badfic-mods.livejournal.comYou wake up in a room. A dim room, with lights off and curtains closed. Perhaps it looks like your own room at home, or your office or your jail cell. Or perhaps it looks like no room you’ve ever been in. Either way, there’s something wrong with it. Maybe you don’t pay any attention to the strange, faraway feeling it fills you with; but the feeling is there, in your heart of hearts. This place is different from any other place you’ve ever been.
You might stay in this room, or you may go out to explore. If you leave your room, you will find that the door closes noiselessly behind you, locking itself. Don’t worry, though. In your pocket, or stuffed into the side of your sock or even slipped into your underclothes is a key back in. You’ll probably feel it, because right next to it, adding extra weight to your clothing, is a tiny machine. You might not know what it is or what it does, or you might recognize it as a Blackberry, circa 2010. Turn it on (if you know how), and you will find a network of other people connected to it. Which almost makes up for the fact that it most certainly does not have access to the internet.
Look back at the door now, and you’ll see something else strange: your own name, or your title, on a plaque on the door. Whatever this place is, they’ve been expecting you, and they know who you are.
Down the long hall in front of you, there are doors. Dozens and dozens of identical, dark, wooden doors, all with plaques reading other people’s names on them. You might see other people creeping out from some of these doors, all as confused as you are. Chances are, you don’t know any of them.
Eventually the hall emerges out onto the rest of this strange place: it is a house. A huge, sprawling manor to be exact. Big, airy rooms with picture windows opening onto bright grounds, luxurious furnishings in a beautiful Victorian style, hallways even longer and more labyrinthine than the first one you entered into, every amenity you could imagine. Look into that door over there and you’ll find a vast library, full of every book you’ve ever read and thousands of others that you never knew existed. Climb the stairs onto the third floor and you’ll find a strange, quiet sanctuary of huge practice and storage rooms, or make your way downstairs and find much more.
But wherever you go, take a look into the entrance hall. You’ll probably want to; the chamber to the out-of-doors may lure you with the possibility of finding whoever owns this place, because they certainly aren’t inside. But when you reach the hall, you won’t find the people who brought you here. Instead, you’ll only find a mysterious message scrawled upon the wall in flowing script above the door:
Once upon a time…