, the sisters Isla and Ciela, an auburn-haired Ava and a childlike black-haired Host with a spiky crown that was Ora, the pink-skinned Ginelia and the blue ghost in a ringmaster's outfit called Jocelyn, Calypso the shark-toothed mermaid, another red-skinned, winged demon with black hair called Delilah, Tessa the Archivist, and still more Hosts, too many to mention them all. He knew their names. He knew their seasons, their reputations, their quirks, if he cared to think of them. He’d never watched a single episode of any of them.

Andy lingered there, still staring, not at any single figure in the mural but at the totality of it—the mythic pageant, the parade of faces and names and histories that somehow lived inside his head. When he spoke, it was less to Laura than to the empty air: “I’ve never actually seen their seasons.” The words fell out slow, a little dazed. “I don’t know why I know any of this.”

He kept waiting for the memory to collapse, for the details to turn fuzzy or the names to dissolve into static. But the effect only sharpened as he traced the line of figures around the rotunda. Faces he’d never seen in his waking life. Names that felt like old acquaintances, carrying the weight of stories he hadn’t lived. It was as if he’d already walked these halls a thousand times, each trip layering fresh strata over the last, until the knowledge was so dense it warped the space around it.

He glanced at Laura. Her two faces studied the mural in tandem, then flickered to him, both sets of eyes lit with something wary and searching. “The flare-ups?” she said, keeping her voice low and even, as if the possibility might spook him into shutting down.

He didn’t answer right away. For a second he let himself imagine the safer explanation: that he’d binged a hundred seasons in a fugue state, that somehow he had absorbed the knowledge from Claire whom he knew had watched some seasons. He wanted to believe it was that simple, but the truth had never felt less like a joke.

He rubbed the back of his neck, the way he did when a migraine was starting. “Maybe,” he said at last. “It’s happened before. I’ll just—know something. Like it was always there.”

It wasn’t the first time. The effect came and went, but it was always the same flavor when it hit: a sudden, certain knowledge that had no discernible origin. Sometimes it was about the HH itself—what Mildred really was, the precise order of elimination in some long-ago season of Harem Hotel: Nysa, which Host was rumored to have slept with which contestant in which forbidden alcove of Harem Hotel: Love and War. Other times it was sharper, more personal: a new lockpick technique, the lyrics to a song he’d never heard, the shape of a lover’s handwriting from a season that hadn’t even aired yet, Sam hugging her brother Michael in some sort of hospital. The information was never random. It arrived purpose-built for the moment, like the universe was feeding him exactly what he needed to know to survive.

He glanced at Laura again, wondering if she’d push. Both faces wore the same expression: a carefully neutral curiosity, cloaked over the faintest edge of concern. He tried to meet her gaze, but she was already looking back at the mural, the line of Hosts, the parade of impossible lives rendered in pigment and myth.

She let the silence stretch, then said, softly: “Does it hurt you?”

The question surprised him. He thought about it, about the way his mind sometimes felt like a building with too many rooms, each one full of voices carrying on conversations without him. “Not really,” he said. “It just… happens.”

She nodded, like this made sense. For a second, she turned both faces to him, and in the double gaze he caught a flash of something that looked like recognition. Maybe she knew more about these episodes than she let on.

He tried, tentatively, to share more. “Sometimes I think it’s like—the HH is leaking into my head. Or maybe I was always supposed to be here, and this is just what happens when you get too close to the source.”

Laura took that in, her faces going thoughtful. “Maybe both,” she said. “Or maybe it’s just how your brain works. You always did have a weird recall.”

He almost laughed. “I don’t think most people’s recall works like this. It’s not like I try to remember. It’s more like the memories show up and I just have them.”

She considered that, then said, “You’re not the only one.” She didn’t elaborate, but he caught the implication. The double memories they both carried, of two lives—one where Laura's had been interrupted at thirteen, and one where it hadn't. Suddenly, irrationally, he wondered whether it had really been Arabella, giving them those memories, or if he had been responsible for them as well.

Laura considered the mural for one more moment, then looked back at him, both faces carrying the same expression: not quite sympathy, not quite unease. “Well,” she said, “it’s still a little unsettling.”

“Yeah,” Andy agreed. “It is.” He didn’t want to think about what it meant.

They stood in front of the mural for a while longer, neither in a hurry to leave. Andy watched Laura’s faces, the way one would narrow in focus while the other half-smiled, then switch in the space of a blink. It was impossible not to feel how much of her was invested in the act of simply being here—like some part of her was watching the whole scene from the rafters, taking notes on what mattered and why.

Eventually, Laura peeled off from the mural, stepping out to the center of the floor, one body leading and the other trailing half a pace behind, like a mirrored shadow. She trailed her hand along a velvet rope that circled the sunken dais, pausing now and then to tap the gold finials or run her finger over the groove left by generations of rope burn.

She said, “I know you walked me through the challenge. But what really happened? Like, not the cut-for-TV version. The part you don’t talk about.”

Andy thought about it. The real part had never been just the break-in, or the contest of who could outwit the Mildreds. It was the way each of them, even the ones he’d never have picked for this kind of job, had simply thrown themselves into it. He said, “The day started with eleven women in matching black latex catsuits—well, except for Erin and Emily. There were satchels of anti-arousal patches, and zero plan beyond: ‘get in, get the artifact, get out.’ Claire had routes designed, but they didn’t know what they were getting into.”

He didn’t embellish. “The museum was crawling with Mildreds in riot gear,” he said, remembering. “The guards were shooting pellet rifles loaded with arousal liquid.” Andy smiled proudly, remembering. “Anyway, they got the disc. The real one. Norah was carrying it, Sam and Claire holding the doors.” He let out a breath, watched it rise toward the dome. “She ran down a corridor towards the exit, and was met by Moory. That’s, ah, a unique Mildred. But Norah did it. Norah jumped at the Moory, and the momentum made both of them fall through the exit doors. She made it out, with the disc.”

Laura started laughing, a sharp, delighted sound. Both bodies doubled over, the echo between them somehow even more satisfying. “Norah would. She probably wrote a memo about it after.”

“She did,” Andy said, unable not to smile. “She made them all sign it. Best Practices in Contraband Artifact Extraction.”

Laura’s faces both rolled their eyes, but it was pure affection.

He stepped closer, walking a slow arc until he was beside her at the rope. The floor inside the circle was a mosaic: a storm of gold and blue tiles, all curving out from the center in a dizzying spiral. Laura watched it a long moment, then said, “This is a lot for just one disc.” Both of Laura looked at him, and for a second the intensity in her eyes went all the way through him. “Was it worth it?”

He thought about the baby in the nursery, the weight of Floppy in his Inventory, the fact that he was standing here with Laura, the impossible story still being written. He said, “I think it was the only thing that ever was.”

Laura nodded, then lapsed into silence, her hands braced on the rope, head bowed just enough to show the seriousness of it.

They stood there a minute, then Andy gestured back at the mural, unable to let it go. “You still want the audio tour?” he asked, lightening his tone just a little.

Laura gave him a look, both faces sly, and said, “Only if you do the voices.”

Andy did not do the voices. But he did walk her through the line, naming each remaining Host in order, giving her the stories behind the ones he’d met and the rumors behind the ones he hadn’t. She listened, sometimes both faces following his finger, sometimes one face looking at him while the other lingered on the art, as if double-checking his facts. For once, Laura was the audience, not the star, and she seemed to enjoy it.

When he finished, she said, “It scares you, that you know all this, doesn’t it?”

Andy hesitated, then shook his head. “It does, but… if it’s the only way to save you, I would not hesitate, you know.”

Both of Laura went still, the kind of still that said she heard him, but wasn’t going to let him get away with being sappy about it. “That’s very sweet,” she said, dry as dust. “You’re a real romantic.”

He grinned. “It’s my one flaw.”

She snorted, then let herself smile, and the silence between them became easy again, comfortable in the way that only old friends could manage.

They lingered there, the only two people in a room designed to overwhelm, and for the first time in a long while, Andy felt like they belonged exactly where they were, neither ahead of the story nor chasing after it, just two people in the same place at the same time.

They didn’t need a map. When Laura was ready, she let go of the rope, turned to him, and said, “Let’s see what else is in here.” Her hand found his, and together, they walked toward the next hall.

---

The corridor out of the rotunda was lined with marble, but the air changed instantly—thinner, chillier, with a sharp edge of ozone that made Andy think of late-night exams and the strange clarity of walking campus at three a.m. Laura stuck close, both bodies pacing in perfect unison, and nudged him with her elbow as they walked. “What was it like? Watching from the throne instead of running it?”

Andy had to think before answering. “I thought it would be fun,” he said, honest. “I thought I’d get to watch everyone else go crazy, that it would be a game. But… it wasn’t. Every time one of them got hit, even knowing it wasn’t real bullets, I felt it. I felt it like I was losing someone for real, even though I knew they would be fine at the end. I never wanted to lose a single one of them, even for an hour.”

Laura didn’t say anything, just reached for his hand, and squeezed.

He squeezed back, letting it sit for a moment.

Then he nodded down a branching side corridor, a grin returning to his face. “This way. The good stuff is ahead.”

Laura let go, then shot him a look over her shoulder, both faces grinning. “Don’t leave out any details. I want to know everything.”

He followed, his own smile returning, and the two of them stepped forward into the Hall of Fertility.

---

The Hall of Fertility was somehow even brighter than the rotunda, its walls lined floor to ceiling with glass display cases, the light inside each one casting a weird, laboratory gloss over the objects within. It was a riot of preserved latex, antiqued dildos, half-melted plastic casts of body parts, and a baffling array of erotic memorabilia that looked more like a failed sex-ed project than history. A thin gold script ran the length of the ceiling, spelling out HALL OF FERTILITY in a font so elegant that it nearly disguised the words themselves.

Laura, unfazed, beelined to the nearest case and read a label aloud, both voices at once: Healing Catgirl Milk - Harem Hotel: They Asked For It Edition, Wrynn, S01. She snorted. “Did anyone ever actually drink this stuff?”

Andy deadpanned, “There are countless catgirls in the multiverse, apparently. I’m sure someone did.”

Laura looked at the case, looked at him, and shook her head. “Why am I not surprised?”

They walked, Laura zig-zagging from one case to another, Andy trailing her and occasionally stopping to explain the context for a particularly strange object. A golden statue of a small woman with a Dutch braided crown, looking surprised, simply labeled Cassandra, and which Laura recognized as a statue of the same Host they had seen painted on the mural. An old VCR tape labeled Season 0 - Test Footage; a gold card labeled Boon Card - Harem Hotel: Haunted Castle, Shar, S01. A tumbler glass (Glass from Murphy’s - Harem Hotel: Domestic Affairs, Genet, S15). A velvet-lined tray of test tubes, each containing a liquid of a different pastel hue. A wall plaque covered in anatomical sketches so stylized and lurid they looked like medical textbook outtakes from a fever dream. Laura paused, both faces tilting in clinical assessment. “Huh,” she said, her left head speaking while her right continued to scan the diagrams. “The insertion angle on that speculum is anatomically improbable. And that’s not where the clitoral hood attaches.” She tapped the glass with one finger. “Someone failed basic cadaver lab.”

Andy felt his ears grow warm—but not entirely from embarrassment. He looked at her sideways, something quieter moving through him. She’d said it so casually, clitoral hood and cadaver lab landing in the same breath as any other observation, and he found himself thinking: she knows that. She actually knows that now. All of it. Years of it. He said, “You realize you just diagnosed a museum display.”

Laura glanced at him in stereo, reading his face. Something in her expression softened, just briefly, before she put it away. “Don’t make it weird,” she said, but not unkindly.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m just—” He shook his head. “You’re going to be a really good doctor.”

She held his gaze for a half-second longer than usual, then turned back to the cases, blinking fast. “Obviously.” She moved to the next display—a glass dome containing an elaborate, bejeweled chastity belt. “Look at this one,” she said, voices teasing. “Feel like you missed out?”

Andy looked at her, deadpan. “Hard pass.”

She grinned, both faces, then moved on, fingers trailing the glass as she walked.

The far end of the room was dominated by a single, larger case, set into the wall as if it were the museum’s own altar. It was empty except for a small brass plaque, the inside back lined with rich blue velvet, a faint indentation in the fabric suggesting something had once rested there. Laura stopped, both bodies facing the case, and the playfulness left her faces all at once.

She leaned in and read the plaque. Edict of Ereshkigal, c. 5200 B.C.E. Baked clay, inscribed. Ubaid/Sumerian. Post-Season — Harem Hotel: Dilmun, Geshtinanna, S01. Underneath, a newer label indicated, Stolen as part of Challenge 3, Arabella, Harem Hotel: The HH, S200. Status: Destroyed. She looked at Andy, the seriousness returning to both faces. “This is where it was?”

He nodded. “It stayed here until Norah broke into the case.”

Laura’s gaze didn’t leave the empty case. “And then?”

Andy hesitated. “Then, two weeks later, Claire watched Arabella dissolve it in water that was used to feed the Blue Rose. It was meant to… to open the gates for you. To get you back.”

Both of Laura’s bodies went still, the kind of frozen that wasn’t shock but the slow, deliberate processing of something too big to fit in a single breath. She braced one hand on the glass, the other on the velveted rail in front of the case, and stared a while longer.

“I thought it would be… I don’t know. Cosmic,” she said. “Not so literal. Not an actual piece of clay breaking apart in real water. It’s—” She shook her head, as if the next word might make more sense if she let it rattle around a bit. “It’s so small. It’s just gone now.”

Andy wanted to say something, but found himself just watching her, the lines of her face, the way both bodies mirrored the same small tremor in the fingertips against the glass. “Sometimes,” he said, voice gentle, “that’s how the biggest things change. Not all at once. Just… small pieces, until it’s not what it was anymore.”

Laura’s hands tightened on the case. She didn’t cry, didn’t say anything else, just stood there a moment and let it sink in.

They stood together in front of the empty case, the bright room around them suddenly a little less sharp, the sound of the building’s air system the only thing left to mark time. After a while, Andy pointed down the corridor off the Hall of Fertility. “That’s the one. Norah ran it, disc in her arms. Sam and Claire holding the door behind her.”

Laura’s two bodies pivoted at once, tracking the line of the hallway, as if she could overlay the past onto the present and watch it unfold in real time. She walked a few steps into it, then turned to Andy. “Is it true she really jumped through the door at the end?”

Andy grinned. “You wouldn’t believe the air she got. Full-on action movie. There was Moory blocking her path, this big Mildred in riot gear, but she just sprinted, then—bam. Charged Moory and crashed through the glass. No hesitation.”

Laura laughed, caught off guard by the image. The sound broke the heaviness, both faces brightening. “I can see it. She’d get up, dust herself off, and pretend she meant to do it all along.”

“She might well have,” Andy said, grinning. “But she was brought back to the gazebo before she could.”

Laura shook her head, still laughing, and the moment that had been so tight around them loosened, the sadness thinning out into something more like wonder. She looked back at the empty case, then at Andy, and said, “Let’s keep going.”

He nodded, falling in step beside her as they walked away from the Hall of Fertility, both of them taking one last look back at the empty case before disappearing into the next set of rooms.

---

They cut north, into the halls visited early during the challenge.

The corridor was dimmer here, the lights set to a gentle, almost underwater blue. The first room they hit announced itself as the Hall of Fetishes.

Laura didn’t even try to contain her glee. The first display was a wall-sized grid of signed ball gags, each in its own clear box, each with a name scrawled in sharpie on the side. The sign above read: Season 92: The Screaming Years.

Laura read the sign, then doubled over laughing, both faces losing all composure. “The Screaming Years,” she managed, before dissolving into giggles again.

Andy tried to keep a straight face, but the sound of her laughter got to him. He found himself watching her, not the wall, and felt a weird lightness that hadn’t been there in hours.

Laura caught him at it, both faces raising an eyebrow. “What,” she said.

He shrugged, sheepish. “I like seeing you laugh.”

She rolled her eyes, but one of the faces was smiling. “You’re such a sap,” she said. “It’s not even that funny.”

He gestured to the wall. “It kind of is.”

Her eyes drifted past him to a small velvet pillow displayed alone on a pedestal. At its center rested a smooth, dark stone carved into the unmistakable shape of a banana. Both of her faces frowned in identical confusion. “What’s that supposed to be?”

Andy followed her gaze. “No placard. Probably some Host’s idea of a joke that didn’t land.”

She shook her head, a faint smile touching both mouths. “Or it landed perfectly and we’re just not in on it.” Her attention shifted to the neighboring case where three polished wooden paddles lay arranged on red velvet. She read the label aloud: “‘Ceremonial - Host Unknown.’ Do you think ‘ceremonial’ means what I think it means?”

“In this place? Almost certainly,” Andy said, grinning.

Laura shrugged. “Ceremonial,” she repeated, both faces wearing identical skeptical expressions. “For ceremoniously whacking someone, I assume.”

“Or ceremoniously stirring punch,” he offered.

She rolled her eyes but was smiling as she grabbed his hand. “Come on. Let’s see what’s in the next one.”

The next hall announced itself in two-foot-tall red neon script: Hall of Kinks.

“Classy,” Laura observed, her eyes taking in the centerpiece: a transparent column stretching from floor to ceiling, filled with a slow, viscous swirl of clear gel. Suspended in the gel, like something between a lava lamp and a deep-sea research station, were dozens—maybe hundreds—of objects. Some were obvious (plush handcuffs, a pink rabbit vibe, something that might have once been a riding crop); others were unidentifiable even to Andy’s occasionally encyclopedic brain.

Laura walked right up and pressed her face to the glass, both bodies mirroring the gesture, and made a thoughtful noise. “If I gave you a week, could you name half the things in here?”

Andy did a quick mental scan, then shook his head. “Absolutely not. I think some of them are custom jobs. Transformations can affect anatomy in weird ways.”

Laura kept staring at the column, fascinated. “Do you think the curators test everything before they put it in here?”

He imagined Mildred’s face if someone handed her a job like that. “I don’t think anyone is paid enough.”

Laura snorted, both faces doing the exact same eyebrow-quirked smile. “Sounds about right.” She turned from the column, hands in her pockets, and strolled down the aisle. “I’m kind of disappointed there aren’t more interactive exhibits. You’d think with all the money that goes into a place like this, there’d be more hands-on opportunities.”

“I think that’s the next hall over,” Andy said, straight-faced.

She laughed, then stopped at a case containing a selection of harnesses and collars. The placard read: Kael’s Kinky Kollars, Pre-Demotion. Laura’s eyes widened slightly, both faces registering the same flicker of surprise. “Pre-Demotion,” she repeated, the words tasting strange. “Guess they didn’t rebrand after whatever happened.”

Andy gave a dry chuckle. “Probably not high on his priority list after getting demoted.”

She ran a finger along the glass above a particularly intricate leather collar. “It’s almost sweet,” she said. “All this effort, just to end up in a museum case with a misspelled label.”

They kept moving. Past a selection of glass sculptures, including a squid-woman entangled with a vintage sewing machine (The Dream of Mrs. Smythe, Host [REDACTED], S189, Finale), past a bronze statue of a woman in a perfect bondage hogtie (Gift of the Innamorata was all the plaque said), past shelves of gags and masks and restraints that got steadily more inventive as they went. Laura was in her element, alternating between open amusement, academic curiosity, and occasional, frank admiration.

They turned a corner, and the signage changed: Hall of Masks and Roles.

This room was less crowded, each display given its own pedestal. The first was a mannequin dressed in a perfect reproduction of a French maid uniform—complete with white lace apron, thigh-highs, and a little feather duster clutched to the chest. The label: Amelia’s Maid Outfit — Harem Hotel, Leah, S01.

Laura walked up to the next: a single pink dress on a stand, small but not child-sized, frilled to the point of parody. The plaque read: Princess Elena’s Pink Dress — Harem Hotel: Payback Edition, Azure, S01. Laura looked at the tag, then at Andy, and said, “Do you think there’s a story behind this? Or do some seasons just get remembered for their outfits?”

He smiled. “I think most stories are probably just excuses to get someone into an outfit like that. The rest is window dressing.”

Laura considered, then nodded. “I respect it.” She lingered, both bodies peering at the dress, amused and oddly pensive. She said, “You know, I’m starting to see why one might want to do a whole challenge in here. It’s a weird place, but it’s not… mean. It’s more like a playground for grownups who want to pretend they never grew up. And love sex.”

Andy grinned. “They’d never want to leave,” he said.

Laura shot him a look. “Neither would you, probably.”

He shrugged, but didn’t argue.

He let her pull him, neither caring anymore about the exhibits, the game, or anything except the warmth of her hand and the sound of her laugh echoing back down the museum corridor.

They continued, heading towards the western wing.