The Woodland Mansion

As the two hurried away, he reached his hand out in a futile attempt to stop them. "Wait-" he started to say, but they were already gone by the time he had gotten the word out. His shoulders slumped. Was it because of how he looked? Was that it? He knew looked incredibly bizarre, but-

He glanced down at his sleeve. Just the smallest bit of what was underneath was showing, but it was enough to make him frantically pull his sleeve back up to cover the offending part of his body. He nervously glanced behind him at the others in the foyer. It didn't look like any of them had been paying attention to him. He sighed in relief, then left to join them.

Just as he was almost where the group was gathered, two of the kids broke off and started up the stairs. Something about the man with the accent rubbed him the wrong way and he still had no idea how to explain the boy's wings, so he decided to follow the two making their way up the stairs.

He finally was able to get close to them when they reached the landing that led onto the second floor. He didn't grab onto one of them, because that would be really stupid. So he just awkwardly stood there, hands in pockets, and said, "You never told me your names earlier."

"Marisol?" Arlais said. She had a hand over her eyes and was peering up at the sky. "I can't see very well. Is that storm getting closer?"

Marisol, who alternated between tugging at the wood and trying to dig up the dirt in front of it, grunted in acknowledgment and looked up. "S***," she said.

"If you don't want to go in through that door," Arlais said, gesturing back to the door Marisol had tried to chop down, "Maybe we should find another?"

Standing up, Marisol nodded. "Yep," she said. "We better make it quick, 'cause it ain't looking pretty."

They walked along the wall, turning around the corner to the back of the mansion. A log's length later, they came across another door, identical to the lost.

Arlais tested it. Locked. "Looks like that axe will come in handy after all," she said to Marisol, who grinned and pulled out the rusty tool. "Just make sure to hit over here, because I think that's where the hinges are.

"Sure thing," said Marisol, grinning and striking one side of the door. Sure enough, after a couple hits, the door toppled inward.

The two squeezed into the small, dark room. They grabbed the top corners of the door and pulled it up, pushing it against one of the walls next to the doorframe. Then they watched through the thin sliver of light as rain began to fall.

Leo startled, again, as the strange elaborate man appeared behind them. It took him a second to realize that he had been asked a question.

"Oh- I'm Leo. Hi there." He gave a nervous grin and held out his hand.

Kit turned from where she was a few steps ahead and scowled down and the man with the ratty wig.

"Kit. You said your name was Griffith?"

"It is," he said, staring down at Leo's extended hand. This was a tricky situation. No matter what he would do, he would end up losing out. If he failed to shake his hand, he would come off as rude and further upset the girl who was already scowling at him.

But if he decided to shake it, he risked being discovered if Leo happened to be just a little too observant. Deciding that he'd rather take that chance over angering the girl who didn't like him, he reached his own hand out and quickly shook Leo's hand. Hopefully he wouldn't notice how little there was underneath the glove.

Then his own hand was returned to his pocket, and he tried to look as friendly as someone with his appearance possibly could. Stupid disguise. If only he was back at his own home! "You mentioned you were lost earlier. That happened to me, too." He adjusted his cloak to make sure it was firmly on his shoulders.

Leo shuddered a bit at how the glove slipped against his skin and tried to wipe it on his jeans as politely as he could.

"I would ask which direction you came from, but I'm afraid I'm too mixed up." He shrugged and figeted awkwardly.

Kit sighed at Leo's klutzy conversation skills.

"This wood seemed a lot smaller when we headed in." She tilted her head, "it's all very strange."

"I noticed the same thing," he said, thanking his luck for Leo's apparent obliviousness. He walked over to Kit and stood beside her. "It's almost like I'm in a different forest."

Kit nodded and crossed her arms. She hadn't said earlier, but something else was bothering her about this mansion- she knew that Sevy had sensed it too.

"When we came into the forest, especially the closer we walked to this place, I sensed some sort of... field of strange energy." She kept her voice low and leaned in a little. As far as Leo knew, she was human like him, and she didn't feel like blowing her cover anytime soon.

He raised a metaphorical eyebrow at how Kit spoke. It almost seemed like she didn't want Leo to hear the information she had just given him, but that wouldn't make any sort of sense - after all, they had to be friends, and they had entered together. Wouldn't she have already told him that?

"I can't tell things like that," he said, keeping things simple. There was no need to mention what he could do - that would just freak her out and reveal more about who he really was. "But this place definitely is creeping me out."

"Agreed." She glanced back toward Leo, who seemed to be deciding whether or not to slide down the banister.

"We were going to look around in the rooms." She inclined her head in the direction they were heading, speaking at a normal volume again. "You can stay or come with."

If she was being honest, Kit wanted to observe Griffith more. He seemed to be wearing some sort of guise, but there was no way to tell what parts of him were real without touching him.

"I'll come with you," he said, nodding out of habit and completely forgetting about the hat precariously perched on top of his head.

It went rolling across the ground, landing all the way back at Leo's feet. It was luckily just something that distracted anyone he met from looking too closely at his face, but it did mean he was going to have to lean down in front of Leo and risk the wig moving to reveal something he desperately didn't want anyone to see.

He went over to Leo and carefully leaned down to grab onto the hat. When his fingers grasped the rim of it, he quickly threw back onto his head and hopped back up to his feet.

Leo blinked as Griffith's hat landed at his feet. Before he could move to pick it up, the hat was already scooped up and back on the man's head.

Kit pressed her lips together at the man's hat fumble. She didn't comment, instead turning and walking down the hallway toward the nearest room. Leo quietly caught up to walk behind her.

He followed Kit and Leo into the nearest room, quietly observing the two of them as he did so. It had been so long since he had been close to someone in the way that the two of them were - all that he had were the friends he had found in between the pages of the books he snuck out from the local library.

As if his thoughts had conjured the contents of the room, he stepped into the room to find shelf upon shelf of books. He eagerly rushed over to the one closest to him and started to scan its shelves. Some of the titles looked familiar - mainly the classics - but most of them were ones he had never heard of before.

His jaw dropped behind his wig when he grabbed a book and started to flip through its page. "This is a first edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!" he exclaimed, clutching the book close to his chest as he continued to look through the shelves. All of the books appeared to be first editions. He wasn't just in a normal library - it was a collector's!

Leo's mouth dropped open at the sheer amount of books in the room. His eyes widened at Griffith's comment. He enjoyed reading more than the average teenage boy, though his genre preference was very specific and he didn't deviate much from it. He walked over to the nearest shelf and carefully slid his finger across the spines, browsing the titles.

"We should try to find a recent publication date." It suddenly occurred to him, "that might tell us something about this mansion."

Kit smiled slightly. Though she would never admit it, Leo did have good ideas from time to time. He was less of a moron than she gave him credit for. Sliding over a little step ladder, she grabbed an armful of books on one of the the top shelves, figuring that it was as good a place as any to start.

"I'm bored," Marisol said after a minute.

"Seriously?" Arlais said, turning to look at Marisol as the latter stepped back into the dark room. "I can hear some people a couple rooms away. You really want to run into them and get into a fight because they think we're ax murderers or something?"

"Then we'll just avoid them," Marisol said, clutching her ax protectively. "And I ain't givin' this up. Maybe we can go on the roof an' see if we can find where we're supposed ta go."

Arlais couldn't disagree with that. She nodded, which was all the permission Marisol needed to kick open the door leading out into a hallway. Arlais groaned and followed Marisol out the door, happy to find that there wasn't anyone else standing around. Then Marisol took the lead, heading down the elaborate red and white carpeting and admiring the wooden walls laced with banners. For an abandoned place, it didn't lack style.

When he realized what the two were doing, he carefully returned the book in his arms to its rightful place on the shelf he had taken it from. Then he moved onto the neighboring shelf, and piled several of its volumes into his arms. He only realized after he was staggering under their weight that he had no idea where to sit down. After quickly scanning the room, he found a table a little ways back and put his pile down on it.

It was time to do some reading.