Paradise Among Metal

Chapter 20

The night after Meredith first arrived at the hotel, the hotel bustled with unprecedented activity.

Her and Aurelio's speeches must have been pretty effective in generating hope, because almost all the residents of Metal had shaken off their pessimism and began to see the colors. They had seen the colors before, but this time around, they could actually see it and feel the hope it oozed. As a result, people flocked in droves to Aurelio's hotel, where all of Metal's hopefuls ended up.

As soon as people started showing up, Aurelio started panicking, but in a good way.

"The hotel has never seen these crowds before! Oh my god, are the rooms clean enough? Do we have enough food for everyone? Heck, do we even have enough rooms?! I don't think I've ever counted the rooms before!"

Meredith helped put his anxieties at ease. She went from floor to floor, counting all the rooms and floors and reporting her findings back to her father. The hotel had fifteen floors, each with fifteen rooms, making a total of two hundred and twenty-five rooms, which could each hold two or three people.

Meredith figured that was more than enough.

She also went into each room herself to dust it. Despite the blankets of dust covering everything, the rooms didn't need much more cleaning.

She also found that the rooms had seemed to prepare themselves for an occupant. Clothing of various styles and sizes had materialized into drawers, all clean and folded. Various toiletries also littered the bathrooms, varying with each room.

Meredith reported this finding back to Aurelio, and he began to worry about assigning the correct occupants to the correct rooms. However, a guest came bounding down the stairs at that moment, praising Aurelio for "setting up for him". This repeated a few times, with various customers and reactions. It seemed that the hotel had its own mysterious way of assigning rooms.

The lizard-man from earlier checked into the hotel that evening, and Aurelio and Meredith had a nice chat with him. They found out that his name was Reslo, and that he was an alien from a planet called Derox. He and his wife Leela served together in an intergalactic peace force, where they fell in love and eventually had a daughter named Bella, who was fourteen when she and her parents died.

Around sundown that night, people began to get hungry. Snacks had been put on the dressers when Meredith checked them, but they had been eaten quickly and people wanted more. Aurelio went searching for more food, and somehow he found that a pantry had been turned into a fully-stocked kitchen.

"Impossible, impossible," he kept muttering to himself, but what he said didn't matter. In this new version of Metal, it was possible.

People had also begun to get bored. The hotel didn't offer much in terms of entertainment, except maybe talking to your neighbor or looking around in the gift shop.

As a result, Aurelio got some people to cook in the kitchen, and some other people to set up a cluster of tables and chairs. People not doing any of those jobs would sit at the tables and tell Meredith and Aurelio what foods and drinks they'd prefer, and the cooks would do what they could to accommodate them. The food and drinks turned out great, causing Meredith to suspect that some of the cooks had been professionals while alive.

As more throngs of people arrived at the hotel, Aurelio could no longer play waiter and left, leaving Meredith to waitress all the tables. To her surprise, she sort of enjoyed it, despite it being a bit of a boring job. After the dinner crowd wound down, she retired for the night.

She had nowhere to sleep, so Aurelio gave her a room of her own. Upon entering it, she found that it too had been prepared just for her. She also found a waitress uniform in the set of drawers, complete with a golden name tag with her name engraved on there. She smiled at the bit of color.

For the first time, Meredith got some sleep that left her refreshed and energetic the next morning. She also got a somewhat warm shower, an improvement from the icy showers at the hospital.

She waitressed the breakfast crowd, then the lunch crowd, and finally, the dinner crowd. She had breaks in between in which she'd get something to eat herself and talk to hotel guests and Aurelio. She began to notice that she inherited a lot of characteristics from Aurelio, like his crooked smile, the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed, and the way he flapped his hands when he got excited.

Meredith wondered how she could be so blind as to think the man her mother married was her real father.

For about a week, she repeated her waitressing cycle daily. It did begin to get boring at times, but whenever Meredith would begin to think that, she'd remind herself that she could be at the hospital, getting her hope sucked out of her. After that, her boredom would quell for a while.

One afternoon, something happened.

The first thing Meredith noticed was the increase of color around the hotel. Sepia had still dominated the hotel as the main color palette, but now, it looked as though it had competition from colors from all over the spectrum. Maybe about half of things Meredith saw around the hotel had color.

She also noticed the guests becoming happier and happier. They began to smile and laugh in their conversations a lot more. Even though the hotel didn't provide much in entertainment, nobody seemed bored.

A strong sense of hope hung in the air, and nobody knew the cause of it. Everyone just felt happier than usual, including Meredith.

As a result of the surge of good feelings, Meredith worked her butt off waitressing. She took orders, carried food, and cleared tables with a new intensity, keeping up with the hungry masses of people coming into the restaurant for dinner. Curiosity still hung in the back of her mind about the cause of all the happiness.

It wasn't until that evening, when the dinner crowds dispersed, that Meredith realized that she and the hotel and all the people around her had full colors.

She smiled and bounced on the balls of her feet a little bit, but she couldn't celebrate just yet. She still had work to do.

Meredith picked up a tray of freshly-prepared food and walked out of the kitchen to deliver it. A feeling washed over her as she did, a feeling that an old friend was nearby.

She turned her head and saw the face of Cora Abbey, the girl that was with her in her last moments. The girl who felt like a real friend during the days and hours leading up to her death.

Meredith set the food down and went to hug Cora. They had a tearful reunion, with Cora doing all the crying. Cora still felt bad about the whole Final Performance thing, since she was the only one not brainwashed into believing the Dame's lies, and she never said anything.

Meredith and one of the boys that traveled with Cora, Jacob, she would later find out, comforted Cora, and as soon as she calmed down, Aurelio appeared and joined their reunion. Cora seemed surprised to learn that Meredith was Aurelio's daughter.

Afterwards, Meredith and Cora went outside into the hotel's back garden to just talk and catch up on things. The prettiest stars Meredith had ever seen twinkled in the sky above. The two girls watched them, and there, it dawned on Meredith for the first time that she was in Paradise, despite being in what used to be Metal.

Everything was alright.

For the first time in fifteen years, two years after her death, everything was alright.

The End

This short part took me wayyy too long to write lol and yet it still feels rushed

Anyways, this is the last official chapter of Paradise Among Metal! The next part will be an epilogue, then this book will be officially finished.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this story, and if you did or didn't, please let me know in the comments! Also, feel free to leave a vote, or put this story in your reading list. It boosts my confidence in my writing so much when people do that.

Have a nice day/afternoon/evening/night!