Walking out of the door, she revealed a connected room. These walls were bland, and the furniture more comfortable than luxurious. "This room contains storage and seating." She waved at the furniture. "It is to be used by you only with permission." Opening a venting door on the side of the room, she pushed a blue crystal into the wall, triggering it to glow brightly. The new light revealed a woman, curled up in a ball, in a clear bubble. She appeared to be asleep. Alyss gasped at the sight. The maid shooed that ball out of the way, revealing row after row of women sleeping in individual bubbles.
Alyss shrieked at the sight of it. Her tour guide looked briefly surprised. Then Veronica collapsed, arms and legs and parts all jumbled into a pile of destruction. Alyss turned away from the bubbles and tried to fit the pieces back together and attempted to take the woman's pulse and, in desperation, perform CPR. There was no life, no breath. Screaming, she ran back through the rooms until she found a door that led out onto a greater hall.
"There's a woman! On the floor!" she hollered. She found a man in worker's overalls passing by in the hallway and promptly dragged him into the scene of the crime. "There! A body!" She shivered, pointing it out to him.
"Ah, darn it." A lean man with an angular face ran into the room. "I told those bastards she was broken. Why on earth did they feel the need to send this one out when there are so many others," he muttered. He swept the pieces up into his arms, calmly walking back out into the corridor. Alyss looked around nervously, then followed when he gestured to her impatiently.
"What happened?" Alyss gasped. She fell to the floor, holding the woman's cold hand.
The man looked at her in surprise. Then he chuckled. "There's no need for the dramatics," he said. "Oh wait, I remember. They all told me the person staying here was from the Original. Don't worry kiddo." He awkwardly stretched his hand to pat two fingers on her shoulder around his large burden. She was just a golem. It's like one of the Mundane's robots, but it's animated by magic.
"Eh? What's a golem?" She tilted her head to the right.
"I'll show you," he said. "Name`s Murray, by the way. I guess your Mundanes would call me an IT department guy. I take care of all the technical magics for the palace. `Course, we don't really have many Mundane gizmos, but we make a lot of things like them ourselves." He called behind his shoulder. They were walking through some corridor of rooms that branched away from the line of Aeron`s apartment. There was a twist, then a turn, and a door was opened to reveal a narrow flight of stairs. "It`s only used by people without a transport spell clearance or the skill to do it themselves, so they didn't want the staircase to take up too much space," he said apologetically. One snap of his fingers and each step was shining with its own phosphorescence.
"Here we are," he said, proudly leading the way through a jumble of broken parts and wires. In the midst of all the metal clutter, were heads and arms that Alyss carefully tiptoed around. "I think," she started nervously, "I shouldn't be bothering you. Umm... I`ve got to go upstairs and, umm... take care of things, so... " She turned tail.
"Wait a second!" he called out, grabbing her by the back of her belt. She gave an urk sound at the uncomfortable feeling, hanging limply in his grasp. "Those are artificial robot parts you just saw. Like an android factory. Ish. Anyways, I'm not going to kill you or anything, okay?" She looked around nervously. He sighed, then dragged her by the belt to the far end of the darkened workroom. "I can't let you just walk around the place on your own, but I think you need to chill out a bit, so seeing my workroom should help you." There were stacks of body parts, sorted by the part. Every few moments a new group of parts would zoom out of the stacks and arrange themselves in midair, neatly draping themselves on an armor rack that then zoomed away through a side doorway, where even more mysterious smells and views came from.
She relaxed, believing the workroom to be what Murray said it was. He let go of her belt. Then the man laughed suddenly. "I bet the golem showed you Aeron's storage unit," he asked. She grudgingly agreed, the disgust in her tone making her opinions on the practice clear.
"It's not like that," Murray guffawed. "The rest of those are his collection of golem, sort of like a bunch of vacuum cleaners or laptops. Our prince is just a little over zealous in his collection, but who can really blame him? Besides, it makes him seem approachable. It's like an action figure collection," he laughed.
"What would you do with those things anyways?" she asked.
"What does Veronica do for you," he asked instead of answering. She flatly replied the golem had done nothing useful for her.
"Well," he hedged, scratching his head. "Umm, when they are in good working order, they clean," he said. "They can cook meals and stuff for you, though he has a staff of sentients for that so it's not really necessary. And, umm, stuff."
She leaned in. "What stuff though?" she asked.
"Well," he stalled. He waved his head from side to side. Leaning in, he dropped his voice to the quietest of whispers. "They do karaoke with him," he confided. She gasped in shock. He nodded very importantly. "Real genuine karaoke. I've heard scuttlebutt that it sounds absolutely terrible, so he makes sure to sing only with those
