Hotel Rubrum

Opening

Hotel Rubrum (located in Shropshire, England) blew up at exactly a minute before midnight on Sunday. Nobody except its inhabitants realised that it had collapsed, even though it had created the loudest sounds as it crashed down, even to the last window.

By the time Monday came, the main pillared structure began to tear apart and By five minutes past Monday, Hotel Rubrum was nothing more than rubbled mess and a much needed insurance service.

The sound spell, which had been cast by the faeries to make sure none of their parties were heard by the nice farmer neighbours around them, had prevented the humans around the hotel from hearing the explosion. Thank god for that. Surely, if anyone had noticed the unusually large lump of what was the remains of Hotel Rubrum out of context, they would have either called the police or the Americans.

If the people inside hadn't already been dead, no one would have survived. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on the context, everybody was already dead, so the debris and glass that flew down from the explosion passed just through dead, ghostly bodies. The only ones who were alive and visited the hotel were an odd group of mythical creatures (then again in their right faeries and vampires and shit were not mythical, and disliked being referred to as mythical), and they had not been there at the time of explosion because fortunately (again), Hotel Rubrum had been closed.

Though then again, if any of them had been there at the time of the explosion, perhaps they could have stopped it from happening. Afterall, they didn't have supernatural demon magic running through their blood for no reason. Besides, they had been specifically told by the owner, or their boss, to take care of the building while she was gone.

And by the time the supernatural creatures came back to the hotel, believing that it would be open, they stood in a line, mouths agape, not able process what exactly was happening. The one thing that they were sure was that they had screwed up.

"Red's going to kill us," was a mutually shared response to the explosion. They had been supposed to look after the hotel as Red, the boss, had gone on her personal business trip to Heaven. She had recently written in a very angry letter that Heaven sucked and she was going to kill everyone if anything was broken when she came back. And now that everything was broken, none of them knew what she was going to do.

There were a wide variety of suggestions of what to with the hotel. One faerie suggested that they rebuild the hotel, but it was going to take too long. A fairy (a faerie and a fairy had very big differences, thank you very much) suggested that they set up an illusion and deal with the mess later, but Red was much too smart for that. A dryad suggested that they grow the forest and pretend the hotel never existed. The sirens suggested they drown the town and run away. But none of the creatures were smart, so none of the ideas were going to work.

Whether or not they were prepared, Red was bound to return. And the day that Red returned, a group of various creatures (faeries, werewolves, vampires, sirens in fish tanks, dryads, fauns, all kinds of them) surrounded the wreckage, ready to be killed, or worse, executed (none of them knew the difference).

"She loved the windows," an old vampire whispered, looking down at the shattered glass scattered across the exploded hotel.

"We all loved the windows, Barry," a tiny dryad said, almost comfortingly.

Red returned on the Thursday morning. It had been three and a half days since the explosion, three and a half days of sleepless supernatural beings surrounding the fallen building. It looked similar to an occult group's rituals, including all the now homeless ghosts who flooded the Shropshire fields with their bluish tints. The ghosts really didn't have much to say except laugh at the creatures' failure, because they were already dead and even Red couldn't really do anything about that.

And the sound Red made, upon arriving at the scene, was very much like a cross between the cry of an obese dachshound trying to move and a child being choked to death by another child. It wasn't the most beautiful sound but it was understandable seeing the state of her own self-made hotel that she had taken care of for so long.

"The windows - " Red spluttered, mouth agape, wondering if it would fit the dramaticness of the situation if she collapsed and cracked a few of the sirens' fish tanks. She stood there for a solid few minutes before letting out the same ugly noise again, the terror of the situation sinking in. What had happened to her goddamn hotel while she was on leave?

"It was like this when we came this morning," Laylia, Red's faerie assistant and somewhat sidekick, said. "I wasn't really expecting this either."

"Well clearly she wasn't either," Grey McWolf (I'm sure you can tell what kind this man is, judging by his nickname) said, gesturing to Red, who had not yet gotten over the shock.

"Well clearly none of us was."

There were many thoughts going around in Red's head (who had cracked her treasured windows, who had left such a mess for her to clean up, why hadn't anyone been guarding the hotel when she specifically told them to, why wasn't anyone shutting up) but she kept quiet. Coming back from the longest conference with angels had left her both irritated and tired, so she honestly couldn't bother with five hundred useless creatures at the moment. She had much more important shit to do.

Instead she took out her pocket dimension pencil case and waved her hands, tucking the ruin of the hotel in. In approximately two seconds, the remains wer gone, and the Shropshire fields was as normal as it could get, aside from the supernatural creatures and ghostly ghosts.

She turned to everyone, who were surprised by how fast she had handled the situation, despite all of them being other-worldly in some sense. Red shrugged, unable to really do anything else at that point.

"Let's move to America."