A/N: Last week was hell for me on every level, but somehow this chapter was by far my favorite to write. It's a bit silly, a bit sexy, and Sarah and Jareth get absolutely plastered. Well, maybe not totally done in, but they get increasingly tipsy this chapter. Please forgive their juvenile behavior and dialogue in the latter half. Spiced peach wine will do that to you. Remember- what happens in Dark Turnabout, stays in Dark Turnabout!

Jary and the lab had to be miles away and I was in a horrible psychedelic space. I was too terrified to scream, too paralyzed, and out of my element to move or direct my course. My body had been launched into a dizzying loop, around what I couldn't know because the blood rushed to my head too severely to see anything but more color spectrums and stars. The loop never revolved back to stability. Upside down I hung suspended by no material save what the upset neurons in my brain could textile for space and dimension. Eternity was wrapped into the two seconds I must have floated like that, light-headed and sick, before being launched a second time backward and dropping at a stiff decline into god knows what was waiting for me.

I didn't need much more convincing that Jary's virtual reality software went beyond sight and sound. Feeling my guts turn over and flailing my limbs for a futile grasp of stability that never seemed to arrive was a rollercoaster in the dark. All I could do was tighten my abdomen, squeeze my eyes shut, and wag my head with the convulsions of movement and disarraying twists, turns, and dips that reminded me predictable physics was out the door.

Sarah, focus on my voice.

That voice was unmistakable. Jary King's words resounded from the abyss as if from god.

"Where are you?" My mouth felt gummy with excess saliva, coming out slightly slurred and soft. Just exercising my tongue off my palette, where it had stuck like glue with tension throughout my plummet, made me want to vomit.

You might not feel it yet, but I'm right beside you. You're stuck in the virtual creation macrocosm because your prefrontal cortex is overstimulated. The shock to your system is detaining your focus. You need to calm down. Take a deep breath.

His explanation was delivered placidly. It was a fostering example that there was a sense of control somewhere in that bedlam. Anything I was unfeeling through space and time had to have been directed by my mind after all.

I inhaled deeply through my nose until I felt the air bloat in my belly and then blew it out through my mouth.

Good girl. Take a few more and center your attention on my voice.

I took another breath, ignoring the thickening in my throat.

I want you to position your body as if you're seated and imagine the solidarity of a chair beneath you. It may feel silly and pointless in that open space, but it will help you settle your body.

Reaching for the underside of my knees made my body lurch forward into a floating spin. I breathed through it and meditated on the hardwood of chair legs meeting behind my calves and a hard backing against my spine. Like magic, my awkward, fetal hold on myself smoothed out and postured into a comfortable seated position. With curious fingers, I reached to my underside and felt the dry, splintering texture of wood.

"Oh, thank god," I whimpered.

You only have yourself to thank. You alone brought that chair into being. Now, as you inhale in your next round of deep breathing, I want you to concentrate on the various fragrances of the space around you.

Oh joy, I thought with a new wave of dread. Let's hope he doesn't apply that devilish sense of humor of his to this part of my sense awakening. With the dizzy sensitivity of my stomach, all it would take was a repugnant stench to set me off into nausea again.

Stench! The word was a red flashing sign in my mind. Stench..stench...why should that terminology matter?

Like a voicemail cassette put into play on an old machine, a hoarse voice broke into my inner ear in response. "...if you so much as set a foot in the Bog of Stench, you'll smell bad for the rest of your life. It'll never wash off." The deja vu registered, but not the origin of the grating voice or what it meant.

Bog of stench? Was that an allegorical title for something? And why remember this now? The memories my damaged brain chose to recover seemed as negligible as newspaper clippings without a headline or body of text to draw from. Just sentence fragments from conversations that could have been no more meaningful than the small talk used to fill a dead silence in a taxi. My history before the institute was a jigsaw without corners or sides, and more than half the pieces missing.

Sarah? Are you still with me? Your food's getting cold.

I snapped back to Jary's voice. Already I had lost my train of sense reconditioning and continued to delay my first foray into virtual reality. I couldn't smell a thing, but just the mention of sustenance made my stomach ache with what could have been a growl of hunger or remorse for the acidic upset it had endured. "Sorry? Did you say food?"

That's right. A new employee of Labyrinth Co. deserves to be treated to lunch. A king's feast in this case. Put that adorable button nose to work.

I was tempted to correct that I hadn't pledged to stay under his employment past trial running his gaming technology, but I had wasted enough time in the black vacuum.

I inhaled and held the air like a windbag.

A note of sour-sweetness like that of yeast reached first, then the rich fragrance of cooked fat like some sort of meat on a spit. "I smell fresh bread and...chicken I think?"

Roast goose, but close enough. Okay, I need your focal point to be your ears now. You've likely been hearing nothing past your panicked pulse. If you clear your mind, you will find a surprising sound habitat around you.

With every exhale this time around, I released an intrusive thought or image and let my body be present to the moment. The pulse in my ears had already begun to dissipate with the relaxing of my form and I could pick up the semi-distant murmur of human voices and a delicate resonance instrument playing that could have been a guitar or possibly a lute. There was a relaxed air about the auditory atmosphere and it made it that much easier to ground me in my body.

You're coming along nicely, Sarah. The transition into the level I've created is nearly done. Your final stretch is the simplest. All I need you to do is open your eyes.

"But I've already had them open." I frowned into the deliciously fragrant commotion and thought of all the hallucinatory colors I had witnessed and the inky black space that had suspended beneath it. "At least...I thought I did."

In the trauma of an individual's first reality shift, even the minor contraction of the muscles that surround the eyelid can be a monumental task. What you've been seeing all this time are phosphenes that we are all capable of witnessing when we rub our eyes or come in from the sun. I'm looking at you right now, Sarah, and while your loveliness remains unblemished by your frenzy, your eyelids are shut so tight that you're creating furrows in your brow. Find the center point of your face and focus on projecting your energy through your eyes. Only then will you open them.

It was freaky how separated I had become from the control of my own body. I thought virtual reality was supposed to liberate the user, not create some sort of depersonalization complex.

I took a breath and tried to imagine the inhale going up through my nostrils and into the back of my eyes.

The blackness hung around me like a bad joke so I envisioned looking at myself from outside my own body. I pictured my eyes, lips, and nose in unlined repose and willed my eyelids to slowly rise up, up, up.

When the externalized Sarah of my mind opened her eyes wide enough for me to see her pupils, the vision evaporated along with the peripheral darkness. The spectrum of a new environment expanded into a foreign landscape around me.

All my senses synchronized and fixed. The scent of baked bread and roast goose from earlier was met with the buttery undercurrent of ale and the less savory stink of nearby sweat and distant sewage. The chair I found myself in was a raised, velvet-lined wooden dais at the center of a lengthy table, bowing under the weight of innumerable hot plates and goblets and the leaning elbows of diners dressed in brocaded tunics and wired caps.

It was more real than reality, more believable than life itself.

"Feels like everything before was a dream, doesn't it?" Jary's voice was resonant and impressive this time. I followed it to the left of me and found him seated in the equally lavish dais beside me, outfitted in a black doublet that opened midway down his chest to the white shirt beneath, outlining a ripple of muscle underneath. A silver crown banded across his forehead and his lower half left nothing to the imagination in a pair of dark hose laced to his waist and black leather boots.

I flinched a look down to see how my attire compared. A dark cotton-like tunic could be seen from the center of my chest to the hem of my skirt and over this, a heavier, red velvet tunic was corsetted around me at the waist. The effect was less than comfortable and packed my breasts tight as sausages into the square cut top, exposing more than half of my chest to the chill of the huge stone room. At the top of my head, I felt a crown of a thinner alloy, but jagged gems and stones under my exploring fingers proved it to be more ornate than Jary's.

"I'm floored." I shook my head in disbelief and wonder underlined my speech. "I'm floored."

Jareth's mouth quirked with humor. "I thought you might appreciate a setting with a renaissance flair. You have queenly bearing to you."

I looked between the caped mass as they gorged on goose legs and a red jelly dish with missing teeth and weathered faces. "What kingdom are we even a part of? Are we in Europe or..?"

"I didn't calibrate it to be historically significant, but I can change that if you wish. Consider this the kingdom of 'us', the peasants 'our people', the country 'our land'. No one here will question your authority or blink an eye at your behavior. They are merely AI with flesh coats."

Roughly no different than the constraints of goombas in Mario World or the ghosts in Pacman, yet so entirely tangible and immersive. No matter how much I might grow to interact with the reality Jary had designed or how many times he lectured me on the finer points of its makeup, I didn't think it would ever sink in fully that this was a programmed game.

I had to test its boundaries for myself. I scouted out a thin minstrel group in a puffy feather caps and multicolored capes. One strummed a lute, while three others played on a crude recorder, standing drum and tambourine.

The lute minstrel's voice went as high as a woman as he sang out dulcet lyrics I didn't recognize. "Holy maid blessed thou be; God's son is born of thee, the fate of heaven, thus live we!"

I pointed him out to Jary. "So if I wanted that group to start playing Hall & Oates…"

Jary's amused smile deepened in laughter. "I can't go for that."

With a tilt of Jary's head in their direction, the group of pasty minstrels froze and resituated their respective instruments. Mouths stuffed with food hung open, ready to choke and all conversation halted to look on the interruption.

Fluttering wings filled my stomach as I waited with them.

A rhythmic pat on the standing drum turned into a familiar beat and all the heads around the table began nodding along like choreographed actors in a music video.

The lute-man began his closest impression of the rolling guitar riff and the recorder and tambourine players sprinkled in a raw version of the twinkling pop-rock chimes.

"Easy, ready, willing, overtime

Where does it stop

Where do you dare me

To draw the line

You've got my body

Now you want my soul

Don't even think about it

Say, no go!"

I couldn't control my burst of delighted laughter and playfully shoved Jary by the shoulders. "You did it! It's still a bit primitive on those instrumentals, but you got them to play it."

Jary's face flushed and he leaned his arm across the back of my chair. "It's a great credit to me to see you laugh like that, but you can alter this world just as well as I can. All you need to do is concentrate on your intent."

It was foreign enough to me that the human brain could be hypnotized into experiencing an illusion so palpable and vivid, much less that I might be able to manipulate it at will. "I can hardly look past my wonder to know what to intend."

Jareth reached down for a heavy-looking slab of bread from the table and extended it to me. "As I walked you through on your journey into the VR, grounding your senses will help build your faith. Hit two birds with one stone and get some food in your stomach. Just submerging into Dark Turnabout takes a lot of energy and calories. I'd hate for you to get sick."

I frowned at the offering and made no move to accept. He had teased food in my hard landing before but I had been too traumatized to dwell on how odd that was. What Jary was implying drew a finer line between physics and the restricted deception of the mind. "I bet it tastes real enough, but how would the illusion of bread do any lasting good to my hunger?"

With a heavy sigh, Jary tossed the bread slab over his head and didn't look back or flinch when it toppled over a trencher of fruit lining the wall and several pitchers with it. "If a nightmare can make a dreamer wake up with lasting physiological fear, perhaps enough fear to cause one's heart to pound and the blood pressure to rise to the level of panic, couldn't it be reasoned that the mind is capable of emulating other physical processes? Life itself is energy and what we refer to as instinct is really life's intent for survival. All life wants a space of its own on the terrain of the universe."

"Now you're turning philosophical." A bejeweled goblet left of the bread platter caught my attention for the argument I was building to and I lifted it for an inhale. The liquid at the level of the metal rim was crimson and the aroma was spicy and fruity all at once. "If Dark Turnabout is as limitless as to have a physical impact on the body, then this spiced wine would make me drunk, which is impossible."

Jareth's wide eyes followed the raising of the goblet to my lips and he tried and failed to swat it out of my grasp.

"Sarah! Sarah, no!" He shook his head. "That's way too much on an empty stomach."

The wine warmed the back of my throat and my upper chest on the way down like whiskey, yet tasted sweet as sangria. Sensations I attested to Dark Turnabout's ability to appeal to the very least of a user's superficial sense of taste and expectation. Nothing more.

"Delicious," I threw the goblet over my head in derision of Jary's anxiety, pleased in a juvenile way by the smash that sounded and the conviction that there were no real consequences for anything that happened in Dark Turnabout. "Deliciously impotent."

Jary's eyes impaled me and he lifted his chin. "So my Dark Turnabout's impotent? Well, let's see what trouble we don't get up to then." With a slight narrowing of his eyes on the brocade clothed table, an identical goblet of wine appeared.

He threw it back in one swallow, his eyes never leaving mine.

"Yes," I said with wry inflection. "Let's." The dark ages Hall and Oates tribute concert broke into a hollow silence and I turned my head.

The minstrel group's coarse instrumentals paused and shifted to a slower, dreamier beat that was obscurely familiar and began to sway from side to side.

I raised my eyes to a shadow that threw over me to find Jary watching me. He stood apart to the side, closer to the open floor of what appeared to be the great hall, but I never caught any movement or heard his chair shift back. More VR mind tricks.

He offered his hand. "As much as I appreciate good sparring, it's been too long since I've danced with a beautiful woman."

I had to keep my features deceptively composed under his flattering scrutiny. "Couldn't catch them?"

"Not for some time." The corners of Jary's mouth twitched and he closed the space remaining between us.

Letting his hand enclose mine, letting him guide me out into the hall forefronting the banquet table was like dipping my toes into the water before a swim. I knew I could turn back and change my mind at any time, but I knew I wanted to stay open to every new experience just as much as I balked at the vulnerability and unfamiliarity. I had decided to let my body carry me and leave my mind to catch up after. It was only a dance. It was only a rhythm out of a dream I couldn't help but sway to.

Jary held me close at the center of the diners turned dancers. In step with them, he waltzed me in small circles, one-half moon to the left, another half to the right, looking down at me always.

I felt my flesh warm all over and stir into the movement. There was no exertion to it. Just a cozy kind of tingle and lightness in my limbs and mind like my insides had taken a bath.

I could see it in Jary too. The taut, serenity of his androgynous beauty had taken on a new color and an expression of eagerness and unguarded tenderness mingled openly on his face.

"Do you feel it too?" he husked at my ear, raising goosebumps down the back of my neck. "That peachy aftertaste? That bliss syrup inside?"

"Maybe," I giggled like an idiot. Everything seemed a little more irreverent to me for some reason.

We continued to dance into the crowd, disappearing in it and reappearing as its core. We were kind and queen. Lovelier, and more graceful than anyone. Worthy to be watched and imitated as the dancers mimicked our every twirl and direction.

All the different colored tunics connected into a bright blur and wired hats and veils seemed to elongate and become rubbery.

The great hall spun even when Jary stopped to hold me flush with his chest and smell my hair. The way his nose agitated the baby hairs on my forehead tickled.

"You're so weird," I laughed and threw back my head from his probing inhales. "I don't get you."

"What?" His eyes crinkled with his smile. "You can't blame me for enjoying delicious things. I bet you taste good too."

Without warning, Jary leaned into me, dipping me into a backward arch that made my dizzy head go buoyant. I floated in the warm rush of blood to my head, the blur that entered my vision just enough to make the upside-down world look ethereal and dreamy. Jary's flicking tongue and gentle grip of teeth at my neck and earlobe threw new dizzying currents into the mix and my stomach tightened with more laughter.

Jary's head pulled back once my laughter took on hysterics and he lost his grip on me.

It didn't hurt hitting the floor. Nothing hurt anymore.

"Oh shit, love!" Jary choked on his wave of laughter, even with the concern in his eyes and crouched next to me on the dance floor. "Are you okay?"

"I'm incredible" I felt myself smiling wide and dumb as a child, but it was okay. He was smiling the same way.

"I already knew that," he purred, his hands trembling with eagerness over my collarbone. He let his fingers glide to the edge of the top of my tunic, where the line of my cleavage began. "Oh what I would give to touch you."

"Aren't you already?," I aimed for cleverness but my words stumbled out loud and ungainly. It didn't make me feel any less attractive somehow.

Jary's gaze flashed between me and where his hands were gravitating and his eyes turned large as saucers. His touch shriveled away. "I've gone right barmy!"

We erupted into more laughter and laid back side by side on the hard floor, watching the dancers carrying on in their rotation to the music. The last of Jary's laughter turned into a hic at the back of his throat and he wrapped his arm under my head and over my shoulder. Now we were warm and euphoric down there together.

Time might have passed while we heard each other breathe and met eyes at intervals, but I didn't think to keep track of it. Thoughts were vibrations of energy and emotion rather than words and plans.

I breathed in the scent of Jary. It came from his hair and skin so close to me. He smelled secret and earthy, like the forest at night.

I wanted to study his handsome features and the cut of his body. I hadn't missed his obvious approval and attraction to me, and it made me dream of being crushed in his embrace.

It was my turn to taste and feel.

Jary's smile was lazy and loving as I crawled on top of him and leaned in for a kiss. "You won't tell anyone," I whispered against his lips. "I just want to have fun."

His lips parted and his pupils enlarged. "You can trust me. I'm very good at secrets."

I felt a ripple of excitement as I slowly leaned in for his mouth, like the very air around us might have been electrified. I traced the outline of his lips first and allowed him a playful hold of his teeth on my fingertip.

When our lips met, the kiss was soft, cautious. Discovering the texture and the right pressure. Slow and thoughtless, I let him open his mouth more. Let his tongue slip in and explore me until the pit of my stomach turned into a wild, hungry swirl. It was a beautiful and ugly hunger that wanted more than could be taken in at once.

I wriggled against him for more of his body heat, pressed my lips harder and harder against his mouth for more of his distinct taste and tongue.

It was when I started missing his mouth and face and rolling over onto my side like a confused toddler that I had to stop. Jary moaned and reached for me but he couldn't find the right direction either, despite my being on top of him.

The rotating dancers looked like one long circle.

I rolled off Jary and whined "God, do they ever stop? I hate them all!"

Jary sat up too quickly, fell over, and pushed up into a seal's stance. "Yeah, me too. This place has no style."

He puffed his chest out and then faltered flat on his face. "Bollocks!"

My stomach hardened at his ineptitude and my own. Everything was sharp and irritating. The slow love ballad had become like nails on a chalkboard and the dancers continued on like jewelry box figurines. "Do something, Jary! Take us somewhere else!"

He pushed up the upper half of his body again, his expression pinched and tension-filled at me. "What does it look like I'm doing?" Right off the tail of his words he lost the balance of his pushup and flattened on his face again with a loud thump.

It would have been funny if I hadn't been so worried about where I was. I had either gotten on a carousel at an amusement park or I had gotten sick at prom. But I was pretty sure I had never made it to prom so that didn't make sense. I wished so badly that I could have been prom queen at least once. Everyone deserved to have at least one special, defining night.

Yes, that's right...this was my night. I thought. This was my chance to grasp the adventures of lost youth!

The white noise base of the music clarified into pop and the room darkened in places and brightened in others. A large ball glittered above me and threw light around the room.

"Jary?" I searched dancing, blurred forms for him. "Jary?"

A few of the vaseline lensed forms cleared to petite boned limbs and chiffon. I felt the heat of close bodies, smelled the cheap perfume, and overapplied cologne.

I was lighter on my feet as I pushed past the faceless, bumping, and grinding crowd, and when I looked down I found myself in a body-skimming sheath dress with beadwork too detailed for my screwed vision to take in. I could see and feel the v-neckline was much lower than I would have ever been comfortable with. It had to be the work of Jary.

The auto-tune pop pounded louder in my ears and an edgy, twitchy feeling coarse through me along with heat under my skin. I had to find him and shake him for...doing something. I couldn't get a grip on my mind on what exactly that was, but I was sure of my feelings.

"Jary!" I shoved a blurred redhead out of my way, toward the flashing light at the back of the room. Maybe I would see better there. "Jary!"

Halfway to what was defining itself as a low production stage, the lights lowered to near-complete darkness and a microphone squealed on through the speakers.

I screamed at the sudden overstimulation and bent over to cover my ears but the announcement smothered my voice.

"Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the first prom of Turnabout High School. It is an honor and a privilege to act as an MC for this momentous occasion."

Jary King was backlit with one hanging stage light, contouring his otherwise shiny, flushed face. His eyes were half-mast and bright. His interpretation of a tuxedo was a spectacle of slim lines, leather, stripes, and colored velvet.

The whys, the wheres, and what he intended was porridge in my head. It was another game and it was up in the as to whether I was a player or a piece.