Page 19 of Alien Peacock
“It’s what wings are for,” he grunts, checking himself for injuries.
“It’s just that on Earth, some creatures with wings can’t fly,” I explain as I pick up my fighting stick and look around the room. It’s a giant hemisphere, and the door we fell through is slightly rounded on this side.
The room appears featureless and extremely bright. The rounded walls are shiny and mirrored, showing distorted reflections of ourselves.
I stand still for a while as my heart rate settles down. “Maybe there's another door.”
“If so, it's well hidden,” Arelion grunts as he strides along the wall, his reflected image a giant, feathered figure that stretches all the way to the apex of the ceiling.
I can't help letting my eyes follow him. He moves with a light step, his strong legs flexing in a most interesting way. His wings are huge, even when tucked tightly in behind his back. The feathers shine brightly in the white light, and I can't help but wonder what kind of evolutionary pressure got his speciesto develop them. It's not like he's not perfectly attractive even without those?—
I suddenly lose sight of him. Instead I'm looking at a thin reflection of myself, seen up close.
“Shit!” The sudden change in the room takes me by surprise. I'm surrounded by mirrors, seeing only myself in all kinds of unsightly distortions. In one I'm thin in the middle, in another I'm thick, in one I'm short, and in another I'm comically tall and drawn.
Looking up, I see the same — just my own reflection, dozens of them.
“A hall of mirrors gone mad,” I mutter to myself. None of the reflections are flattering. A girl could get a real blow to her self esteem in this place. “Picasso would have loved this.”
I reach out to touch the one in front of me. My finger doesn't touch anything, but still it's stopped and prevented from pushing into the image.
“Are you seeing this?” comes a deep call from somewhere. “They're force fields.”
That must be why they could appear so suddenly. And why they can move, I realize. The image in front of me is now me seen from behind, with my butt looking laughably flat and bony. But of course that's the way it always looks.
“What do we do?” I yell back to Arelion. “Are we trapped?”
“It's a maze,” he tells me. “One that keeps moving. Let's try to find each other first.”
“Fine with me,” I tell him. “Where are you?”
“I'm here,” he calls back. But it sounds like his voice is coming from several different directions, starting to my left and then moving to my right while he speaks.
“Are you moving around?” I ask, just to be sure.
“I'm standing still,” Arelion replies. “Areyoumoving? It sounds like you are.”
“I'm standing still, too.” Damn. Both light and sound are being badly warped in this unpleasant hall of mirrors.
The mirror in front of me shows me normal size, but is totally exaggerating the size of the pores on my nose, making them look like deep, crusty gorges. Or do I really have those?
“Can we get out of here?”
“They're hard to break,” Arelion says to me, sounding as if he's on a fast-moving swing over my head. “I don't know which way to go.”
I take a few steps past the mirror in front of me, finding that it is indeed a maze. Everywhere I look I'm confronted by extra ugly versions of myself, even when I look up at the ceiling and down at the floor. I can't escape myself, and that’s quickly becoming an absolute nightmare.
I speed up to a fast walk, turning this way and that and constantly crashing softly into the force fields and the images of myself. There's panic tugging at the edge of my mind — what if we're stuck here forever, doomed to wander around this nasty place and always seeing warped and deformed images of ourselves? Or maybe the room is showing Arelionniceimages. This should be just the right place for him, with mirrors as far as the eye can see. He can admire himself to his heart's content.
“What do your reflections look like?!” I yell into my own face, one where my teeth are all brown and cratered. “Mine are really ugly!”
“I have looked better,” the deep bass comes through the air. “The images seem specially made to ridicule.”
That's a small relief, anyway. I'm not the only one getting shown nightmarish pictures of themselves.
“I'm walking through the labyrinth,” I tell him. “It keeps changing. What is making these force fields?”
“There must be a generator,” Arelion says, sounding like he's ten feet below me, going in a fast circle. “I suspect it's hidden in the ceiling.”