Finally you managed to fill the recess with mirror pieces, and the door opened. Despite your exhaustion, there wasn’t much hesitation to move on.
There could have been another collapse, after all.
You next stepped into a sunlit room swirling with dust motes, an ornate wooden door set into each of its ten short walls, not counting the single hallway stretching into darkness. Aside from dated but lush green carpet, there was nothing else to shed light on the situation but a dusty tome resting on a podium. The cover was far more ornamental than descriptive, but flipping through the thin leaves showed you a plethora of mind-numbingly worded advice on dinner etiquette and dancing.
That certainly seemed an ill omen for most of you, and there was very little time to make sense of the instructions before the doors flew open in unison. Amorphous shapes, only visible from the way they distorted the details behind them, swept out into the room, making a number of concerned and pitying noises as they inspected the group as a whole. They were more prone to murmurs than anything, but they spoke in full agreement on one point:
“This simply won’t do.”
Whether you cooperated or not, you were swiftly pushed through one of the doors and locked in. The space seemed a bit cramped for a room, but it was luxurious for a simple changing stall. You felt a few odd prods and pokes as your measurements were taken with invisible tapes, then the door opened and shut before you could possibly slip through. After a few moments of not being entirely sure whether your assigned Denizen had left or not, they surged back inside with fine formalwear draped in their hands(?). While it at least wouldn’t be any gendered clothing you were uncomfortable with, the formality level was much higher than most of you were used to. Did you have to?
The Denizen hung the clothes as needed but didn’t leave the room. Though you only had the haziest sense of where their eyes might be, you could still somehow feel them boring into you with earnest.
“You must do everything you can to hide your identity here—dress nicely, speak courteously, step lightly, blend in. The Denizens here have been hurt badly by Passengers before and will broker no mercy if they realize that’s what you are. Bodily, they aren’t all so different from you, but the eyes…”
They retrieved an ornate masquerade mask from the formalwear and presented it to you.
“This will disguise you perfectly as long as you wear it. Value it with your life. I’m only able to provide one, so if anything should happen to threaten it… Please, be careful.”
So… On threat of your life, you had to dress up fancy, wear a mask, and survive some kind of upper crust social event without revealing you didn’t belong here?
All of you?
Oh dear.
—
[Car Reference Post]
