The Hotwife Hotel
By Sarah Tonin
Lazy Summary:
- Top result in search for "hotel"
- Last place you want to stay
- The elevator works
- For standing enthusiasts
- Mercifully free if your time has no value
From the Paranormal Investigation Files of Sarah Tonin
I watched my luggage not appear at the baggage carousel. Violet leaned over my shoulder, still in a bikini with a linen shirt from our trip to Al Zahra. Her phone buzzed. She read Dirk's text over the sound of shifting bags.
"Hotwife Hotel. Satellite thermals suggest stationary crowds, potential zombie infestation." She stopped reading and looked up. "He underlined 'hotwife.' Twice."
"You know how he gets about hospitality." Half my attention was focused on the carousel. Every suitcase that wasn't mine slid by to be picked up by its owner. "You can double underline texts now?"
"Hotwife Hotel," Violet repeated, slowly. "Hotwife. Hotel." She turned the words over, apparently lost in thought. We continued to wait.
After another twenty minutes, the thunking of offloaded bags stopped. There was one lonely hard-shell left behind. Circling away, abandoned and tagless. I watched its sad turns around the belt with an opportunistic eye.
"That's not yours, Sarah."
"Ever hear of maritime salvage law?"
Third time by and "Article III(c): Finders Keepers" kicks in. I hauled my new luggage off the carousel. It was silver and looked expensive and wore a sticker advertising Big Bear Lodge. Inside: White parka. Bodysuit. Winter boots. Mittens. A toque. (That's Canadian for "cold head hat.") And under all that, at the very bottom, was a trench coat. Tidily folded and so lengthy it could have doubled as drapes.
"Ski Resort Uniform," Violet said. "You're cursed."
"I'm practical," I replied, kicking off my shoes. "Nobody's looking, right?"
Somewhere, over an ocean and far, far away, a stranger was unzipping my suitcase to find a notebook, pheromone detector, telescopic crutches, and Violet's emergency restraints. Whoever they were, I'm sure they had questions.
Check-In Apocalypse
Arriving at the Hotwife Hotel is like stepping into that scene in every zombie movie. You know the one. Where the survivors break into the shopping mall. There, they find an undead horde lurching about, persistently perpetual and utterly stagnant. Who could blame Dirk for suspecting the walking dead here? But ask around, and you'll discover these zombies don't want brains. Just brain.
I'm getting ahead of myself. I've been in some big hotels. You might even call them Grand. In terms of sheer lobby size, Hotwife has them all beat. Everyone compares big cavernous buildings to airplane hangars. This was like an airplane hangar hangar. It's big enough to store your spare airplane storage.
But instead of airplanes there were people. Despite the ample dance floor and a bar (sans -tender), the shambling crowd was drawn to one spot. I wondered if they were trying to check in like we were.
"Where's the front desk?"
"I don't think there is one," Violet replied, already weaving through with the ease of someone who had been here before. Not that she had been. She just has that energy.
"There's got to be a service desk. It's a hotel."
"Is it?"
She'd vanished in the crowd. I shrugged.
[Investigation Note: The main floor at the Hotwife Hotel is a huge tunnel with a bar and a dance floor and some seating here and there. There's a partial wall that seems to command respect, separating the used and unused parts of the room. The entire population clusters around the landing point, in an area roughly the size of my first apartment. We're not sure why.]
A Woman in a Parka Asks to Speak with the Manager
The first person I talked to was a woman in platform heels and a dress weighed down by sequins. She looked me up and down, taking in my outfit. The parka. The mittens. My cold head hat. The question confused her. "What check in?"
"You know, to the hotel. The Hotwife Hotel? Which this is?"
She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Nobody checks in here."
"Then how do you get a room?"
"Those elevators over there." A vague flick of her wrist toward the bank of gleaming doors on one wall.
"But who gives out keys?"
She had already turned to speak to someone else. Over her shoulder, "You're cute. Nice coat."
Violet appeared at my elbow. She was holding a drink. Looked like a fizzy gin and frozen fruit. "Any luck?"
"That girl said nobody checks in. No keys. You just go straight upstairs."
"Sounds about right."
"What? I know you've stayed at hotels and--Violet?"
She was gone. I saw a hand on her arm and a smile from a stranger. Then a flash of linen and laughter, but not just any--it was that one laugh Violet puts on when she's decided something's fun.
I tightened the parka's ruff around my neck and adjusted the cuffs of my mittens. For all the guests who weren't being checked in, the atmosphere was remarkably calm. You would expect some kind of riot by now. I pushed back into the throng, alone but determined.
[Investigation Note: There's no staff, front desk, concierge, bellhop, valet parking, check-in, welcome cookie, city or harbour view, executive lounge, water slide, or chance of an upgrade. What there is, is people. So many people. It's crowded and laggy and the slapdash PBR doesn't help.]
Violet's Having the BEST Time, Thanks for Asking
I should tell you something about Violet. In any new environment, she conducts what she calls "reconnaissance." To the untrained eye, this looks exactly like flirting. She might offer an uninvited compliment to a stranger. Or she'll engage them with open-ended questions. Sometimes, she touches their arm when they say something interesting. Or when they think they have. The way her head cants, has she ever heard anything so fascinating?
While I was asking my fourth stranger about where to check in ("We're investigating the hotel." "In a ski suit?"), I caught sight of Violet across the room. She was at the bar. Before it had been empty. Unstaffed and sad. Now it had purpose: she was it. Bikini-clad with an elbow propped on the counter, she had acquired a small audience. Violet accumulates orbiters like a gravity well.
From somewhere--possibly even the bar, aforementioned--she had found a different drink. Same gin, different fruit. I heard her laugh again. Wait, had someone given her a second (third) drink now? She didn't have enough hands for that, but she managed. She always does. Someone else was showing her something on their phone. Still someone elser was standing too close. I would've been uncomfortable. I guess I was uncomfortable.
There goes the laugh again. That settled it for me. She was treating this investigation as if it were a night out. She thought she was hot, but me? Full-on winterized. Objectively and thermometrically, I was the hottest wife in the place. Check the heat signatures. Ask anyone. Nobody held a candle to me. I'd retain the heat.
[Investigation Note: The crowd at the Hotwife Hotel is its main attraction. For people-watching and profile-reading? It's fine. Violet integrated in about ten minutes. I didn't. Who knows, you might even speak to a stranger.]
The Ents
https://i.gyazo.com/dd744f95fcf61259da83fb09feee69bd.png
After so much effort, I decided I had de facto checked in simply by asking around a lot. Now I wanted to see the rooms. The spa. Whatever else this place had to hide when it stopped pretending to be a hotel. The elevators beckoned. But they were under guard. Heavy, tall guard.
Everything about the men surrounding the elevators was absurdly tall. Everything but their boots, which were wide. Layered in charcoal denim and black leather with metal shot through their lobes and faces, I was certain their wallet chains had wallet chains to bridge the enormous gap between pocket and belt. Their proportions were an altboy's fever dream about oil money skyscrapers turned corporeal. Yet the boots--God, the boots--were what drew the eye most. These enormous clunksters, each a platform delineating not just the wearer's personal space but his ability to take a dropped sledgehammer to the toe without flinching. With soles stacked high, these men wore impassive expressions that held their innermost opinions about stippled surfaces in reserve.
"Ents," I whispered to Violet. She had rejoined me after some "incredibly productive fieldwork." Her cheeks were flushed and she had a phone number scrawled on her forearm.
"What?"
"They look like Ents. From Lord of the Rings. Remember, those tree people?" I gestured at one of them, whose limbs appeared to sprout from his boots, rooted to the floor with the patience of ancient biology. "Look how firmly their feet are planted, Violet. Maybe the hotel was built around them?"
Violet looked up. All the way up. "They're magnificent."
"They're blocking the elevator. And Treebeard never wore a choke collar."
"You don't know that. The books don't describe everything."
"You're right. As if anyone's read the Silmarillion."
[Investigation Note: It was hard not to notice the groups of very tall men in very chunky boots standing around. Spotting The Aesthetic during our visit to the hotel became a kind of side quest.]
Operation: Longcoat
With the rooms upstairs and the Ents between us in the elevators, we had to come up with something. Fortunately, Violet had an idea.
"Absolutely not," I said.
"It'll work."
"There is no way that will work."
"It works in movies."
"Which movie? Name one movie where that even almost worked."
"All of them. Every one with a trench coat. It's the whole point of trench coats, Sarah."
She was already unfolding my maritime salvage coat from my maritime salvage luggage. It would land mid-thigh with Violet perched on my shoulders, which is to say it was comparatively modest by Hotwife Hotel standards. The plan was simple: stack ourselves into one very tall person, infiltrate the Ent formation, and gain access to the elevators.
"This is insane."
"It's fieldwork. A good investigator is always prepared to be taller than she is."
Not five minutes later, I was sweating through my parka with Violet balanced on my shoulders, trench coat draped around us like a tent. She had borrowed someone's sunglasses and arranged her expression into something she called "righteous ceiling tile dissatisfaction."
I took a few cautious steps. We looked like two short people having an argument inside a coat. Violet hissed into the collar, "Slower. Be more brooding."
We shambled at the elevators while the Ents watched. One of them raised an eyebrow. Another examined a flickering pendant light. I felt the wall of tall recede.
"Is it working?" I whispered.
"They're not stopping us. Act natural. Hit the button."
I stuck my arm out through the jacket's buttons and felt around. My fingers wrapped around what seemed to be the links of a chain. Following it up, my hand disappeared into somewhere cavernous and warm. I fumbled around. There was a pleased moan from far above. But it wasn't immediate. Like on a tape delay. Apparently nerve endings have latency issues when the spine gets too long.
"Left, left! That's not--"
"I AM TWO PEOPLE IN A COAT OKAY."
I pulled my hand free from the Ent's pocket and pressed my palm to the wall. A pleasant chime sounded followed by the rush of parting doors. Stumbling inside, our unstacking was graceful--this wasn't Violet's first couples' pose. The elevator sped upwards. One way or another, we were checked in.
[Investigation Note: The trench coat method isn't recommended or required to access the rooms or the spa. Everything's free, provided it's not occupied. You can just go up.]
Beyond the Fellowship of the Ents
Our first stop was the spa. My parka was immediately saturated with steam from the cesspool that I refused to call a "hotwife tub" out loud, despite Violet's insistence. She was dressed for it and waded in.
"I can feel the relaxation, Sarah. My skin's crawling."
"That's not what relaxation feels like."
We hit the elevator again and tried the first available penthouse. It contained all the bare bones enthusiasm of a derelict Airbnb. There was a bed and a sofa and some furniture that looked like one of those carpet trees you put out for the cat. It had places to attach handcuffs.
"This is the number one hotel in search," I said from the doorway.
"Top-ranked," Violet replied, distracted. She was paying more attention to her phone. The new messages had been coming in since the elevator.
There wasn't even a mint on the pillow. If there were pillows to begin with.
[Investigator's Note: Compared to the disappointing lobby, the rooms at the Hotwife Hotel are something of a disappointment. A door that closes and a couple horizontal surfaces that could arguably be furniture. There's that one sofa from Good Moaning you see everywhere--the one with a Richter scale attached--and some bed. But it's unadorned and underdecorated and not especially private. If you visit, make sure to bring a sense of humour and someone interesting.]
Conclusion
The elevator sunk to the lobby and we pushed through the Ents into the crowd. Despite warnings of zombies and the discovery of a new species of tree cryptid, we didn't feel any closer to the truth about what was going on at the Hotwife Hotel. Come to think of it, we weren't really sure what temperature had to with marriage in the first place.
"So, what do you think?" I asked Violet as we moved toward the doors. She was trying to catch the eye of some person near the bar by doing that thing where you make your hand into a phone, like 'call me?'
"I think if you put a bunch of people in a room and call it a hotel, they'll figure out what happens next on their own."
I considered this while we waited for our ride. Violet was scrubbing at the ink on her forearm with a makeup wipe. "You're right, I guess? About the hotel, I mean. No staff, no check-in, nobody's too upset. It kind of works."
"But what will we tell Dirk?"
"Let's tell him his zombie theory was almost right."
"Almost?"
"Yeah, almost. Zombies are desperate for brains. These people are desperate for--"
"Validation?" I offered.
She laughed--her real one this time--and moved to link arms with me. Her hand got stuck in my puffy sleeve. "I was going to say sex, but that works."
We filed our investigation under "Not Zombies, At Least Not in the Traditional Sense." Even as the most popular hotel in Second Life, the Hotwife Hotel isn't for everyone. It might not be for anyone. Especially not anyone looking for a hotel.
