Red Room.

I walked around to the front of the man, still pink in color. His eyes were open, but he appeared to be staring into empty space. He was clearly alive though.

“Sir? SIR?!” I said, to which I got no response. The light I saw from the previous room came from two torches positioned on either side of where I was. Together, they illuminated a long, tall staircase leading even higher into the structure. Since the gentleman on the floor appeared to be in good condition considering his catatonic state, I decided to head up the steps to see if there was anyone else or anything I might be able to use to help him…or even me.

Oh, my legs were tired. What was I even doing? I put so much effort into what I was doing here and I wasn’t even sure if it was going to help me at all. I trekked across this wet and dry barren landscape for a long, long time, and what do I do? Stumble upon a supposedly abandoned palace that was full of money and valuables I couldn’t use, a bunch of reed bundles and a dazed naked guy curled up on the floor. However, as weird as everything was, I kept feeling that if I kept going, things would eventually pay off.

They almost did. I reached the top of the stairs and struggled to pull my weight up the very last step. This room looked like what I had been waiting for. It was filled with tables, fine woven rugs, pillows and chairs, tapestries that spread out along the walls, and on the far side sat a single throne carefully positioned between two large windows. However, what drew my attention first was the smorgasbord of food displayed on the table. Everything looked and smelled fresh, as if it had just been prepared. How could it, though, when there was no one around to make it? Not even the guy downstairs could’ve done all of that in his condition. But I finally concluded that I should stop asking questions and start digging in.

I was famished. I pulled up a chair and got down to business. There were all sorts of fruits and vegetables; some I recognized, and some I didn’t. I grabbed a knife and sliced off a piece of a small turkey and anything else that looked good to me. Before long, I was stuffing myself. However, as soon as I put any of the food into my mouth, it all tasted bad. I hesitated to eat it, but I convinced myself to down a few more bites. “What was wrong with it?” I wondered. How could something that looks so good taste so bad? And then I saw it – a sign on the other side of the table. To my surprise, it was written in English and seemed to be a warning, or at least a cause for concern.

“Even the best things in life come at a price,” it read.

It made me think of the food I was eating, and I spit the last of what I had in my mouth back out and into a napkin. I needed nourishment, but not that badly. I reached for a carafe of water only to discover that it was foul tasting as well. “What’s with all this?” I stood up and quickly backed away from the table. I surveyed the room again thinking some clues may be elsewhere. Perhaps there was even another passageway to a fourth chamber.

I walked over to the throne and pulled out the small book again. Unfortunately, other than showing it’s location in relation to the last room I was in, there was nothing about this room in detail. I scoped the outer edges of the walls, even looking behind paintings and drapes, but found nothing. Once I saw that the windows overlooked nothing but the bare Mont Lac landscape, I realized that this was as far as I could go inside this thing. I then began frantically looking everywhere, nearly tearing apart the room for any information that might help me out.

Finally, I stumbled across a box behind the throne that contained pictured, most of which featured a distinguished looking gentleman and his loved ones. Just about all of the images had him in there somehow. As I thumbed through each one, I read the captions as best I could to determine that the man was, in fact, a king of some kind. “Jin,” I said, reading his name aloud. I repeated it a few more times in a feeble attempt to make sense of it all, but it got me nowhere.

All of the sudden, I saw the man that I came across just inside the doorway at the bottom of the stairs climbing over the top of that last step to the flat area of the room where I was. I put two and two together when he struggled to lift his head toward me.

“You heard your name, didn’t you?” I suggested.

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