The Ringmaster's Keeper

Chapter 36: Pampered

I scuttled into the surprisingly large dressing room. Gosh everything was up scaled in this palace.

I locked the door behind me and approached the dress. It was exactly how I remembered it. I took a quick glance around the room and saw some shoe racks and some jewellery boxes- full to the brim- sitting on a pedestal in the centre of the room. The back of the door was one big mirror and there was also a chair in the corner.

My colour scheme didn't stray too far from black and violet, only sometimes using gold as a highlight colour.

I quickly slipped off the current dress and draped it over the back of the chair. I un bagged the dress. It was gorgeous. I stepped into the open collar and pulled it up onto my shoulders. I only just couldn't reach the zip on my back and decided I would just get one of the girls to zip it up. I looked at the three pairs of shoes on the rack. The one on the top was a shiny black pointed heel with gold trim. The middle was a violet felt pointed heel with a big golden buckle on the top. The bottom was a sort of black sandal thing that looked a bit out of place, so I chose the top pair. The pair fitted snuggly on my foot. Almost too snug.

I then turned to the pedestal of jewels. There had to be thousands of thousands of dollars here. I wonder why I could only chose from three pairs of shoes and over- what looked like -fifty items. There was a pyramid of black felt sections that held all the rings, necklaces, and bracelets. There was a black metal branch that stemmed out of the centre of the pyramid that held many pairs of earrings. Of course, to stick with my theme they were all in obsidian, amethyst and yellow gold.

I scanned the array of jewels and felt a bit over whelmed about which choice I should make.

After several minutes of scanning my eye over the large display, I finally picked out a set of chandelier earrings that had a large obsidian in the centre of many amethysts. The pair looked very heavy, but beauty is pain after all.

I looped the golden rod through my ear and didn't feel the weight of the earring at all. I took it off and weighed it up in my hand and it was very light. Why was everything here so perfect. I looped them back in and then gazed at the mirror. I looked kind of... nice. I straightened out my dress and opened the door. Several girls were sitting in what looked like hair dresser chairs. When I thought about it, nothing had been done to my hair. As soon as I thought that several people filed into the room, all wearing plain, black uniforms. I found out that several was an understatement. They kept coming in, one after the other, until the final one entered the room and closed the door behind her. Most were women, but there were several men mixed in up with them. Each stood behind a chair which was positioned in front of each of our mirrors. I approached my mirror and standing behind my chair was a young Asian woman with jet black hair. She smiled at me and gestured to the seat. I asked her if she could zip me up first and she obliged. I sat down on the plush chair and she made eye contact with me in the mirror and smiled.

"Hi, I'm Sophie, and I'll be your stylist for the duration of your stay. I'm the one who chose out your dress and other items. You were already assigned the colour scheme from the start and I had to make it work with my choice of dress and other items." The way she spoke made it seem like this was a scripted spill of information that she's been instructed to say. At least she answered some of my questions that I was preparing to ask her.

"Now I will be doing your hair and make-up for the ball that is occurring later on this evening. Do you have any questions before we start?" Her smile was still wide and she was waiting for my answer.

"Oh, umm, no, I'm good." I smiled back at her through the mirrored image.

"Okay that's fine. Now, during your stay, you will almost always get a choice in your style. Such as the shoes and the jewellery." She looked at my earrings and then only realised that I hadn't chosen any other items.