As soon as Forrest heard the distinctive electronic buzz of the hotel door lock she pushed it open with her shoulder and entered the room. In an set of economical movements that she didn’t realise she was capable of she’d dropped her bags and fell face first onto one of the two double beds present in the room.

They had been on the bus for so long. Now Forrest wasn’t that tall and she was decent at travel. But she had felt super restless and cooped up for the entire journey. The whole situation probably wasn’t helped by all the awkwardness that was currently hanging out around her. Oh, and her broken arm. She had broken her right arm at prom.

The doctor—who had been very patient with her—had said it was a broken wrist and her...uh...femur? Wait, was it her femur? Whatever, it was a mystery to her. It had needed surgery to fix, so here she was. Arm wrapped in a cast that went all the way up to her bicep, or what passed for one on her body.

It had been an awkward journey due to it and the other factors.

But here they were, in Washington D.C., the capital of America and home to legal weed. Not that she needed an excuse but as far as the law was concerned no one could stop her. They would be going out and exploring the sights of course, but if she could also sample some capital city weed she was totally going to indulge. She could even put a group together.

But first there was a mystery to solve.

Forrest raised her right arm up off the bed and spoke to the others, voice muffled by being face down.

“Hey guys is the broken part my femur?”

"The femur is in the leg," Dolly said from where she was crouching, lifting her voice slightly to be sure Forrest would hear her. She was ducked down by the side of the other bed, peering beneath it to get a good look at the carpet. It was ugly, to be sure, but everything seemed to match so far.

She straightened up with a sigh, unsure whether she was disappointed. She was glad to finally have reached the hotel; she'd dressed down a bit for the trip in charcoal gray romper overalls with a strawberry pink blouse, but she it wasn't exactly on par with lounging around a bus in sweatpants. Stretching her legs a bit around the hotel room was a relief.

Poor Forrest, though. Not only had she had her prom night dampened by her injury, but she'd had to endure the hours-long drive in extra discomfort. Dolly didn't blame her for immediately flopping into bed.

"If you broke your wrist, I think it'd be the... radius? Or the humerus." Bones actually were not Dolly's strong suit, but she remembered a bit from going over the skeletal system in biology. She was pretty sure she had the names of the arm bones down, but wasn't completely sure about the arrangement of such.

Ah, well. If Dolly didn't have it right, she imagined that Beryl and Nia might have an idea. She was overall pleased with her rooming arrangements, though of course it was a mild disappointment to not be sharing with Marceline. Forrest was an odd duck, and so was Beryl for that matter, but Dolly expected things to be peaceful, if interesting.

Anyway, she hadn't been in a hotel since she'd read that article about the things you should check for to see whether there had previously been a death in your hotel room, so this was her first chance to give it a try.

Only now did Beryl idly realize she could have offered to help Forrest with the bags.

She drifted into the room, heralded by the click of roller wheels shyly kissing door frame. Dolly and Forrest already painted the room in the whimsical hues of their dressings. Cozy enough, it seemed. Beryl felt the vague oppression of friendly sentiment, draped atop warmth and skin; under thick and plain, denim and cotton. Her wrists gently rattled as she walked. Mahogany obsidian: for healing the truth, or, whatever passed for the truth.

She passed Forrest's prone body, seemingly slowly sinking away into bed like corpse into grave. She picked the head of the bed where the pillows were still neat and sterile, unfamiliar. Beryl industriously tugged the comforter askew, broke the straight lines. The metallic snarl of her zipper briefly sounded, then an armful sized pile of stuffed animal was dropped atop the bed. The strong face of a plush husky, which Beryl supposed reminded her much of a long gone Rosalind. Maybe. That could have just been her thinking too hard about the semblance. She told herself: what she remembered was not necessarily what was worth remembering.

Beryl abandoned her bag on the floorspace between bed one and bed two, and approached Forrest's outstretched arm.

"Humerus..." She lightly touched whatever spot on the cast could have been called Forrest's flabby bicep.

"Radius," Forrest's wrist, closer to the thumb. "Ulna." A line traced, endpoint settled nearer to the pinkie.

"... Might have mixed up those two." The bedspread fabric of spacetime warped as Beryl settled into her chosen seat by Forrest's side.

>> APOLLONIA "NIA" KARAHALIOS: TRIP START


Nia brought up the rear of the group, observing their surroundings, noting their neighbors, certainly not falling behind because she was having trouble with her bags. Certainly not. She had perhaps overpacked, but she disliked not having her notebooks at hand if there happened to be something she needed to reference. Unfortunately the only bag she had was a very big and not-on-wheels duffel bag, which she had half-carried, half-dragged to the room, and she would be quite happy to let go of it.

She filed in behind Beryl, dropping her bag as soon as it was far enough from the door not to be in the way. She glanced up at the others and their quick exchange of thoughts; she waved to Beryl briefly to get her attention and signed a quick YOU--CORRECT to clear the matter up.

Nia liked Beryl, as far as she really liked anyone. She was interesting, she had knowledge in a variety of disparate fields, she made at least some effort toward learning sign language, which Nia couldn't help but appreciate. Dolly, too, was an adequate choice as far as roommates were concerned, if she had to have roommates. Forrest was the odd one out in her estimation, and so far she was unimpressed. At least she wasn't loud. It could be worse.

That was her general mantra going into all of this. It could be worse. Every time she reconsidered having gone on the trip at all, she'd remind herself. Anyway, the museums would presumably be worth it.

It occurred to her, though, that Beryl's elementary grasp of ASL wasn't going to get them very far, and she reluctantly returned to her bag and fetched her main sketchpad and a couple of pens. Glancing back up, looking for a place to rest, she chose to collapse onto the bed that Forrest wasn't occupying. The bed that Dolly was currently observing the carpet around. A combination of general knowledge of the subject and general knowledge of Dolly Upton was enough for her to make an educated guess at what she was doing. She wrote something down, and tapped Dolly's shoulder to get her attention.

Check the light fixtures for flies. Or the air conditioners. Cleaners tend to forget there, or so I've read.

Oh, she had been off by a lot. Whoops.

"Well, I broke my arm." She said as she rolled onto her side.

Still, when Beryl traced out the actual bones she nodded along. It turned out she had destroyed a few bones that night. It was an interesting feeling. The cast also doubled as a physical manifestation of it. A nice, chartreuse reminder. It was a funny story though, so there was that.

In the meantime, everyone else had filed in behind her and started to go through their own routines. Dolly who had an interesting—but seemingly high effort and maintenance—fashion sense was inspecting the room for...something, while Beryl unloaded a stuffed animal onto the bed. It was the kind of decision making Forrest could get behind. Nia was the final one to enter and did so slowly. She was mute, Forrest was aware of that. It did make her feel slightly bad that she didn't know any ASL. It would have been easier for Nia if she could communicate with them in the language she knew.

Currently though, everything seemed to be going well.

"I snapped both so." She gave a small shrug, her eyes looking between her three roommates for the week. She was ok with it. She continued to watch for a moment before she became a cat.

"What're ya doing?"

Dolly nodded along absently as Beryl listed off the bones as well, though she was more focused on the note that Nia held out to her. "Ah, good point."

She toed her shoes off and climbed onto the bed to peer into ceiling light. It looked a bit dusty, but that was all. "I'm looking for bugs," she told Forrest. "Or stains. Mismatched carpet. Sometimes they're not very thorough cleaning hotel rooms, especially if there's been an incident."

She looked at the light a moment longer before clicking her tongue. "No bugs," she reported to the room at large and Nia in particular. "What about the air conditioner?" She pointed to the unit under the window, admirably doing its job of blowing cool, damp air into the room. Very nice after spending nine hours on a bus that was alternately frigid and sweltering with so many bodies packed onto it and the air conditioning system struggling to compensate.

Beryl stared at the manifest that confirmed the inventory of Forrest's broken bones. It was a pleasantly, painfully eye-watering color. Beryl was seized upon by unanswered compulsions of seeking shelter for her eyes: polarized shades, lab goggles, blast-proof concrete. So on, until she eventually lost track of the whimsy and the bounce of the synapses in her brain puttered into an atypical sluggishness that Beryl had noticed was more likely as of late.

She yawned to herself as she contemplated Forrest's slender frame. Tired as she was Beryl had a vague and murky current of desire bubbling underneath the grey of her brain, that she could cuddle into Forrest and stay there some time. Beryl supposed, however, that would have been imprudent or the like.

"Turn the tables around and upside down," Beryl noted, bored, but how she always sounded. "They probably miss corners.. due to viscosity, impact ballistics... blood splashes at more angles than one might think."

She curled up onto herself, defensive like mutt left out against the rain. Her long legs piled up on the bed, knee against her chin.

"What do you guys plan to do? Tomorrow."

No signs of prior death so far. Unfortunate. A haunting would certainly be a unique experience to add to her theoretical resume. She was too tired to know if her own thoughts were even joking or not. Either way, she shrugged at Dolly and dragged herself back off of the bed to check the vents of their air conditioner. Unsurprisingly, they were... well, spotless would be too charitable a description, they were certainly dusty enough to suggest that the cleaners had in fact regularly forgotten them. But there were no bugs to be spotted. Beryl's insight into another method of investigation was valid, but also involved an amount of effort that she had no desire to put into this enterprise. The lack of evidence so far pointed to an obvious, if potentially disappointing to Dolly, conclusion.

She reseated herself on the bed. She'd chosen the spot furthest from the door, closest to the air conditioner, for no other reason than the other bed had been taken when she entered the room and Dolly had been investigating the other side of the bed. It was conveniently also the coldest spot in the room, which could only be a good thing as far as she was concerned. Particularly considering the exertion it had taken her to get here. The cold air seemed to freeze her sweat on her skin. Oddly relaxing, in a way.

Beryl, at least, had moved on from the murder scene potential of the room to their future plans. A subject which Nia had opinions on. However, the unfortunate bit about her choice of sleeping position was that she was too far from the other bed for the writing on her sketchpad to be visible. She could get up, but, well, she didn't want to. She also didn't particularly feel like finger-spelling the names of half the museums in DC.

She wrote something down, and, in a slightly unusual display of levity, took the thirty seconds necessary to fold her note into a paper airplane. She was quite satisfied with herself when her throw landed the papercraft neatly on the bed next to Beryl.

I plan on fitting as many of the Smithsonian museums as I can into this trip, but I'm starting with Air and Space, ideally. Would you like to accompany me?

Beryl would make good company, and it seemed reasonably in her wheelhouse. Not that Nia would mind going along, but Beryl had the most fascinating habit of coming up with bits of information out of nowhere that she wouldn't have thought to ask about on her own.

"Oh an incident, sounds spooky and potentially governmental." Forrest said as she continued to watch Dolly inspect the minutiae of their room. It was interesting watching her assess everything, taking in details of things Forrest herself had never before considered or thought about. She just turned up at a hotel, dumped her stuff and used it to sleep and shower. Sometimes eat if the restaurant was supposed to be good or go to a rooftop bar or pool if the hotel had those. But she had never looked for any signs of "incidents" that had occurred in the room previously.

As her eyes once again roamed over her roommates for the duration of the trip she caught sight of Beryl looking over her from her position on the bed. She was tall, far taller than Forrest herself was, which was slightly ironic in Forrest's mind she was named after trees. Still, she saw her and gave a small smile before mouthing "Whatup."

Meanwhile, Dolly was inspecting the air con, which as far as Forrest was concerned was doing its job perfectly. She'd have to make sure to mention to the staff that it deserved a raise or a move to one of the fancy rooms. If the hotel had fancy rooms, she didn't know. She hadn't asked or checked. As far as she went with her knowledge was that they were told they were going to the hotel and that had been all she needed.

She watched as Nia sent a paper plane across the room, upgrading the message in a bottle system to the modern day and the air. After it landed Forrest answered Beryl's question, turning her attention back to the taller girl.

"Fly like paper, get high like planes."

"Oh, the tables. That would be good to check. Maybe later, though." Everyone else's momentary interest seemed to have faded almost as soon as it came, and Dolly didn't necessarily feel up to moving furniture around or being an unnecessary bother. Instead of stepping down from the bed, she kicked her legs out and let herself fall and bounce. She watched as Nia sent the paper plane over to Beryl, smiling slightly. It was whimsical in a way she hadn't quite expected from Nia.

"I plan on going to as many of the history museums as I can. Some monuments too, if there's time, but I suppose we have the whole week." Plus whatever Marceline wanted to do; they hadn't discussed an itinerary, but Dolly expected they'd be spending most of their time together. Museums, monuments, some shops, a break here and there to call home and check in on Artem and such. It was a slight disappointment that he hadn't felt up to going on the trip. Dolly had resolved to send lots of pictures and pick up a souvenir or two for him. There were bound to be some interesting books and trinkets in the myriad gift shops.

Dolly laid back on the bed and stretched her arms over her head with a sight. Right now, she was content to rest up a bit. Everyone had arranged themselves so that it seemed Beryl and Forrest would be sharing one bed, and Dolly and Nia would have the other. That was fine by her; hopefully she just wouldn't have any issues sleeping in an unfamiliar place. She wasn't too worried. It was usually stress rather than a change in environment that set things off for her, and while the travel itself had been a bit of a hassle, Dolly was hoping for and expecting fun and relaxation during the next week.

Some unknown amount of time passed pleasantly enough. Things occurred at a normal-enough seeming rate, maybe even one second to one. Serendipitous. Beryl said nothing in that indefinite interval that might have implied she had anything in particular to do with it. Nia made planes, and Forrest made references to planes that were ticklishly funny, right to the funny bone buried deep in her gray matter. Beryl couldn't help but not smile, much as it otherwise seemed appropriate.

Gestures of amusement typically followed amusement, but Beryl was starkly conscious of her being atypical. She crisply unfolded the paper airplane in the same second that she neatly caught it.

Beryl quickly understood, slowly cared. A gentle nod.

"Is this letter just for me?" She held onto it anyways, just to be sure. She slid off the bed and hit the hotel floor in that ninety-nine and infinite nines thereafter probability that she didn't spontaneously phase through the floor when all her atoms aligned just the right amount of wrong. Hm. Oh well.

At least she'd have company a little while longer, right? Hopefully more than plus one. More was better, supposedly, that's how the saying went in it's purest dilution without additional presupposition. Addendum aside, because Beryl might have personally chosen to add that more people was more complexity, was greater chance of navigational error. Just her personal touch. Anyways. She distracted herself with her usual well-traveled feet, trying to take on Forrest's humor in her quiet voice:

"All I wanna do is-" and four neatly crunchy gun shot noises as she half spun and pointed two barrels worth of finger gun with her free hand, right at Forrest. Beryl supposed she might as well have been a gun in an alternate life, jammed and making wispy clicking noises in a far off universe where she was more reliable than her present model. She turned back to her current endeavor. Nobody had concluded the matter of the room's being a crime scene in the past tense, perhaps the matter had been dropped implicitly, but Beryl wasn't presently inclined to read between the lines or read much at all- she'd already seen all the hasty scribbles she needed to and confirmed she'd at least be able to pretend she wasn't unfathomably alone for a few hours. Thus, she could exist in the wrong frame of their total conversation, lagging somewhere back where they'd still cared about the murder mystery.

Beryl's phone was turned to flashlight, and with casual strength she hoisted the table between the beds to lean up by two feet. The room phone tapped the wall in loud protest. She checked the bottom as illuminated.

"Clean," she confirmed, quietly returning the table to normal.

The construction of the Washington Monument began in 1848; it wasn't completed, however, until 1884, a convenient numerical parallel. It was an impressive undertaking, but even so it didn't literally take 36 years to complete; the project was troubled from the beginning. The original design was more complicated and involved the obelisk surrounded by a colonnaded building full of statues of Revolutionary War heroes, which would be fascinating to observe now had it ever been completed, but unfortunately that idea had proven too expensive. Hence the current design, a relatively simple but nonetheless striking structure. While it wasn't officially recorded it was almost certain that slaves were involved in the original construction, as it was before the Civil War and the number of documented laborers was far lower than the number that would be needed for such an undertaking. Construction went on for six years before money ran out, at which point only 152 feet of the 555 foot (approximately, measurements ranged from 169.046 m to 169.294 m) obelisk had been built. Contributions toward the monument stopped due to a political controversy when members of the Know-Nothings destroyed a stone that had been dedicated by Pope Pius IX, resulting in protests and unrest. The party seized control of the Washington National Monument Society, which resulted in Congress withholding funds from the monument. However, while the party was ousted by 1858, 4 years later, construction didn't resume on the monument for yet another 21 years. At that point construction continued with surprising speed, likely partially due to the slave labor being replaced by skilled craftsmen as slavery had been abolished by this point, and the monument was complete in 1884. It opened to the public 4 years later.

If anything relevant was happening in the rest of the room, Nia was no longer aware of it. Plans had been, vaguely, made. She scrolled through the Wikipedia entry on her phone, determined to know more about the Washington Monument than the local tour guides before she came anywhere near it.

Well, at least one person had found her joke funny.

But yeah, museums, yeah that was probably why they were there after all. It was still a school trip, even if it was like at the end of term and they'd all be leaving pretty much once it was over and done with. But before that, they had the entire capital of the land they called home to explore and do as they saw fit in, as long as they didn't do anything illegal. Then they got to go home, which would have been less fun because she was fairly sure they'd been required to pay to be able to go on the trip. The money was probably not given back if you got kicked off.

That was a problem she didn't need to worry about however because of the fact that she was sure weed was legal in D.C. So she could just get high legally and the chaperones on the trip wouldn't be able to do anything about it. They'd have to watch her and shake their fists being all 'Curses! The reefer madness is nigh!' and then go back to drinking probably. The chaperones must have gotten messed up themselves right? It would have been a waste of a week for them to have to look after a bunch of kids and not indulge a little. Forrest for her part was planning to indulge a lot. But whatever the rest of her line of thought was going to be was interrupted by Beryl shooting her four whole times.

Forrest for her part got hit four times and with an "Urk!" fell from the bed, bashing her arm on the floor in the process, because y'know it was broken.

"Ow. Forgot my arm was borked."

Looking up Forrest saw Beryl lift the table with casual ease.

"Hi...I feel like I'm supposed to normally end up here when I'm drunk."

Dolly was half-listening and nearly dozing, when a buzzing from her purse accompanied by a succession of small chimes pulled her back up from the fuzz. She sat up, swinging her legs around the side of the bed again, and reached for the purse to retrieve her phone.

From: Artem
> Dolly?
> I'm sorry to bother you.
> I'm sure you're busy.
> Let me know when you can talk?

Ah. The corners of her mouth lifted, pleased and perhaps something like relieved too. Artem had been... withdrawn. He'd come down with something at prom, he'd said, but he hadn't been around much even after some time had passed, and had given various and sundry reasons to turn down face-to-face interaction. It was a little worrying; Artem was never the most social, but Dolly almost would have thought he was avoiding her if she didn't have it on good authority that he'd been that way with everyone for a while. It was what they called a funk, perhaps, or some artist's fugue. Hard to say without intruding. She was glad that he'd reached out; the alternative was chasing him, and Dolly had never felt quite right doing so.

To: Artem
> Not busy at all, we just got to the hotel.
> How are you feeling?

She didn't really believe that he'd been sick all this time, but what else was she to say without implying that she thought he'd been untruthful?

From: Artem
> I'm
> I'm okay.
> I wanted to talk to you about something.

It would come out in its own time.

To: Artem
> Of course, what's going on?

Perhaps nothing. She'd wondered, though which path she'd rather take: to worry fruitlessly over nothing, or to stand oblivious of some kind of struggle happening just outside her awareness.

From: Artem
> It's a
> lot to try to type.
> Can I call you?
> If it wouldn't be too much trouble.

Artem texted as stiffly and formally as he did anything else, but the familiarity wasn't soothing, considering the words.

To: Artem
> Just let me step outside.

Dolly stood before she'd even finished typing the message.

"I'm going to take a call," she announced. "Don't wait up."

((Dolores Upton continued in Miserere))

It wasn't too late in the evening. That'd be quite a long call.

Beryl ignored the remainder implications and they evaporated away as all the other thoughts she spent a moment too long pretending didn't exist. Transience was bliss.

"You must have ended up down here sober at least once," and her chide was spirited, slightly forward as she tumbled across the floor on hands and knees. In essence and spirit like the pounce of a war hound, and her bare knees now hurt, but dogs didn't traverse the world on their knees- or they did but not with any relevant frequency- and the metaphor fell apart like most structures conjured by her brain eventually did. Ozymandias' reign, truncated and clipped to words of apocryphal wisdom. Likewise:

"It could be just as fun." Beryl's hands gently impacted Forrest's shoulder- the good one, probably, unless Beryl had misplaced which one that was in time and in space and in the illusion of a cast misleading her eyes because she supposed those were probably also easily led astray by the irrelevant details of what merely existed as opposed to what those things implied. No, but Forrest wasn't yowling in pain unless Beryl's sense of perception was also dull and lifeless as a knife overused, so, Beryl had her mark.

She began to bodily guide Forrest back up. The other girl was warm, and Beryl might have enjoyed that fact out of context. Or even within context? She couldn't really guess at what her primal brain demanded of her anymore, because it was always wanting something it simply couldn't have.

"But I've never been drunk before, so I wouldn't know." Beryl idly spoke as she worked, her gentle manhandling of a small waif's worth of other human being barely even constituting effort insofar as she had any bodily awareness from one second to the next. "I'm due for such an experience eventually, and I imagine it'll be fun once I get around to it."