Lalika

Xiao Ru, ever twinkly, led the way. Ashley, ever blase, trailed behind. My own mind, still grappling with the notion of a job granted by cosmic fiat, struggled to process the city as we moved. We left the bustling square of the Umbral Nexus and entered a quarter of the city that seemed to stretch upward in a series of improbable angles and stark, brutalist lines. It was a landscape of towering, minimalist structures, where light and shadow carved geometric canyons.

They brought me to the base of a particularly tall, angular tower, its walls smooth and unbroken save for a single, unadorned doorway. The door itself was a strange and unsettling thing—a seamless, semi-translucent membrane that shimmered with the faint, oily colours of a soap bubble—similar in nature to the panes at Sera’s boutique.

Xiao Ru nodded, pointing toward to the door with an encouraging smile.

I raised the holographic keycard, its phantom magnetism a faint thrum against my palm. With a motion that felt half-voluntary, at Xiao Ru’s encouraging nod, I swept it across the surface, and the door answered—with a low, sonorous hum, like the sound of a struck crystal glass, opened.

"It is unlocked!" Xiao Ru chirped. "And the space within has been... configured for your purpose."

I took a breath and stepped forward, passing through the threshold. The plastic membrane did not part, but rather enveloped me for a brief, unsettling instant. It was a strange, clinging pressure, like passing through a cold, thick fluid, and it left the faint, sterile scent of bleach upon my skin. Then, with a sound like a recoiling spring, it sealed itself behind us, and we were inside.

The office—if such a word could survive in this stetting—was, as Xiao Ru had suggested, of a similar design to her own dwelling, but exorcised of all warmth and comfort. It was a study in severe, angular geometry. The space was dominated by great, interlocking blocks of a cold, blue-grey metal, their surfaces unnervingly smooth. Some of these monoliths served as low, wide tables, others as benches or shelves. Some simply floated, hovering impossibly near the ceiling or jutting out from the walls at defiant angles, their purpose a complete mystery to me. Screens of the same liquid shadow as the Nexus flickered on various surfaces, as if residue from a machine’s dreams, displaying glyphs and images whose meaning I could not begin to guess.

I stood in the center of this abstract sanctum, a detective in an office designed by a mad philosopher. It was a space granted by a silent Empress whose will moved like tectonic plates beneath understanding—for a purpose I had yet to define, and I felt a bewildered sense of being an anachronism in my own life, a ghost haunting a future I did not build.

My ocular survey of the chamber—a space of strange, blocky finality—was brought to an abrupt and dreadful cessation by the sight of that which merely passed for an ingress to the upper sphere. It was a vertical fugue of form and colour, a manifest melody carved from the void. Great, elongated blocks, hewn of a polished, absolute black and a stark, unforgiving white, ascended into the higher shadows. Their precise shaping—a dreadful echo of the keys of some celestial, long-abandoned grand piano—was a cruel and immediate paradox to their disposition; for they were not joined, but hung suspended in the very air at disparate heights, a fragmented and impossible scale leading inexorably toward some hidden, unearned terminus.

Xiao Ru gave no quarter to reflection—seeing my hesitation, hopped onto the first white "key." It depressed slightly under her weight with a soft, melodic hum and then gently bounced her toward the next. A staircase that played its climber like a piece of music.

Following her lead, I melodically ascended. The upper sanctum was as sparse as the one below, dominated by a single, low platform. Upon this platform rested a perfect, shimmering quadrangle of liquid… of what appeared to be water, contained by no visible barrier, as if held by a hostile tension. It caught the weak, distant light, scattering the spectrum of colours in an internal chaos, yet the surface held to a terrible, static repose. Nearby, like the remnants of some esoteric ritual, smaller, oblong shards of the same anti-gravitational fluid were frozen into being.

Before my mind could begin to catalogue the dreadful implications of the spectacle, Ashley emitted a whoop of delight, a rare glimpse it seemed so indeed. Gathering a running momentum, she did not hesitate, but plunged headfirst into the geometric plane of the liquid. She executed no splash, achieved no violent rupture of the surface, but simply sank into it, as though the fluid were the softest down, or the amorphous shadow of a dream. The unmoored "water" rose with a calculated grace, enveloping her form entirely, yet without a single drop so much as dampenin"Oh, I love these beds," she sighed, her voice muffled and blissful from within the watery embrace.

Beyond the strange bed was another opening, leading to a small, stark chamber tiled in the same grey stone. There was no basin, no privy, no apparatus for bathing that my earthbound senses could readily catalogue. The features of the space were reduced only to smooth, featureless walls, a single panel of pale, internal light, and a drain set flush into the floor from which a faint, clean-smelling vapour seemed to perpetually ascend. I stood in the doorway, mystified as to the room's purpose.

Xiao Ru appeared at my shoulder. "This is the lavatory," she explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "For ablutions. You simply stand in the center; the mists cleanse and refresh."

A bath of scented vapour was one thing, but the more... fundamental necessities of a body, even one such as mine, still remained. I stared into the empty, mist-filled room, my brow furrowed in… practical confusion. "But how does one..."

Xiao Ru, who seemed to possess a supernatural sensitivity to my mortal predicaments, gave me a knowing smile, cutting off my indelicate question. She reached out and pressed a hand to the glowing panel on the wall. With a soft, pneumatic hiss, a section of the far wall slid away, retracting into the ceiling to reveal a recess. Within it sat a simple, grey block, not unlike the others that furnished the apartment. Atop this block, however, was a perfect, donut-shaped ring of that same shimmering, gelatinous liquid that comprised the bed.

"Ah," was all I could manage. It was a problem, I decided with an internal sigh, that I would contend with at a later time. My new life presented a seemingly endless series of such small, bizarre indignities.

Just as I was contemplating this new mystery of foreign plumbing, a clear, resonant chime echoed up from the chamber below. It was not a jarring sound, but a single, pure note that seemed to hang in the air like a question.

"Oh!" Xiao Ru exclaimed, her violet eyes lighting up with genuine delight. "You already have a client! See? I told you there was a need for you!"

She turned and bounded for the piano-key staircase with an infectious enthusiasm. I followed, my own heart beginning to beat with a strange mixture of apprehension and professional curiosity. From the upper chamber, Ashley's muffled, blissful voice called out, "Do try not to be murdered on your first day, detective." She, it seemed, would not be bothering.

We descended the strange, bouncing keys, the single chime still echoing faintly. My first client. My first case in a world without law. I had no idea what to expect, and that, I found, was a feeling I had not truly experienced in a very long time.

As we rounded the final turn, I saw a figure standing in the center of the chamber below. A woman with a cascade of warm auburn hair, from which protruded a pair of sharp, attentive fox ears. She turned at the sound of our final step, and I paused mid-stride, a breath catching in my throat.

It was Xiao Ru. And yet, it was not. The face was identical, the same delicate features and large, expressive eyes. But where Xiao Ru's hair was a lustrous black of night this woman's was the colour of a warm spring day. Where her eyes were a gentle violet, this creature's were a startling, vibrant veridian. Her trousers, too, were a shade of deep peridot.

Seeing only me as Xiao Ru was obscured by my paused figure, she rushed forward and took my hands in hers, her grip surprisingly strong.

"O, most humble detective!" she declared, her voice a melodious and theatrical thing. "Providence has surely guided me to your door! Won't you please aid me in my quest?"

"'Quest?'" I repeated, the word feeling archaic and strange on my tongue.

"To find my sister!" she cried, her eyes beckoning with a desperate plea.

Just then, Xiao Ru, her curiosity piqued, stepped out from behind me into the woman's line of sight.

"Yes! Just like that!" the strange woman exclaimed, pointing a triumphant finger at Xiao Ru. "My sister! She looks an awful lot like you!"

I watched as Xiao Ru's expression of blithe curiosity faded, replaced by a look of weary annoyance that I was beginning to recognize. Before she could speak, the auburn-haired woman had closed the distance, her curiosity apparently overriding all decorum. She gently took one of Xiao Ru's fox ears between her fingers.

"Remarkable," she mused. "The fur is identical, with the same white trim upon the inner edge." She then leaned in close, peering into Xiao Ru's eyes. "And the eyes are the same shape, though a different hue... perhaps my sister is a little more... buxom, however..."

A faint blush crept across Xiao Ru's cheeks, a mixture of embarrassment and pure, simmering fury.

"LALIKA!" she shouted, her voice echoing in the stone chamber.

The girl—Lalika—merely tilted her head, a look of innocent puzzlement on her face. "How curious," she said. "How ever did you know my name?"

The pieces of this particular puzzle, I mused, did not require a detective's mind to assemble. This was not a client seeking a lost relative. This was a lost relative who had somehow failed to recognize her own sister standing directly in front of her.