Chapter 093

Chapter 93: Museum

In the long deserted theater, the empty ticket window glowed. The old machine clacked, spitting out red paper tickets for entry. It was eerie, but Little Red Riding Hood looked calm, as if she had seen it a hundred times.

A few seconds later, the machine went quiet. Three connected tickets slid into the window tray.

Little Red Riding Hood blinked. She did not reach for them. She knocked again and said, “Hold on. Four tickets. Four people.”

Nothing moved inside the booth. After two or three more seconds, just as she raised her hand to knock again, the light inside flickered a few times and went dark.

Only three red paper tickets lay quietly in the dusty window.

Yu Sheng stared, counted their group, then looked at her and asked, “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. This never happened before,” she said, uncertain. She picked up the tickets and glanced at Yu Sheng, Foxy, and Irene. “The Museum entrance can communicate. On every hour and half hour after sunset, it can correctly identify and respond to a valid entry request. It has never ‘made a mistake’ like this on purpose.”

Yu Sheng frowned, looked over the four of them twice, then froze. His eyes landed on Irene.

The little doll twisted her body and said, “What are you looking at?”

Yu Sheng sounded unsure as he said, “Children under a meter tall get in free?”

Irene was stunned, then realized what he meant. She almost jumped up to bite him: “You’re the child! Your whole family is children! You will be a child forever! Do you know how hurtful that is to a mature lady?”

Yu Sheng held back Irene’s flailing arms and legs and looked up at Little Red Riding Hood: “Do you think my guess makes sense?”

Little Red Riding Hood was still dazed. She had worked as a Spirit Realm Detective for years and had seen many strange things, but this kind of strange was new to her. After a long moment, she managed, “It sounds a bit reasonable.”

Irene immediately shifted her anger from Yu Sheng to Little Red Riding Hood and lunged with a roar, only to be dropped to the floor in an instant by two wolves that sprang from the shadows.

Miss Doll looked like she was about to cry.

Yu Sheng pulled Irene up and tried to soothe her, then asked Little Red Riding Hood, curious, “No one noticed this rule before?”

She gave a wry smile and said, “Even the most hard hearted in our line wouldn’t bring babies under a meter tall on a mission.”

Irene actually burst into tears.

“You didn’t have to be that blunt!” Yu Sheng said as he fussed over Miss Doll. He shot the girl in red a helpless look. “So what now? We’re one ticket short. Can Irene still come with us into the Museum? Or is there really a ‘free admission’ rule, and she still has entry rights?”

“Hard to say. We have to test it,” Little Red Riding Hood said after thinking it through. She handed tickets to Yu Sheng and Foxy, but then glanced back at the black window, muttering to herself, “Would an ‘entrance’ really have such a human friendly rule?”

The dark booth gave no answer. Instead, a corridor leading into the theater lit up with dim lights, as if urging the “audience” with tickets to enter.

“Let’s go. The passage is open,” she said at once. She turned toward the lit hallway and waved. “Stay behind me and don’t do anything extra.”

Yu Sheng’s face turned serious. Even Irene calmed down with a clenched jaw. Together with Foxy, they followed Little Red Riding Hood into the long, narrow corridor.

The lights extended with their steps, brightening the depths of the theater. After a while, Yu Sheng seemed to hear footsteps around them, more and more of them, as if many invisible spectators were walking beside them down the dim hallway toward a show about to start.

After another moment, those footsteps faded.

A door came into view. It stood half open, light pouring from inside. Yu Sheng could see orderly rows of seats and, at the far end, a stage.

Little Red Riding Hood lifted her paper ticket and said, “Hold your tickets up like this. If you hear a scolding voice at the entrance, stop at once and we will go back the way we came. That means entry failed, and forcing your way in will cause the Museum to generate ‘security’ Entities. That is dangerous.”

Yu Sheng sharpened his focus and, together with Foxy, copied her movement, lifting his ticket as if showing it to an unseen staffer at the door. Then they slowly passed through the half open door.

He did not hear any scolding. Neither did Irene.

They entered the theater, walked past rows of dusty red seats, and took their places in the front, closest to the stage.

“These clothes will need a wash later,” Yu Sheng whispered to Irene. “These seats are filthy. I should have brought old newspapers.”

Little Red Riding Hood heard him and stared, surprised.

She still was not used to Yu Sheng’s way of thinking. It was practical, but in an Otherworld it felt very odd.

Just then, a quick bell rang from outside the theater.

The house lights dimmed fast with the bell. Above, spotlights popped on with loud clicks. Bright beams pointed at the stage. In the next second, Yu Sheng heard applause.

It was dense applause, plus whistles and cheers. All kinds of sounds rose at once from the empty seats, like a sudden wave crashing in from every side.

He looked around in the applause and felt the heat of the spotlights on his head.

Foxy, Irene, and Little Red Riding Hood stood near him, and with him stood at the center of the stage.

Just as the files said, once you enter the old theater and sit with a valid ticket, when the applause begins, the ticket holder changes from a spectator to an “actor” on the stage. Night at the Museum opens with that applause.

It will last until the night show ends, or until the “performance” on stage pleases those unseen clappers a great deal, or until an actor on stage becomes a new exhibit of the Museum.

Stage sets rose up on all sides. Walls the color of wheat, ceilings with reliefs and colored patterns, floors of dark green and navy blue, doors, display cases, and rooms.

Everything moved fast before Yu Sheng’s eyes, reshaping into a maze like Museum. A mural suddenly appeared on the far wall, showing a red dragon. In a blink, a plaster knight formed near the wall, and the knight thrust his sword at the evil dragon inside the mural. They clashed and tangled, then fused into a new relief.

Then soldiers in old armor marched out of a distant door, only to be ambushed halfway by a squad of musketeers hiding in a painting. Gunshots cracked. Smoke drifted. The soldiers were wiped out. Flowers sprouted from their bones and became neat planter boxes and green walls lining the sightseeing route.

The roar of shifting architecture and the dizzying sights went on for a full ten minutes before it all calmed down.

Only a broad hallway remained in front of Yu Sheng. Landscape paintings hung on both sides. Bright lights shone above. At the far end, there seemed to be a hall.

Low, uneasy whines came from nearby wolves. At some point Little Red Riding Hood had already used Summoning to call out her Phantom Wolf Pack. She glanced at Yu Sheng, who looked a little stunned, and smiled: “Startled? The Museum is an amazing place. If you ignore how dangerous it is, it is actually a hall of wild imagination and art. Aemorabi praised it like that before he died.”

“Who is Aemorabi?” Yu Sheng asked.

“An artist from out of town. Famous outside the Borderland. He died in the Museum, for the sake of art,” she said with a trace of feeling. “If we get ‘lucky’ later, we might see a painting in a sky blue room called The Field, signed by Aemorabi. That is what the artist ‘created’ after becoming one of the Museum’s exhibits.”

“You can still ‘create’ after becoming an exhibit?”

“That is what the experts say. The Museum sometimes gains new things. They often link to people who disappeared here. Sometimes it is a portrait or statue of the victim. Sometimes it is an artwork with the victim’s signature. The common view is that this is the Museum’s way of ‘collecting’ and ‘creating.’ But don’t worry too much. The danger level here is only 2. If you follow the rules, don’t fight the ‘security’ head on, and don’t enter dangerous rooms, the Museum won’t kill you on its own. It is fairly peaceful.”