Round 1 Day 3 - Behind the Curtain

Emma had no idea where she was even supposed to start looking. She just knew she had to try something. Anything. So she ran. Through the castle, down the endless corridors. There had to be a place where they left from. Where Matt and Sarah would have come back to, that Poppy hadn’t. If she’d had any capacity for rational thought left then she might have thought about turning around and asking Sarah. She might even have remembered that the throne room was where they had arrived at the start of the competition. But the more her panic grew, the less room there was for thought. So she ran.

She ran.

She ran through doorways, around corners, picking directions at random, hoping against all logic that she’d find some kind of clue about where her girlfriend had disappeared to. She didn’t. She found Scarlet.

“Woah, hold the fuck up!” the ginger woman instructed, stepping out in front of the panicking athlete.

Emma did not hold the fuck up, but only because she didn’t have enough time to react. Before she could even begin to slow down she had crashed directly into the much smaller woman and they went down together in a tangle of limbs. Emma controlled her fall as best she could, rolling to a stop with only a bumped elbow and a sore chest. Scarlet crashed down awkwardly on one arm, and yelped as something went crack.

The Host lay there for a moment with her wrist at an angle bones were not meant to bend at, then groaned and picked herself up into a sitting position. The bent arm burst into flame, and slowly straightened itself as she turned to face Emma.

“That,” she said sternly, raising an accusatory flame-wreathed finger and then slowly retracting it as the fire died down, “Was almost entirely my fault. Sorry.”

“That’s alright,” Emma said on autopilot, rubbing her elbow as she gasped for breath, then her eyes widened as her brain caught up to the situation. “Wait. Where’s Poppy?” she demanded.

“Good question,” Scarlet grinned as she stood up and dusted herself off, but gave no further answer.

The grin did nothing to soothe Emma’s agitation. She scrambled to her feet and surged forward, grabbing the Host by the shoulders. “Where’s Poppy?!” she asked again, louder, her voice hoarse with panic.

“Hey, careful!” Scarlet yelped, holding her hands up, “I can forgive the broken arm, but if you hurt me again then I’ll have to punish you, whether I want to or not.”

The warning pierced the swirling vortex around Emma’s brain and she let go of Scarlet like she was scalding her. The small ginger woman rubbed one of her shoulders and rolled her yellow, bird-like eyes.

“Fucking hell, you’re as bad as Sarah,” she muttered.

“Where’s Poppy?” Emma tried a third time, marginally calmer, from a safe distance.

“She’s safe. She’s busy. You’ll see her in the morning. Is that good enough?”

The relief nearly took Emma’s knees out from under her, even though she wasn’t entirely sure why she was just taking her word for it. “Okay, that’s good, that’s...” she gasped, doubling over on the spot, “...why not until the morning?”

“Because she’s busy, I just told you,” Scarlet pointed out, “I’m sure she’ll tell you all about it when you see her. Now get busy yourself, or you’ll miss curfew.”

“...curfew?” Emma stood up straight again, and suddenly noticed the sun setting outside the window, and the ache in her legs that she hadn’t felt since her competition days. She hadn’t realised how long she’d been running for.

Scarlet just stared at her sternly, and gestured with her quill to hurry along. Emma resisted for a moment, questions fidgeting about on her tongue, but then nodded her reluctant acceptance and stiffly walked away.

Scarlet waited until Emma had passed out of sight before allowing herself to slump. She hated when her Producer interfered like this, not that there was anything she could do against such a flawless and powerful entity, but at least she could make Poppy’s journey back from the wedding a subtler and more comfortable one than Matt’s.

She picked a doorway, it didn’t matter which one, and pressed a hand against the frame. She felt for the symbolism of the threshold, and all the other potential thresholds it could connect to, then reached out to trick the narrative into connecting two of them that weren’t normally linked. It resisted. A wall. A ward. Something sealing away the set where the wedding had taken place. Her hand shifted, fingers tightening against the stone. She knew what that meant.

In the background, the sun slipped below the horizon, and the stars came out. Scarlet remained where she was, with her hand on the frame, waiting for the door to open. She couldn’t open it herself. She couldn’t even knock. Only wait for one of two people on the other side to open it for their own reasons. She knew they would, it wouldn’t be a satisfying end to the story if they didn’t, but she didn’t know which one of them it would be.

The ward came down, and Scarlet’s heart twinged as she recognised which of the two had done it, but it might not have meant what she thought it meant. She didn’t have time to worry about it anyway, and she pressed on the symbolic link as soon as she was able. The door opened, and Poppy stepped through.

“Oh,” said the tiny woman, blinking up at Scarlet and clutching her camera in front of her, “Hello.”

“Hello there, you little troublemaker,” Scarlet grinned, though it wasn’t all that convincing, “How was the wedding?”

“It was good,” Poppy nodded, “I wasn’t expecting the ghosts.”

“The foreshadowing was there, if you read between the lines,” she chuckled.

The unlikely pair stood staring at each other for a moment. Poppy never lost a staring contest, as far as she could remember, but she somehow got the sense that Scarlet wasn’t actually looking at her even though her eyes were pointing in the right direction. It was a familiar feeling for the last few hours.

“Scarlet?” Poppy asked eventually, “Why was nobody looking at me, after all the other guests left? Why did the ghosts not hurt me like they hurt everyone else, even when they went right through me?”

The Host let out a soft laugh, and shook her head, snapping back into the present. “You, my little fairy, got a little preview of your endgame - courtesy of this season’s Producer.”

“Oh,” the small woman said blankly, “And what does that mean?”

“Your Myth is the fairy,” Scarlet explained, “And something very powerful helped you to really embody that archetype when you needed it. You temporarily became one of the fae: unseen, and untouched by death. There would have been more you could have done, if you tried. Not that you would have known what to try.”

“Why is that my endgame?”

“Because that’s how you’ll end up by the time this show is over. If it all goes well for you, then you’ll be able to reach for it whenever you want. If it doesn’t go well for you...” she shrugged and gave a sad smile, “Then you won’t have to reach. Nobody will ever see you again, whether you want them to or not.”

“Oh.” Poppy said again. The single word felt like a complete sentence in the face of that revelation. She looked around, taking in her surroundings properly for the first time since her return, and noticed the night sky outside the window. “I guess I should go to bed now.”

“Probably,” Scarlet said with a small nod.

Poppy returned the nod, then turned to walk away. She had no idea which direction the bedrooms were in, but she expected she’d find her way eventually.

“Wait,” the Host said, before she could get more than a few steps away.

Poppy waited, looking back over her shoulder.

“Arabella said something to you when you arrived at the wedding,” she continued in a quiet and serious voice reserved for private matters, “The narration only said it was in Mandarin. What did she actually say?”

“Right. Sorry. I almost forgot after everything else that happened.” Poppy furrowed her brow as she tried to remember. “She said ‘Tell Scarlet I love her, and tell her I said goodbye.’”

Scarlet went still. She stopped breathing. She stopped blinking. It would have been difficult to say for certain if her heart was still beating. Poppy looked away. This was a staring competition she knew she would lose, without a shadow of a doubt.

“Okay,” Scarlet whispered, an eternity later. She still didn’t move, other than her lips and throat. “Thank you for the message, Poppy. Now off to bed with you.”

Then she incinerated. One moment the Host was standing there, utterly still. The next moment, there was a pillar of flame. Another moment, and there was nothing. Poppy stared at the empty space, wondering if this was one of her daydreams after all, then decided that she should probably get to bed anyway even if she was imagining the whole thing. She clutched her camera close to her chest, and wandered away to try and find her bedroom.

Deep in the bowels of the castle, where nobody would ever wander unintentionally, a pillar of flame appeared in the middle of Scarlet’s library-cum-office. It died away after only a moment, leaving the Host herself standing there - utterly still. Then, movement. Her chest rose and fell, shallow panting quickly growing into deep, heaving breaths. Her jaw clenched. Her shoulders shook. Her hands balled into tight fists at her sides.

A sound started low in her throat, then expanded until the howl of anguish filled the improbably-expansive room. She threw her head back, and screamed, and screamed, and screamed. A bird’s mourning cry, a swansong from a phoenix, that lasted longer than the breath in her lungs. Tears streamed down her cheeks even as her eyes blazed with fire.

The scream ran dry and she slumped forward, gasping for air. She knew exactly what had happened now. A copy of The HH sat on her desk, unopened, but she didn’t need to read it to know the contents of its latest chapter. She never had to read, unless she was feeling sentimental about it. Every story in the library, the entire vast and confusing history of Harem Hotel, was only a thought away if she knew what to look for. Every story except her own, which had been wiped clean by her Producer. Everything she had ever done before this season had been erased, apart from the memory that Arabella had gifted her.

One night was all she had left. One night spent together. One night with a woman who loved her, and remembered her. A woman who was now beyond her reach. A woman who was only another memory now, like the ones that had been discarded before this season even started.

“You’re not taking that memory, you hear me?!” Scarlet shouted into the ceiling, sweeping her arms wide and snarling as tears continued to drip from her chin, “That one’s mine, through every lifetime.” She jabbed with her quill, punctuating the statement. “Forever.”

“What makes you think I want it gone?”

The Producer didn’t suddenly appear, because that would imply it had ever left, but suddenly its debatably-corporeal form had always been present. It probably lounged loosely against one of the bookshelves, wearing a suggestion of a smile and most likely folding some number of arms across what could have been a chest. Scarlet turned to confront it, all fire and fury in the face of the indescribable entity.

“It doesn’t matter if you want it or not,” she spat, “Wipe my past again, unmake me if you like, that memory stays. Arabella gave it to me somewhere you have no power over.” Her snarl turned into a nasty grin, even though she never stopped weeping. “Even if you get rid of everything else I am, that night and the night she gave it to me are untouchable.”

“And that’s a fate you’d be okay with?” The Producer might have raised an eyebrow, assuming it had them, “I unmake the parts of you I can reach, and what’s left behind is stuck in those few scenes forever? Unchanging, never moving forward, frozen as your character arc is only just beginning?”

Scarlet’s expression flickered, the anger and anguish briefly overtaken by fear before settling into something like resolve.

“I was happy with her,” she said shakily between gritted teeth, stalking forward to come face-to-probable face with the entity that held her immortal life in its grasp.

“Maybe,” The Producer admitted impassively, “And maybe you can find happiness again in the future. But for now, some darker emotions make for a better story beat. You may keep your grief, as long as you don’t let it derail the rest of your season.”

“I won’t,” she promised, more to herself than The Producer, “No matter how much you interfere.”

There was no reply. The Producer had already slipped away between sentences, folding back into the narrative. Scarlet looked at the space it had apparently occupied, as her fury began to build again without a target to vent at. Her breathing grew deeper and deeper, and then with a scratching scream she slammed a fist into the side of the bookshelf. The bones of her hands crunched and splintered at the impact, but she didn’t care. She just sank to her knees as her hand immolated and healed itself, wishing her heart could do the same.

When the scream had gone, a sob took its place. Scarlet knelt there, alone, with tears still pouring from her bird-like eyes and dripping onto the flagstones.

A minute or an hour later, it was impossible to tell which, a warm desert breeze caressed the back of Scarlet’s neck, and then a large presence settled in beside her.

“Are you okay?” Cleo asked, the shopkeeper laying a gentle hand on Scarlet’s back.

“What do you think?” the Host sniffled wetly, not looking up.

Cleo didn’t answer the question. Instead she settled into a comfortable sitting position and rubbed small circles on the smaller woman’s spine.

“...I think I loved her,” Scarlet croaked eventually, as if that explained everything. It almost did. “I don’t remember most of the time we spent together, but I know there was more than just that one night,” she continued without prompting, “And I know that she loved me. I saw her at that party, and she told me a joke we used to share, and it meant nothing to me at all. She just had to go to her death without ever being able to say goodbye to the version of me that she knew, and I never got to say goodbye to her either.”

“What would you have said to her if you had the chance?” Cleo’s question was a low, reverent whisper, as if she didn’t want to break the fragile moment.

“I would have said...” she sniffed, and blinked hard, “I would have thanked her for remembering me, even when I don’t remember myself, I would have promised to remember her in return, and I would have told her I’m going to miss her.”

Cleo made an odd noise in her throat, like something had risen in there that she didn't know what to do with, and then she said: “I’m going to miss her too.”

Scarlet felt something in the air shift at the admission, and finally looked up at her assistant. Cleo was looking down at her, and her cat-like eyes were shining with tears of her own, barely held back.

“You knew Arabella?” she asked, thin and strained.

“I did,” Cleo nodded, her own voice equally weak, “In my own way.”

“I guess she touched a lot of lives,” Scarlet gave a tiny laugh that wasn’t at all humorous. Then she frowned as she realised why something didn’t feel quite right. “Hang on. Those weren’t questions. You always talk in questions.” She narrowed her eyes at the massive shopkeeper. “Why weren’t those questions?”

Cleo smiled, the motion dislodging some of the moisture that had gathered on her lower eyelids so that it trickled down her cheek. “Why do you think?” she asked.

Scarlet’s mouth fell open, then snapped shut again into a frustrated grimace. “You’re infuriating,” she pointed out, then sighed, “I get that it’s in your Myth, but could you not for once in your life just give a straight answer to something? Not even now? Between this and the thing you said about a clue in the crossover chapters, I...” she trailed off. “Wait. Fuck. The lock. Arabella mentioned a lock, just before she gave me the memory. Asked how many tries it took me.” She twirled her quill, deep in thought, temporarily distracted from her grief. “She pretended it was just a figure of speech, but it wasn’t, was it? That was the hint you wanted me to look for.”

Cleo just kept smiling, as if the smile was all that was keeping her face in one piece. Scarlet surged to her feet, putting her barely a head taller than the sitting woman.

“What fucking lock, Cleo?” the Host demanded, glaring down with every ounce of the authority she had. The effect was only slightly ruined by her wet eyes and nose.

The smile widened, just fractionally, and the sphynx reached into the folds of her robes. “Did she perhaps mean this lock?”

“Give me that,” Scarlet desperately snatched it before even fully seeing what she was grabbing, then turned the item over in her hands as she examined it. It was a fist-sized box, formed of something that looked like black iron but felt like a burning coal. Shaped intricately, covered in angular runes in some long forgotten language, a grinning skull with rubies in its eyes was embossed on one side while the opposite face held a grid of unmarked tiles. It emanated magical power of the worst kind from the symbolism alone.

“Arabella gave you this?” Scarlet asked, taking a closer look at the tiles. A four-by-four grid of small squares, with nothing to distinguish each one from its neighbours. There was a row of four small holes along one edge of the grid. “And it’s a lock, is it?”

Cleo stood without answering either question, and took a slow step away while Scarlet’s attention was still firmly on the box, wiping at her eyes as she went. Was this one last gift of Arabella’s from beyond the grave, like the message she had given to Poppy?

“A combination lock?”

Scarlet shakily tucked her quill behind her ear then pressed one of the tiles. It sank into the box, and stayed depressed. One of the four small holes illuminated with a pinprick of red light. Cleo took another step away.

“Okay, a combination of four buttons then. But which four, and in what order?”

The Host turned the box over again, looking for clues amongst the runes as the dead language slotted into place in her brain, but they only held warnings of a painful death would-be thieves. It didn’t matter. She had to find out what was inside, and death didn’t scare her anyway. She pressed a second tile at random. A second light lit up in red. Cleo took another step away.

“Is it red because it’s the wrong button? Is it a puzzle?” She pressed a third button. A third red light appeared. Cleo took yet another step away from her. Scarlet looked up, and noticed her assistant had retreated by several feet. “Why are you running away?” she asked with an accusatory glare.

“Do you need me close by for some reason?” Cleo, back on form, answered the question with another question. The look on her face made it seem as if she wasn’t sure what answer she wanted, though her eyes kept flicking down to the box.

Scarlet pursed her lips suspiciously, then turned her attention back to the grid and pressed a fourth button.

A jolt of pure death struck out from the lockbox. No simple attack, not just a killing spell, but a bolt of distilled essence of the underworld. The kind that stripped the soul from the body and dragged it to the afterlife without asking permission. The kind that took a living being and turned it directly into a corpse with no intermediate step. The kind that even gods and immortals feared.

Scarlet’s empty body hit the floor, gently smouldering. Her eyes still held the remains of tears even after all life had left them. Her hands still clutched the lockbox, but the quill had fallen away from its position behind her ear. She was dead. As completely and utterly departed from the mortal realms as the woman whom she had barely started mourning.

She coughed.

A flicker of flame passed Scarlet’s lips, then her body contorted as life surged through her limbs. She grimaced and arched her back off the floor, then hauled herself back up into a sitting position with a groan of discomfort.

“That was a nasty trap,” she grumbled, then squinted at her assistant, “Did you know that was going to happen?”

“What makes you think that?” Cleo replied pleasantly, standing up from where she had been crouched behind the heavy desk.

Scarlet scowled, then picked up her quill from where it had fallen to the floor and jabbed it towards the shopkeeper.

“You’re on thin ice, kiddo. Don’t think I won’t replace you with a goblin if you give me the excuse.” She climbed to her feet, turning the lockbox over one final time then tucking it away inside her red leather jacket to puzzle over later. “Fucking hell, what a day. And I haven’t even started writing my speech for this big anniversary convention that’s coming up in January.” She turned the quill over between her fingers, and her expression turned from frustrated to pensive. “I’ll write a eulogy first though. I’m going to say some words in Arabella’s memory even if nobody hears them but me.”

“She would have appreciated that,” Cleo said solemnly, bowing her head.

Scarlet frowned at the statement that wasn’t a question, but nodded to acknowledge the truth of it. Perhaps sensing that she was no longer needed, Cleo began to disappear, dissolving into sand drifting on the wind without ever lifting her head until she was entirely gone.

“Use a door, show off,” Scarlet muttered to herself. She sat down at her desk and pulled out a sheaf of parchment, then held her pen poised above it but paused before beginning to write. Her copy of The HH, of Andy Cooper’s story, Arabella’s story, was still there. She changed her mind, moving the parchment out of the way then pulling the book over instead and opening the cover. She didn’t need to read it to know its contents. She never had to read, unless she was feeling sentimental about it.