"How are we gonna get out of here?"
"I don't know."
"Why is there no door?"
"I don't know."
"Why did Chariot send us here?"
"I don't know!" Jazz snapped. Wes was kind of freaking out. Jazz was inspecting a portrait they would have had no hope of seeing without the candles.
"How did the candles light themselves?"
"I don't know," Jazz growled, stopping herself from slamming her forehead into the wall. Wes slid to the floor in front of the bookshelf, accidentally knocking several off. Absently, he picked a green one up. It fell open in his lap.
Then his jaw likewise dropped. For he was no longer in the little round room with Jazz, or should he say, he was now not only in that room but also another?
It was a jarring sensation for Wes to be simultaneously in two separate and distinct rooms. He still felt the cold tile floor of the Doorless Room. But additionally, he stood in a room bathed in greenish-blue light. It rippled like water. And he heard water, specifically that of crashing water on a beach.
He walked to a window (and 'twas a strange experience to walk and sit in the same). Outside was a cliff and a beach and a sky and he was so glad to see the sun that he dropped the book.
The cliff and the sly disappeared. He was now only in the Doorless Room.
"Oh my god," Wes gasped.
"What?" Jazz had been in the chest of drawers. She looked at Wes.
"Come open this book."
"Why?"
"Just do it." She did. Her eyes bugged out of her skull. She looked at Wes, then around the room (and presumably around the room on the cliff), then back at Wes.
"This is…" she said, at a loss for words.
"Can you see the sun?"
"Yes." She nodded, smiling. "It's much better than this drab room." Jazz closed the book, and Wes saw… clarity- or focus- return to her eyes. "Let's try another," she said, reaching for another. She and Wes opened it together and then dropped it like it was a wild, rabid animal.
Because it was. Well, it was a book, but it snapped and snarled at them just the same. They both screamed (embarrassingly with the same high pitch).
On the floor, the book was not quite a book anymore. It retained a resemblance to one, but it also became deranged. The cover was more leather skin than leather cover; the outer edges of the pages were no longer paper but sharp and glinting fangs. The whole thing tickled something deep in his mind, a feeling of deja vu or remembrance.
Jazz stomped on it. "It's a mimic!" she shouted. And the deja vu solidified into a concrete memory: His brother Easton had told him about his D&D days. He had mentioned mimics as shapeshifting monsters that lured in their prey with an unassuming appearance.
Wes and Jazz backed away slowly, cautiously, so as to not arouse more bite-y bite-y. Wes and Jazz met eyes.
"Well that's unfortunate," said Wes. Jazz nodded.