Jessica Hayles
September 05, 2020 1:06 PM
Decompression. by Jessica Hayles
Even after four years in the wizarding world, MARS still kind of creeped Jessica out. She spent most of her time there in the water room, swimming in a spectacular swimming pool, which appeared completely normal in every way. In terms of smells and occasionally tastes and even how her skin and hair felt after she was done, the pool was almost identical to the indoor pool she used in the winter at home. This despite the fact that Jessica only knew these things about a pool, not exactly how they sourced the water or how much chlorine or whatever to put in one. She had wondered before if she was really swimming at all, rather than just being trapped in some kind of very vivid induced hallucination, but consistently finding her swimsuit still damp and smelling of pool water when she got back to her dorm had more or less convinced her that wasn't the case after a year or two. Which in a way was worse, because it meant it made what she wanted without her knowing how to make that thing herself, which implied horror movie levels of sentience from a room, which implied that the room could turn against its creators at any time and start killing them off one by one.She continued using it anyway. What was she supposed to do, give up her favorite form of exercise and relaxation? Considering how much of her time at Sonora had been spent being tense, she regarded it as by far the less of two evils to just trust in her luck and hope that it was either Zara or Jeremy who was inside on the day MARS went psycho, if anyone had to be in there when it did that.
Today, she had not wanted her usual swimming pool, and so it had not appeared. Instead, she was in a smaller-seeming room with a floor of pinkish marble. Most of the surrounding features were windows, white-framed with many smaller panes of glass which seemed to look out on an artfully simple, serene landscape, but these stood between columns of more of the same marble; these had torches attached to them, as while MARS could mimic a pool well enough, electric lighting seemed a bit beyond it. These, to Jessica's mild curiosity, were not burning the way light sources usually did around here; instead, the flames were clearly not a normal chemical reaction, and also smelled of fresh roses and honeysuckles. In the center of the room was a hot tub, its surface churning from all the jets streaming into it, into which Jessica sank with a sigh of relief even as blood rushed into her pale neck and face, flushing them a ridiculous color which clashed awfully with her clipped-up hair.
She wanted a massage almost as much as she wanted air to breathe today, but she couldn't have a massage because there was no masseuse at the school and the room did not seem able to produce trained specialists to assist students, at least not beyond portraits, and portraits could not help her with the knots in her shoulders. She thought this might be better anyway, though. The jets massaged her back, the heat of the water relaxed her, and she got to remain (more or less) decently covered in the bright red bikini Mara had dared her to sneak into her shopping basket one day last summer, but which she had never worn before. At the very worst, it was the best thing she had been able to think of, and it seemed to be working.
Jessica did not like relying on herself too much, and so the very day after her conversation with Felipe in the common room, she had gotten to work. A letter to Robert, purposefully very short on details, had resulted in the morning's mail: a wrapped parcel containing a thick matte red binder, its cover emblazoned with Arvale branding, into which her driver had first put a number of print-outs from the company website as a cover before he had neatly organized all the research she'd asked him to do on how to support a friend with mental health troubles.
She was glad to have it. She wanted to do good, not make the situation worse. Even the glance through she had managed between classes, though, had been enough to make her think she was in for some grim reading, and so she had elected to soak in the hot tub for a while before she went to make an attempt at reading it all the way through. Her shoulders were tight enough that she kept wincing as they relaxed, so she thought it would be far easier to handle that task later, at least unless she fell asleep as soon as she got back to her room; that was one of the more inconvenient potential side effects of de-stressing....
She closed her eyes, trying to immerse herself in soothing fantasies instead of letting her thoughts continue to swirl about. It was difficult going, though - was it selfish, or at least selfish to the point of excess, for her to take this time for herself, just to feel a little better? Would it mean that she processed the material and then developed plans based on it just a little too late to stop...something awful from happening? - and it wasn't made any easier when she heard, faintly over the water sounds closer to her ears, the door opening.
16
Jessica Hayles
Decompression.
1442
1
5