“Well, if it really is speaking Spanish, then we have nothing to worry about,” Vicky mused. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-three
“Come in, come in!” Professor Torella exclaimed, opening the front door before Vicky could even knock. “I’m so pleased to have you in my home! All the other professors are just going to be so jealous when they find out I was the one who got to host the famous Professor Victoria!”
“Oh, well, thank you.” Vicky smiled at her as she and Chain walked in through the front door.
Inside, it was minimalist décor. The floors were smooth gray marble and there were no pictures hanging on the white walls—mainly, Vicky thought—because there wasn’t enough space to hang any. The huge house was basically a glass box with floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere you looked.
“Your house is so airy and spacious,” she said politely to Professor Torella, who was being trailed around by her two students—the beefy brunette and the slender blond. “You must get a lot of natural light in here.”
“Oh my yes—I am addicted to natural light,” the other woman exclaimed. “You know, the sun we orbit here on Priima Belle is a blue giant but we are rather far back from it and our atmosphere is almost always cloudy. So I like to soak up every spare photon of sunlight I can. Now come—I’ll show you the lounging area.”
She led them through the large, open-concept house which didn’t appear to have hardly any walls to divide the space into rooms, as far as Vicky could see. Instead, she saw little clusters of furniture scattered around the large area in artful clumps.
She saw some chairs and a couch together in one place and a collection of what looked like exercise equipment in another. A third grouping had a screen for entertainment as well as a bookcase clustered with several padded stools and little tables. Strangely, every piece of furniture seemed to be on a kind of low platform—Vicky wondered what that was for?
There was even what appeared to be a small food prep area—if the appliances she saw were indeed used to prepare and store food. They appeared to be a kind of cold storage box, a single countertop, a small sink, and something that might have been an indoor grill or fire pit.
A little later on, they came to a big puffy hammock-type bed with a beanbag-like mattress—or was it a couch? Anyway, it was silver and had a collection of blue and green pillows and bolsters on it. And, like all the other furniture, it was placed on a small metal platform. Was it someplace to take a nap or just a place to sit and relax or maybe both, Vicky wondered? Nothing about the layout of this place made sense!
“The layout of your home is rather…esoteric,” she remarked to Professor Torella as they walked. “Back where I come from we have different rooms for different functions. But here everything just seems to be scattered around all over the place.”
“Oh yes—that’s how we like it here on Priima Belle,” Professor Torella said cheerfully. “Or I like it anyway. I believe that one’s home must be ever-changing to keep the mind from becoming set in its ways. That’s why all the furniture groupings are on hover-boards. I have them remotely programmed to constantly rearrange themselves during the night while I sleep. It’s so charming to wake up and not know where anything is, you know!”
Vicky didn’t think it sounded charming at all. She imagined stumbling out of bed and going to where the kitchen ought to be for her morning cup of coffee, only to find that it was now the living room or the den or maybe even the bathroom with no coffee in sight.
That would seriously piss her off but Professor Torella appeared to be a rather flighty person who liked living with daily uncertainty. Or maybe she just liked surprises. Either way, she was certainly an interesting woman.
“Now, here we are at the lounging area—the one place in my entire domicile that doesn’t change,” Torella announced. “Mainly because the fire pit and the pool aren’t mobile—more’s the pity.” She sighed mournfully.
Vicky looked around this new part of the house with interest and saw that Chain was doing the same.
The first thing she noticed was an immensely long free-standing fireplace which looked like an extension of the gray marble floor. It ran half the length of the room and was around waist-high, with a long translucent chimney made of glass bricks positioned above it.
The fuel appeared to be some kind of blue crystals and the flames were gold and green and blue as they flickered over the long fireplace. Vicky could see pearly blue-gray smoke from the fire flowing up through the glass chimney, presumably being let out into the night sky somewhere above.
On the other side of the fireplace, three long padded tables were standing and a little way beyond them was a rectangular pool filled with clear lavender liquid.
Vicky didn’t think the liquid was water—it didn’t move like water for one thing. There appeared to be a kind of rippling current running through it but the small waves it caused didn’t exactly lap against the sides of the pool. They moved more like syrup or honey, with a sluggish motion that seemed to coat the gray marble and then slowly leak back down again.
Sitting across from each other on either side of the pool were two long, low, white leather couches that looked spotlessly clean. They were filled with throw pillows in every shade of purple and silver and gray imaginable—presumably to match the liquid in the pool.
