The Mysterious Garden
Daniella approached the large dais with the altar in the center. This altar was much bigger than the one in the skeleton room, having three different depressions set inside of it. This one was in the huge, circular atrium right outside that hall, and she had seen it as she and Poppy wandered around the room, wondering if the snake bites had been venomous. She noticed the diamond shape immediately... This was where the crest was meant to go. The snakes had been a defense mechanism... but for what? What would happen when she put it here? Whatever it was, it was a secret. She looked down at the other two depressions... to the left was a triangle-shaped depression, to the right, a pentagon. The diamond went right in the middle.
She cautiously lifted the diamond crest and set it in place. She looked around, waiting for something to happen... but nothing did. She looked over at Poppy, walking through the jungle-like vegetation. He must be pretending he's outside, she thought with a half-hearted grin. She really did love this room. It was beautiful, temperate, and enormous, and was a much nicer atmosphere than the rest of this place. Its walls were white instead of black, and bright shapes danced across them as the water moved. As she was thinking about this, a deafening noise came to her ears. She put her hands up to cover them, looking around to see what was happening. But she saw it almost right away.
Over near the waterfall on the other side of the room, there were three pillars. The one closest to the waterfall started moving horizontally, positioning itself under the cascade. Poppy started running around in circles, barking madly at it, and Daniella just looked on in awe. That pillar must have been thirty feet tall! She wondered how something so big could move without toppling over. But it did, and she watched as it moved beneath the waterfall, catching the water on top of it. Once it was directly underneath, it stopped. But that wasn't all... at the top of each of these pillars was carved in stone a giant face of an old man, who strangely enough she could swear she recognized. Once the water hit the top of the pillar, the mouth dropped, leaving a hole, and water began pouring out of the mouth and down into the pool again.
She just stood there and stared at it for a while, thinking. So each time she put a new crest into this altar, one of the pillars would move. The one that just moved was the highest, and positioned itself directly beneath the waterfall, the water somehow coming down through a passage in the middle of the pillar and shooting out the mouth of the old man. The next closest pillar was shorter, and she guessed that when it moved, it would move sideways like the first one and catch the water shooting out of its mouth, in turn opening its own mouth and doing the same, and the third one would do the same thing for the second. Right now, that water was just dropping into the pool below. But if she could find all three crests and place them here... she looked at the bottom of the waterfall.
Right now, the water was falling into a large pool at the bottom. But if she could get all three pillars to get into position, she noticed another, smaller basin farther from the waterfall. The water would be falling into that one instead... She had no idea what that would do, but she knew it would do something. Something important, judging from how well this crest was guarded. She looked down once again at the altar. The people, this place... there was some dark secret. A well-protected dark secret. And she wanted to know what it was. Doing this, she thought, may get her closer to the answer. If she was going to be stuck in here, she would at least know the truth.
Poppy had managed to calm down, and was roaming the jungle again, the moving pillar already forgotten about. Daniella wished, at a time like this, she could be that stupidly blissful. She had so many things she was worrying about... she just wanted to forget about them all and find out who she was, where she should go, how she should live. She smelled a strange odor, and found one more thing to be worrying about... hygiene. From putting on these already worn clothes, the dried blood from her wounds, the gunshot and the snake bites, and going into that room, the smell of death had clung to her. She wanted to find some new clothes... but for now all she wanted to do was bathe. As far as she knew, she hadn't had a bath since she came out of that tube, covered in slime. She shuddered at the memory, and shook it off.
She approached the large pond-like pool at the bottom of the waterfall. The water was extremely clear, and she had no problem seeing through it. The great stone pillar was standing right in the middle of it now, actually creating kind of a nice centerpiece. She looked at the track the pillar had used to slide across, and saw two dark lines where its path had been, leading into the pool. Did it use wheels or something? It was unlikely, it would lose its balance... She tried to stop thinking about it, taking in the beauty of her surroundings. The water fell in a prismatic sheet down to the pond below, and the rocks and vegetation around the pool made it feel like she was in some secret spring out in the wilderness. She looked back at Poppy, watching him walk around the trees for a minute, then looked at the doors leading into the room. What if somebody walked in on her...? She hadn't seen a single person here other than Fendari, who would have no reason she knew of to come here... and the agent... but he was...
She shook the dark thoughts out of her head once more. Nobody would come. She would be fine. She took a final glance at the glass doors, then around the room. There was a large mirror on the wall to the side, but no windows except the glass doors. Satisfied, she began removing her clothes. First the skirt, then her blouse. She looked around cautiously, feeling as if she were being watched... but she knew Poppy was the only one that could see her. It always felt that way in this place... dismissing it, she slowly removed her underwear, leaving it all by the side of the pool. She tested the water with her toe, and finding it warm, she stepped into the water. It felt very good, and she tried to forget all her worries as she walked underneath the waterfall, moving her hands up to her hair...